Local Selfhood, Global Turns

Sumit Chakrabarti is Professor in the Department of English at Presidency University, Kolkata. He is a historian straddling the fields of culture studies and postcolonial studies. His areas of expertise are Nineteenth-Century Bengal, intellectual history, and postcolonial and cultural studies. His most recent monograph is titled The Calcutta Kerani and the London Clerk in the Nineteenth Century: Life, Labour, Latitude (Routledge, 2020) and the editor of the forthcoming Oxford World's Classics edition of the short stories of Rabindranath Tagore.

• Introduction; 1. The Discontents of Eclecticism: The Milieu of Akshay Kumar Dutta; 2. The New World of Science: Akshay Dutta as the 'Science Worker'; 3. The Tattwabodhini Period: The Conflicting Contours of Self-Fashioning or Towards a Global History?; 4. Reconstructing Bengali Selfhood: The Conception of Dharma in Akshay and Bankim; 5. On the Question of the Public Sphere: Civic Life, Polity, Dissent, and an Affective Engagement with the Janasamaj; 6. Imagining Bharatvarsha: Identity, History, Nationhood; Conclusion and Further Thoughts; Index.

'In this sumptuous intellectual history, Chakrabarti conducts a fine-grained analysis of Akshay Kumar Dutta's thought, situating him as a precursor to Bankimchandra, and reading him alongside luminaries like Vidyasagar and Bhudev Mukhopadhayay. Defying easy categorization into nationalist, liberal, or 'culturalist', Dutta contributed to a variety of fields, from religion to science to creative translations of European phrenology, that shine through this innovative book. Showcasing a deep knowledge of Dutta's vast oeuvre as well as global historical scholarship from Europe and North America, this book offers invaluable reflections on conceptions of jati, science, nation, and affect in colonial modern milieus. Local Selfhood, Global Turns will command the attention of all intellectual historians interested in conceptions of the global, the local, and those interstitial spaces resonant with postcolonial societies throughout the world.' Neilesh Bose, author of Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal