Purdue Today features Dr. Tithi Bhattacharya as part of "In Print" series

Dr. Tithi Bhattacharya, Associate Professor in the Department of History, was featured in Purdue Today as part of its "In Print" series for her recent book, Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence. In the book, Dr. 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. 

Dr. Bhattacharya introduces readers to the multifarious habits and personalities of Bengal’s traditional ghostsand 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, Dr. 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.

Read more about Dr. Tithi Battacharya: https://cla.purdue.edu/directory/profiles/tithi-bhattacharya.html 

Learn more about Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: https://www.cla.purdue.edu/news/college/2024/ip-ghostly-past-capitalist-presence.html

Visit the Purdue News "In Print" page: https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/purdue-today-topic/in-print/