Bengal in Global Concept History

Culturalism in the Age of Capital

Andrew Sartori

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Jahr: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780226734866
• Thema: Storia
• Thema: Storia mondiale

Today people all over the globe invoke the concept of culture to make sense of their world, their social interactions, and themselves. But how did the culture concept become so ubiquitous? In this ambitious study, Andrew Sartori closely examines the history of political and intellectual life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengal to show how the concept can take on a life of its own in different contexts.
Sartori weaves the narrative of Bengal's embrace of culturalism into a worldwide history of the concept, from its origins in eighteenth-century Germany, through its adoption in England in the early 1800s, to its appearance in distinct local guises across the non-Western world. The impetus for the concept's dissemination was capitalism, Sartori argues, as its spread across the globe initiated the need to celebrate the local and the communal. Therefore, Sartori concludes, the use of the culture concept in non-Western sites was driven not by slavish imitation of colonizing powers, but by the same problems that repeatedly followed the advance of modern capitalism. This remarkable interdisciplinary study will be of significant interest to historians and anthropologists, as well as scholars of South Asia and colonialism.

Index

acintyabhedabhed, 148

Act X of 1859, 204, 205

Adam, William, 91

Adelung, Johann, 36

Adorno, Theodor W., 61–62

Advaita Vedanta: nondualism of, 78, 112, 113, 145; Rammohun Roy on, 78, 82, 112, 113; Debendranath Tagore’s rejection of, 114; and Vaishnavite immanentist monism, 148; Vivekananda’s advocacy of, 256n61

agency: subjective freedom versus worldly, 111–17, 134, 135. See also autonomy

Age of Reason (Paine), 94

Age of Reform, 68–69, 90

agriculture. See cash crops; peasant society

Ahmad, Abul Mansur, 218, 219–23, 224, 268n162

Ahmad, Muzaffar, 224

Alocana, 136

Althusser, Louis, 236n29

Anandamath (The Abbey of Bliss) (Bankimchandra Chatterjee), 109, 124, 145, 254n35

Anderson, Benedict, 11, 236n27

anthropological culture, 34–40, 122–23

anti-Catholicism, British, 82

anticlericalism, British, 82

antimissionary mobilization, 102, 114

anushilan: Bankimchandra Chatterjee founds new humanism on concept of, 110, 117, 119–20, 134, 176–77, 252n36; displacement as equivalent for culture, 176, 177, 189; doctrine of culture (anushilanatattva), 43, 122, 160, 171; Swadeshi-era secret societies associated with, 176

Anushilan Samiti (Culture Societies), 176, 225

Apu trilogy (Ray), 1–2

Arnold, Matthew: Aurobindo compares French with, 141; Aurobindo influenced by, 142; on better liberalism, 30; Bankimchandra Chatterjee compared with, 122; on culture, 26, 28, 37, 42, 142, 238n2

Atmiya Sabha (Friendly Society), 77

Aurobindo Ghose (Ghosh): on the bourgeois type, 157–58; in boycott in response to partition of Bengal Presidency, 137, 163–64, 166; on culture of India, 174; on grounding politics in life of the people, 169, 198; liberalism criticized by, 139–42; on middle-class leadership, 172; and Muslim popular, 211, 228; New Lamps for Old series, 139, 141–42, 169; on passive resistance, 259n119; Platoinspired dialogues of, 254n19; productionist philosophy of practice of, 160–61; on rational unfolding of Idea in history, 149–50, 154; on return to land for Hindus, 211, 214, 215; Tantric Vedantism embraced by, 147; transformation into yogi of Pondicherry, 153, 215–16, 257n67; on Western materialism versus Indian spirituality, 175; yoga practiced by, 215, 255n38

autonomy: in antinomic logic of culture, 41; Pramatha Nath Bose on, 190, 192; Bankimchandra Chatterjee and creation of autonomous national subject, 134; of culture, 26, 30–34, 38, 47; global resonance of subjective, 67; of human subjectivity, 39, 40; Pakistanism as, 219, 220; productionist, 165; in Swadeshi political vision, 173; in Rabindranath Tagore’s educational philosophy, 181

babu: Pramatha Nath Bose on, 193, 197; in capitalist transformation of Bengali...