Accepted Sanskrit conventions for rendering deities’ names have been followed throughout in my own prose. In Bengali titles or quotations from Bengali sources, however, I utilize Bengali transliteration (Śiva vs. Śib).
Proper names are rendered with Bengali diacritics if the person in question wrote in Bengali, spoke to me in Bengali, and/or did not have or request an Anglicization. Commonly Anglicized names are retained (Swami Vivekananda, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Subhas Chandra Bose). Some names vacillate between conventions, depending on the context: the Bengali saint Rāmakṛṣṇa is spelled Ramakrishna when I am discussing the American branches of the organization founded in his name.
Place names, including those for districts, subdivisions, cities, towns, villages, roads, and the names of neighborhood Pūjā committees, have all been rendered without diacritics. For recognizable names that already have Anglicizations, I utilize them; for names of small towns or villages, I keep as close to the nondiacriticized Bengali originals as possible. Since the great majority of people living in the time period covered in this work (the late eighteenth century up to the present) knew Calcutta as “Calcutta” and not “Kolkata” (the latter coming into legislated usage only in 2001), I retain “Calcutta” for the sake of consistency until 2001, whereafter I use Kolkata. The only place names that receive diacritics are Bengali temples (Kālīghāṭ Temple).
Many lowercase words with italics and diacritics follow Bengali spoken forms: for instance, bhadralok, darśan, ghaṭ, and sarbajanīn.
Months, Pūjā days, and caste names are capitalized with diacritics, spelled as they are pronounced in Bengali (the month of Āśvin; Nabamī, the ninth day of the festival; and Kumārs, or hereditary potters).
Festivals generally retain their Bengali forms with diacritics (Bhāiphõṭā, Caḍak Pūjā, Dol Yātrā, Gājan, Rās Pūrṇimā), but pan-Indian festivals like Diwali are spelled as such.
Goddess is capitalized when the reference is to “the” Goddess, but written in lower case when the referent is plural or generic.