Kinship and Family among Muslims in Bengal, Masahiko Togawa and Abhijit Dasgupta, eds., New Delhi: Manohar publishers, 2021

Kinship and Family among Muslims in Bengal, Masahiko Togawa and Abhijit Dasgupta, eds., New Delhi: Manohar publishers, 2021

Contents：

Introduction

Paribar and Kinship in a Moslem Rural Village in East Pakistan, Tadahiko Hara

1. Introduction

2. Individualism, Equality, Gender Relations and Prestige

3. Occupation

4. Territorial Groups

5. Marriage

6. Paribar

7. Kinship

8. Conclusion

Bibliography

Part II: Revisiting The Text

1. Village, Kinship and the Wider World: Tadahiko Hara's Contributions to Sociology in South Asia, Abhijit Dasgupta

2. The Methodological Aspects of Tadahiko Hara's Ethnography and its Relevance to Village Studies in Bangladesh, Md. MujibulAnam and Md. Abul Kalam

3. Tadahiko Hara's Contributions to Social Anthropology, Anwarullah Chowdhury

4. Village as an Economic and Cultural Unit: Rethinking Tadahiko Hara's Paribar and Kinship, Atrayee Saha

5. Continuity and Change in Gohira: Revisiting the Village after Five Decades, Ranjan Saha Partha

6. Reconsidering Individualism in Rural Bangladesh: Ethnography of Hara and Subsequent Village Studies, Ai Sugie

7. Revisiting the Ethnographic Study of Tadahiko Hara: Islam and the Peasant Society in Gohira Village, Bangladesh, Masahiko Togawa

Glossary

Index

Available at：

https://www.amazon.com/Kinship-Family-among-Muslims-Bengal/dp/8194991226

Introduction

We feel extremely privileged to edit Paribar and Kinship in a Moslem Rural Village in East Pakistan by Tadahiko Hara after a gap of three decades. The book was originally published by the Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa,Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS) in 1991. In many respects the study was a first of its kind. This was the first full-length monograph on Muslim family and kinship in a village in erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Second, this was the first study in which the author used intensive fieldwork methods to examine family and kinship in a village. The author relied on participant observation for the collection of field materials, stayed in the village for close to two years to collect information on Muslim family and kinship in Chittagong. Finally, Hara was the first foreign scholar to undertake village studies in East Bengal. Although a new Department of Sociology came into existence in Dhaka University under the auspices of the UNESCO, no attempt was made to do intensive village study. Pierre Bessaignet, the first Head of the Department of Sociology, conducted a sample survey on family in East Bengal. He edited Social Research in East Pakistan in the early 1960s wherein almost all social scientists emphasized the study of society with the help of secondary sources. Hara's intervention with new research methodology made a great deal of difference as it highlighted the need to shift methodological concern from 'book-view' to 'field-view'.

The study of family and kinship merits attention for several reasons. First, in Islam, some of the basic principles of marriage and family are derived from the sacred text of the Quran. Restrictions in the 10 Introduction selection of partners are mentioned in the sacred text. This was pointed out by Hara in his monograph. Muslims in South and Southeast Asia follow marriage of close kins, both cross-cousins and parallel -cousins. Polygyny too is common in many areas. At the same time, influence of Hindu marriage and family on Islam in South Asia made marriage practices more complex. In the last 50 years, since this study, the rural society of eastern Bengal experienced monumental changes like the emergence of an independent state of Bangladesh, population increase from about 50 million in 1961 to 160 million in 2016, rural and social developments in various fields, and rapid economic growth in recent years. We can reflect on these developments by revisiting Hara's ethnography.

Tadahiko Hara was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1934, and studied cultural anthropology at Tokyo University and conducted extensive fieldwork in East Pakistan in the 1960s. He lived in a village of the Gohira union, the Rauzan thana, in the Chittagong district, from 1962 to 1964, as a participant observer in the field. Gohira village can be reached in about 40 minutes by bus from Chittagong. In 1962, the village had 75 per cent Muslim residents, 15 per cent Buddhists and 10 per cent of Hindus. Hara surveyed mainly the Muslim community and compiled the ethnography, entitled Paribar and Kinship in a Moslem Rural Village in East Pakistan, which was submitted as a PhD thesis in 1967 at the Australian National University, Sydney. [The following is omitted]

Contributors

Abhijit Dasgupta is Professor (Retd.) of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. He has published several papers on agrarian relations in West Bengal and Bangladesh, population displacement, and affirmative action with reference to the minorities in South Asia. He is the author of Growth with Equity: The New Technology and Agrarian Change in Bengal ( 1998); Displacement and Exile: The State-Refugee Relations in India ( 2016), and co-editor of the following books: Minorities and the State: Changing Social and Political Landscape of Bengal (2011); Bengal: Development, Communities, and States; State, Society, Displaced People in South Asia; and Jati, Varna, and Bangali Samaj (in Bengali).

Masahiko Togawa is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS), Japan. He has published several books and papers on religion and society in West Bengal and Bangladesh. He is the author of An Abode of the Goddess: Kingship, Caste and Sacrificial Organization in a Bengal Village ( 2006); and co-editor of the following books: Minorities and the State: Changing Social and Political Landscape of Bengal (2011), and Gram Bangla: Itihas, Samaj o Arthaniti (Village Bengal: History, Society, and Economics, 2007, in Bengali).

Md Mujibul Anam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. Mujibul's area of interest is public health anthropology, social justice, and 366 List of Contributors environment. He completed his PhD at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia on 'Majmawalas and Sexual Health Promotion in Bangladesh: An Ethnography of Street Healers in Dhaka City'.

Md Abul Kalam is a qualitative research analyst at Helen Keller International (HKI) based in their country office in Dhaka. His primary areas of interest are medical anthropology, women and child nutrition, food security, gender, women and youth empowerment.

Anwarullah Chowdhury is a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Dhaka and the Ambassador of Bangladesh to Bahrain. He earned his master's degree in Sociology from the University of Dhaka and PhD from Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. He was also a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sussex, England and he conducted a post-doctoral research there. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota (Mankato), USA for one academic year. He is the author of Agrarian Social Relations and Development in Bangladesh (1982); A Bangladesh Village: A Study in Social Stratification (1978), among others, and editor of Pains and Pleasures of Fieldwork (1985).

Atrayee Saha is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Muralidhar Girls' College, Calcutta University. She is working on the issue of Agriculture and Development in Bardhaman district for her PhD thesis at the Centre for Studies in Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has published papers in journals like South Asia Research, Contemporary Voice of Dalit and Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies. Her major areas of interest lie in rural sociology, agrarian economy, social stratification, issues of development and political economy. Email: atrayee.dse@gmail.com

Ranjan Saha Partha is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. He completed his MA and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Hiroshima University, Japan. Dr. Partha's areas of specialization include anthropology of development; gender, poverty and health; peace and human rights; List of Contributors 367 climate change and local livelihood, civil society and good governance; and agriculture and peasant society.

Ai Sugie is a Designated Assistant Professor at the Institute for Advanced Research, Nagoya University. She is the co-author of Perspectives on Geographical Marginality, Volume 4: Rural Areas between Regional Needs and Global Challenges (2019); What is the Rohingya Issue (2019) (in Japanese).

Acknowledgements

We express our deep gratitude to Professor HaraTadahiko's family members for giving us the permission to publish the book and for support us to complete this project. The essays in the volume were first presented in a conference held at the Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh in January, 2018, and the second conference held at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS), Tokyo, Japan in June, 2018. The essays were revised and presented in a workshop again in Independent University, Dhaka, in October, 2019. We are grateful to all the participants who attended these three workshops and went through each paper and commented at length. Our thanks to Professor Sirajul Islam, Professor Ishii Hiroshi, Professor Taniguchi Shinkichi, Professor Ando Kazuo, Professor Fujita Koichi, Professor Ikeda Keiko, Professor Takada Mineo for their comments and sharing the valuable experience as a colleagues of Professor Hara on many projects. We are grateful to Professor Rasheda Akhtar, Professor Zakir Hossain Raju, Dr Imran Masood, Dr Nurul Huda Sakib, Dr Humayun Kabir, Professor Iizuka Masato, Professor Nishii Ryoko, Professor Tanaka Masakazu, Dr Kusakabe Tatsuya and Dr Minamide Kazuyo for supporting this project. We express our thanks to the department of Anthropology, Jahangirnagar university, Centre for Social Science Research (CSSR), Independent University, Core-Project-Anthropology, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, ILCAA Joint Research Project 'Ethnographic Studies of Muslim Society in South Asia' (2018-20), JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A)[19H00554], JSPS Fund for Fostering Joint International Research (B)[18KK0024], and Japanese Association of Bengal Forum for supporting and collaborating with the project. We thank Prama Mukhopadyay for editorial work and for preparing the index. All the data, figures, maps, charts and tables in Professor Hara's monograph are based on the original text, which is reproduced faithfully by respecting his intention, although the minimum necessary corrections are added due to various technical reasons.

We express our condolences to Mrs Hara Hiroko, wife of Professor Hara on her sudden demise in October 2019 while editing work was in progress. Mrs Hara Hiroko too was an outstanding cultural anthropologist who helped us in many ways. To pay our tribute we dedicate the book to her.

Masahiko Togawa

Abhijit Dasgupta