This book examines the location and representation of the colonial clerk or the kerani within the cultural and social space of nineteenth century colonial India. It provides a comparative history of the clerk in Calcutta vis-à-vis the clerk in contemporary London in order to understand the manifestations of modernity in these two disparate but intimately related spaces. The volume traces the socio-historical life of the clerk in the newly emerged city-space of Calcutta and reveals how the Bengali kerani became a complex and distinct figure of bureaucratic and colonial modernity. It analyses the techniques of surveillance and ethical training given to the native clerks and offers insights into the role of education in the production and dissemination of knowledge and hegemony in the colonial setting. The author, through a reading of clerk manuals, handbooks and literary representations, highlights the class and cultural identity of the English educated colonial clerk in the new city-space. He also focuses on the ambivalence and unreliability of the clerk or colonial babu who became complicit and gave legitimacy to the empire while personifying a complex modernity within the networks of the colonial administration. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of colonial and imperial history, literature, cultural studies, city studies, British studies, area studies, commonwealth studies and South Asian studies, particularly those interested in colonial Bengal.

This book examines the location and representation of the colonial clerk or the kerani within the cultural and social space of nineteenth century colonial India. It provides a comparative history of the clerk in Calcutta vis-a-vis the clerk in contemporary London in order to understand the manifestations of modernity in these two disparate but intimately related spaces. The volume traces the socio-historical life of the clerk in the newly emerged city-space of Calcutta and reveals how the Bengali kerani became a complex and distinct figure of bureaucratic and colonial modernity. It analyses the techniques of surveillance and ethical training given to the native clerks and offers insights into the role of education in the production and dissemination of knowledge and hegemony in the colonial setting. The author, through a reading of clerk manuals, handbooks and literary representations, highlights the class and cultural identity of the English educated colonial clerk in the new city-space. He also focuses on the ambivalence and unreliability of the clerk or colonial babu who became complicit and gave legitimacy to the empire while personifying a complex modernity within the networks of the colonial administration. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of colonial and imperial history, literature, cultural studies, city studies, British studies, area studies, commonwealth studies and South Asian studies, particularly those interested in colonial Bengal.

The book examines the works of Akshay Kumar Dutta (1820–1886), who can be seen as ideologically inhabiting the cusp between religion and rationalism – the two most crucial avenues of debate and discussion in the public sphere in nineteenth-century Bengal. While nineteenth-century Bengal has been an important discourse within South Asian history, major figures of reform such as Rammohun Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, or Keshub Chunder Sen have generally been the focus. The book attempts to rescue Dutta from the clutches of academic amnesia, and to locate him as one of the foundational figures of intellectual refashioning among the common albeit educated public in nineteenth-century Bengal.