Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal

by Tithi Bhattacharya

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.

Genres: History, India, Nonfiction, Religion, Asia

232 pages, Paperback

Published August 23, 2024

About the author

Tithi Bhattacharya is Associate Professor of South Asian history at Purdue University. She is a prominent Marxist feminist and one of the national organizers of the International Women's Strike on March 8, 2017. She is a vocal advocate of Palestinian rights and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

Reviews

[Ian Kenneth Macbeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating and incredibly rich account of the changing status of ghosts and spirits in Bengali society around the turn of the 20th century, and how that connects with the then incipient Indian nationalist movement and anticipates contemporary Hindutva. A short book, but absolutely crammed with ideas and inspirational insights – during the section about the bourgeois ideal of the home and the spirit world's threat to that sanctity, I found myself wondering if that's why vampires need to be invited over the threshold of a dwelling.

It's a bit of silly criticism to make of an academic book published by a university press, but Bhattacharya's prose does sometimes bear the baleful hallmarks of tell-don't-show academese: redundant, pedantic sentences like, 'In this chapter I advance Abanindranath's claims about this relationship between history and spaciality in the context of Calcutta as a colonial city' or 'In this chapter, I continue to center Doreen Massey's beautifully phrased insight that space is "stretched our social relations"...' etc. etc. I hugely respect Bhattacharya as both a first-rate scholar and a committed activist, but sentences like those quoted above make me long for historians like Hobsbawm or Thompson or Rowbotham, authors of works no less erudite and ambitious than this, but written with far greater elegance and for a mass, popular audience to boot. Maybe that audience no longer exists, and maybe the academy wouldn't produces fine stylists able to communicate with it even if it did.

Such minor quibbles notwithstanding, this is a brilliant book.

[Neil Rogall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished this lovely book by Tithi Bhattacharya. I really wasn’t sure what to expect but I thought it would be good. It was. It tells the tale of how the old but delightful ghosts of pre colonial Bengal who lived in the trees , gardens and the wild areas of the ‘world’ were replaced by the frightening gothic spectres of the ‘home’ under colonial modernity . And it looks how and why this happened: through the dissemination of ‘colonial knowledge’, the creation of a new ‘Hindu’ nation by the upper class and upper caste bhadralok and the development of a ‘scientific spiritualism’ in the new public meeting rooms and homes of Bengal. It is a fascinating and very readable story that for me finally explained why Theosophy was so dominant amongst the elite nationalists of the early Indian National Congress and why Annie Besant, socialist, and Theosophist believed in the ‘1000 rishis of Tibet’. Well worth reading for those interested in Bengali history but also for those interested in the history and construction of horror. It also gave me an insight into why I was terrified at age 5 of ‘the wizard of Oz’ and was subsequently frightened of the witch who lived in my bedroom closet