Introduction
Horror, history, haunting
In the 1930s, there stood an old, imposing college hostel in the bustling city of Calcutta. Its students shared a peculiar dread of the bathroom on the ground floor. Rumors swirled about an ex-student who had met a tragic end within those very walls. One night, a young student, unaware of its haunted past, decided to use the bathroom. As he stepped into the bathroom, a chilling sensation washed over him. He felt a presence behind him, a cold breath on his neck. Turning around, he saw nothing but empty space. Dismissing it as a trick of his mind, he continued his business. But then, he heard a faint creaking sound from above. Looking up, he gasped. A man, his face contorted in agony, was suspended from the ceiling, a noose tightening around his neck. The sight was so horrifying that the student fainted. When he regained consciousness, he realized the terrible truth: an ex-student had committed suicide in that very bathroom, a chilling reminder of the tragedy that had occurred within those same walls.Footnote 1
This story, a supposed anecdote shared by a friend of philologist Sukumar Sen, is among the many twentieth-century Bengali tales of horror, death, and darkness. Stories of ghosts, apparitions, and the supernatural lurked in early and mid-twentieth-century Calcutta, the city that emerged as the seat of modern scientific inquiry and rational thought. The haunted spaces of the metropolis—the High Court, eerie bathrooms of old colleges, or the dimly lit corridors of decaying mansions—starkly contrasted the towering presence of modern institutions of knowledge production. How do we reconcile the ghosts of Calcutta with the advent of colonial modernity that sought to embrace the science of logic and reason? In examining social attitudes toward death, hallucinations, spiritualism, and the unexplained, can ‘unreason’ be a useful framework to comprehend the past? This article delves into these questions as it journeys into the lives of the dead in colonial Bengal.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the dead had come to lead an ordered life in the city of Calcutta. From the haphazard disposal of a disordered past, the dead now moved neatly and quietly into visible spaces of the material landscape of Bengal—crematoriums, burning ghats, dissecting theatres. Preoccupation with cadavers assumed greater urgency than ever before. The dead now acquired new histories, memories, and institutions and sought to be regulated in ways that were new. This article analyses the dead as an anatomical body and ghostly presence in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bengal. It investigates the native cadaver—buried, burnt, cremated, dissected; ‘deviant’, ‘uncivilized’, haunted—to analyse the historical processes through which it emerged as a scientific and spectral subject of study in the British Empire. Drawing on a vast range of sources—from the colonial archive of municipal reports to the vernacular archive of Bengali ghost stories and medical tracts, I problematize new ways of seeing and understanding the body in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century British India. By connecting the disparate worlds of the clinical body to the ghostly body, I argue that a rare historical moment was forged in colonial Bengal that drew from a positivist tradition, and yet transcended the fragile artifice of normative reason to lure us into the realm of unreason. In that world, the affect-laden modernity we encounter was stripped of its Enlightenment rationality and hinged on the inexplicable, irrational, and unhinged.
The first part of this article traces the passage of the body from its death to becoming a ‘cadaver’. With the proliferation of medical colleges in nineteenth-century Bengal, the corpse was no longer subjected to romanticism or associated with the emotional trauma of death. It became the pathologized ‘body’ as the physicians defined their knowledge in opposition to indigenous magic, charms originating from the dead body. The second part of the article is a story of how the world of the dead, which found expression in occult and spirits, often happily coexisted with the anatomical dead. With the advent of colonialism, the physical space of rural Bengal changed dramatically, owing to colossal mortality triggered by malaria deaths. Deserted villages and subsequent haunting paranoia of the diseased and the dead became pervasive in Bengali literary genres, thereby creating fluid spaces for the dead to traverse the rural and the urban. Caught in between the worlds of the living and the dead was yet another world wherein a doctor, Dr James Esdaile, induced death-like trances in his patients to perform ‘painless’ surgeries. In this world, liminal creatures repeatedly crossed the treacherous boundaries between living and dead, only to be ‘reborn’ as a new subject of colonial scientific curiosity. By framing the dead as its subject, this article weaves together three stories—the anatomical, the ethereal, and the spectral—to demonstrate how archival records, fiction, haunted spaces, emotive narratives, and seances can complicate our understanding of colonialism, science, embodiment, and modernity.
The dead in history and historiography
The dead have been subjected to a life of robust investigations by anthropologists, historians, literary critics, philosophers, religious studies scholars, and sociologists alike. While work on death within the history of science and medicine remains sparse in the South Asian context, a sophisticated scholarship on the history of death, dissection, and anatomy exists in North America and Europe. In his celebrated work, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America, Michael Sappol paints the cultural world of nineteenth-century America from an anatomical perspective.Footnote 2 He lays out the goal of his book in no unclear terms: ‘My subject is the anatomical acquisition, dissection, and representation of bodies—and how such activities contributed to the making of professional, classed, sexed, racial, national, and speciated selves.’Footnote 3 A meticulous study, Sappol explores how the science of anatomy played a critical part in the ‘cultural politics of medical professionalization and bourgeois self-making’.Footnote 4 Prominent historian, Thomas Laqueur’s interest in the ‘disenchanted corpse’ gave us his phenomenal study, The Work of the Dead, which remains one of the most exhaustive cultural histories of the dead.Footnote 5 The dead, according to Laqueur, ‘do work’ for the living, meaning how we care for, remember, and commemorate the dead, plays a crucial role in shaping cultural identities, social structures, and human connections to history and memory. Vastly expanded in scope, Laqueur, however, does not venture outside of the Western societies of France and Britain. In a similar vein, eminent historian of science Ruth Richardson’s richly archival work, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, examines twentieth-century English attitudes towards the corpse by focusing on the Anatomy Act of 1832 that criminalized dissection of condemned murderers and replaced them with ‘unclaimed bodies’ derived from the poor denizens of public hospitals, poorhouses, and workhouses.Footnote 6 Furthering Richardson’s study and taking us back to eighteenth-century England, Richard Ward has investigated the Dissection of Convicts Bills of 1886 and 1896 to show that although these proposed legislations were meant to aid anatomists by providing a steady supply of bodies for dissection, improving their surgical skills, developing teaching in provinces and for public anatomical demonstrations, both these bills failed to pass into law.Footnote 7 He argues that the failure of these parliamentary measures can be understood as a historical moment ‘when the competing claims of anatomy and criminal justice vied for supremacy over the criminal corpse’.Footnote 8 Linking the development of anatomy to the larger socio-cultural milieu, he shows that obtaining criminal corpses was part of a conflict between the dissection of criminals as a medical practice, the needs of medical research, and the negative image that it bestowed upon anatomy. In a richly empirical study that traces the modernization of Sweden post-1870, Eva Ahren places the dead body as a central site of cultural negotiation with medical authorities, visual cultures, and public health works.Footnote 9 By delving into dissections, medical education, post-mortem photography, and cremation practices, she argues that the ‘attitudes toward death correspond to culturally constituted, historically changing needs’.Footnote 10 The above-mentioned works, therefore, paint the material-cultural landscape of the dead along with the construction of scientific knowledge around it, visual representations, and ethical concerns.
A divergent strand of scholarship within the broader histories of the corpse has centred around forensics, serology, autopsies, and criminal law. Jeffrey Jentzen, for instance, has examined the physicians’ attempts to replace the lay coroner and create a medical examiner system in twentieth-century America.Footnote 11 Writing about colonial India in his study of death investigations, Jentzen points to the early difficulties in ascertaining the cause of death due to the unique conditions of rapid decomposition of bodies, religious practices of prompt cremation and burial, and the great many poisons available in the subcontinent.Footnote 12 It was only until the Coroner’s Act in 1871, and the Indian Evidence Act in 1872, that scientific facts were brought to colonial courtrooms in new forms of evidence, such as toxicological analysis for drugs and poisons, fingerprints and photographs, as well as in the person of the medicolegal expert.Footnote 13 The figure of the British civil surgeon in India and later on the coroner and the chemical examiner in overseeing medicolegal cases has been examined closely by legal historian Mitra Sharafi. Sharafi has demonstrated how colonial anxieties around dissimulation and their ‘fear of the false’ were a special focus of the criminal justice system in British India.Footnote 14 But the greatest strength of Sharafi’s work lies in her ability to look beyond the usual narrative of colonial stereotypes surrounding ‘racial difference’. Rather, Sharafi locates the complexities of punitive self-harm and fraudulent evidence in the tradition of legal pluralism.
The literature on the dead in South Asia has focused primarily on cremation, burial rituals, gendered violence, colonial punitive measures, and less on the corpse as a subject of medical education and anatomical inquiry. David Arnold’s Burning the Dead delves into cremation practices to analyse the colonizing power of the state over its corpse.Footnote 15 More recently, sociologist Ravi Nandan Singh’s book Dead in Benaras analyses the communal and ritualistic aspects of funeral processions, focusing on the symbolic and emotional meanings attached to cremation and mourning.Footnote 16 He argues that the act of ‘funeral travelling’ or shav yatra—the movement of the dead body through various spaces—serves as a communal act that connects individuals to broader social and spiritual networks. With its unique role as a funerary city, Banaras becomes a focal point for understanding how the living engaged with death.
Scholars have also explored the varied ways of dying, thereby demonstrating how death practices featured in colonial imagination, among the Hindu literate middle-class, Brahmin pundits, Christian missionaries, and others duly invested in it. For instance, one of the finest discourse analyses, Lata Mani’s Contentious Tradition studies sati’s violent death, while Saumya Saxena takes the debate on sati into the post-colonial state and Hindu law reforms.Footnote 17 If Mani demonstrates how the women who committed sati were either glorified as ‘brave and valiant’ or pitied as ‘hapless’, Saxena investigates post-independence police records that describe women committing sati as ‘insane’ or ‘not in their senses’ and yet responsible for their act. Sati, argues Saxena, was not a mere crime, but also a public spectacle. The idea of death as a strategic display is also taken up by Kim A. Wagner, who has investigated how punishments, especially being shot from cannons during the revolt of 1857, functioned as a disciplinary tool of the Empire, meant to instil fear in the masses.Footnote 18 In a subsequent book, closely examining the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, Wagner contends that death was a performative act as epitomized by General Dyer’s racialized paranoia and violence.Footnote 19 The dead subalterns appear in the scholarship of Clare Anderson and Alastair McClure, who have analysed how death through executions was a key feature of the colonial penal regime in South Asia. Focusing on the Andaman Islands (Cellular Jail, Ross Island), Anderson notes that the colonial state employed hangings as routine punishments, indicating a penal infrastructure that was procedural, bureaucratized, and violent rather than judicial.Footnote 20 In a similar vein, Alastair McClure contends that while in the early years of the Crown rule, colonial judges could grant lenient sentences to murder convictions, all that changed by 1898. An amendment to the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) made ‘death the presumptive punishment, requiring special justification for a lesser sentence’.Footnote 21
That the colonial state had extrajudicial reach over people’s lives and death has been reiterated by several historians, including Radhika Singha, Mark Condos, and Elizabeth Kolsky, who have highlighted the violent, racialized rule of law that came to dominate, especially in the frontier regions of the subcontinent.Footnote 22 Blending the medicolegal with the political, Jordanna Bailkin elucidates how British police surgeons and coroners were often complicit in legitimizing the ‘ruptured spleen’ defence within the colonial legal system.Footnote 23 They provided expert testimony of the inherent fragility of the spleen when an Indian soldier died from a soldier’s kick. Death was therefore more often considered an accident due to malaria-induced, delicate spleens of Indians, as this discourse effectively evaded murder charges against the British. Footnote 24
Besides the body of the dead, the lived human body has also been a focal point of scholarly inquiry in South Asia recently. For instance, in their edited volume, Contextualizing the Body, Sudit Krishna Kumar and Suvobrata Sarkar have identified three distinct academic strands within the histories of the body.Footnote 25 The first tends to study the body as an object for the natural sciences such as life sciences, biology, and medicine. The second interprets the body as a set of metaphors and symbols. A third trend seeks to understand the body as ‘a means of articulation’, communicating ideas, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings in public.Footnote 26 As they seek to develop the second and third conceptualizations surrounding the body as a symbol and as an agent, the authors in the volume dismiss the first line of inquiry as being ‘outside the domain of humanities’, which however, is not an accurate description of the myriad ways in which the interdisciplinary field of medical humanities has thrived and grown.Footnote 27 There is a scant but sophisticated scholarship within the history of medicine in South Asia that has problematized the complex ways in which bodies, both living and dead, were racialized, classified, dissected, and scrutinized in the colony. David Arnold, one of the pioneering scholars in the history of medicine, in his seminal work, Colonizing the Body, opens his book with the riveting and unforgettable scene of a ‘ghastly incident in Burra Bazaar’ one Sunday evening in June 1908.Footnote 28 We come across Paltoo, initially mistaken to be a dom at the Calcutta Medical College Hospital, who appears in the streets of Burra Bazaar with a decomposed human arm and a skull, to the utter bewilderment and shock of the local people. Arnold reveals how Paltoo’s exhibit—an ‘irregularly dissected’ dead arm and a badly severed skull was taken as proof of the dismal state of teaching at ‘self-constituted’ private medical colleges in Calcutta in the nineteenth century. Paltoo’s grisly antics led to a questioning within the newly established colonial medical administration on the need for a medical registration act to rescue Western medicine from its disrepute and malpractice in the city.Footnote 29
One of the rare and illuminating works that tie medicine, bodies, and the logic of liberalism is by Ishita Pande, who has examined anatomical education in colonial Bengal.Footnote 30
As the humoral system of Ayurveda or Unani came to be rejected in favour of a more pathological understanding of the body, the native dissector was offered a rite of passage into rational medicine that superseded Hindu caste convictions of touching the corpse. Pande argues that in the nineteenth century, instead of an eradication of difference in favour of a universal science, anatomical education led to an ‘objectification of bodily difference’ as marked by caste, religion, occupational hierarchy, learning ability in the racialized bodies. The growth of colonial anatomy, therefore, according to Pande, did not erase caste distinctions under the light of reason, but instead reformulated caste hierarchies as a form of racial difference. Writing about the Ayurvedic body, Projit B. Mukharji, in his fascinating work, Doctoring Traditions, briefly mentions Ayurvedic colleges in Bengal hunting for bodies for teaching dissection in the 1920s.Footnote 31 Furthering Arnold, Pande, and Mukharji’s foray into the dissected dead, this study merges the medicalized body of the cadaver with the spectral body of corpse-spirits that could be summoned, felt, and communicated with by the living. This nineteenth-century curiosity with the wide-ranging forms of the dead, from dissected, anatomized, to bodies subject to mesmeric trances, to the dead that returned, is in many ways a new phenomenon. This resurrection of the dead was cast not only in the language of a positive tradition emanating from Europe, but also on a fuzzy ground where facts gave way to an affective reality.
Studies of the dead ought to be located not only within an intellectual engagement with histories of the body, but also with affect theory. As Patricia Clough terms it, the ‘affective turn’ in social sciences and humanities has led to a rethinking of the power of body and mind on one hand and of reason and passions on the other.Footnote 32 Emphasizing its novelty, the editors of The Affective Turn argue, ‘In this conceptualization, affect is not only theorized in terms of the human body.’Footnote 33 Rather, affect is also theorized in relation to the ‘technologies’ that ‘produce affective bodily capacities beyond the body’s organic-physiological constraints’. This study seeks to expand the contours of histories of the body by situating the corpse within the corpus of the history of medicine, intellectual history, and new affective modalities. Ishita Pande has explored how the transition to neatly executed dissections in colonial Bengal (following Madhusudan Gupta’s celebratory dissection in 1835 at the Calcutta Medical College) heralded a new way of ‘seeing reason’.Footnote 34 I argue that while leading us to a regime of vision that gained legitimacy from reason, this new ‘science’ also made room for the ‘affect’—the supernormal, and the spirits that made their presence felt in the world of the physical. So, if the otherworldly was cast in the language of a positivist tradition wherein facts and reason reigned supreme, it also contained within it a fuzziness between reason and the inexplicable affect. By coopting the medical within the humanities to craft a world where the ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ collide with the ‘irrational’ and haunted, this study seeks to integrate the medical with the cultural, the anthropological with the historical, and the archival with the Bengali popular fiction.
Who are the dead? The dead in the world of living
This article is not about the existential experience or philosophical questions surrounding death and dying. While I acknowledge the criticality of studying the dead as subjects of theology and philosophy, my work differentiates itself from such by examining human attitudes surrounding the materiality of the cadaver and the specific historical context that gave birth to a new discursive domain about the dead. The bodies that I study are unnamed and unclaimed and remain mostly unrepresentative—bodies of convicts, criminals, paupers, and prostitutes. Bodies bereft of names. Bodies stripped of history and identity. It is in their namelessness that we find their presence. It is also a history rooted in the liminal boundary between the living and the dead.
Spaces of the dead
Writing in 1882, H. E. Busteed, Civil Surgeon of Cuddalore (a district in Tamil Nadu) and author of Echoes from Old Calcutta, points to the unequal spaces occupied by the living and the dead in the city of Calcutta. He notes, ‘but so much space has been given by those who lived in Calcutta in the last century, that none is left for those who died and were there buried’.Footnote 35 He chides the cavalier attitude of the English towards preserving their dead through relics and memorials in the churches and churchyards of Great Britain—a neglect that expresses itself in the Christian cemeteries of Calcutta. Given the general apathy of the English people towards looking after their dead, he wishes that ‘some national title to preservation’ be set up to care for the many tombs of Calcutta.Footnote 36 In his book, Busteed brings to life many of the dead in the cemeteries of Calcutta—from a little-known heroic young sailor to the celebrated writer Walter Savage Landor—all deserving of a memorialized past.
By the nineteenth century, the rotting dead came under suspicion. The horrors of encroachment by the dead into the city’s heartland reconfigured the urban living spaces of the Indian subcontinent. For instance, in 1854, an anxious Bombay government ordered inquiries into ‘the nuisance occasioned by the burial of low caste Hindoos, cattle, etc. on the beach in Back Bay’ and sought immediate measures to remove them.Footnote 37 The solution was to build a public cemetery for ‘cattle and low-caste Hindoos on the Flats’. The contours of the physical separation between the dead and the living were beginning to be distinctly defined. The site of the proposed new burial grounds was ‘so removed from the inhabited portion of the town’ that the dead ‘would not be so injurious to the public health’ as compared with burying them on Back Bay beach near the most densely populated portion of the island. That the dead induced ‘poisonous effects which must be expected from a state of things’ was the sneaking suspicion, just as was ‘pollution of the air of dwelling-houses, through the decomposition of the bodies interred in or near them’.Footnote 38 The angst of the state towards its dead was palpable. In 1854, the government of Bombay noted:
The stench from which is most disgusting, and overpoweringly offensive; and all these are to the windward of the Native Town, which has its sea-breeze, that would otherwise be health-giving, thus poisoned. It is likely that the unwholesomeness emanations are one of the causes why Girgaum has what is thought to be a proportionately high mortality when cholera is epidemic.Footnote 39
By the early twentieth century, religious sensibilities and public health concerns in Bengal mingled to demand that the deceased deserved a dignified burial rather than being discarded into the Ganges River.
The new Municipal Act permits the throwing of a bit of half-burnt flesh from a dead body into the river; but this cannot be done if the constable is not paid four annas and the dom even more. This may be of no consequence to rich people; but to all others this is a positive grievance, as the throwing of the flesh into the Ganges is enjoined by the religion of the Hindus, and many are really mortified at being unable to do it, in consequence of their inability to satisfy the unlawful demand of the constable and the dom. Will the authorities kindly see to it?Footnote 40
Alongside anxieties about disposal, pollution, and poisonous gases that made their way into living quarters, concerns also emerged regarding the design of the burial ground. Overcrowding was an issue—there were too many dead bodies, including those of children, argued the civil authorities in Bombay. Thus, fears of pollution were restricted not only to germs, but also to the spatialization of castes and access to the city, even after death.
Ordering and recording the dead
Along with great changes in the necrogeography of Calcutta, the demands of the ‘sanitary city’ ensured that deaths needed to have a recorded burial in spaces determined by the state. Dr Leith, a name that recurs in any attempts to standardize mortuary returns, pointed out the efficacy of registering deaths for ‘advancing medical science’.Footnote 41 Dr Leith’s efforts in categorizing the dead are visible in the Mortuary Returns for Bombay for 1848–49, wherein the dead came to be classified according to caste, religion, occupation, and race (Indo-Britons, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Portuguese). Registering the dead was to be accompanied by clearly defined rules on where to bury or cremate them. In 1855, for instance, the Bombay government claimed to have discovered a practice whereby the bodies of stillborn infants and those under two years of age were buried near the houses of some locals.Footnote 42 Considerably alarmed, they issued immediate orders to stop the practice, along with a host of inquiries into it, verifying the religious sanctity of such a death ritual—did the practice extend to Hindus of ‘inferior castes’? Was it confined to Bombay? Did the Shastras enjoin it?
Deploring the lack of appropriate laws in India, the government was quick to bring in the power of scientific awareness in England, where such rituals were opposed to ‘true sanitary principles, and dangerous to the public health in populous places’.Footnote 43 The registration of birth and death by civil authorities (medically and scientifically trained registrars in the service of the state) rather than the religiously induced recording of baptism and burial are all signs of the new regime and its efforts to appropriate the dead for the regime of life. The dead body thus became ground zero of what Foucault called biopower, a ‘technology’ of power that governed subjects through regulating live bodies, a biopolitics where policy and power collided with the living bodies of political subjects.Footnote 44
The dead in the science of life
As the dead began inhabiting more industrialized spaces and undergoing more ordered burial practices, we notice a new scientific interest in studying bodies. So the larger question worth asking is: When and how did the dead become ‘bodies’? One way of looking at it is through crime and criminality. As discussed earlier, the body of the crime has been the subject and object of dozens of forensic exhumations since the middle of the twentieth century, and continues to be a significant part of such studies.Footnote 45 For my part, I examine the dead body through the lens of medical anatomy, which I subsequently weave into the realm of the otherworldly. By the nineteenth century, a new medicalized culture had found institutional expression in a series of colleges and hospitals in the country. Founded in 1822, the National Medical Institution (NMI) trained students in pharmacology, materia medica, physiology, medicine, surgery, and anatomy. Ayurvedic and Unani texts were often supplemented by those of anatomy. In 1835, the Anglicists, advocating the English language as the medium of instruction of Western arts and sciences, stopped funding all Orientalist learning. That year, the NMI was abolished to give way to the Calcutta Medical College, one of the pioneers of medical education in Bengal. It was followed by Campbell Medical College and Hospital in 1848, which was largely dedicated to teaching Descriptive Anatomy, Surgical Anatomy, and Physiology. In 1875, the establishment of Mitford Hospital in Dacca was another crucial step in anatomy education in the country. Ishita Pande argues that nothing quite encapsulates the difference between ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ medical traditions as the single element of the study of anatomy through dissections.Footnote 46 Indeed, in colonial ethnographic imagination, the one constant lament was of the lack of anatomical knowledge among Hindus. The British were quick to point out that the Hindus were so embroiled in their caste rigidities and taboos about touching a corpse that they missed out on any useful anatomical investigation. All this explains, according to these colonial ethnographers, why nowhere, from the Khajuraho to the Chola bronzes, do we see a depiction of the human anatomy or power of expression that we see in Renaissance paintings or art.
In many ways, the nineteenth century was also a moment of disenchantment with the dead body as it became just one more locus for the scientific study of life. A series of new innovations in death and burial practices fostered the growth of a scientific culture around the procurement of bodies and the removal of the dead. The hunt for bodies became persistent throughout the late nineteenth century. Not every student could obtain a body of their own. In 1874, the Campbell Medical School sent out calls to procure bodies to teaching hospitals for medico-legal instruction: ‘There ought to be a sufficient number of dead bodies available from the wards of the Sealdah Hospital itself or from the Calcutta Police dead-house for all purposes of instruction.’Footnote 47 It was essential to obtain a ‘certain proportion of dead bodies’ annually during the winter season, from 1 November to 15 March, which was typically the ‘dissecting season’. By 1875, the curriculum of anatomy classes came to be widely debated; new dissection rooms were built, and the Manual of Anatomy was translated into Bengali for vernacular instruction in surgery and anatomy. By 1892, new methods of removing and dispatching the dead came to be debated.
Both in India and England in the nineteenth century, anatomy was still regarded as a shady business, and so the question was how to procure bodies honourably. The Anatomy Act of 1832 in England regulated precisely which bodies would be made available to whom, at what cost, and under what conditions.Footnote 48 In England, an actively Christian country, many people assumed that the body would need to be whole for full resurrection to occur. This meant that there was a lot of social resistance to dissection after death.Footnote 49 Despite the challenges to dissection, Campbell Medical College in Calcutta saw rapid advances both in its infrastructure and curriculum that helped establish Anatomy as a professional discipline. As early as 1878, congratulating the students on the success of anatomy exams, Professor W. J. Palmer opined that there were two reasons for the students at the College to excel in Anatomy.
First, because there are great natural facilities for obtaining subjects for dissection in this country, and secondly, because Govt has hitherto granted a liberal number of demonstrators, without whom the subjects could not be profitably utilized.Footnote 50
By 1915, practical dissections and Anatomy had become an established field of study within the medical colleges of Calcutta. The Calcutta Medical College, for instance, made Anatomy an integral part of its curriculum from the second year onward, where students had to demonstrate their expertise in dissections.Footnote 51
Living with the dead: Demonstrators, dressers and domsFootnote 52
Despite inroads into anatomy education, the widespread popular aversion to dissection meant that Western medicine was thought of as one that cut open bodies instead of curing them. Before the advent of bacteriology, there was a consensus among Western and indigenous medicine that it was through the examination of dead bodies that doctors could aspire to learn the diseases that plagued the living. So, when in 1836, Pandit Madhusudhan Gupta and four Indian students performed a human dissection at the Calcutta Medical College for the first time, the moment was celebrated by a 50-round gun salute at Fort William. By the end of the nineteenth century, dissection, honoured as the triumph of Western civilization, had become a common practice in anatomy classes. As these classes attracted more students, there were animated debates about the nature of the curriculum, the need for proper dissecting theatres, and the role of doms, dressers, and permanent ‘demonstrators’ in the dissecting rooms.
Little is known about the ‘demonstrators’ who handled and lived with the dead routinely—their social classes or the nature of their responsibilities besides exhibiting bones to Anatomy students. We learn from the testimonials of demonstrators such as Nil Madhub Mookherjee that, in addition to keeping records of dissections and superintending the work of the dissecting rooms, they also had to ‘make arrangements for the supply of dead bodies for anatomical lectures’.Footnote 53 While bodies for dissection were abundant, Prof. Palmer was mindful of the challenges facing individual demonstrators of Anatomy. He empathized with the demonstrators’ long work hours during the dissecting months; ‘they have an undue amount of depressing work, in an unwholesome atmosphere, to perform’.Footnote 54 H. Cayley, speaking from his experience as the Assistant Demonstrator of Anatomy in a London medical college, pressed for hiring more demonstrators at the Calcutta Medical College. He argued, ‘The duties of a demonstrator are always trying, and this country is much more so than in a colder climate, and no man can carry on such work for more than a very limited number of hours.’Footnote 55 S. C. Mackenzie, on the other hand, disagreed with his colleagues about increasing the number of demonstrators. He observed,
when as a student at the Edinburgh University we had from 300 to 400 students attending the Anatomical demonstrations and dissections annually, and we had only three demonstrators; these were found to be ample, and I am sure that practical anatomy was taught quite as well and thoroughly at the Edinburgh University then by that eminent Anatomist Professor John Goodsir, and his bale assistants, Mr. Turner and Drs. Cleland and Wilson, as it is now taught in any medical school in the world.Footnote 56
While Anatomy demonstrators were emerging as a professional category within the field, the lines between other occupational categories—doms, dressers, taxidermists—remained blurred. For instance, in 1892, a ‘dresser’ of the Kandi Giris Chandra Hospital petitioned the government, demanding allowance for assisting with post-mortem examinations.Footnote 57 Responding to this petition, Dr Boville, the officiating Civil Surgeon of Murshidabad, sympathized with the dresser who, according to him, performed ‘the most trying and disagreeable duties connected with the Government medical service’.Footnote 58 Dr Boville recommended that if no allowance could be paid to the dressers, then ‘a dome or other regular dead house attendant’ should be employed in all districts where post-mortem examinations were conducted.Footnote 59 By the early twentieth century, the salaries of doms and taxidermists were regularized. For instance, the Campbell Medical School decided that doms and taxidermists would receive 5% of the ‘bones sold to private parties’.Footnote 60 The uniformity in the remuneration of doms and taxidermists is intriguing, given the scientific validity and professional expertise of taxidermists as against doms in the nineteenth-century medical ethos. While dissections and study of anatomy were not intrinsic to Ayurvedic or other indigenous medical traditions, the British routinely employed doms to assist them with handling bodies in the dissecting rooms in the early 1900s. One cannot help but notice how the British co-opted Hindu social norms into their understanding of the dead by navigating the question of what tasks befitted which castes.Footnote 61 If caste was imbricated into dissecting rooms and the corpse economy of Bengal, the unlikely pay equivalence between the doms and taxidermists defies that stigma of a polluting characterization. We wonder if modern anatomy took over in a world in which the most degraded of the castes, doms, cohabited with the more ‘respectable’ taxidermists and dressers? Perhaps not. An objective science took hold through anatomy education, but the dead retained its disagreeability. The line between the dead as a ‘body’ and the dead as a once-living subject could only be traversed by a dom, positioned in the lowest rungs of the Hindu-Bengali society, who could seemly navigate the boundaries of the dead and living in their most polluting state.
The clinical dead
By 1912, the Anatomy Department in Campbell Medical College was honoured with a separate building, and by 1914, a morgue came to be attached to the hospital. As the dead body drifted into biology, there was now to be a new sense of the body that had departed its soul. Greater attention was now paid to looking for signs of death in diagnostic and medical terms, finding signs of putrefaction, and determining the dead. Michel Foucault has interpreted the clinical gaze, whether into the living or the dead body, as a founding moment for a new regime of power. Medicine, grounded in its intimate knowledge of the body and the environment, would take over the care of souls from priests and guide the state in building an ‘untroubled, dispassionate society restored to its original state of health’.Footnote 62 Death becomes a symptom of failure, and the dead body is a site for understanding what went wrong. ‘The birth of the clinic’ and the rise of pathological anatomy in the early nineteenth century are, Foucault argues, all signs of the new regime and its efforts to appropriate the dead for the regime of life.
The scientific psyche of ‘black and barbaric’
In this new regime of death, scientific progress owed its life to Europe. The fetishization of ‘science’ continued throughout the early twentieth century. However, it is not a simple, linear story of an enlightened Europe’s indebtedness to India. In 1929, Captain P. Johnston-Saint of the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, along with Sir Denison Ross (director of the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London), delivered a lecture titled ‘India—The Real Home of Medicine’. It condemned early British Orientalizing zeal and stood out in its glorification of ‘Hindu anatomy’.Footnote 63 The author asserted that the British Empire in India ‘was laid, not by fire and sword’, but through the legitimacy of medicine. British power in India owed its life to a surgeon, Dr Gabriel Boughton, who successfully treated several members of Emperor Shah Jahan’s household, and in return, the Emperor granted him a firman to open a factory at Hugli, thus consolidating the edifice of British rule in India. He mocks the early colonial perceptions that saw ‘Indian medicine as a matter of childish charms and filtrates, almost a sort of voodoo devil dancing. A few inexplicable tricks the natives might have, but in the main, their arts were about superstitious nonsense as compared to the blazing light of Western science.’Footnote 64 Acknowledging the ‘humiliating ignorance’ which was ‘at once so extraordinary and so self-sufficient’, he identifies three reasons for the appalling ignorance among Victorian doctors. Not only did limited knowledge of Sanskrit make it difficult to translate some of the classical works, but interestingly, he also pointed to the asymmetry of knowledge in the world of medical education. He opined,
A disproportionate part of our education was devoted to ancient Rome and Greece, where we learned all about Apollo … and in Greek history, we came to Hippocrates. Certainly with all this good classical knowledge so laboriously acquired, we were not prepared to venture still further afield, and most assuredly not into the clouds of the story of a land which we universally regarded as both black and barbaric.Footnote 65
It is in this ‘black and barbaric’ India that Europeans encountered the wonder of Ayurveda, legendary surgeons like Susruta, physicians like Charaka and Dhanwantari, and Buddhist scholars like Jivaka.Footnote 66 Ancient India was the land of ‘real knowledge’—from advancements in skin grafting and treatments of asthma to toxicology, snake bites, caesarean sections, and dentistry. Ancient India possessed superior ‘Hindu surgical instruments’ than England could have imagined. India had forceps that looked like the ‘jaws of beasts’—forceps with jaws shaped to resemble that of a tiger, wolf, or bear. If India was the ‘golden age of Indian surgery’, it was, however, not destined to last forever. Touching the dead was an anathema that led to the ‘decline of Hindu surgery’. He notes, in no unequivocal terms, a ‘Hindu’ prejudice to anatomy:
The ceremonial prejudice against the touching of a corpse rapidly increased, and before long it was impossible for the student to learn his anatomy from practical first-hand dissection. Bodies had to be laid out in water, there to be rotted away, till at last the skeleton was exposed. In this way only was it lawful to get at the bones. Dissection had to be made on goats, or anything rather than the human body. Anatomy then was being lost as a first-hand knowledge.Footnote 67
The Hindu-Indian surgeon was perceived as a ‘person unclean’. Manu Samhita forbade its readers from eating cooked rice from the hands of a doctor (surgeon), and over time, the authors argue, ‘We begin to find various substitutes for the knife’. With patients being averse to operations, surgeons gradually avoided actual cutting and surgery and shrank from post-mortem examination. The speakers are at their creative brilliance in describing the surgery practiced at the time of Buddha. Instead of human cadavers, ‘flowers, bulbs, and gourds were all pressed into service as models for the dissecting table’, and ‘models of the human limbs were fashioned for lessons in bandaging’.Footnote 68 In such a regulatory Buddhist regime, surgery died a natural death. In this scheme of rationality, science emanated not only from Europe but also from India. The Orientalist trope that harped on a pristine Hindu past that had subsequently fallen into disgrace was not entirely new. Quite famously, the British jurist Henry Maine made a series of observations in the mid-nineteenth century that placed India in the evolutionary scheme of arrested development needing British tutelage. Such ideas of colonial difference that forcefully underpinned the logic of imperialism were foundational to the justification of empire in British India. However, the language of the lecture here is not confined to a question of colonial difference, but also of determining the legitimacy of the Oriental and Western knowledge systems. If Ayurveda and ancient surgery are celebrated, the first anatomical dissection in Calcutta Medical College in 1835 was a moment of banishment of ‘native superstitions’ and the advent of scientific reason in the minds of the colonizers.
The living-as-dead
Ensconced between the worlds of the living and the dead was another esoteric world. Here, the human body imbibed many entities—sometimes as formless spirits, sometimes as bodies insensible to pain, and sometimes ethereal creatures traversing the boundaries between the living and dead. In this world, bodies were rendered ‘passive as a corpse’, magnetized, mesmerized, and cut open.Footnote 69 The liminality of these bodies compels the historian to rethink the shifting boundaries between pain and painlessness, consciousness and unconsciousness, mortality and death, and the in-betweenness therein. What constitutes a ‘body’ if it no longer retains its consciousness and will? Can seasoned reason, as epitomized through the science of surgery, mutate into trances, mesmerisms, and unreason? We find answers to these questions if we look deep into the curious world of mesmeric operations of mid-nineteenth-century Calcutta.
The curious case of Dr Esdaile
Dr James Esdaile was a particularly intriguing gentleman with a gripping mission. He performed a series of controversial surgeries on ‘natives’ of Jail and Charity Hospital, Hooghly, claiming them to be perfectly ‘painless’ procedures. The doctor meticulously journaled his experiments in his book, Mesmerism in India, where he gloated on the efficacy of his treatments and his invaluable contribution to alleviating the ‘suffering of Natives’.Footnote 70 Quite strategically, he packaged his operations as a ‘gift’ to the people of Bengal. Esdaile was permitted to set up an experimental hospital in Calcutta for his delirious surgical and medical adventures. The hospital had a brief, tumultuous life—from 1847 to 1848. Faced with increasing dissent from the medical community, the hospital met its abrupt death in 1848. Dr Esdaile used something that was controversial within the practices and confines of Victorian medicine. He ran an ‘electro-magnetic machine’ on the arms of the patient, whereby the patient would convulse. He then proceeded to ‘mesmerize’ his patient to induce a ‘corpse-like insensibility’ to pain, following which he would operate upon them. He was often joined by Suroop, the somnambulist who put the patients to ‘sleep’. On waking up from their trance, his patients, Dr Esdaile notes in his book, had absolutely no recollection of having gone under the knife. Most of them were miraculously ‘cured’ of their preexisting ailments like enlarged glands, breast tumours, cancers, chronic rheumatism, and hypertrophied scrotum.
Somewhat distrustful of Esdaile’s methods, the government was prompted to nominate ‘Visitors’ to the hospital. These ‘Visitors’ were chosen from among the Medical Officers of the Bengal Presidency and entrusted with inspecting Dr Esdaile’s proceedings from time to time.Footnote 71 It is noteworthy that Esdaile conducted most of his experiments on the locals—people from the labouring classes that include coolie, woodcutters, barbers, beggars, peddlers, washermen, convicts, and a few writers. As Dr R. M. M. Thomson, a marine surgeon, observes:
Since being present in this case, I have with great satisfaction witnessed the performance by Dr. Esdaile of several formidable operations, with perfect success, none of the patients waking until 10 or 15 minutes after the native mesmerizer makes his passes. That deep sleep with insensibility to pain, and all outward impressions can be induced by mesmeric processes, is in my opinion, placed beyond all doubt, when practised on the Hindoos and Mahomedans of these provinces; but I am not aware of a single instance wherein similar results have been obtained when the mesmeric passes have been performed daily for an hour or two, and continued even throughout a series of one two or three months on Europeans and Eurasians in Calcutta; I believe also it has frequently failed in producing any effect among many of the natives.Footnote 72
In investigating Esdaile’s choice of patients, we could ask: What happened to which bodies, and how did caste hierarchies and privileges continue to be inscribed onto the corporal body even after death? With dissections, by touching the corpse, the native would be either polluted or, as Ishita Pande argues, would lie outside the system of caste that defined their world and would be ready to be reformed.Footnote 73 The funny part of mesmerism was that the practitioners would not touch a dead body, but rather one that had been induced into a death-like trance. Caste convictions might not matter.
Trances and ethereal bodies
The first patient, Madhab Kaura, was a hog-dealer, convicted of seven years’ imprisonment, who lived with a painful double hydrocele. He was ordered to be removed from the jail and taken to the charity hospital to be operated upon. Esdaile raves about the success of his ‘first experiment’:
he began to gape, said he must sleep, that his senses were gone; and his replies became incoherent. He opened his eyes, when ordered, but said he only saw smoke, and could distinguish no one; his eyes were quite lustreless, and the lids were opened heavily. All appearance of pain now disappeared … Being now satisfied that we had got something extraordinary, I went over to the Kutcherry, and begged Mr. Russell, the judge and Mr. Money, the collector to come and see what had been done, as I wanted the presence of intelligent witnesses in what remained to do. We found him in the position I had left him in.Footnote 74
Dr Esdaile boasted of several such trances of ‘altered sensibility’ that it produced in his patients, who came from not only the lowly classes of convicts and prisoners but also from among the middle classes of Calcutta. For instance, we hear of a certain ‘intelligent Hindoo gentleman’, Rajah, who had ‘an English education and speaks our language perfectly well, wished to be operated on for hydrocele, while in mesmeric trance’.Footnote 75
In its short life that it enjoyed in Calcutta, mesmerism crossed the confines of hospital beds to become an exhibitionist spectacle in Hoogly in 1845.Footnote 76 Esdaile’s defences were strong. He argued, ‘If these tests are not considered an “experimentum crucis” I am at a loss to imagine what will be reckoned more satisfactory by the human physiologist. It appears to me that when we see the involuntary organs of the body revolutionized, it is absurd to attribute it to effect of the will.’Footnote 77 This was no magic. Nor was it some ‘African mumbo jumbo’. Neither did it arrive from Europe. He takes us to the sources of his knowledge that came from the East. He merely repackaged the great art for its people. A missionary doing God’s work. He notes,
I had learned the secrets of the great Sooleymann, from the moollahs and fuquuers, and I had a great desire to ascertain whether our charms were the same, as the hakeems of Europe held the wise men of the East in high estimation, knowing that all knowledge had come from that quarter.Footnote 78
Esdaile’s stand on mesmerism is complex. He considered himself a Western-trained medical doctor who prescribed such an ‘alternative medicine’ as the last recourse. While singing its praises, he was careful that the people of India should not mistake him as the ‘mesmeric doctor’, almost a blasphemy, ‘for it would as be true to call me a rhubarb, jalap or castor-oil physician’.Footnote 79 He was no Oriental magician. He was a man of Western medicine.
Even in the Indian colony, where European imaginations could run riotous and untamed, Dr Esdaile faced severe opposition to his creative, pain-free cutting skills. Sceptics such as Dr F. J. Mouat, an officially nominated visitor to Esdaile’s Mesmeric Hospital in 1847, reported that, ‘the fourth patient was pronounced by Dr. Esdaile to be ready for operation although he did not exhibit corpse-like insensibility’.Footnote 80 In a similar vein, Dr R. O’Shaughnessy, a professor of Surgery appointed by the Govt of Bengal to investigate the operations of Esdaile, was aghast to see that ‘there appeared to be so little uniformity in the proceedings of the Mesmerisers. One man made passes in one way and another differently, and some made no passes at all.’Footnote 81 Noting that the patients were not completely insensitive to pain, the Professor argued that the procedures made the ‘most unfavourable impression of mesmeric surgery’ on his mind.Footnote 82 There were a few dissenting voices, such as Dr Kean of Berhampore, who lauded Esdaile’s mesmeric treatment as being ‘very efficacious in insanity and epilepsy’. Visitors to the Mesmeric Hospital opined that ‘the cries and movements of mesmeric sleepers greatly resemble those of hysteria’.Footnote 83
Esdaile’s experiments have attracted the attention of historians of science and medicine, who have mostly situated his theatrical stances within the framework of a binary between the more rational metropolitan science and irrational, colonial science that took shape in the laboratories of India. The earliest study on Esdaile is by Waltraud Ernst, who examines how Esdaile’s work lacked scientific credibility in the eyes of the British.Footnote 84 Ernst argues that while initially the observers were amused by Esdaile’s surgeries, the novelty soon wore off as he shifted to treat more ‘medical’ cases than mere surgical ones. Additionally, she argues that Esdaile’s popularity faded primarily because of the realities of the colonial order in which he was embedded—an order that was accustomed to viewing Indian systems of medicine as inferior, superstitious, and fraudulent. For Esdaile, to make a mark, he had to cross over the boundaries of mummery and dive into the ethos of a more scientifically explainable Victorian medical order. His methods reeked too much of native quackery. For Gyan Prakash, caught between a socially acceptable metropolitan science and native absurdities and superstitions, Esdaile’s mesmerism was the classic example of science ‘gone native’.Footnote 85 Alison Winter, in her chapter ‘Colonizing sensations in Victorian Britain’, demonstrates how Esdaile borrowed from indigenous trance-inducing experiences like ‘jhaar-phoonk’, and blended them into a structured mesmeric surgery.Footnote 86
Kapil Raj’s recent article contests Waltrund Ernst’s argument by placing Esdaile in the larger global order of science. He argues that Esdaile’s public performances of mesmerism were meant to legitimize mesmeric anaesthesia within the Victorian intellectual landscape.Footnote 87 A critical intervention into the narrative of colonial science, Raj frames his analysis around two major arguments. One, he contends that Esdaile sought to globalize mesmerism. He, however, provides no evidence to support it beyond Calcutta and Africa. Europe is almost a given in his paper. Second, he argues that Esdaile’s private, ‘backstage’ meeting with a certain Bengali magician was to ensure its translatability and guaranteed that ‘Indian magic could now be justifiably hospitalized’.Footnote 88 This argument seems contradictory to Esdaile’s declaration that his work ‘is no magic’, and the urgency to claim its status as a valid science within Victorian medicine. Overall, Kapil Raj uses Esdaile’s experiments to argue that science is not about knowledge creators and their practices but about the local context where their practices are situated. This understanding aligns with the Constructivists, who have been influential since the 1960s.Footnote 89 Consequently, one might question the novelty of Raj’s central thesis within the existing historiography of science.
Historians and philosophers of science have often explored the inherent tension between a ‘local’ and ‘global’, or the ‘particular’ and the ‘universal’—between those who think that humanity has a single universal destiny that is shared equally by all peoples, and those who think that each group has a particular path of progress for itself that is untranslatable into other contexts. The idea that there is a single science that emanates from an Enlightenment rationality and trickles down to the rest has long been defunct.Footnote 90 Within the field of post-colonial science and technology studies, science is seen as being multicultural, with there being no one scientific method or reasoning, because European and world societies have used different styles of explaining how nature works.Footnote 91 In the South Asian context, Ishita Pande, for instance, has shown how liberal racialism worked in colonial education policy through the juxtaposition of ‘universal’ human values and a strategic use of the idea of ‘cultural difference’.Footnote 92 Prominent historians of science such as David Arnold, Pratik Chakrabarti, and Michael Worboys have read places of fact-creation like laboratories as sites of projected ‘modernity’ that showcased the moral authority of the empire.Footnote 93 Others, like Gyan Prakash, have studied laboratories as places that ‘staged science’ and contributed to a nationalist modernity.Footnote 94 Overall, there is a consensus that science was tropicalized and hybridized into local, colonial contexts, which, in turn, should be studied as a ‘different modernity’.Footnote 95
Borrowing from these historiographical trends but diverging from them, this article demonstrates how Esdaile’s mesmerisms can open up new possibilities to reassess our understanding of the history of science. Esdaile’s practice was local, distinctly ‘colonial’, that drew predominantly on native bodies and sought to elevate the labouring masses. He clarified, ‘Mesmerism often comes to the aid of my patients when all the resources of medicine are exhausted, and all the drugs of Arabia useless.’Footnote 96 It was, therefore, his ‘duty’ to ‘make it known for the advantage of mankind’.Footnote 97 His mesmerism worked through a proud assertion of scientific proof that he dutifully flaunted through his spectacular ‘shows’ and carefully drafted book of ‘practical application’.Footnote 98 What makes Esdaile such a fascinating contradiction is that his positivist stance that insisted on the material fact of touching the body, ‘seeing’, and inducing trances, however, rested on the power of ‘non-feeling’ on the part of the patients. Thus, while supported by scientific evidence, Esdaile’s ‘painless’ surgeries bordered on a new regime of the affect that was fuzzy and inexplicable. A regime marked by feeling and yet non-feeling, seeing and yet un-seeing. It is in this liminality that science escaped the visceral realities of life and entered the domain of the unknown. His refusal to use ether was another step in validating this very liminality, where an affect-laden sensibility overtook his proudly proclaimed positivist science.
Ether was first used successfully by William Morton in England in 1846. Curiously enough, we discover that Esdaile was acutely aware of the use of ether but did not administer it because his goal was to establish the power of ‘mesmeric agents’. Dr R. O’Shaughnessy was particularly infuriated by Esdaile’s complete disregard for ether, arguing that ‘the dangers of ether are imaginary’ and that Esdaile should not incite popular opinion against the efficacy of this drug. Pointing out the merits of ether, he noted about Esdaile’s procedures:
Contrast this with the newly discovered agent, ether. It is equally efficacious, and certain in its effects, when administered to a patient writhing in agony from a recent wound, or about to undergo an operation for a painless tumor.Footnote 99
It is, therefore, limiting to try to comprehend Esdaile’s experiments through a measure of success or failure, as some historians have sought to. Instead, it can be read as one of contradiction—a scientist with positivist claims, who lapsed into fantastical moments of particularism that held space for painless trances and sought to puncture the world of Victorian pragmatism. In analysing scientists who studied race in colonial Latin America, Nancy Stepan argues that we cannot call these men ‘racists’ because the scientists who gave scientific racism its credibility were often first-rate scientists struggling to understand what appeared to them to be deeply puzzling problems of biology and human society.Footnote 100 Likewise, for Esdaile, hedged in a complex colonial reality where hierarchies of power permeated every strand of life and death, mesmerism was, on the one hand, intended to make science ‘respectable’ within the Victorian scientific community. On the other hand, it generated an otherworldly affective reality.
The occult and spirit bodies: The Society for Psychical Research (SPR)
The task for the historian is to comprehend the mystery behind a host of surgeries that sought to induce death-like trances in living bodies and cure them of their ailments in the context of what constitutes ‘science’ and ‘reason’. In trying to understand the origins of ‘race science’ in the Indian context, prominent historian of science Projit Bihari Mukharji has contended that ‘there is no clear line that demarcates “science” from “pseudoscience”’.Footnote 101 He argues that colonial projects classified and taxonomized the ‘native body’ in deeply political ways that were both essentialist and contested.Footnote 102 India was indeed the laboratory of the British Empire, where imaginations could run wild, almost unconstrained by the dictates of law and justice. The colonized, a mere body, waiting to be poked, prodded, measured, scrutinized, and experimented upon. However, case reports of mesmerism were not intrinsic to the ‘native’ lands of India or Africa. In London, a curious body, founded in 1882, sought to investigate mediums, mesmerisms, and apparitions. How does one reconcile the dichotomy between hallucinations and hauntings when Victorian science was the hallmark of civilization and ‘modernity’ that justified colonization of distant lands and native heathens supposedly mired in superstitions? One finds an answer in a peculiar body—the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded by scientists and philosophers at Trinity College, Cambridge, who sought ‘scientific’ evidence to understand ‘occult’—psychic and paranormal activities such as ghost sightings, spiritualist mediums, and extrasensory perception. We learn much about the SPR’s activities until its eventual decline in the 1920s from the British novelist and psychical researcher Renée Haynes.Footnote 103 The Society included notable philosophers such as Henry Sidgwick, psychologists such as Edmund Gurney, the physicist William Fletcher Barrett, as well as future Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and poet alfred Lord Tennyson. Its aims, as succinctly set out in every proceeding of the Journal of Psychical Research, were ‘to examine without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable in terms of any generally recognized hypothesis’.Footnote 104 In studying ‘real or supposed’ ‘faculties of man’ that are ‘inexplicable’, the Society positioned itself in the bleary space between fact-driven science, supernatural, and spirit bodies.
The founders of the SPR primarily wanted to traverse beyond what they described as ‘the narrow dogmatism of Victorian science’. They considered the materialist, mechanist posture of scientists to be bankrupt. In crossing over to the other side, they investigated haunted locations and reported apparitions, attempting to gather first-hand testimony and investigate physical evidence. Thus, one of its well-known early works was the study of telepathy by Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore in Phantasms of the Living.Footnote 105 In her PhD dissertation, Molly Helen Noonan demonstrates how ‘the early psychic researchers believed that contemporary scientific attitudes had thwarted the progressive revelation of Nature’s marvels’.Footnote 106 It is no wonder, therefore, that Dr James Esdaile’s book of mesmeric experiments in Calcutta made its way to the SPR in London and Chicago. Reprinting and releasing the book in 1909 in Chicago, the editor stated in no unclear terms, ‘The Psychic Research Company has rescued this book from oblivion because it contains the simplest, clearest, and most convincing data on the power of the mind to control agonizing pain.’Footnote 107 In an interesting turn of fate, it is this emphasis on empirical research into the ‘scientific’ origins of the paranormal that led the SPR into an estranged relationship with its sister institution in India—the Theosophical Society.
Founded in 1875 in New York by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, and others, the Theosophical Society explored esoteric philosophy and spiritual and mystical knowledge of the East. In 1882, Blavatsky established the international headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Adyar, Madras. Soon, however, the society was embroiled in a raging controversy when Madame Blavatsky allegedly faked her spiritual manifestations. In 1884, Richard Hodgson, a member of the SPR, arrived in Adyar to investigate Blavatsky’s supposed supernatural phenomena. His official investigation, the ‘Hodgson report’, was scathing. He indicated that Madame Blavatsky was a charlatan. We learn much of Blavatsky’s misadventures in an 1885 book by A. P. Sinnett, a prominent figure in the Theosophical Society. His book, The Occult World, was accompanied by a set of protests by Blavatsky, where she staunchly refuted such claims.Footnote 108
The SPR and its activities make us wonder: If the West dabbled in ghosts, visions, dreams, and hauntings—how did it differentiate itself from the ‘Other’—the foreign ‘savage’ characteristic of an early stage of human history? If ‘the twentieth-century man’ was a man of reason, we struggle to make sense of figures such as Esdaile or Henry Steel Olcott. How do we reconcile a ‘reason-driven’ Western modernity with its emphasis on ‘unreason’, or what Shane McCorristine, in his study of the occult in Ireland, terms ‘more than rational’? McCorristine argues that, far from being peripheral, the obsession with the occult, dreams, and hallucinations was central in making people in Western societies feel modern.Footnote 109 In a similar vein, Mitch Horowitz, in his books Occult America and The Modern Occult, highlights how, in America, occultism often encouraged individual empowerment and exploration compared with traditional, institutionalized religion.Footnote 110 Colonialism adds a layer of complexity to the way in which we comprehend histories of the supernatural. In the context of India, scholars widely acknowledge that colonialism hinged on a ‘rule of difference’.Footnote 111 This difference marked a crucial feature of the emerging identity of the modern West. What happens when the white man draws on dreams, hallucinations, trances, and hypnotisms that run contrary to the establishment science that Europe boasts of? Both Esdaile and Blavatsky found creative ways to situate their ‘science’ within the cultural core of colonial society—often as an alternative science benefitting the colonized millions in the superstitious land of the magic, while at the same time, disrupting the secure limits of Victorian science. The occult was in no way to be shunned to the margins of mainstream cultural and spiritual thought. Rather, it was firmly ensconced within what constitutes modern thought. Ephemeral bodies caught between life and death; reason and unreason lead us to our concluding story—ghostly bodies. To that story, we now turn.
The ghostly dead
If the ‘clinical body’ was subject to scientific curiosity during late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal, the spectral body of the dead straddled the rural-urban divide. Did the ghosts of Bengal get assimilated into the ‘science’ question?Footnote 112 What is a ‘human’ body if a whole array of entities like spirits and mediums can take it over? In her enthralling work on histories of rumour and imperialism in Africa, Luise White defends her use of vampire stories as a tool to write colonial histories. She argues, ‘To dismiss them as fears and superstitions begs the question: To reduce them to anxieties—about colonialism, about technology, about health—strips them of their intensity and their detail.’Footnote 113 Building on the insights of White’s study, I take us through a world where unreason has a free pass.
Possessed bodies
Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the ghosts of Bengali fiction seem to have found a happy home in the rural villages. With diseases such as malaria, cholera, and smallpox ravaging the villages of Bengal, mortality rates soared, agriculture suffered, and homes were abandoned as people fled to safer zones. By the late nineteenth century, the Bengal countryside wore a deserted look, which, Bengali fiction writer Sukumar Sen argues, gave rise to a spurt of ghost stories.Footnote 114 Sukumar Sen wrote ‘Preter Atithya’ while Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay mentioned the ravages of cholera in the district of Manbhum and Chhotonaagpur in ‘Rankinidebir Kharga’.Footnote 115 Balaichand Mukhopadhyay’s short story ‘Daktarer Bipod’ had a phantasmal trope.Footnote 116 Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay’s series of ‘Tārānāth Tāntriker Galpo’ (The Stories of Taranath Tantrik, Kinnardal, Katyayani Book Stall, 1938) examined the uncanny through the ethos of tantra. Pramiti Chatterjee has examined desi bhooter golpo (Indigenous ghost stories) and the Indigenous intelligentsia’s preoccupation with ‘scientific spiritualism’.Footnote 117 She argues that any inexplicable pathological symptom or abnormal behaviour was regarded as shoot pāwā (possession by a ghost) or nishite pāoā (enchanted by an evil spirit) in popular belief, which also had its reflections in literature. According to her, the persistence of a horror genre in the villages fed into the trope of ‘otherness’, carefully crafted by the colonial officials. Many ghost stories revolved around a medicalized phantasmal trope in which a doctor encountered an ailing body in a village and fell victim to its whims.
The city of Calcutta was not untouched by tales of ghost sightings, apparitions, and hallucinations. Sukumar Sen writes about men’s hostels and canteens being visited by unearthly entities. One of his many short stories bespoke of the dead haunting public spaces of the city.
It was the early 1920s, and Amit Babu, a young college lecturer, had recently moved to Calcutta to pursue his BA degree. Living in a bustling hostel, Amit’s responsibilities included overseeing the students’ sleep hours and return times. One quiet night, around midnight, Amit was startled awake by strange noises coming from the living area downstairs. The lights were on, and the sound of a piano drifted through the halls. Intrigued and slightly alarmed, Amit hurried downstairs to investigate. To his astonishment, he found a young boy playing the piano in the deserted hall. When Amit asked who he was, the boy panicked and fled, disappearing into the shadows. But that wasn’t the only surprise. As the boy ran past, Amit saw a severed head trailing behind him, seemingly floating through the air. The encounter left Amit shaken and perplexed. He had witnessed something truly inexplicable in the heart of the bustling city. The ghostly piano player became a tale he would share with his friends and family for years to come, a chilling reminder of the supernatural mysteries that lurked beneath the surface of everyday life.Footnote 118
While a robust faith in scientific empiricism and reason guided many a Bengali intellectual, they increasingly questioned the existence of unknown, otherworldly creatures in their often familiar, known world. For instance, in ‘Kolkatar Bhoot’, a physician, Subhadra Kumar Sen, is caught between belief and scepticism as he questions the validity of personal anecdotes and memories as repertoires of scientific empiricism. He writes,
This city witnesses the deaths of people of different characters. The unborn ‘future’ was ‘present’ someday, which again had rolled into the ‘past’. And when the ‘past’ time or the ‘bhut’ projects itself into the present, it unfolds its ghostly existence and becomes a scary spectacle. But like many other things, the presence of ghosts is also a matter of belief. If you believe in ghosts, it becomes a phenomenon; if you do not, it ceases to exist. It is difficult to prove its existence beyond the fictive narratives. To what extent shall we believe in the personal anecdotes? Personal experiences of ghostly intimation are always activated memories; they have no independent domain. Opinion about its existence is always a divided house. It is difficult, nay impossible, to prove its existence empirically.Footnote 119
If evil spirits existed, they needed to be purged. If good spirits existed, they needed to be communicated with. Spiritualism offered the necessary bridge to cross over to the other—the underworld of the departed.
Souls and spiritualism
In 1900, an anonymous Bengali writer published a book titled Bibhuti Vidya, in which the author delineated a range of methods for exorcising ghosts and malevolent spirits. According to the text, young children and women were particularly vulnerable to possession.Footnote 120 The text read, ‘What scientists term “convulsion” and “hysteria”, are in all actuality, spirit possession. The remedy lies in chanting “bhoot-charano” mantras and sprinkling mustard oil on the possessed body.’ In subsequent chapters, the author explores the art of ‘Bhoutik-Vidya’, tracing its origins to the ancient dakini-yoginis of Hinduism. Arguing for a well-established tradition within Hinduism, he demonstrates how the pundits have categorized the eerie and the ethereal into eight groups: Dev (gods), Danav (demons), Gandharvo, Yokkhya, Pret, Bhujongo, Rakshash, and Pishach—each of these categories dwells on different bodies, giving rise to different kinds of spirit possessions. If Bibhuti Vidya was steeped in Tantric religious and ritualistic exorcism, other influential figures had a more ‘scientific’ take on life after death. These thinkers studied the supposed ‘existence of disembodied spirits who continue to live even after they have lost their material forms’.Footnote 121 Such good spirits were believed to have brought ‘comfort and consolation’ to many people. The ‘father of modern spiritualism’, a Swedish Christian theologian named Emanuel Swedenborg, claimed that a revelation had given him the power to communicate with angels and other supernatural beings. His book Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell had tremendous influence among a certain class of American intellectuals, especially those from the Emersonian tradition of American Transcendentalism.Footnote 122 It also influenced thinkers in Vedantic philosophy who now blended Western spiritualism with the Bhagavad Gita.
Closer home, in his study on Spiritualism, Moron-er Opare, Swami Abhedananda explored how some departed spirits remained in a state of delusion for a long time.Footnote 123 A discipline of Ramakrishna, the Swami was sceptical of fraudulent claims, urging critical thinking when approaching mediumship and the occult. Writing about seeing our doubles outside our bodies, he asks, ‘What kind of hallucination is this? Clairvoyance, telepathy, and thought transference have failed to explain these cases.’Footnote 124 His reflections on the afterlife were captured in his writings:
If we deny the existence of the soul as independent of the body, we cannot explain many facts that occur during our lifetime, nor the genuine phenomenon described in the reports of the Psychical Research Society of Europe and America … Life after death means the continuity of this life, only on another plane. It is not a place. There is no place-relation … Around this earth, there is a spirit world. It is like a fourth dimension. It is on another plane. All that exist here do not exist there because space-relations do not exist.Footnote 125
Abhedananda traced the origin of modern Spiritualism to the tradition of ancestor worship among Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chinese, and Parsis. He blended spiritualism and Vedantic philosophy to make psychic phenomena accessible to a broader audience.
Ghosts and spirits have been a fertile subject of inquiry among anthropologists, sociologists, criminologists, cultural and media studies scholars, and psychoanalysts. One of the ways ghosts came to be rehabilitated in academic thought was through the concept of ‘Hauntology’, which originated with Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx and heralded the so-called ‘spectral turn’ in academia, specifically in post-structuralist literary and cultural theory.Footnote 126 Hauntology as a theoretical framework, however, had a very brief life.Footnote 127 Among Marxist and left-leaning readers, it met with, as Michael Sprinker puts it, ‘from skepticism, to ire, to outright contempt’.Footnote 128 If ghosts have received considerable attention among critical theorists, historians have debated whether imagined experiences can constitute legitimate sources of history. Through extensive fieldwork on the Asante, as early as 1937, historian E. E. Evans-Pritchard demonstrated that witchcraft and magic were not haphazard beliefs.Footnote 129 Rather, they were based on structured systems of thought, as the Asante used empirical reasoning within the framework of their own cultural logic. Luise White’s Speaking with Vampires is a valuable contribution that delves into the world of rumours and vampire tales in Africa and opens before us ‘varieties of vocabularies and the multiplicity of insinuated meanings that historians of witches and vampires work’ with.Footnote 130 More recently, Tithi Bhattacharya has explored how ghostly narratives in India were deeply connected to societal fears, including the anxieties created by British colonialism and capitalist exploitation.Footnote 131 There is also an established body of literature on the somewhat related theme of spirit possession across disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and religious studies. If the discourse in the West is more around ‘demonic’ hallucinations and manifestations that ought to be treated, in South Asia, it is more oracular and occupies a position of respect.Footnote 132 Frederick Smith opines that spirit possession is often misunderstood in Western academia or popular discourse. It is viewed as a medically treatable psychological ailment or as a condition that requires exorcism or punishment. However, in South (and East) Asia, such ecstatic or oracular possession has been widely practiced in early and recent Hinduism, Jainism, Tantric traditions, and Buddhism. Recently, anthropologist Kalpana Ram, in her book Fertile Disorder, has shifted the focus from an emphasis on religion and the esoteric to bringing out what narratives of spirit possession can reveal about everyday occurrences in Tamil Nadu.Footnote 133
How do we narrativize the dead and make sense of the varied manifestations of spirits and ghostly presence in the Indian colony? The contradiction between the emancipatory potential of European rationality and modernity and the limits of its universalist ideas, as exemplified in the colonies, is further complicated when the white colonists celebrate unreason. The Theosophical Society, for instance, like the SPR in the metropole, believed that reason is perhaps not the best principle to base human life on. Esdaile’s experiments take us to a world of hypnotic trances. The horror stories that entice the Bengali middle class force us to blur the boundary between productive imagination and delusional phantasm that run contrary to any discussions of Reason in modern Europe and its singular place in world history. When, in 2018, the psychologist Steven Pinker equated Enlightenment philosophy with scientific rationality, he was severely criticized for missing out on how the majority of canonical Enlightenment philosophers placed great value on the role of passions in guiding the conduct of our lives and warned of the dangers of surrendering ourselves to the supreme authority of the faculty of reason.Footnote 134 British philosopher Justin E. H. Smith contends that by the eighteenth century, the power of reason of the previous century came increasingly under pressure. Smith tells us that, conceptually and historically, it is useful to see ‘counter-Enlightenment less as Enlightenment’s opposite than as its twin, and to see unreason less as reasons opposite than as the dark side of a unified and indivisible whole’.Footnote 135 Several scholars have meticulously examined the palpable paradox between Europe’s celebration of reason and its reliance on the colonies—the pockets of unreason—for its sustenance. Smith puts it eloquently, ‘The great victory of reason on the continent, it was imagined, cast modern Europe as a sort of island afloat in a sea of unreason: the supposed unreason of the non-European peoples on whom Europe depended, as well as the unreason of the violence and domination that underlay this relationship of dependence.’Footnote 136 This article has demonstrated that instead of the hegemonic rationality deriving from seventeenth-century Europe, in the Indian colony, we are confronted with a more complex web of reason-unreason, imagination-passion, and inference-facts. Irrationality, in this story, is not pure ignorance. Rather, one that belies a dogmatic faith and overemphasis on normative judgement. In this extra-inferential world, the mortal souls’ communion with the dead, bodies enter into mesmeric trances, and spirits of the past leave traces on the present. Here, the colonial order turns upside down. The white colonists subvert their French emancipatory reason and blissfully induct spirits into their living rooms. Bengali intellectuals borrow science, technology, and logic from the Greeks, French, and Romans, but from within, discover spells for warding off ghosts who try to outsmart them.
Conclusion
‘Subtile bodies’, unreason, and an affective modernity
In 1880, the Bengali writer, Peary Chand Mittra, drew our attention to Spiritualism as an ancient dharma grounded in science, which is in ‘opposition with materialism’.Footnote 137 Warning us that ‘spiritualism has been regarded as Bhutvidya or magic or jugglery’, Mittra, on his part, sought to emphasize the bodily subjectivity of Spiritualism—‘the subtile body and our progress through that body’. Foregrounding a medicalized, bodily analysis of how spirits work, he states, ‘some spirits act on the nervous system and thus work on, to evolve the subtile body’. In Mittra, there is almost a nationalist evocation of science and a fascination with the old glory of spiritualism. He notes,
Those who are shrouded in materialism and have not enquired will naturally laugh at those who talk of communication with the dead. This was not only believed and taught in ancient India, but there are millions of persons who have accepted spiritualism, and among them there are many eminent persons in several countries.
Originating in ancient India, it was ‘discovered’ by Blavatsky, Olcott, and other American thinkers who then refined it further. The best example of the commingling of Western and indigenous traditions, and thereby the birth of a ‘scientific Spiritualism’, is evident below:
We have to raise ourselves on a non-molecular region—on a region distinct from this molecular world, where there is no desiring or sorrowing or mourning, no joying, no materializing; where there are no phenomenal states but pure quietism and pure effulgence ennobling the subtile body and brightening it up for the soul state. In this way, our Rishis promoted their soul cultures. In this way, Fenelon and Madame Guyon reached quietism. Footnote 138
Mittra supports his claim with the London Dialectical Society’s Report as well as letters between mediums from London and America as valid proof of an afterlife, as he categorizes mediums into their respective kinds. For instance, a Mr C. E. Williams is a ‘physical manifestation’ medium, whereas Mr A. W. Firman is a ‘materializing medium’. Mrs Woodford from Russell Square, London, is a ‘developing medium’, while J. J. Morse is a ‘trance speaker’.Footnote 139 Subtile bodies in the form of mediums, that worked at a ‘non-molecular region’, punctured the limits of the corporal and the dead.
Interestingly, the nineteenth-century twin curiosity in the bodies of the dead—both anatomical and spectral—functioned within an age-old positivist tradition that emphasized verifiable facts and empirical science. The nineteenth century was, as we know, in many ways marked by a fetish to find a ‘scientific’ explanation for most things—from diet to hygiene to sports. Within that world, spiritualism was a scientific-positivist trend, much like anatomy. If anatomy sought to ‘see’ the workings of the inner organs of the dead, with spiritualism, one ‘sees’ the departed soul via mediums and seances. If anatomy delved into the material body, spiritualism delved into the ‘subtile body’. With anatomy, the new tools of ‘seeing reason’ were dissection, forensics, and autopsy—proof of the clinically dead. With Spiritualism, there were myriad ways of communion with the dead—planchette, clairvoyance, table tipping, independent slate handwriting, seances, spirit photography—all of which were ‘positive proof’ of the presence of the soul of the dead. We notice a recurrent invocation of ‘modern science’ in understanding the dead. For instance, the English spiritualist and editor of the journal of the SPR, Stanley de Brath reminds us that ‘it is necessary to give a rapid glance at modern science, because this is so intimately connected with its supernormal extensions that these latter cannot be understood without fairly clear ideas on Matter and Energy … some such definite knowledge is absolutely essential to comprehension of phenomena which at first sight seem irreconcilable with Physics.’Footnote 140 Thus while everything was rooted in ‘modern science’, the physical world could include more than mere solid matter such as energy fields, space-time, or ‘supernormal’ forces that cannot always be explained away by the laws of Physics. This interest in physicalism was a compelling new development where bodies—mortal and spectral—met at a fuzzy crossroad.
In this new regime of vision and felt experiences, the fissures were not colonizer versus colonized, but different roads to a sensory science. The affect, which hinged on a faith in objective facts, could be breached by windows of unreason and the inexplicable. Geoffrey Hodson, a member of the Theosophical Society of Australia, has left behind a riveting narrative of his mystifying, inexplicable experience, which ended up in the library of the Theosophical Society at Adyar.Footnote 141 Geoffrey Hodson began his journey into theosophy by participating in bi-weekly seances. Very soon, however, he felt disillusioned by practices of ‘negative psychism’ that drained his physical vitality. He gave up seances as well as discontinued association with his spiritualist friends when one night, the unexplainable happened. He describes it vividly:
The attacks would begin immediately the lights were turned out at night. They first took the form of raps on the walls and furniture, and when, through sheer weariness, he was overtaken by sleep, the author was continually awakened by taps upon his face and upon the pillow. The manifestations gradually increased in intensity. The wardrobe door, though firmly fastened, would swing open, and horrible, grinning forms would appear within. Matter would be drawn from the etheric double—a most unpleasant sensation—and from it ugly, menacing forms would be built up round the bed. All this was accompanied by an almost hypnotic suggestion to return to the seances. Then a huge spider-like shape could be felt crawling up the bed. The climax of the difficulty was reached when the author, failing to sleep through the sheer exhaustion, would find that, as he went off, his hands would slowly rise up to his throat. On one occasion, as he did not wake quite quickly enough, he very nearly strangled himself.Footnote 142
After such gruesome experiences that lasted for months, he narrates what was ‘the culminating point of the whole prosecution’. The night that brought him peace through an inexplicable, powerful presence functioning outside the limits of ‘scientific’ understanding,
in his extremity, the author cried aloud, both mentally and physically, for help. Instantly, a powerful force descended upon him, seemed to sweep through his aura and the room, completely clearing both of all evil entities. Thereafter, he fell into his first restful sleep for many weeks.
If the nineteenth-century anatomists and spiritualists both valorized vision and positivism, at rare moments, this sensory science branched out into a liminality where it escaped reason. In explaining the space between the living and dead, Mary Davis, one of the prominent Spiritualists, clarifies, ‘first, that man has a Spirit. Second, that this Spirit lives after death. Third, that it can hold intercourse with human beings on earth.’Footnote 143 She adds,
True Spiritualists agree on these unwritten articles of faith … but daring to meet every subject face to face, they feel at liberty to measure all ideas by the line and plummet of Philosophy, and cast anchor only in the safe harbor of Reason.Footnote 144
How does the historian make sense of this brand of ‘Reason’ where there was room for more-than-rational presences and forces? If the seventeenth century was the era of logic and reason, the field of ‘metaphysics’ (felt experiences instead of scientific observations) was popularized by a handful of mystics such as the Swedenborgs and the Blavatskys.Footnote 145 By the late nineteenth century, positivist philosophers had denounced ‘metaphysics’ as a bad word.Footnote 146
Justin Smith contends that the term moved from the centre of philosophy into the margins. The unease was perhaps palpable in ‘respectable’ circles, but the Blavatskys of Madras were confident in their disavowals of Victorian science and leapt into a world beyond scientifically observable facts. Instead of being sidetracked into the periphery, as Smith contends, I argue that they were quite at the centre of the knowledge systems of the afterlife and the occult. Also, this was no folk wisdom or native mumbo-jumbo. This deliberate lapse into irrationality was a bold, defiant science that was backed up by emotive landscapes of hallucinations, visions, imaginations, and phantasms.
If Europe defined itself as the cradle of Enlightenment modernity, it reveals its other fantastical face that doubles up as unreason and takes centre stage in the Indian colony. Eminent political scientist Partha Chatterjee has proposed a binary to grasp the early twentieth-century Hindu-nationalist imagination—a neat bifurcation between the inner/spiritual and the outer/material. According to Chatterjee, the political project of nation-building romanticism hinged on an inner/cultural core untouched by colonization. My study punctures this neat bifurcation to show that reason was often hijacked as unreason made its way stealthily but steadily into the ‘outer’. Rather, I demonstrate that the outer was also the metaphysical, of spirits and unreason. Herein, we are faced with the birth of a distinct modernity that dwells on a dichotomy and co-opts unreason as the basis of human foundation. On one hand, a dispassionate, anatomical gaze personified in the cadaver’s body, and on the other hand, an affect-laden ethos that personified ghosts trapped in an emotional box. If science was overpowering in nineteenth-century Bengal, febrile fantasies flourished with equal zeal. The cultural core remained firmly in place and nurtured the living dead with all its might.
The dual tales of the dead direct us to new ways of understanding the world of colonial Bengal—an empire predicated on the delicate swing between reason and unreason. Ghosts of this new world straddled the connections between anatomy and empire, between the supernatural and the new scientific rationalities that were becoming naturalized. This story departs from the traditional narrative of colonial science, often hijacking the discourses of indigenous consciousness. Here, we see that the assimilation of science into the worlds of the indigenous intelligentsia did not banish the ‘uncanny’ to the margins. Rather, the language of colonialism brought back the dead among the living, unreason in a colony, in newer ways as it crafted a new ‘spectral’ modernity. Reason tells us that there is only one world to live in, that is universal, logical, and common. The curious worlds of Esdaile, Blavatsky, and the innumerable ghost stories tell us to lapse into the defiantly irrational. As we enter the phantasmagorical scientific ethos, we face unreason that is private and yet widely shared with the reasoned mortals. It is here, in unreason’s reach beyond and ability to puncture holes into the mundane and the everyday, that modernity reigned—in a new affect-laden sensibility.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Dipika Jain, Projit B. Mukharji, Denys P. Leighton, Mark Huddle, and Pratik Chakrabarti. I thank the anonymous reviewer of MAS for the comprehensive and meticulous comments. My gratitude to Jaishree T. and the staff at the Library and Research Center of Theosophical Society, Adyar, for their support and assistance. The archival research conducted at the Wellcome Collection and the British Library was made possible by a faculty research grant from O. P. Jindal Global University.
