Cover
Titel
Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence. A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal


Autor(en)
Bhattacharya, Tithi
Erschienen
Durham, NC 2024: Duke University Press
Anzahl Seiten
214 S.
Preis
$ 26.95
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
Margrit Pernau, Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, Berlin

Once considered anathema in serious and rational scholarship, ghosts have established a noticeable presence in history writing and its allied disciplines in the last couple of years. Three strands stand out. The first one draws on anthropology’s traditional interest in popular beliefs and takes an interest in the way ghosts were part of the way the subalterns make sense of their world. Instead of brushing off ghosts and other superstitions as evidence for a pre-modern and unscientific worldview of no importance to the historian, they are taken seriously as a pathway to recovering the subaltern voice. However, historians remain uncomfortable in the presence of ghosts and struggle with the need to reinterpret them as signs of something else, from group solidarity to resistance against the colonial state. For a long time, the interpretation of the past in the voice of the subaltern – ascribing reality and agency to ghosts, spirits, and gods – can only ever enter historiography as a language of the sources, not of analysis.1

The second strand of interest in ghosts comes from literature and film studies. Here the ambiguous fictionality of the ghosts does not separate the author and his audience on the one side and the historian on the other but forms part of the convention of the genre. The interpretations cover a wide range of approaches, from focusing on the development of the genres to reading literature as a source for cultural and sometimes even social history.2

The third strand started with Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, in which he used the interpretation of Hamlet’s ghost for reflections on the role that ghosts play in the quest for justice: they are the resolved part of the past that refuses to go away and continues to haunt and remind the present of tasks remained unfulfilled. Ethan Kleinberg has further developed the connection between ghosts and temporality. Ghosts are figures that disrupt the neat classification of the past, present, and future, and create the present through their presence. While they take the look of analytical categories, their status remains ambivalent: like the past in the present, a ghost is – their existence is crossed out, leaving them in an ontological in-between.3

Tithi Bhattacharya, professor of history and global studies at Purdue University, and author of an acclaimed study on the middle classes in Bengal in the nineteenth century4, has presented a thoughtful and engagingly written intervention in this field. Instead of assuming that all ghosts are created equal, or that the differences we can observe are random, she offers a consequent historicization of ghost. Like so many other things, colonial modernity also profoundly transformed ghosts and spirits. Pre-modern ghosts, at least in the Hindu-Bengali field from which she draws the bulk of her material, were a species altogether different from humans. They were ghosts from the beginning, rather than former human beings transmuted into ghosts after their death. These ghosts resided in wild and untamed spaces, in the forest and uncultivated lands, in graveyards, and in trees. They were not part of a supernatural, but very much integrated into the natural and everyday world, which they shared with animals and with humans. Their stories were embedded in local communities and circulated orally – it is only once ethnologists, both colonial and Bengali entered the field that we find written descriptions, hovering between the denouncement of superstitions standing in the way of modernity and a recovery of the beliefs and mores of the popular and the past, on which the nation was to be built.

Simultaneously to this recovery of the old ghosts, new ghosts made their entry – no longer linked to the lifeworld of the rural inhabitants, but to the new urban middle classes. Global capitalism, Bhattacharya convincingly shows, had an impact even on ghosts. Their transformation did not happen randomly, but forms part of the social and economic history of the rise of the Bengali middle-class, the bhadralok, whose life-worlds provided the background for the emergence of the new, modern ghosts. The ghosts which could be contacted through séances had little in common with the ghosts of old: they were the spirits of the departed, often of departed formerly known to those they encountered, but at times also the spirits of wise and enlightened men (seldom women), who continued to guide the living. The possibility of the transformation of humans into ghosts in turn needed a reconfiguration of the world after death, in which beliefs in reincarnation now struggled with ideas of an afterlife, at times even conceived in images of heaven and hell. It was from this time-space that the spirits could reach out to those still living on earth, to console and lead or to haunt them. Theosophy was an important transmission belt for a spiritual imagination which claim rationality and science as its basis. But the boundaries between reason and its other remained contested. “The modern uncanny [was] being anchored to the development of capitalism as a specific ensemble of social relations.” (p. 9)

This exciting and innovative approach opens up a whole new field of studies, both within hauntology and within investigations of colonial modernity. The narrative of the ghosts’ transformation is fascinating, however, like for other analysis on the movement between the premodern and colonial modernity, the question of its linearity remains open. Did the old ghosts really leave, once the new spirits started to appear in the homes of the bhadralok? Much of the change hinges on moving the gaze from one social group to another. But certainly, the villages and their beliefs did not disappear? For a different geographical region, Anand Vivek Taneja has shown, how the jinns of Delhi – which would qualify as old ghosts – retained their presence in the twenty-first century, at the heart of the metropole, but incorporated some traits of the modern bureaucratic state, for instance in the format of the petitions now addressed to them in writing.5 The premodern, modern, and postmodern, ghostly or otherwise, we might suggest, don’t follow each other in a neat suggestion, but retain what Reinhart Koselleck called the “contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous.”6 We might well imagine old and new ghosts sharing time, and perhaps even encountering each other.

The second major intervention of this book is the historicization of the emotions evoked by the ghosts. The fear to which the old ghosts gave rise was real, “as real as the fear of wild animals.” (p. 6) But at least to the nostalgic gaze of the modern ethnologists collecting these tales, this fear was embedded in the homeliness of a stable and unchallenged world-view, which softened its edge. This fear profoundly changed once the new spirits ousted the ghosts of old. “The location of fear had shifted from the trees, heaths, and marshes and was now the home,” (p. 85) destabilizing the very center of the middle-class selfhood and substituting the uncanny for the homely. But fear was not only getting more existential in a world which together with its enchantment had lost its homeliness – in a contrary move, the new spirits opened up to scientific exploration, which made the world and even the spirits understandable and thus might reduce the fear they evoked. Unlike the residents of the trees and marches, they moreover often share a relation of familiarity with those they visit in a séance, evoking not fear, but providing consolation from the afterworld. Fear, this investigation shows, is by no means a self-evident category, neatly divided from other emotions, but a complex conglomerate of varied and at times contradictory feelings, which need to a multitude of experiences and expressions, which change over time, for individually as well as socially.

Notes:
1 See the discussion in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton 2000, pp. 16, 104–106.
2 Mariá del Pilar Blanco / Esther Peeren (eds.), Popular Ghosts. The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture, New York 2010; Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story, 1840–1920. A Cultural History, Manchester 2010; Katarzyna Ancuta / Deimantas Valančiūnas (eds), South Asian Gothic. Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media, Cardiff 2021; Meraj Ahmed Mubarki, Filming Horror. Hindi Cinema, Ghosts and Ideologies, Delhi 2016; Meheli Sen, Haunting Bollywood, Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema, Austin 2017.
3 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, New York 2006; Ranjan Ghosh / Ethan Kleinberg (eds.), Presence. Philosophy, History and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century, Ithaka 2013; Ethan Kleinberg, Haunting History. For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past, Stanford 2017.
4 Tithi Bhattacharya, The Sentinels of Culture. Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal, Delhi 2005.
5 Anand Vivek Taneja, Jinnealogy. Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi, Stanford 2018.
6 Reinhart Koselleck, “Sediments of Time,” in: Sediments of Time. On Possible Histories. Translated from German by Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Stanford 2018, pp. 3–9.

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