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The Conservative Animal: Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay and Colonial Bengal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2017

Satadru Sen
Satadru Sen*
Affiliation:
Satadru Sen (satadru.sen@qc.cuny.edu) is Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
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Abstract

This article examines the writings of the nineteenth-century Indian essayist Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay. Locating the writer within the history of colonial Bengal and a wider world of racial anxieties, it excavates the foundations of Indian conservatism outside the familiar terrain of anti-Muslim ressentiment. It argues that “traditionalist” conservatism in India was a transformative project that sought to intervene in the racial nature of a colonized people, focusing on the reordering of familiality, education, and health. Simultaneously liberating and constraining the individual subject, the interventions were expected to produce a population that, through engaging in a tense dialogue with Europe, could redefine its distinctive body of custom and also repair its perceived degenerative condition.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , May 2017 , pp. 363 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2017 

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