Colonial Bengal Research Articles

BANKIM’S RAJANI: A STUDY INTO HEALTH AND HUMANITY

Though there has been a plethora of books and articles written on Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s eponymous fiction Rajani, what is conspicuous after all these is the necessity of a medical humanities’ perspective into this masterpiece of Chattopadhyay. To fulfill such lacuna in the previous studies, the present article makes a hermeneutical attempt to contextualize Rajani at the backdrop of medical knowledge and medical culture during Colonial India. With this hypothesis, the paper proves how Bankim stirs the public imaginations about human health, hygiene and disability along with their cultural and clinical manifestations and ramifications, especially in colonial Bengal.

Ecce Homo—Behold the Human! Reading Life-Narratives in Times of Colonial Modernity

The essay explores Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Krishnacaritra—published in 1886—the life of a humanised god, as engaged in cross cultural dialogues with John Robert Seeley’s Ecce Homo, Natural Religion, and The Expansion of England in particular, and the broader European tendency of naturalising religions in general. It contends that the rise of historicised life writing genres in Europe was organically related to the demythologised, verifiable god-lives writing project. Bankimchandra’s Krishnacarita is embedded within a dense matrix of nineteenth century Indian secular life writing projects and its projection of Krishna as a cultural icon within an incipient nationalist imagining. The essay while exploring such fraught writing projects in Victorian England and nineteenth century colonial Bengal, concludes that ‘secularism’ arrives as not as religion’s Other but as its camouflaging in ethico-cultural guise. Secularism rides on the backs of such demystified god life narratives to rationalise ethico-culturally informed global empires.

Book review: Asoke Basu and Saibal Datta, Indigenous Roots of Modern Science in Colonial Bengal: From Canon to Criticism (c. 1750–1950)

Asoke Basu and Saibal Datta, Indigenous Roots of Modern Science in Colonial Bengal: From Canon to Criticism (c. 1750–1950). Kolkata: The Asiatic Society, 2019, 294 pp., ₹650 (hardback). ISBN: 978-93-81574-82-9.

An Alternative History of Technology in South Asia: The Unknown Viśvakarmās of Colonial Bengal

An Alternative History of Technology in South Asia: The Unknown Viśvakarmās of Colonial Bengal

Piety in Print: The Vaishnava Periodicals of Colonial Bengal

Abstract The voluminous corpus of Bengali Vaishnava periodical literature remains largely untapped in scholarship on Bengali Vaishnavism and colonial Hinduism more broadly. This article explores a range of Bengali Vaishnava periodicals from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to understand the complex ways in which educated Vaishnavas sought to forge points of convergence for Vaishnava culture within the colonial Bengali public sphere. The ensuing investigation will, it is hoped, demonstrate both the centrality and versatility of the role of the periodical in the broad and multiplex program of Vaishnava retrieval in colonial Bengal.

Calcutta Town Hall or Covent Garden? Colonial horticultural knowledge, mimicry, and its discontents

This article investigates the entanglement of knowledge regarding vegetable gardening in early colonial Bengal through the prism of the yearly vegetable exhibitions organized in Calcutta by the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India (AHSI, founded in 1820). The European members of the society thought that there were not enough vegetables grown in Bengal and that the commonly eaten vegetables were nutritionally inadequate. In order to ‘improve’ local vegetable cultivation, the society held a yearly exhibition in which Bengali gardeners received prizes for growing new vegetables, such as cauliflower and cabbage. To supply these exhibitions, the society ordered large shipments of seeds and then distributed them to malis (Bengali gardeners) around Calcutta. In the 1830s they extended this practice to their satellite societies across India. The end result was an increase in the cultivation of these vegetables, and eventually their absorption into local cuisine. Yet, Bengali gardeners continued to bring other vegetables to the exhibitions which were not from the AHSI seed. Eventually, the society’s officers reacted to these unsolicited contributions by including awards for them. However, many members were anxious and unsure about these changes, constantly trying to make the vegetable exhibitions mimic the vegetable market at Covent Garden in London. In order to contain the changing exhibitions, they reiterated a divide between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ vegetables by holding separate exhibitions for each. As such, this article reformulates the idea of mimicry, focusing more strongly on British ambivalence and anxiety as they tried to reiterate colonial boundaries with mixed success.

Book review: Varuni Bhatia, Unforgetting Chaitanya: Vaishnavism and Cultures of Devotion in Colonial Bengal

Varuni Bhatia, Unforgetting Chaitanya: Vaishnavism and Cultures of Devotion in Colonial Bengal, Oxford University Press, New York, 2017, xiii +291 pp., $105 (Hardback).

Intimate Violence in Colonial Bengal: A Death, a Trial and a Law, 1889–1891

Much excellent work has been done on the colonial Act X of 1891. Yet, three important contexts have largely gone missing. One is the framework of colonial Personal Laws where the practice of infantile marital cohabitation was embedded till it migrated to criminal laws. Unless we comprehend how the framework constrained judicial decisions and legal interventions, no single law can possibly make full sense. There were highly acrimonious public debates, too, especially in Bengal and Bombay Presidencies, that significantly shaped the Act. Legal reform in the field of gender, I argue, grew more out such debates than from colonial initiatives.

A "Moderately" Bengali Alice: Tracing Moderate Nationalism in Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay's Kankabati

A "Moderately" Bengali Alice:Tracing Moderate Nationalism in Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay's Kankabati Sreemoyee Dasgupta (bio) We have all heard the Kankabati tale as children. Kankabati's brother bought a mango. Keeping the fruit in the safety of his room, he warned one and all—"Let no one touch my mango. Remember, I will marry the one who consumes it." A mere child, Kankabati couldn't gauge the implications, and ended up eating that very fruit! So her brother declared: "I will marry Kankabati!" Parents and acquaintances went blue in the face trying to convince them that this was not the proper thing to do! … The brother, however, refused to pay heed. … Kankabati was abashed beyond measure! She made a boat and set herself afloat on a river, winding away just behind her house, left with no other recourse. She was out of her brother's reach, and beyond his determination to marry her. —Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay, Kankabati, translated by Nandini Bhattacharya This pracheen kawtha, or ancient tale, at the beginning of nineteenth-century Bengali writer Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay's most well-known novel, Kankabati, foreshadows many of the concerns of female identity and agency that dog his eponymous heroine, while simultaneously establishing a difference between old folklore and contemporary colonial reality. He ends this little prologue with the words, "is it possible to believe such a tale? Is it probable that a brother would insist on marrying his sister for the sake of a mere fruit? This is patently impossible! I will narrate a tale that lies within the realm of probability" (Mukhopadhyay 3). While the story of Mukhopadhyay's Kankabati might not contain the incestuous and phallic overtones of [End Page 1] a brother and his mango, it does have similarly arbitrary and superstitious authority figures and speaks of a world where women continue to be oppressed by irrational patriarchal codes. Further, the tale he goes on to narrate is a fantastic one that recalls Lewis Carroll's Alice stories: a central female protagonist slips into a dreamscape where she encounters the strange and the wondrous; has adventures in unfamiliar and somewhat exotic settings; meets a variety of curious and fantastic anthropomorphic creatures and finally, returns to the realm of reality. If Mukhopadhyay seeks to highlight the contrast between the ancient tale and his own modern tale, why call our attention to similarities through his prologue? If he did want a probable tale (as opposed to the patently impossible ancient folktale that he recounts), why would he adapt Lewis Carroll's fantastic setting? By turning to the temporal and geographical intersection of the text's publication, i.e., late-nineteenth-century colonial Bengal, which was permeated by increasing literacy and the rise of early anticolonial political events, we can answer both questions. As a text of a very particular historical moment, Kankabati portrays the early stirrings of nationalism (also known as Moderate Nationalism) and a social discourse best represented by a fluid movement between the old and the new, reality and fantasy, between the possibilities and improbabilities of contemporary Bengali society. By framing his novel in the context of both an ancient Bengali fairy tale and Carroll's Alice stories, Mukhopadhyay calls attention to the changing political time and advocates for necessary domestic social reforms, while simultaneously voicing anticolonial sentiments. The world of textuality in nineteenth-century Bengal was chaotic and colorful. In the aftermath of the introduction of the colonial education system and the rise in literacy, education, and professional aspirations among the Indians, educators, both Indian and foreign, felt the increasing need for textual material more suited to the needs of the Indian population.1 The resulting rise in the import of European books took place simultaneously with the growth and formation of the domestic publishing industry. Although a variety of nonfiction materials were popular for the benefits of knowledge and social mobility they conferred upon their possessors, a large part of readerly attention was occupied by the delights of more imaginative forms of literature. This article explores the symbolic and functional advantages of imaginative fiction, especially the genre of children's fantasy, presented to authors in colonial Bengal. I argue that the ideological and formal conveniences offered by...

Interpreting the Legal Archive of Visual Transformations: Textual Articulations of Visibility in Evidentiary Procedures and Documentary Formats of Colonial Law

Author(s): Akhtar, Asif Ali | Abstract: This article is concerned with tracing an onto-epistemological break through the archeology of colonial penal law, whereby a historical restructuring of the “visible” and the “articulable” produces modern ways of “seeing” and “knowing.” This epistemic break will be investigated through eighteenth and nineteenth century “Regulation” of Islamic sharīʿa penal law by British administrators of the East India Company in colonial Bengal. The juridico-discursive body, which came to be known as Anglo-Muhammadan law, will be analyzed through court records compiled by Company jurists and their Regulations modifying sharīʿa jurisprudence. Islamic penal law is based on hermeneutical practices of juridical reasoning formed through particular ways of seeing, knowing, and verifying the truth through eye-witness and testimony. In this article I will show that when the British commandeered this system of justice towards their own ends, the regulatory changes they instituted inadvertently brought about visual transformations of the ways in which legal life-worlds of the colony come to be recorded, articulated, and expressed. Under the British administration of colonial Bengal, this dual-process of appropriation and subversion of the law took shape through translation and transliteration of fiqh treatises, to legal amendments and sweeping legislations in substantive law. This process not only provided colonial power access to the bodies of colonial subjects, but also conditioned the relations between criminality, visuality, and juridical veridiction through penal legislation. As this article will show, the East India Company’s regulation of Islamic penal law began incorporating modern forms of evidentiary proofs, indexicality, and documentary formats that restructured the lifeworld of colonial law in 19th century Bengal.

From Manuscript to Print

This article takes the Nabivamsa—the first major work of Islamic doctrine to be written in Bangla, in the seventeenth century—as the basis for larger observations about Islamic Bangla literature and its transition from manuscript into print. The article charts three moments in the four centuries of the Nabivamsa’s textual life, reflecting on why such well-loved early modern religious texts fell into obscurity in the print era. The first phase from 1666 to 1777 marks the emergence and efflorescence of this literature, produced by Muslim intellectuals in the Cattagrama (Chittagong)-Arakan region. The second period, from 1777 onwards, is marked by the emergence of print as well as dobhasi Bangla in colonial Bengal. The third phase of this survey pertains to the constitution of a literary public sphere in Bengal linked to the momentum generated by print. This period saw the formulation of the Bangla literary canon through the efforts of publishers, literary critics, anthologists, translators, editors, historiographers and manuscript collectors. All of these were sustained through print’s cultural marketplace and the public discourses it engendered. The essay examines the ways in which Islamic Bangla literature’s value was articulated by the politics of archive-building and literary historiography central to the nationalist project.

Owners, creditors and traders: Women in late colonial Calcutta

This article tries to reconstruct the world of the property-owning, mortgage-holding and money-lending women in late colonial Bengal and especially in Calcutta, the commercial capital of British India until the First World War. It argues that as all poor women occupying the urban space were not either sex workers or domestic servants, similarly all middle-class women in colonial Calcutta were not dependent housewives, teachers and doctors. At least a section of them engaged in other gainful economic activities. However, existing scholarship sheds very little light on those women who chose other means of survival than the bhadramahila: those who bought and sold houses, lent money for interest, acquired mortgages, speculated in jute trade and even managed indigenous banking business. Evidence of court records suggests that they, along with the lady teacher, the lady doctor, the midwife and the social worker or later members of political organisations, could be found in considerable numbers in late colonial Calcutta. Due to the enactment of stringent laws to control moneylending, on the one hand, and the commercial decline of Calcutta, on the other hand, these women were possibly driven out of the shrinking market of the 1940s and 1950s.

Gentlewomen in Colonial Calcutta: Experiences of Schooling

This article shows how two pioneering institutions for female education in colonial Bengal, Bethune and Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ Schools, made significant contributions to female education at a time when women’s education was mostly restricted to home teaching. The study brings out the underlying contradictions between traditional and modern approaches towards education displayed in the goals, admission process and curriculum structure of these two schools. Analysing their respective contributions demonstrates that Bethune and Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ schools produced the modern Bengali bhadramahila (well-educated woman) who secured higher education, but was also rooted in traditional values. The final section illustrates how with the expansion of education in the twentieth century, the boundaries of the reformist zeal gradually blurred, so that educated women in Bengal could fight for greater equality.

Siting and Experiencing Cultures of Devotion in Colonial Bengal

Siting and Experiencing Cultures of Devotion in Colonial Bengal

Retraction: From courtyard sport to competitive sport: evolution of wrestling in colonial Bengal

Retraction: From courtyard sport to competitive sport: evolution of wrestling in colonial Bengal

Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India: Family, market and homoeopathy by Shinjini Das

Reviewed by: Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India: Family, market and homoeopathy by Shinjini Das Neshat Quaiser Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India: Family, market and homoeopathy By Shinjini Das. Cambridge University Press, 2019. Scholars studying South Asia's Indigenous medical traditions and their troubled relationship with Western medicine during the colonial period have predominantly focussed on medical practices such as Ayurveda and of late Unani and to some extent Siddha. Homoeopathy has received little attention from the scholars of South Asian medicine, despite the fact that India became the largest consumer of homoeopathic medicine. The reason is obvious that despite being of Western origin, homoeopathy was not a British colonial medical project like Western medicine/English medicine/allopathy/doctory, which had become an integral part of the larger colonial machination of domination. As such, the Indigenous medical traditions were faced with perceived and real threats of domination, denigration and extermination by the colonial structures of power. As a result, "the domain of medicine was, perhaps, the most compelling site for the articulation of sentiments against the claims of superiority of Western knowledge," as this reviewer has elsewhere argued. Thus, the book under review was much needed. The book primarily deals with the ways in which homoeopathy was "reconstituted as vernacular medicine" in colonial Bengal. This concern is explicated through a study of "how medicine, family and market were interconnected in British Bengal" (2). The book is divided into five chapters, a fairly long introduction and a conclusion (epilogue). The introduction outlines the significance of families, market, and the vernacular in colonial Bengal and explores the question "How does homoeopathy lend a useful lens through which to study the institution of family?" (6), and consequently its relation with the market and colonial state. This question is analysed with reference to salient features of the South Asian family as well. Chapter I deals with the question of a heterodoxy between the institutions with reference to bureaucracy, the print market and family firms. Chapter II analyses the biographical writings of a homoeopathic family linking it with the biography of science and medicine, the Hindu way of life and the ways in which homoeopathy was made a familiar vernacular science. Chapter III deals with the question of science in translation with reference to medicine, language and identity where the question of the Hinduisation of homoeopathy is brilliantly discussed, and homoeopathy in rural settings is also brought under discussion. Chapter IV finely outlines the issues relating to the questions of Indigeneity, self-help and the Hindu joint family. Chapter V relates to the making of a homoeopathic public with reference to elections, public health and legislation. The conclusion is a fine summing up. Thus, using homoeopathy as a point of departure, the book is an important signpost as to how new social, cultural, scientific, educational and political landscapes propelled by colonial contexts were effected and the ways in which these were responded to and appropriated by different sections of Indian society with rather conflicting vantage points. Thus, the book reconceptualises certain key issues such as caste identities, vernacularisation and Hinduisation of homoeopathy, discovering new Hindu identity, new commercial interests and ventures, the crucial role of the Bengali print market and culture and the intrinsically linked relationship between certain homoeopathic family firms, the colonial state and emergent nationalist politics. Through and against these dimensions and context, the book very competently deals with the new arts and science of negotiations with the politics of Western science, medicine and notions of modernity through homoeopathy that the different sections of people developed in colonial Bengal, having wider implications. Vernacular medicine is the key concept of the book. According to the author homoeopathy as vernacular medicine in colonial Bengal emerged through the processes of translation, domestication and Indigenisation through which it was reconfigured (246). But importantly, the author traces the vernacularisation of homoeopathy through "manifestly religio-cultural idioms of Hinduism in colonial Bengal" (27). However, there could be other factors, in addition to its not being part of and patronised by the British colonial state, that made homoeopathy vernacular and familiar medicine even in Bengal. Of these, predominantly the absence of surgery in homoeopathy was a crucial factor that made it...

When Child Is the Father of Man: Contesting Meanings of Childhood and Adulthood in the Fairy Tale Collections of Colonial Bengal

This article explores how the binary of the righteous/rational/dependable/ intelligent parent (or more specifically, the father) and the disobedient/unreasonable/undisciplined child in dire need of guidance came to be overturned in the Bengali fairy tale collections of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This reversal was an effect of the countercultural expressions of anticolonial nationalism.

India beyond the Ganges: Defining Arakanese Buddhism in Persianate colonial Bengal

In the late eighteenth century a Scotsman returned from Bengal with one of the largest private libraries of Persian texts collected in the Subcontinent. Among those manuscripts were several volumes of translations of Arakanese and Pali texts into Persian, as well as quasi ethnographic accounts on Buddhism as it was practiced in what is seen today as the frontier region between South and Southeast Asia. In this article I look at this archive and the historical moment that surrounds its making in the perspective of the development of Buddhist studies. This large corpus of texts happened to be a false start in the history of the study of Theravāda Buddhism, but it constitutes a unique source to learn about local forms of Buddhism on the eve of the fall of the Arakanese kingdom and the integration of its religious institutions within the Burmese sangha. While discussing a selection of texts from this vast corpus, I pay special attention to the culturally layered transmission of knowledge on Arakanese Buddhism via the work of Bengali munshīs (i.e., Persian secretary). I argue that this layered transmission caused the almost immediate obsolescence of this corpus as a source of information in the early colonial context. However, for the cultural historian, those Persian texts contrast with the then emerging institutionalised orientalist discourses and offer a new vantage point for the study of Arakanese Buddhism.

Rosalind and "Śakuntalā" among the Ascetics: Reading Gender and Female Sexual Agency in a Bengali Adaptation of "As You Like It"

My article examines how the staging of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It is negotiated in a Bengali adaptation, Ananga-Rangini (1897) by the little-known playwright Annadaprasad Basu. The Bengali adaptation does not assume the boy actor’s embodied performance as essential to its construction of the Rosalindequivalent, and thereby it misses several of the accents on gender and sexuality that characterize Shakespeare’s play. The Bengali adaptation, while accommodating much of Rosalind’s flamboyance, is more insistent upon the heteronormative closure and reconfigures the Rosalind-character as an acquiescent lover/wife. Further, Ananga-Rangini incorporates resonances of the classical Sanskrit play Abhijñānaśākuntalam by Kālidāsa, thus suggesting a thematic interaction between the two texts and giving a concrete shape to the comparison between Shakespeare and Kālidāsa that formed a favourite topic of literary debate in colonial Bengal. The article takes into account how the Bengali adaptation of As You Like It may be influenced by the gender politics informing Abhijñānaśākuntalam and by the reception of this Sanskrit play in colonial Bengal.

Evils of Child Marriage, Gender Consciousness and Social Reform Movement in Colonial Bengal

Evils of Child Marriage, Gender Consciousness and Social Reform Movement in Colonial Bengal