In the era of human-induced climate change, insects have become the preeminent emissaries of Death, morphing the proverbial scythe into tiny tentacles of destruction. The invasion of tropical insects into the Global North has emerged as a key narrative template of the climate apocalypse: articles in scientific and journalistic outlets register the harrowing threat of…
Author: Suvendu Ghatak
Suvendu Ghatak is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Florida. In his dissertation research, he explores the conjunctures of medical and cultural narratives in obscuring the impact of colonial developmentalist policies on malarial epidemics, and in marking the disease as a malady of primitivity and degeneracy. He traces the continuities of this colonial semantics of malaria in postcolonial state policies and medical practices in South Asia. His archival research for the dissertation has been funded by the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, UF. Currently, he is the Kumkum Chatterjee Memorial Fellow in Indian History, affiliated with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. More broadly, he is interested in how prolonged crises, beyond the suddenness of “outbreak” or the closure of cure, shape disease imaginaries and medical practices in the Global South. Connect with Suvendu by email, ghataksuvendu@ufl.edu, or on Twitter, @ghatak_suvendu.
Colonial Lit(t)eraria: Topographies of Purity and Pollution on the Bank of the Ganga
Is there a link between the histories of the sanitation of the Hooghly and the formation of a discourse of sanitary womanhood in colonial Calcutta? The river in question, Hooghly or Ganga, was the epitome of pollution for the British while being synonymous with purity for the colonized Hindu. The historian Pratik Chakrabarti makes an…
Tale of a Colonial Tonic: or the Pharmacy of the Supernatural in Bengali Literature
What does a fledgling Bengali periodical for paranormal tales in early-twentieth-century Calcutta have in common with a contemporary anti-malarial tonic? Both sneak across the colonial divide in their formal heterogeneity. On the pages of the periodical Aloukik Rahasya (literally, Mysteries of the Supernatural), edited by the Bengali playwright Kshirode Prasad Vidyabinode from 1909 to 1915,…