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Books by Sumit Chakrabarti

Cambridge University Press, 2023

The book examines the works of Akshay Kumar Dutta (1820–1886), who can be seen as ideologically i... more The book examines the works of Akshay Kumar Dutta (1820–1886), who can be seen as ideologically inhabiting the cusp between religion and rationalism – the two most crucial avenues of debate and discussion in the public sphere in nineteenth-century Bengal. While nineteenth-century Bengal has been an important discourse within South Asian history, major figures of reform such as Rammohun Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, or Keshub Chunder Sen have generally been the focus. The book attempts to rescue Dutta from the clutches of academic amnesia, and to locate him as one of the foundational figures of intellectual refashioning among the common albeit educated public in nineteenth-century Bengal.

Ananda Publishers, 2022

উনিশ শতকের দ্বিতীয়ার্ধে রচিত দুটি নাটিকা কেরাণী-দর্পণ ও কেরাণী পুরাণ। ঔপনিবেশিক প্রশাসনের অবিচ্ছে... more উনিশ শতকের দ্বিতীয়ার্ধে রচিত দুটি নাটিকা কেরাণী-দর্পণ ও কেরাণী পুরাণ। ঔপনিবেশিক প্রশাসনের অবিচ্ছেদ্য অঙ্গ কেরানির তদানীন্তন সামাজিক অবস্থান, দৈনন্দিন যাপন, ব্যক্তিগত, পারিবারিক ও কর্মজীবনের নানা মুহূর্তের সুচারু ছবি তুলে ধরে রচনাদুটি। নাটিকাদুটির নিবিড় পাঠ ও টীকা রচনার সূত্রে উঠে আসে আরও জটিল কিছু প্রসঙ্গ। বর্তমান সটীক সংস্করণের আলোচনা শুরু হয়েছে কোম্পানি আমল তথা ব্রিটিশ শাসনকালের কেরানির সঙ্গে তাঁর দেশীয় পূর্বজদের মিল-অমিলের প্রসঙ্গ ছুঁয়ে। একে একে আলোচিত হয়েছে তাঁর কাজের ধরন ও চরিত্রের বিবর্তন, বাঙালি ভদ্রলোক শ্রেণির সাপেক্ষে কলকাতার কেরানির সামাজিক অবস্থান, কেরানির স্বাস্থ্য, বেতন, চাকরিজীবনের ওঠাপড়ার পাশাপাশি ঔপনিবেশিক আমলের বৃহত্তর রাজনৈতিক ও সামাজিক পরিবর্তনগুলির সমান্তরালে তাঁর ঐতিহাসিক ভূমিকার নানা দিক। উনিশ শতকের কলকাতায় অফিসে, বাড়িতে, রাস্তায় বাঙালি কেরানির দৈনিক জীবনের নানা মুহূর্তের সূত্রে ঔপনিবেশিক আধুনিকতার কয়েকটি গুরুত্বপূর্ণ দিক চিহ্নিত করে এই বই। মূল নাটিকা, বিশদ টীকা ও ভূমিকা সংবলিত এই সটীক সংস্করণ উনিশ শতকের কেরানি চরিত্র নিয়ে বিস্তারিত আলোচনার অভাব অনেকটাই পূরণ করবে।

Routledge, 2020

This book examines the location and representation of the colonial clerk or the kerani within the... more This book examines the location and representation of the colonial clerk or the kerani within the cultural and social space of nineteenth century colonial India. It provides a comparative history of the clerk in Calcutta vis-à-vis the clerk in contemporary London in order to understand the manifestations of modernity in these two disparate but intimately related spaces.

The volume traces the socio-historical life of the clerk in the newly emerged city-space of Calcutta and reveals how the Bengali kerani became a complex and distinct figure of bureaucratic and colonial modernity. It analyses the techniques of surveillance and ethical training given to the native clerks and offers insights into the role of education in the production and dissemination of knowledge and hegemony in the colonial setting. The author, through a reading of clerk manuals, handbooks and literary representations, highlights the class and cultural identity of the English educated colonial clerk in the new city-space. He also focuses on the ambivalence and unreliability of the clerk or colonial babu who became complicit and gave legitimacy to the empire while personifying a complex modernity within the networks of the colonial administration.

This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of colonial and imperial history, literature, cultural studies, city studies, British studies, area studies, commonwealth studies and South Asian studies, particularly those interested in colonial Bengal.

Papers by Sumit Chakrabarti

Asian Journal of Social Science, 2017

A much neglected section of the 19th Century imperial bhadrolok population during British rule in... more A much neglected section of the 19th Century imperial bhadrolok population during British rule in India was the Bengali clerk or the kerani. While his English education and caste identity likened him to the middle-class gentleman, his pattern of work, low salary, lack of opportunities for improvement, pushed him closer to the labour class. But was this neglected section of the “bhadrolok” always without his representational space? In this paper, I shall study examples from clerks’ memoirs and from contemporary literature and read them alongside the violently repressive The Clerk’s Manual published in 1889, to see if the clerk was secretly discovering a heterotopia of his own.

Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies

International Studies Interdisciplinary Political and Cultural Journal, 2012

The essay takes up the issue of postcolonial representation in terms of a critique of European mo... more The essay takes up the issue of postcolonial representation in terms of a critique of European modernism that has been symptomatic of much postcolonial theoretical debates in the recent years. It tries to enumerate the epistemic changes within the paradigm of postcolonial theoretical writing that began tentatively with the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978 and has taken a curious postmodern turn in recent years with the writings of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. The essay primarily focuses on Bhabha's concepts of ambivalence and mimicry and his politics of theoretical anarchism that take the representation debate to a newer height vis-à-vis modes of religious nationalism and Freudian psychoanalysis. It is interesting to see how Bhabha locates these within a postmodern paradigm.

Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2015

Debates regarding the possibilities and limits of theoretical studies in the humanities have take... more Debates regarding the possibilities and limits of theoretical studies in the humanities have taken multiple curious turns since the later years of the last century, and claims towards the end or the death of theory have frequently been emphasized. The problem of representation, the politics of individual subject positions and the recurrent patterns of locating and trying to deconstruct hegemonic practice have somehow lost their tropic incision and been relegated to the confines of sophisticated academia, more often than not.