Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay

• Goldsmiths University of London

Using archival evidence, this paper tries to use Callon's idea of ‘embeddedness of the economy in economics’ in order to understand the process of economization of India under the East India Company. The Company's state self-consciously tried to construct an economic terrain by using their coercive power, but the rise of the market did not lead to...

This article explores the process of transmission of the image(s) of 9/11 through an ethnographic/art-historical examination of Bengali (Indian) pat (traditional scroll painting) made by a community of rural Indian artisans with little or no exposure to mass-media. It transpires that while the impact of mass-media – often held responsible for the e...

Cultural Studies needs to be reinvented for India - a polity where the larger part of the population are disenfranchised non-citizens. The terrain of ‘culture’ here being differently constituted, manners could serve as a useful category for theorizing this difference. Included in ‘manners’ are a different historical formation of subjectivity as wel...

This photo-essay analyzes the politics of dwelling of the inhabitants of ‘outcast’ Calcutta - the city that is the nightmare of urban planners and whose squalor, filth and poverty are taken to be indexes of the failure of the postcolonial urbanism as such. The city that turned itself into a barricade during the street-fighting years of the 1960s is...

This article seeks to document the vernacular perceptions of ‘globalization’ in rural Bengal (India) and, in that connection, seeks to rethink some long-held western notions concerning commodity, consumption, representation, the nature of sociality and the politics of democratic empowerment in the third-world. In the subaltern imaginary, images see...

Deriving from the recent discussions on paideia (spiritual exercise), which links knowledge with mores and manners, this article argues that the expurgation of certain extreme tastes from the genteel Bengali palate, in the course of 'nationalist' reform in the 19th century, demonstrates the operation of a certain 'civilizing process' coterminous wi...

Like all great cities, Calcutta has its share of catty rumors, many of which are about Calcuttans themselves. One of these runs as follows: Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897–1999), the noted Bengali Anglophile and man of letters, visited England for the first time sometime in the late 1950s. Out on the streets of London, Niradbabu started navigating his cab...

■ Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay: Home, and the World voyage, traduction et domicile dans la modernite bengalie En se placant dans la ligne de fuite de la - «globalisation» en marche, l'objet de cette etude est d'analyser, a partir de la lecture de recits de voyage repartis sur deux siecles et demi - fin XVIIIe -debut XXe - la facon dont la «modernite» vint...