The poor company: Economics and ecstasy in the Kartabhaja sect of colonial Bengal (original) (raw)

Space of Deprivation :The 19th Century Bengali Kerani in the Bhadrolok Milieu of Calcutta

Asian Journal of Social Science, 2017

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.

Religious experiments in colonial Calcutta: modern Hinduism and bhakti among the Indian middle class

Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis, 2011

Any discussion of India from the point of view of the West must deal with the problem posed by the colonial past and the ways in which India was colonized, interpreted and constructed to fit into an imperialist agenda. The terms ‘Hinduism’ and ‘religion’, for example, are themselves quite problematic, since they are born of Western and Judeo-Christian thought, and may not reflect the complexity and diversity of Indic traditions well enough. A translation and transmission of terms and concepts from one cultural domain to another is required, but it is bound to be merely tentative and approximate, since a comprehension of the full meaning of words and concepts related to Indic religions presupposes an extensive grounding in the rich religious thought of India. Bhaktisiddhānta lived on the border between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, between the black and the white towns of Calcutta, between India and the West, and between two world wars. His effort to search for and apply ...