Tithi Bhattacharya receives 2025 Bochhorer Best Award for 'Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence'

Professor Tithi Bhattacharya was recently honored at the prestigious Anandabazar 2025 Bochhorer Best Awards ceremony as the “Year’s Best Historian/Author” for her book, Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke University Press, 2024).

Held on July 24, 2025, in Kolkata, this year’s Bochhorer Best Awards were presented to nine individuals from various fields including performers, athletes, mentors, and innovators who were recognized as the “Year’s Best” in their chosen field. The Awards are given annually by Anandabazar House, the leading publishing/media house in Bengal.

Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence now also with an Indian edition, has received praise from both reviewers and readers for Professor Bhattacharya’s scholarly contributions to understanding the role of Bengali ghosts and ghost stories in the modern Indian nation. The eminent novelist Amitav Ghosh called the work “The best account I have yet read of the enchanted and uncanny world of stories and beliefs that Bengalis like myself grew up in.”

Dr. Bhattacharya’s book is the first academic work to chart the social history of an emotion – fear – in the context of British colonialism and modernity in Bengal. It is an unique contribution to South Asian history and opens up pathways of research into multiple fields such as religious and cultural studies, gender history and of course the history of colonialism in the global south.

Dr. Bhattacharya is a professor of South Asian History at Purdue University, having joined the Department of History in 2002. She received her PhD in History from the University of London in 2000. 

In addition to Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence, Professor Bhattacharya is the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2005) and is the editor of the now classic study, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017). Her coauthored book includes the popular Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019) which has been translated in over 30 languages. She writes extensively on South Asian history, Marxist theory, gender, and the politics of Islamophobia. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies, South Asia Research, The Guardian, Jacobin, The Nation, and the New Left Review. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Gender Studies, Studies on Asia and Spectre.

Dr. Bhattacharya teaches courses in South Asian history, Transnational Gender, Colonialism and Global History. Learn more about Dr. Tithi Bhattacharya at this link.

A video of the 2025 Bochhorer Best Awards can be seen at this link. Closed captions are in Bengali and can be translated to another language in the settings on the YouTube video.