The Conservative Animal: Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay and Colonial Bengal

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

E-ISSN: 1752-0401|76|2|363-381

ISSN: 0021-9118

Source: Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.76, Iss.2, 2017-03, pp. : 363-381

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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.