Adnan Mahmud

This essay addresses a persistent lacuna in the voluminous scholarship on pre-1947 Bengal: a comparative study of how Hindu and Muslim intellectuals, between 1850 and 1950, engaged with fault lines of socioeconomic asymmetry and inherited prejudice. Through a close reading of three Bengali autobiographies (Rajnarayan Basu's Ātmacarit of 1909, Sivanath Sastri's Ātmacarit of 1919, and Jasimuddin's Thākurbāṛir Āṅgināẏ of 1961), it explores the intersections between realities of India and representations of Britain, as well as between Hindu and Muslim lifeworlds, in the medium of autobiographical self-searching. Building upon recent studies of South Asian modernity that move beyond binary frameworks of resistance versus accommodation, the essay proposes a tripartite framework of "incremental", "cosmopolitan", and "fractured" modalities of colonial subject formation. These modalities, it is argued, do not operate in isolation; rather, they unfold through dynamic inter-relationships of braided interaction, cascade effects, and productive interference, with their direction and intensity shaped by differential access to economic resources, institutional positions, and social capital. By attending to the material conditions under which universalist visions persistently become fractured against quotidian realities, the essay reveals modernity's arrival in Bengal as a non-linear process in which the search for self remains inseparable from the search for livelihood, recognition, and belonging across Hindu-Muslim borderlines.

This essay reviews James Tartaglia and Tracy Llanera's A Defence of Nihilism (Routledge, 2021). The book defends a stipulated, narrow conception of nihilism, namely the denial that human life has cosmic meaning, and argues that this view has no terrible consequences and indeed serves as a prophylactic against utopian secular meaning-substitutes. The review credits the book's terminological discipline, its three-part refutation of cost-benefit appraisals of life as a whole, and Llanera's pragmatist reframing of the moderate position as a problem of egotism rather than nihilism. It presses, however, on four structural limitations: an unresolved oscillation between treating nihilism as a pure metaphysical fact and as an ethical-political resource; a consistent pattern of engaging weaker rather than stronger versions of opposing views; the absence of Tartaglia's transcendent hypothesis from his earlier work; and a curiously parochial framing that engages neither the contemporary analytic literature on meaning nor the non-Western philosophical traditions which have addressed cosmic meaninglessness for far longer than the modern West. The review also tests the book's prophylactic claim against a domain in which secular eschatology is now operationally consequential, namely autonomous defence systems and the wider machinery of artificial intelligence governance, and argues that the deflationary nihilism the book defends is too thin to do the prophylactic work the book asks of it.