000			02009nam a22002297a 4500
005			20241230121007.0
008			241230b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9781478030713
028			_a: International Book Distributors _b: Flat No.- 17, Prakash Apartment, 4405/2,5 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi _c: 121072 _d; 17/12/2024
082			_a954.14 BHA
100			_aBhattacharya, Tithi.
245			_aGhostly Past, Capitalist Presence _b: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal. _c/ Tithi Bhattacharya.
260			_a, London _b: Duke University Press _c, 2024.
300			_axi, 213p. _c: 24cm.
365			_b1645
520			_aIn 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.
650			_aGhost stories
650			_aMultifarious habits
650			_a Colonial archive
700			_aTithi Bhattacharya
942			_cBOOK
999			_c62647 _d62647