Global Intellectual Seminar Series: Lecture ‘German Genius in the Bengali Imagination, 1920 – 1940: An Intellectual History’

Public lecture by Arnab Dutta (Groningen and Freie Universität Berlin)

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Abstract

Placed within a broader project on German-Bengali cultural and intellectual entanglements in the interwar years, this lecture draws from the Bengali fascination with the German trope of das Volk der Dichter and Denker (the nation of poets and thinkers) and critically situates the genealogy of conservative and upper-caste internationalism(s) in late colonial British India. By doing so, it delineates the reception of German Geniebegriff (genius-concept) in British Bengal and its political habitations within the rhetoric of anti-colonial nationhood.

Biography

Arnab Dutta is a PhD candidate of Modern History at the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands. He is also a visiting doctoral fellow at both the Department of History of Ideas, Uppsala University, Sweden, and the Global Intellectual History Graduate School, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.