In Print: Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence
Publication Title
Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal
Author
Publisher
Duke University Press
Publication Date
August 2024
About the Book (from the publisher)
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.
About the Author
Tithi Bhattacharya is a professor of South Asian History at Purdue University. She is the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2005) and is the editor of the now classic study, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017). Her coauthored book includes the popular Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019) which has been translated in over 30 languages. Her new book, Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal, is due out from Duke University Press in 2024. She writes extensively on South Asian history, Marxist theory, gender, and the politics of Islamophobia. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies, South Asia Research, The Guardian, Jacobin, The Nation, and the New Left Review. She is on the editorial board of Studies on Asia and Spectre.
Professor Bhattacharya teaches courses in South Asian history, Transnational Gender, Colonialism and Global History. She is currently accepting graduate students interested in studying South Asian history, gender and social reproduction theory.
For more details please visit Professor Bhattacharya’s Website