In 1940, Rabindranath Tagore wrote about his childhood companion – a Brahmadaitya, a saintly Brahmin ghost who lived peacefully in a nut tree at the family’s Jorasanko mansion. This benevolent spirit would stretch his legs between the tree and the terrace, observing human life with philosophical detachment until electric lights arrived in Calcutta. “There is more light now,” Tagore noted with melancholy, “both inside and outside.” The Brahmadaitya had vanished.

Taking ghosts seriously

What happened to Bengal’s ghosts when modernity arrived? This question animates Tithi Bhattacharya’s remarkable Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence, a work that uses supernatural beliefs as an unexpected window into the profound transformations of 19th-century Bengali society. The result is cultural history at its most inventive – a book that takes ghosts seriously, not as folklore curiosities but as historical actors whose changing fortunes reveal how colonialism reshaped everything from urban planning to ideas about death.

Bhattacharya’s central insight is that the transformation of Bengal’s supernatural landscape mirrors the broader violence of capitalist modernity. The diverse, localised beings of precolonial Bengal – bhuts who conducted elaborate business transactions, petnis who gave birth to baby ghosts, dakinis who accompanied goddesses into battle – were systematically replaced by refined “spirits” who could be summoned through scientific séances and studied in respectable drawing rooms. The contrast illuminates deeper changes.

Traditional Bengali ghosts were earthy, mischievous creatures embedded in specific communities and landscapes. They lived in sheora trees and marshes, married other ghosts, held elaborate feasts, and even died natural deaths requiring proper funeral rites. Crucially, they weren’t reviled – they belonged to a multifaith world where Hindu and Muslim storytellers freely borrowed supernatural beings from each other’s traditions, where boundaries between gods and ghosts remained fluid.

Colonial modernity shattered this cosmology. Drawing on Marx’s concept of abstract labour, Bhattacharya shows how diverse supernatural beings were homogenised into generic categories that could be managed by colonial administrators and studied by the emerging Bengali middle class. Just as capitalism reduces all forms of concrete work to their quantitative exchange value, the colonial project stripped local spirits of their particular characteristics and reclassified them under universal rubrics of “superstition” or “scientific spirituality.”

This wasn’t simply European rationalism overwhelming indigenous belief. The book’s most fascinating sections trace how the Bengali Bhadralok elite – Western-educated intellectuals like Shishir Kumar Ghose and members of the Tagore family – created “Scientific Spiritualism,” a hybrid discourse that claimed both rational respectability and cultural authenticity. These figures didn’t abandon supernatural beliefs; they transformed them into something that could compete with European claims to scientific superiority.

The results were tellingly hierarchical. While old ghosts associated with lower castes and rural communities were dismissed as “superstition,” refined spirits contacted through planchettes became evidence of Hindu civilisation’s spiritual advancement. Séance circles in Calcutta drawing rooms summoned well-behaved upper-caste souls who invariably confirmed their living descendants’ cultural authority.

The supernatural, rather than disappearing under colonial rule, was repackaged to serve new projects of class formation and Hindu nationalism. Bhattacharya’s archival work reveals a fascinating world largely hidden from conventional histories. Chemistry professors edited occult magazines, nationalist journalists used planchettes to ask spirits about the future of British rule, and Theosophical societies became recruiting grounds for anti-colonial politics. The author mines an impressive range of sources – spiritualist journals, colonial death registration records, folk tale collections, personal memoirs – to reconstruct how intimate cultural transformations connected to larger political processes.

Ghosts as historical subjects

The spatial dimensions of this story prove equally revealing. Traditional ghosts inhabited the “wild” – forests, marshes, cremation grounds – spaces outside colonial control. Modern spirits, by contrast, haunted bourgeois homes, the very bastions of middle-class security. This shift reflects colonial efforts to sanitise urban death through new burial laws and medical surveillance, creating the Gothic sensibility that made domestic spaces feel vulnerable to spectral intrusion.

The book’s theoretical sophistication occasionally threatens to overwhelm its historical insights. Bhattacharya draws creatively on spatial theorists like Henri Lefebvre and feminist scholars like Doreen Massey to analyse how haunting reflects changing relationships between space, time, and social power. But the most compelling passages occur when she lets the sources speak – when we encounter the earnest chemistry professor explaining how “ghostly matter condenses” or read colonial officials fretting about villagers who refuse to register deaths for fear of bureaucratic entanglement.

The work succeeds in making supernatural beliefs seem central rather than marginal to understanding colonial transformation. By taking ghosts seriously as historical subjects, Bhattacharya reveals how even apparently “irrational” cultural forms are structured by material relations of power. The Bengali intelligentsia’s creation of Scientific Spiritualism demonstrates how dominated groups appropriate hegemonic discourses while maintaining claims to cultural authenticity – a process with obvious contemporary resonances.

Yet the book occasionally struggles with the binary logic it seeks to critique. The precolonial world can appear remarkably harmonious compared to the fractured modernity that followed, and the sharp distinction between “traditional” and “modern” ghosts sometimes seems more analytically convenient than historically accurate. The analysis also remains somewhat elite-centred despite its sensitivity to subaltern perspectives – we learn more about how Bhadralok intellectuals theorised supernatural beliefs than about how ordinary people experienced them in daily life.

These limitations don’t diminish the book’s considerable achievements. Bhattacharya has written a cultural history that illuminates fundamental questions about how colonialism transforms not just political structures but the most intimate aspects of human experience. Her analysis of how capitalist modernity reshapes relationships between the living and dead offers fresh insights into the emotional dimensions of historical change.

The book also speaks powerfully to contemporary India. The Hindu nationalism that emerged from 19th-century Scientific Spiritualism bears uncomfortable resemblances to current projects that present Hindu culture as uniquely rational and scientific. Bhattacharya’s historical analysis suggests that such claims have deep roots in colonial anxieties about cultural respectability and intellectual legitimacy. In tracing the fate of Bengal’s ghosts, Bhattacharya reminds us that the past never simply disappears – it persists in transformed forms that continue to structure our present.

The Brahmadaitya may have fled Tagore’s electrified Calcutta, but his spectral descendants continue to haunt debates about tradition, science, and national identity. The old spirits didn’t vanish under colonial rule; they were actively transformed into new forms that could serve different social projects. This makes Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence more than a work of historical curiosity. It’s a meditation on how cultural forms survive and adapt under conditions of political domination, how the marginalised create spaces for resistance within hegemonic discourses, and how the apparently dead past continues to shape living politics. In showing how supernatural beliefs were reshaped by colonial power, Bhattacharya reveals something profound about the creativity and violence of historical change itself.

Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal, Tithi Bhattacharya, Duke University Press.

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