Select Abstracts

Madhumita Sengupta and Jahnu Bharadwaj, 'Empire Remembered: The Intimate Economy of Tea in Assam and the Making of "Chameli Memsaab", Postcolonial Studies (Taylor and Francis) https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2021.1989816

Through a close historicist reading of literary and cinematic Assamese tracts, this essay examines the complex intertwining of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities in the making of memories about the colonial past. Using literature as an archive, and intersubjectivity as a lens to understand memories of the Empire as culled not merely from the subjective experiences of an individual but from a community’s collective perceptions of the past and the present, the essay calls for due diligence in relation to the immediate postcolonial context in which the memory project is ordained. At a more elementary level, the essay argues that reduction of the colonial experience to a conflictual negation of the imperialist project impairs our understanding of the myriad factors that mediate the colonial experience. The polysemy of colonial memories reflects the multiplicity of intersubjective exchanges among colonial and postcolonial subjects. In this essay, Nirode Choudhury’s short story, ‘Chameli Memsaab’ becomes our focal point for entry into a hitherto neglected domain of contrary literary representations of the European planter  that put a gloss on the dark side of Plantation abuses to project the plantation economy in Assam as a desirable economic addendum to the Raj. We argue that all short stories from the period that describe the planter regime, display a profoundly ambivalent attitude about the unequal sexual exchange between the European sahib and the coolie woman, which we call ‘the intimate economy of tea’ in Assam, and which, as the coercive underside of the economy, denuded the production relations on the plantations of their putatively capitalist character. The coolies were treated as the ‘other’ on grounds of both ethnicity and caste. Understandably, therefore, the sexual abuse of coolie women was not seen as sufficient cause for outrage. In Choudhury’s short story, sex and desire were carefully sheathed in romance and sentiment to project an image of the benign planter sahib in love with Chameli, the coolie woman.

Madhumita Sengupta and Shreya Sen, 'Commercialization of Bengali Food: Insights into Caste, Class and Commensality in Colonial Bengal', Social History (Taylor and Francis), vol. 47, Issue 2, 2022  https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2022.2044212

This article argues that the failure of early twentieth-century novelistic, autobiographical and periodical literature to acknowledge or celebrate the novelty and social significance of the commercialisation of Bengali food reflected the deeply rooted caste and class prejudices underlying the dietary choices and literary styles of the Bengali bhadralok (educated middle class). As late as the 1970s, eminent Bengali littérateurs lamented the non-availability of ready-to-eat Bengali food, notwithstanding the fact that a chain of new public eateries called Pice hotels had been serving home-style Bengali food since the 1920s. The gastronomic revolution ushered in by these eateries was more or less ignored in contemporary print literature, with the notable exception of Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay’s celebrated novel, Adarsha Hindu Hotel, written in 1940. The failure of Bengali writers to acknowledge the pioneering role of Pice hotels in offering a socially inclusive dining experience in Bengal contrasted with their effusive celebration of the new culinary experiments that created a cosmopolitan eating culture of public dining in the colonial city of Calcutta at the turn of the twentieth century. 

Madhumita Sengupta, 'Becoming Hindu: The cultural politics of writing religion in colonial Assam', Contributions to Indian Sociology, 55, 1 (2021): 59–88 

The use of labels such as ‘isolation’ or ‘assimilation’ to characterise tribal communities dwelling in the plains region of British Assam had a discursive history that took no notice of the region’s prolonged tradition of vibrant interfaith transmissions and cultural exchanges. This essay flags a disjuncture between early ethnographic literature on the ‘tribes’ of the plains region of Assam, and their later enumeration in census data from the middle of the 19th century. While census makers in Assam attributed an ‘unusual’ surge in the number of Hindus to proselytisation by Vaishnavite and Brahman priests, and to the erosion of tribal modes of worship, this article argues that colonial enumerative practices were directly imbricated in producing the ‘Hindu’ in a way that was transformative of quotidian relations and processes of exchange characterising the region. The political pressure to possess fixed and singular identities and the growing rhetoric of a muscular Hinduism symbolised by renewed interest in Indological studies, combined to enhance Hinduism’s prestige and symbolic value. Becoming a Hindu was easier now that the definition of Hinduism as a loosely bound corpus of ritually coded behaviour enabled a wide array of practices to be labelled as ‘Hindu’. 

Madhumita Sengupta, 'War of Words: Language and Policies in Nineteenth-century Assam', Indian  Historical Review , 2012 39: 293

One of the crucial features of the tussle over Assamese in the nineteenth century was that it inspired multiple imaginings of the ‘Assamese’. This article has been conceived with the aim of following some of these different mappings of the ‘Assamese’ that became the focal point of a debate over the identity of the Assamese language in nineteenth-century Assam. The article contends that neither the official nor the missionary discourses on linguistic identity can be labeled as either exclusively ideological or instrumentalist. One of its principal aims has been to foreground a particular moment in the history of the debate when official rhetoric seems to have shed, if only momentarily, its usual concerns of governance and power and engaged in a genuine quest for ‘authentic’ linguistic attributes for defining the vernacular. The article addresses both the ideological parameters of the official discourses on the identity of Assamese as well as the pragmatic considerations and the lack of harmony in the seemingly unanimous discourse of the missionaries. Further, there has been an attempt to reflect on the many lives of Assamese in the pages of the vernacular periodicals, wherein, apparently fixed linguistic boundaries were tampered with in an attempt to equip the ‘mother tongue’ with suitable linguistic and cultural properties. The article shows how boundaries of religion were drawn up and affirmed as the provincial elite sought to produce a Hindu–Sanskrit identity for the ‘Assamese’ community.