Title: Nation and Cultivation in Post-Colonial India

Speaker: Dr. Gautam Ghosh (Department of Humanities and Social Science, CUHK (Shenzhen))

Date: 20 November 2020

Time: 1:00-2:30 pm

Zoom Meeting Info

Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/92331275794

Meeting ID: 923 3127 5794

Passcode: 030061

Abstract:

The presentation will focus on post-colonial India and, in particular, the role of middle-class Bengalis therein. It will show how key segments of the Bengali middle-classes saw themselves as the “first-among-equals” within the Indian nation because they putatively brought together the best of modernity with the best of Indian culture. They sought, for example, to spearhead a scientific and political rationality that could make India a progressive “modern” nation – a project that, in their view, the stultified and decadent aristocratic groups could not undertake. At the same time, these middle-classes avered that cultivation and refinement were essential to avoid the crass commerce-driven calculations of those overly-enthralled with money and bourgeois ways. Attention will be given to how a specific, South-Asian notion of what might be called “aesthetic education” informed these convictions. If time permits, I will comment on how this (i) informed leftist politics in West Bengal and (ii) may provide a unique standpoint for interpreting the tensions between equality and hierarchy implicit in “first-among-equals” discourse, both in India and, perhaps, more broadly.

Bio:

Gautam studied anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Chicago (Ph.D. 2000). His research has been funded by the Fulbright, Guggenheim, MacArthur, and Rockefeller Foundations, as well as by the Davis Center of Princeton University and the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has given invited lectures at several institutions including Harvard University, Heidelberg University, The University of Amsterdam, Stanford University, Oxford University and Kings College London. Service on editorial boards includes Anthropological Quarterly, SITES: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, and Expedition. He has served as an elected officer of the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology and as Faculty Advisor for the Center for the Advanced Study of India. He was recently awarded a Senior Fellowship and a Rajendra Vora Fellowship, both by the American Institute of Indian Studies. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Otago — receiving teaching awards at both — before joining CUHKSZ.