| Skip to main content | Skip to navigation | Skip to Search |

[University home]

School of Arts, Histories and Cultures

Dr. Anindita Ghosh

Contact Details

Lecturer in Extra-European Modern History
Room N2.5, North Wing, Second Floor
Humanities Lime Grove Building, Oxford Road
Ph: 0161 275 3095
Email: a.ghosh@manchester.ac.uk

Profile

Born and educated in India, and obtaining my doctoral degree from Cambridge, I joined the History Department at the University of Manchester in 2001 as a lecturer, having also served as a Simon Fellow here between 1999 and 2000. Since then I have been teaching courses on colonialism and nationalism in India, at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. My published work so far has focussed on the social and cultural history of the book, and the making of indigenous identity in colonial Bengal. I have been particularly interested in popular print-cultures that survived the onset of standardisation, and the wider impact of the process on Bengali language, society and cultural politics.My monograph, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society (ISBN: 0195673298), was published by Oxford University Press in 2006. More recently, I have become interested in urban material cultures in colonial cities, and am engaged in preparing a book length study on Calcutta in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Research Interests

Very broadly speaking, I am interested in questions of power, culture and resistance. In my monograph I study this in the context of the printing industry and shaping of literary tastes in Bengal. Contrary to the dominant academic belief that flourishing 'high' literatures succeeded in wiping out ephemeral and cheap prints in nineteenth century Bengal, I demonstrate that the latter survived with much strength and vitality. Such an argument also helps reopen some fundamental debates on the social structure of literacy and the Bengali bhadralok intelligentsia. It offers a reassessment of groups previously thought to inhabit the peripheries of literate society  petty urban dwellers, women, impoverished Muslims and low castes  by highlighting the primacy of orality and specific reading practices in an Indian context, among others. The work is thus also a conscious intervention in the standard Eurocentric historiography on the book and reading cultures.

In extending my study on resistance, I have been also drawn into the realm of women's experience in colonial South Asia. The overwhelming image of Indian women during this time has wavered between one of extreme passivity or occasional outstanding confrontation. In an edited volume (forthcoming, Permanent Black), together with others, I have tried to unearth a narrative of deeper and perhaps more enduring subterranean resistance offered by women in their daily lives. A lot of evidence exists to support such a proposal, some from unconventional sources such as women's songs, photographs and embroidery, but also from legal records, memoirs and other printed/published works. But this work is as much about power, as it is about women. The volume, inspired by both subaltern and gender studies, tries to highlight the complex ways in which power operates in oppressive structures, that makes any simple valorisation  and for that matter, theorisation  of such 'resistance' quite impossible.

In my most recent work, I look at the city of Calcutta in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, analysing its material cultures and social structures in the context of colonialism, technology, changing patterns of occupation and public spaces, crime, scandals and disease.

Publications

Power in Print

Books

Contributions to edited books

Contributions to academic journals

Recent Workshops/Conferences/Seminars

Teaching

My teaching interests include the social and cultural history of the empire and nationalism in India, print and the public sphere, questions of gender and race and the making of imperial and colonial identities. I am happy to supervise projects and dissertations on any of the above topics.

Postgraduate Level:

While my published work so far relates to print, popular culture and social identity in colonial India, I am happy to supervise PhD students keen to research other themes in an imperial and/or colonial context. I have been engaged in supervising doctoral students working in topics as diverse as the Indian army and governmentality, big game hunting and the empire, Indian travel writing, and colonial masculinity, in the recent past. My most current research is concerned with urban material cultures and colonial cities.

PhD Supervision

| Skip to main content | Skip to navigation | Skip to Search |