Tanika Sarkar deploys to great effect her trademark focus on the small, the specific and the emotive defining moment in history to arrive at larger, compelling pictures which show us how people actually felt and experienced life in colonial Bengal. The colonial universe outlined in this book centres around women as both defiled and deified; the nation as woman-goddess within a country comprising plural traditions; male reformers battling Hindu conservatives; a Hindu novelist idealising nationalism as the demolition of Muslim symbols; male-dominant social norms threatening principles of softness and femininity; theatre and censorship; and the sometimes contrasting worldviews of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore.