The Swarming Undead of the Raj

South Asianists never speak of the undead. Africanists do. Latin
Americanists do. But not South Asianists. Favoured by a more fulsome
textual archive, South Asian historians dwell upon seemingly weightier
matters. Historians of science in South Asia are even less interested in
the phantomatic.1 Public Health, Foucaultian entanglements of
pouvoir/savoir, the global ‘circulation’ of intelligence and even more
Public Health usually engage their attention and keep them away from
what Jean and John Comaroff have called the “phantom history” of the
undead.2 Yet when one allows one’s self the liberty of such
distractions, one cannot fail to observe the swarming undead of the Raj.

An illustration accompanying an undated but published Bengali collection of spells for raising the dead. The illustration is copied from a woodcut published by the English Swedenborgian, Ebenezer Sibly, in 1784. The illustration originally depicted the sixteenth century alchemists, Edward Kelley and John Dee, raising the dead. The Bengali collection makes no reference to any of the English figures, but reproduces their spells and incantations in English. The collection possibly dates from the first decade of the twentieth century.

Nowhere were these undead more legion than in British Bengal that formed
the cornerstone of the empire. The Bengali undead however, were not the
‘zombies’ of the plantation economies of the Caribbean. There were in
fact myriad forms of Bengali undeadness. The Betal (pronounced:
Betaal) for instance, was a corpse that had literally been ‘taken over’
by a soul or spirit. The Pishach on the other hand was a ghoul who
feasted on corpses.3 Then there is the grave-robbing Ghul from
which comes the English term ‘ghoul’, the Afrit or sometimes Akrit,
who lurk in ruins and many more. They were all undead, but in different
ways. Each of them had their own characteristics and inhabited different
niches. What was common to all of them was that they all shared the
social space with humans and interacted with them in various ways. They
also provided different types of links with the past. Much of this would
be familiar to folklorists, students of religion and cultural
historians. But what is seldom noted and yet quite remarkable is just
how central the undead were to the key projects of 19th century
Bengali modernity. The very first textbook of Bengali prose, written by
Iswarchandra Vidyasagar—educator,
social reformer, erudite scholar and one of the founding fathers of
modern South Asia—featured a cycle of tales narrated by a paranimate.
The textbook, Betal Panchabinshati [Twenty Five Tales of the Betal]
(1847), was written as a primer for the linguistic instruction of young
British officers upon arrival. Key legal texts such as Shyamacharan
Sarkar’s Vyavyasthya Darpan: A Digest of Hindu Law as Current in
Bengal (1859) also invoked pishacha lore in discussing the law of
marriages, inheritance and adoption.

What do these undead beings want and why are they so plentiful in 19th
century Bengal? A lengthy poem by an unknown Bengali poet, Nabinchandra
Das (there is a better-known poet of the same name slightly later, but
this is not him), written in an idiom that tries too hard to be polished
and published from a cheap Calcutta press, gives a fascinating
answer.4 In a lengthy conversation between a Pishacha and a
Betal, we find that these undead beings are the bearers of a past that
has been erased from human memory. Tellingly, the conversation takes
place on the fringes of the blood-soaked battlefield of
Plassey.
It would be too distracting for us to go into the fascinating details,
judgements and histories that were shared by the Pishach and the
Betal on that fateful day, but that such a conversation took place
testifies to the place and function of the undead in 19th century
Bengal. They were not simply ghosts, like Hamlet’s father, looking for
someone else to settle their unsettled scores for them. No. These were
pasts that lived on. That refused to die. But were yet, neither fully
alive nor fully embraced by human society. Even as colonial modernity
worked out the precise line dividing zoe from bios at
Plassey, on its margins—beyond both zoe and bios—there sat the
undead: thinking, talking, judging and living a parallel form of life.
This is paranimacy, i.e. para-animacy. Forms of life that run parallel
to those circumscribed by the
necropolitics
of empire.

Paranimates, it is worth noting, are nothing like the ‘living tradition’
that the Hindu or Muslim right-wing speak of. For them, ironically like
the rationalist scholarship in history of science, these paranimates can
only at best be metaphors not real beings. They can thus be reformatted
without any reference to their autonomous being and fitted into
neo-traditionalist agendas. They become, like the stuffed beasts of the
taxonomist, mere ciphers in a museum devoted to the image of an ossified
and purified ‘tradition’. The conversation on the fringes of Plassey on
the other hand happened between two paranimate beings. The Pishacha of
Plassey denounced the rampant casteism of 19th century Bengali society
at length. He linked the defeat at Plassey to the sins committed through
numerous everyday acts of gendered violence and most emblematically the
horrible custom of widow-burning (Sati). Finally, he recounted a
mongrel history of travel and inter-marriages which rendered all
nations—Asian and European—kinsfolk. The Pishacha of Plassey would
surely offend the Hindu right-wing. But so what? He wasn’t their
servant, least of all some stuffed up exhibit in their Hall of Hindu
Horrors. He was a paranimate with his own views and life-story, however
unpalatable or mongrelized.

In this colonial world, crowded as it was by paranimacies, it was but
natural that early Bengali science fiction would also feature
paranimates. While the Bengali SF tradition dates allegedly from 1857
when Jagadananda Roy is said to have penned a time travel tale,
scholarship on it is remarkably thin. What little exists, copies off each
other. Indeed the whole issue of Roy’s priority over Wells, based as it
is on an utter lack of any original research in most cases, has produced
ludicrous results. James Dator for instance, is one of the more erudite
proponents of the 1857 date.5 Yet, for all his scholarly credentials,
he does not allow facts to stand in the way of a grand claim. Roy, after
all, was born in 1869! The canon that has thus been created by the lazy,
internet-enabled, copy-paste-enter mode of inter-textuality makes no
mention either of paranamacies or paranimates.

Resurrecting these colonial paranimates, I will argue, allows us to
grapple with modes of radical alterity that have been elided not only in
the history of SF, but in the history of science more generally.
Paranimates subvert the all too familiar human/nonhuman binary for
instance, but not in the now fashionable way by keeping ‘western’
ontologies of animacy and humanness intact and invoking either hybrids
or nonhumans. Paranimates, by their very existence draw attention to
other cosmologies and ontologies, where animacy is neither an
exclusively human virtue, nor indeed are humans and nonhumans the only
two kinds of beings. Learning from Latin American scholars like Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro, I want to re-think animist ontologies in a way that
will challenge the continued ontic hegemony of the west.
I strongly feel that even seemingly progressive moves such as including
the nonhuman in histories of science all too frequently work insidiously
to universalize a western-centric ontology of human/ nonhuman, matter/
nonmatter etc. and marginalize any engagement with radically Othered
cosmologies.

Such radically Othered cosmologies also engender, I will argue,
radically othered ‘sciences’ and ‘practices’ and indeed there have been
some very timely calls to
expand the very definitions of terms like ‘science’ and ‘practice’ to
make history of science more inclusive. But I want to suggest that such
inclusiveness, despite its promise of equality, needs to be carefully
thought out. What is the cost of incorporation into such universalized
terms? Does it not compromise the very possibility of radical alterity?
Does it not undermine our most radical hopes that in marginalized,
radically Othered cosmologies there are intimations of a more equitable
political ecology? By seeking admissions into a broader church of
‘science’ will we not compromise our untranslatable heterodoxy? After
all, did Jean Baudrillard not show us that the only radical alterity is that which
cannot be translated into a version of the familiar?

It is this radical alterity that I hope, perhaps impossibly and
precociously, to resurrect. In the subsequent blogposts therefore, I
will reanimate the paranimate ontologies that lie buried in the Bengali
SF archive of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such
reanimation and the forgotten cosmologies they will evoke, I’ll suggest
might illuminate not only radically Othered images of science, but also
locate in these radically Othered images forgotten temporalities that
eschew the forward-moving linear teleologies of progress and science.
For as Walter Benjamin reminds us, “the true picture of the
past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up
at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”

Banu Subramaniam’s new book Ghost Stories for Darwin is a brave
attempt to change this, but her ghosts, at the end of the day, are
purely metaphorical. The undead as a metaphysical and
socio-historical reality are still clearly unacceptable to
historians of science. Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of
Variation and the Politics of Diversity (Champagne: University of
Illinois Press, 2014). ↩