Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence

A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal

Tithi Bhattacharya

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478059691
• Print ISBN:
  9781478030713
  9781478026464
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

In Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence, 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• A Note on Conventions
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Uncanny Histories: Ghosts, Fear, and Reason in Colonial Bengal
• One. “Undisciplined, Playful and Yet Bhadra”: Old Ghosts and Their Advocates in an Age of Enlightenment
• Two. The New Spirits
• Three. Deadly Spaces: Haunted Homes and Haunting Histories
• Four. Enacting Ghosts: New Spirits, New Rituals
• Five. National Ghosts, Ghostly Nations
• Conclusion. Thinking about Ends and Beginnings
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index