Conference Grants: Pratiti at BASAS 2023
We are pleased to support our students sharing their work at the premiere conferences in their field. Pratiti presented their work "Ghosts (of) in Calcutta: Viewing the Cities ‘Dead'" at the annual meeting of the British Association for South Asian Studies. From Pratiti:
The BASAS 2023 held at Leeds provided for an intellectually stimulating experience. I was in a panel titled, Legacies of Colonialism.
The Abstract
My paper looks at will focus on the ideas of spectrality and its relationship to urbanity in Calcutta, and will attempt to answer the question, How does the Calcutta Narrative deal with the trauma of colonisation, the extremely violent decolonial process and then the reducing importance in a post- liberalised open economy? It tries to think about how the three narratives use spectrality to deal with dissonance, and how the modern Calcutta Narrative is using ghosts to cope with the loss and trauma of decolonisation and post-colonisation. I want to explore how the narratives think of the epistemology of western scientific rationale which is key to the narratives I study, and the local epistemology of Bengal rooted in memory and ghost-like beings. What is the bizarre telling us about its people, its many memories, and what has been lost? How does one understand this through lived experiences of modern Calcutta?
The paper, which is part of Master’s Dissertation Research uses new media techniques, particularly associated with the the use of digital maps.