Bøger af Tapati Bharadwaj

This book (the second in the series) has a selection from the early newspapers that had been printed in the early years of the British-East India Company, that is between 1780-1820, in colonial Calcutta, India. How do we read these texts that were written centuries ago and make sense of the printed texts? We cannot elide the fact that they were meant to be textually consumed by the Britishers who had arrived in India as part of the package of colonization. Reading primary texts alters how we theorize. The newspapers allow us to peek into this newly emerging world in Bengal and how socio-technological changes were taking place. We seem to think that these changes seamlessly moved into Bengal without any hiccups. We rarely do have access to these primary texts, as they are hidden in archives. What emerges is the human face of the process of British colonization and not an abstract concept of absolute power.There is a moment in the history of the English printed newspaper that emerged in Calcutta in the last two decades of the eighteenth century that defies all logic; when we consider the history of the newspaper and try to understand as to what was it that allowed it to transform itself whereby news was printed simultaneously in three different languages, we are unable to arrive at any coherent answer. The printed newspaper that evolved in Britain had a logic of its own. But, when print was transferred to India, it followed a trajectory that was particularly its own. It was introduced under colonization, undoubtedly but the manner in which print technology transmuted itself is not very clear.The multilingual newspaper allowed the convergence of multiple languages that had and existed in different social moments in the history of India: English was the language of the new British rulers, while Persian had been used earlier and Bengali was the language in use by the inhabitants of Bengal. The hegemonic present of colonial rule, the native present and the immediate past all featured in this heteroglot text, creating the illusion of linguistic parity while in reality that was not the case. Examining the reasons as to why such a multilingual text would exist does give us an opportunity to understand the heterogeneous nature of Indian society.

We belong to a generation in urban India that really is unable to fathom the need to agonize about the foreign-ness of the West as we have normalized the presence of many aspects of western civilization in our lives; it is cool to speak English with a (south) Indian slightly incomprehensible drawl, eat with your fingers and be arrogant about the poverty that still exists alongside the overt wealth that is uber-evident all around. My parents were migrants to India from Bangladesh after 1947, and I grew up listening to many linguistic variations of Bengali; by the time my children grow up, the colonial past will be as distant to them as the Mohenjo-daro-Harappa civilizations. The colonial past for them will be another phase in the history of India, as was the Islamic past. Their generation of natives won't really care about how the Orient was discursively constructed by the West and that colonial-native relationships might have been fraught with tension and notions of power. Texts which deal with the white sahib, the civilizing mission of the white Europeans versus the effeminate, natives will be as anecdotal (and amusing) as cartoon strips. They will be so far removed from the memories of British-western colonization, that the past of the previous two hundred years will become, mostly, literary-textual sources for history. My children will say, "once upon a time, the West construed us within such racialized parameters of Other/barbarian and it is amusing for us as we read them."Natives collaborated with the West as many aspects of modernity were transferred onto the colonies. In a letter that Jeremy Bentham wrote to Rammohun Roy in 1831, Bentham describes himself as having had a great influence on James Mill who dictated the histories of India through his work, The History of British India (1818); Mill is seen as a family friend, a discipline and a student of Bentham. What is of immense interest is how Bentham subtly suggests to Rammohun that his ideas have been influential in determining the future of India, via the various people whom he knew (he mentions many officials of the EIC and James Mill, of course) and therefore, his establishment of the new penal system in England-the panopticon-is also an institution that Rammohun could consider for India. Bentham wrote, requesting Rammohun to join in the process of establishing an ideal prison system in India: What say you to the making singly or in conjunction with other enlightened philanthropists, an offer to Government for that purpose [of building the panopticon]? Professors of all religion might join the contract; and appropriate classification and separation for the persons under management provision correspondent to their several religions, and their respective castes; or other allocations under their respective religions.This is a fascinating anecdote to narrate, showing us the near macabre ways in which the new modern systems of knowledge that were emerging in the West were transferred to the colonies.One can argue that the issue is this: to understand whether the natives were complicit and starry eyed at the newness of western civilization and not to agonize over the fact that western discourses that were written in the two hundred years of global colonization were replete with images of the sly native who is also a barbarian, versus the civilized West.Postcolonial theory has discussed, ad nauseam, the fractured psyche of the colonizer/colonized in the presence of the specter of the racial Other. The colonized were written over, and denied subjectivity. But all of this, at the present, is now passé. We have to keep in mind that simultaneously, during colonization, the natives were synthesizing two disparate cultures. As we historicize the emergence of postcolonial theory, it will allow us to declare the death of this particular theoretical and literary movement.

In order to create a feminist genealogy in India, we need to be able to incorporate a diverse range of voices of women. As there is some documented source on the lives of women who were directly connected to Sri Ramakrishna, we should also embrace these narratives when establishing a tradition of the lives of women who were living in the nineteenth century in India. This book looks at the lives of two female disciples of Sri Ramakrishna, the mystic saint who lived in the nineteenth century, at Dakshineshwar, near Calcutta. I examine the lives of Lakshmi Devi (1864-1926), Sri Ramakrishna's niece, and Yogin-Ma (1851-1924), and both were disciples of the Master. Lakshmi Devi was a child widow, and Yogin-Ma was the daughter of Prasanna Mitra, a doctor of the Calcutta Medical College and was quite involved with the Young Bengals; Yogin-Ma left his dissolute husband and lived at her maternal home most of her adult life. The lives of these two women is reasonably documented, and yet we know very little about them in feminist histories, unless one happens to read the publications of the Ramakrishna Mission.Of course, the question that is inevitable is this: why do we need to know about them at all as they would have led conventional lives within the domain of married domesticity, raising children and involved in domestic labor, as was the norm for all women in nineteenth century Bengal. Of tantamount importance is the fact that these two female disciples, who were born in quite conservative families, were able to occupy a space in the semi-public realm of the religious-spiritual, through their involvement with Sri Ramakrishna. They were at par with the male devotees and disciples of Sri Ramakrishna, and that is saying a lot. Sri Ramakrishna ensured that there was parity between his male and his female disciples.This book also argues that Sri Ramakrishna's acts of gender inclusion in an essentially male domain of Hindu religion in the nineteenth century is a historical fact that has been elided by feminist scholars; more surprisingly, all hagiographical narratives on Sri Ramakrishna, published by the Ramakrishna Mission, are also silent about this. What we know about Sri Ramakrishna is based on interpretations that have been written about him; more often than not, they are hagiographical in nature and not surprisingly so. But what is quite interesting is that Sri Ramakrishna was actually quite socially transgressive for his time period, considering the fact that he was an illiterate Brahmin-priest from rural Bengal, and we never really get to hear this about him. He was loath to perpetuate and maintain the status quo which was represented and disseminated by patriarchal, Hindu institutions.

In the newly established realm of print culture set up by the Britishers in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, it did not take long for the natives to pick up the new technology, and the English language. This process of exchange and learning was made possible through close interaction.In this book, I have looked at the broader canvas of how natives, in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, were involved in the imperial realm of print as compositors, writers, booksellers, printers, teachers and translators, mastering and replicating all aspects of print culture and technology. My specific focus has been on Rammohun Roy's engagement with this emerging realm of print, thus tracing the transition that took place from imperial print to native print. This process of cultural transmission and exchange did not pass through any phase of mimicry.Here, I argue that the realm of English native print in Calcutta in the early nineteenth century was dominated by the writings of Rammohun Roy. I look at how it was possible for Rammohun to operate within the newly formed communications circuit that specifically targeted the native readers. How did printing take place in Calcutta, and who were involved? How did native entrepreneurs to pick up the new technology? This book is an attempt to recuperate some sort of history of the communications circuit that was established for and by the natives in the early nineteenth century.

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna has an a-historical appeal that cuts across generations, time periods, geo-social spaces and lifestyle choices. The text or the person is not the sole belonging of a particular institution or a group of people.We belong to a generation that is flippant in our habits and our notions of Indian-ness and the world, and we flirt with global cultures. And yet, The Gospel does make sense. One can imagine Sri Ramakrishna, examining us benevolently, and questioning us about our lifestyles; never judging us but engaging with us and having a discussion, so that we ourselves are critically empowered to understand ourselves better.Sri Ramakrishna is obviously enough, not specific to any particular nation or community or religious belief. He embraces all and in this all embracing gesture, reaches out to everyone. His teachings critique the global dominant notion that we have about mainstream Hinduism - where Indian-ness and being Hindu is equated with a repressive concept of moral prudishness.More often than not, Sri Ramakrishna spoke in riddles, and his saying are self contradictory, on the verge of being unsolved conundrums - as if questioning the intelligence of the listener. His guise of an unlettered rustic, poor Brahmin helped him. As a reader, we can be thrown off the track if we fall into that trap.

The focus in this brief essay-book is to retrieve the voice of a nineteenth century subaltern in Bengal, India, Rani Rashmoni (1793-1861) and the conditions under which she lived. By having a dialogue with a subject from the past, by recuperating a history that has been elided by feminist historians, we are compelled to conclude that Rani Rashmoni was an agent on her own rights. Oftentimes, we have to be willing to venture into documented sources out of the norm in order to create a space from where we can make ethical contact with the subaltern, even if the subaltern seems not to have any agency - complying and conforming to most norms of patriarchy, caste and class. We have to create new interpretative parameters to read within and into the stories which create these social matrices that construct the oppressed female subaltern. More importantly, where do we locate primary or even secondary material about women who lived at this time period? If we, as feminists, are willing to broaden our focus on what texts we are willing to read, then we can sketch out the lives of women who were living at this time period. It is because of Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886), the mystic saint of Bengal, that we know so much about the life of Rani Rashmoni but why is it that we hear little about her, or there is little mention of her, outside the works published on Sri Ramakrishna by the Ramakrishna Mission? When the Britishers arrived, towards the end of the eighteenth century, were all native women victims of sati and patriarchy? It is within this premise that I try to understand the life of Rani Rashmoni, who can be considered as actively involved not only in philanthropy but also in business and management. It is at the interstices of the religious interiority of her life, and the public-ness of being a member of the rich elite that we have to deconstruct her life. Was Sri Ramakrishna more a closeted social revolutionary than anything else, and through his politics of allowing for a lower caste woman to be his patron, articulating a position that was socially radical? In the early nineteenth century, through the life of Rani Rashmoni, we do get to hear the subaltern speak, thus problematizing the feminist conundrum - can the subaltern speak? If Rani Rashmoni was after all, a hybrid, westernized female entrepreneur, under the disguise of conforming within the patriarchal mould, she was legitimized within mainstream Hinduism by the presence of Sri Ramakrishna.

The emergence of print culture in colonial Bengal, in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, under the East India Company, is largely an untold story. Calcutta would become the capital of the British empire, and the realm of print culture played an important role in maintaining and perpetuating British rights to this colonial territory. The history of how this realm of print culture evolved in Calcutta is central to this book. Ships that sailed from England carried books; printing presses were brought all the way from Europe and with the help of Indians, a realm of imperial print emerged. How do we understand this engagement between the colonizer and the colonized? It would be a more meaningful discussion if we understood power as operating in a more sophisticated manner rather than simply being imposed upon others in a binary fashion. Those Britishers who traveled to India were people who were part and parcel of the Juggernaut of empire making and they were blood and flesh people and not necessarily heinously mean or cruel. The intellectual brahminical elite allowed themselves to be participants in this process, only because they were involved in a new epistemic shift; the tradeoff must have been fair. It is rather simplistic to construe the natives as being overpowered or incapable of resistance of any sort. The realm of early nineteenth century print culture in Calcutta was a heterogeneous one, where natives and colonizers engaged with print in a heteroglossic manner. The sheer fascination with the new-ness of the social and technological aspects of print culture might have been, after all, irresistible.

27Till as recently as two hundred years ago, India was a manuscript culture meaning that the printed text did not exist. When the transition took place from a manuscript culture to a print one, it seems to have taken place with great ease, implying that the shift was made without much murmurs and complaints from at least the native, elite sections of society. This book looks at the emergence of the first printed newspapers in colonial Calcutta, India (1780-1820).

In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, a realm of print culture evolved in Calcutta serving the needs of empire. The East India Company used this realm--which printed news, gossip, Oriental scholarship, literary journals--to establish and maintain its control over the territories. Moreover, the printed scholarship of the scholar-administrators of the East India Company reveals their belief that print technology was a step into modernity, a move away from Indian scribal culture. Print culture, in Bengal pre-1800 was produced for a non-native audience, that was also located in Europe. As content determines how interpretations take place, I have argued that the white settlers read in order to create a sense of imperial identity and thus, print technology in the colonial context was never innocent. Between 1780 and 1800, many newspapers in Calcutta printed news in multiple languages side by side on the same sheet of paper. This was a moment in the history of newspapers in England and in India that had not happened before and was not replicated subsequently. Any reader of these beautiful multilingual sheets of paper would question as to why such newspapers went out of fashion in a few decades after they were printed. Not only had the new technology of print culture entered India with the Britishers but also, this technology, in the process of establishing itself within a colonial situation, underwent changes on how it was conceptualized. Is it possible that such a multilingual text could only happen in south Asia where a multilingual society exists. In some ways, and unwittingly so, the Britishers captured an aspect of Indian society within these printed texts and the sheer spirit of invention marks these newspapers. The possibilities of what could have been if newspapers had continued to be multilingual are not explored for it denotes an epistemic shift, thus answering a question: what happens when a technology that has its origins in a different social space enters a new geographical locale and how does it change?