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Tithi Bhattacharya, "Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal" (Duke UP, 2024)

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Content provided by New Books Network. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by New Books Network or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://staging.podcastplayer.com/legal.

In Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke UP, 2024), Tithi Bhattacharya maps the role that Bengali ghosts and ghost stories played in constituting the modern Indian nation, and the religious ideas seeded therein, as it emerged in dialogue with European science. Bhattacharya introduces readers to the multifarious habits and personalities of Bengal’s traditional ghosts and investigates and mourns their eventual extermination. For Bhattacharya, British colonization marked a transition from the older, multifaith folk world of traditional ghosts to newer and more frightening specters. These "modern" Bengali ghosts, borne out of a new rationality, were homogeneous specters amenable to "scientific" speculation and invoked at séance sessions in elite drawing rooms. Reading literature alongside the colonial archive, Bhattacharya uncovers a new reordering of science and faith from the middle of the nineteenth century. She argues that these shifts cemented the authority of a rising upper-caste colonial elite who expelled the older ghosts in order to recast Hinduism as the conscience of the Indian nation. In so doing, Bhattacharya reveals how capitalism necessarily reshaped Bengal as part of the global colonial project.

Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University.

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1766 episodes

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Manage episode 480343265 series 2421445
Content provided by New Books Network. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by New Books Network or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://staging.podcastplayer.com/legal.

In Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke UP, 2024), Tithi Bhattacharya maps the role that Bengali ghosts and ghost stories played in constituting the modern Indian nation, and the religious ideas seeded therein, as it emerged in dialogue with European science. Bhattacharya introduces readers to the multifarious habits and personalities of Bengal’s traditional ghosts and investigates and mourns their eventual extermination. For Bhattacharya, British colonization marked a transition from the older, multifaith folk world of traditional ghosts to newer and more frightening specters. These "modern" Bengali ghosts, borne out of a new rationality, were homogeneous specters amenable to "scientific" speculation and invoked at séance sessions in elite drawing rooms. Reading literature alongside the colonial archive, Bhattacharya uncovers a new reordering of science and faith from the middle of the nineteenth century. She argues that these shifts cemented the authority of a rising upper-caste colonial elite who expelled the older ghosts in order to recast Hinduism as the conscience of the Indian nation. In so doing, Bhattacharya reveals how capitalism necessarily reshaped Bengal as part of the global colonial project.

Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

  continue reading

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