Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T22:15:39.619Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Conservative Animal: Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay and Colonial Bengal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2017

Satadru Sen
Satadru Sen*
Affiliation:
Satadru Sen ([email protected]) is Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Get access

Abstract

This article examines the writings of the nineteenth-century Indian essayist Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay. Locating the writer within the history of colonial Bengal and a wider world of racial anxieties, it excavates the foundations of Indian conservatism outside the familiar terrain of anti-Muslim ressentiment. It argues that “traditionalist” conservatism in India was a transformative project that sought to intervene in the racial nature of a colonized people, focusing on the reordering of familiality, education, and health. Simultaneously liberating and constraining the individual subject, the interventions were expected to produce a population that, through engaging in a tense dialogue with Europe, could redefine its distinctive body of custom and also repair its perceived degenerative condition.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , May 2017 , pp. 363 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

List of References

Ahluwalia, Sanjam. 2007. Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India 1877–1947. Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Alter, Joseph. 2000. Gandhi's Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, David. 1993. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. [1940] 2005. “On the Concept of History.” Translated by Dennis Redmond. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm (accessed September 15, 2015).Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi. 2004. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2005. The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal, 1848–1885. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2007. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chaturvedi, Vinayak. 2010. “Rethinking Knowledge with Action: V. D. Savarkar, the Bhagavad Gita, and Histories of Warfare.” Modern Intellectual History 7(2):417–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohn, Bernard. 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Devji, Faisal. 2012. The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Devji, Faisal. 2013. Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forbes, Geraldine. 2007. Women in Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, an Introduction. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Gay, Peter. 1993. The Cultivation of Hatred. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Guha, Ramachandra. 2015. “Where Are the Conservative Intellectuals in India?” Caravan, March. http://ramachandraguha.in/archives/where-are-the-conservative-intellectuals-in-india-caravan.html (accessed September 15, 2015).Google Scholar
Harrison, Mark. 1994. Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hatcher, Brian. 2014. Vidyasagar: The Life and After-life of an Eminent Indian. New Delhi: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2004. The Philosophy of History. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover.Google Scholar
Highmore, Ben. 2001. The Everyday Life Reader. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Ranger, Terence. [1983] 2012. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hughes, H Stuart. 1977. Consciousness and Society. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1993. The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lahiri, Nayanjot. 2013. Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization Was Discovered. Kolkata: Seagull.Google Scholar
Majumdar, Rochona. 2009. Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Menon, Dilip. 2014. “Degeneration and Satyagraha: Hind Swaraj and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy.” Paper presented at WiSER symposium, University of Witwatersrand, October.Google Scholar
Minault, Gail. 1999. Secluded Scholars: Women's Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mishra, Pankaj. 2013. From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. New York: Picador.Google Scholar
Mitter, Partha. 1995. Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mukhopadhyay, Bhudeb. 2010. Bhudeb prabandha samagra [Collected essays of Bhudeb] . Kolkata: Charchapada.Google Scholar
Naoroji, Dadabhai. 2010. Poverty and Un-British Rule in India. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Pick, Daniel. 1993. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Raychaudhuri, Tapan. 2002. Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-Century Bengal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rudolph, Lloyd, and Rudolph, Susanne. 1987. The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.Google Scholar
Samanta, Arabinda. 2002. Malarial Fever in Colonial Bengal, 1820–1939: Social History of an Epidemic. Kolkata: Firma KLM.Google Scholar
Sarkar, Sumit. 2002. Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Sarkar, Sumit. 2006. Writing Social History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sarkar, Sumit. 2010. The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.Google Scholar
Sarkar, Tanika. 2001. Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Gender, Religion, and the Prehistory of Indian Nationalism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.Google Scholar
Sartori, Andrew. 2009. Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sen, Satadru. 2007. “Anarchies of Youth: The Oaten Affair and Colonial Bengal.” Studies in History 23(2):205–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sen, Satadru. 2012. Disciplined Natives: Race, Freedom and Confinement in Colonial India. New Delhi: Primus.Google Scholar
Sen, Satadru. 2015. Benoy Kumar Sarkar: Restoring the Nation to the World. New Delhi: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Viswanathan, Gauri. 1990. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. London: Faber & Faber.Google Scholar
Zachariah, Benjamin. 2012. Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar