India, April 25 -- West Bengal is witnessing an extremely charged and polarised assembly election, with the first phase of polling crossing an unprecedented 92%. One approach to understanding political Bengal is to study voting data, the evolution and performance of political parties, their record in office, the shifts in political economy over the decades, the region's interaction with colonialism, and the Partition. Another approach is to dive deep into the region's public culture and understand the factors that have shaped politics over the decades. The Bengal Reader, edited and translated by Arunava Sinha, is a handy guide to understanding literary Bengal. It is a collection of fiction, essays, poetry, plays, speeches, excerpts of film scripts, etc. produced in Bengali over two centuries. Divided into five sections, it provides samples from the rich oeuvre of writers, filmmakers, journalists, and politicians. This expansive menu should help the readers, particularly non-Bengalis, understand why Bengal is the way it is. The canon (Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Kazi Nazrul Islam, among others) is represented, of course, and so are the powerful and popular purveyors of fiction such as Tarasankar Bandopadhyay, Bibutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Ashapurna Devi, Adwaita Mallabarman, Mahasweta Devi, Satinath Bhaduri, Premendra Mitra, and Sankar. Poets across generations - Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Tagore to modernists such as Jibananda Das, Bishnu De, and Buddadeva Bose, and the later generation of Joy Goswami and Mandakranta Sen - offer a rainbow across decades. Some writings reflect their times - journalist Gour Kishore Ghosh on the Emergency, Ritwik Ghatak on Vietnam, and Kanu Sanyal's speech on Naxalbari - and help grasp the radical spirit that enriched the culture of the post-60s Bengal....