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 homogenous specters amenable to ‘scientific’ speculation and invoked at séance sessions in elite drawing rooms. Reading literature alongside the colonial archive, she uncovers a new reordering of science and faith from the middle of the nineteenth century. Bhattacharya 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.

Tithi Bhattacharya is Associate Professor of History at Purdue University, author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal, 1848–1885, and coauthor of Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto.

A Note on Conventions  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Uncanny Histories: Ghosts, Fear, and Reason in Colonial Bengal  1
1. “Undisciplined, Playful and Yet Bhadra”: Old Ghosts and Their Advocates in an Age of Enlightenment  22
2. The New Spirits  55
3. Deadly Spaces: Haunted Homes and Haunting Histories  82
4. Enacting Ghosts: New Spirits, New Rituals  97
5. National Ghosts, Ghostly Nations  130
Conclusion. Thinking about Ends and Beginnings  155
Notes  159
Bibliography  187
Index