Summoning the Dead: Psychic Happenings and Gendered Spiritualist Practices in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Calcutta

Abstract

The closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decade of the twentieth century were marked by an unprecedented rise in the practice of spiritual exercises in domestic séances amongst the cultural elites in Calcutta. This paper demonstrates how the sacrosanct character of these circles of grief came under suspicion when the supposedly ‘psychic’ component of spiritual matters became tainted by eroticised interactions with the dead. In this context, the afterlife was poised to become a site for the expression of female sexuality, normally repressed by a fragile politics of domineering enlightened male intellectualism.