Arup K Chatterjee
Biographic Data
| ID | 938907 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Arup K Chatterjee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Arup K |
| FAMILY NAME | Chatterjee |
| SIGNATURE | CHATTERJEE A K |
| AFFILIATIONS | O. P. Jindal Global University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8880-7762 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
G.F. Kellner and the making of an imperial state apparatus in the Indian railways
This paper attempts to chalk an account of the rise and decline of G.F. Kellner & Co., a hospitality and merchandizing firm affiliated to the Indian railways, to primarily demonstrate how its culinary provisioning contingently took on the role of an imperial state apparatus. Drawing on archival sources, the paper argues that Kellner’s created imperial mobile spacetimes to reinforce colonial hierarchies of taste, authenticity, provenance, civility…
Latour Against “Freeze- Framing”: A Sacred Indian “Monument” in the Anthropocene
This paper attempts to reconsider a previously studied bulk of archival material and contemporary cultural debates, around— what is considered by a multitude of Indians as— a symbolic “monument,” in the light of some of Bruno Latour’s influential writings and concepts. Latour’s spirit looms large in inspiring us (even in his physical absence) to redefine the secular in terms of the freedom to historicize the geological as a key to disrupting the …
The 19th Century Colonial Archetype of the Indian Crocodile: The aquapelagic roots of Rudyard Kipling's 'Muggers
This article studies the archetype of the Indian crocodile (also called by the British as 'mugger,' derived from the Hindi word magarmachh, meaning aquatic monster') in late-19th century colonial anthropological and zoological accounts. These constitute a vital archive of imperial views of environmental others, especially within Indian lacustrine contexts. I attempt to explore the historicity of the crocodile-archetype-that Rudyard Kipling, for i…
Mythologizing late Victorian tea advertising: The case of the Illustrated London News (1890–1900)
Late-Victorian popular culture discourses around tea advertisements by companies like Lipton's Mazawattee, and United Kingdom Tea Company constitute an essential archive of Victorianism's ideological moorings. Following a revolution in Victorian tea retail, in the 1890s, tea advertisements became complex aesthetic performances of mythologizing and reconditioning the semiotics of Englishness rather than simply marketing tea for consumption. The vi…
Pothum Janakummah Ragaviah’s “Fairy-land”: A “Hindoo Lady of Madras” in Victorian London
Ram Setu and Delusions of Archaeological Grandeur: The Politics of Obscuring a Sacred Geology
This article discusses the Indian film Ram Setu (2022) against the backdrop of 21st century public discourses, geological debates, legal proceedings and the general surge of politics revolving around the eponymous tombolo - Ram Setu/Adam's Bridge (understood by geologists as a stretch of 103 patchy reefs or shallow shoals connecting India's Rameswaram Island with Sri Lanka's Mannar Island). It is important to question the locus standi of not only…
Jiddu Krishnamurti and the Problem of Conscience
Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) remains an enigma for philosophers, historians and lay audiences. Being chosen to be made “World Teacher” by the Theosophical Society (Adyar), Krishnamurti renounced his demi-godhood, in 1929, and went on to become a spiritual teacher. Krishnamurti’s vexed life has increasingly come under scrutiny, in the last three decades, owing to his perceived acts of immoral behavior. This correlates to the growing culture of p…
The “decline” of London’s curry houses invented tradition, authenticity, gastromythology
Curry houses are among Britain's most prominent historical, cultural, and gastronomic links with Asia. Recent developments in the context of Britain's "declining" curry culture suggest that the industry's challenges cannot be explained through watertight analyses of immigration controls, the allegedly latent racism of British society, its aggravation by the Brexit discourse, shrinkage of South Asian talent and the turn towards healthy and green c…
Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of Lucid Dreaming: The Place of Oneirogenesis in the Science of Deduction
This article examines a much-underrated aspect in the Holmesian canon: dreams and the potential for dream-rehearsals by virtue of the brain’s “dream drugstore” faculty. Frequently described as “dreamy-eyed” or the “dreamer” of Baker Street, Holmes possesses powers of visiting scenes of crime “in spirit,” exhibiting powers of oneirogenesis. This unorthodox criminological strategy marks him as a critic of Western rationality, placing him in a genea…
Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of Theosophy: Spiritual Underpinnings of the Science of Deduction
Sherlock Holmes is often oversimplified as a secular modern professional, with a remorselessly scientific outlook. This hypothesis overlooks late-nineteenth-century English society’s pursuit of new social possibilities for spiritualism, following challenges from Darwinist biological determinism to orthodox biblical mythology and morality. If we see Holmes in a default empirical scientism affiliated to imperial ideologies, we will remain blind to …
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and the Consumerist Utopia
Twenty-six years ago, Aditya Chopra’s film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) biblicized the neoliberal romantic fantasies of India and the global Indian diaspora with an adventurous romantic plot, against the backdrop of diasporic and ethnic settings, global brand placements and émigré Indians embodying traditional values. Reviewing the film’s mediascapes as an index of India’s middle-class subjectivity through the prism of neoliberal consumer c…
Mapping Icons of Victorian Femininity: Engendering London in Nineteenth-Century Indian Accounts
Indian travelers in Victorian London began engaging with questions of nationhood, modernity, family, home, and gender roles within the ambit of reproducing the city’s imperial geography on increasingly gendered and sexist lines. The rise of Indian feminists like Sarojini Naidu, Cornelia Sorabji, Rukhmabai, and Princess Sophia notwithstanding, Indian men redrew London’s patriarchal contours. Drawing on a legacy of accounts by nineteenth-century In…
“Soft thick carpet under your feet”: The Indian eye on Victorian London’s homes
Indian visitors to late-Victorian London like Mukharji, Pandian, Baijnath and Pillai, whose accounts carefully essayed the city’s Victorian homes, have been hailed as agents of cosmopolitan and aesthetic subjectivity in the history of Indian nationalism. Though their accounts have been read as the evidence of growing Indian suitableness for Home Rule, bonds of colonial hospitality, and London’s contestability as a colonial space, the Indian eye’s…
Do you believe in Ram Setu? Adam’s Bridge, epistemic plurality and colonial legacy
The Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project, whose construction was halted by a 2013 judgment of the Supreme Court of India due to religious sensitivity, has become a domestic and international strategic flashpoint. The religious and epistemic conundrum around the Sethusamudram project and Adam’s Bridge is a colonial-era legacy. Without understanding how the British colonial state saw Adam’s Bridge, we may wrongly infer that today’s Indian nationali…
Oriental Dressings, Imperial Inhalations: The Indian Hookah in British Colonial Culture
Over the course of its Anglo-Indian career, the hookah began as an archetype of colonial hybridity in eighteenth-century Bengal, before entering nineteenth-century London and its consumer sensorium as a seductive Oriental artefact, through travelogues, hookah clubs, Indian-styled diwans and a massive cataloguing of Eastern artefacts culminating in the Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851) and the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886). Hookahs appeared…
The Gastromythology of English Tea Culture: On the UKTC's Advertisements and Making Tea a "Fact" of English Life
In Victorian England, tea culture became "a fact of life" as advertising appropriated the imperial commodity's surplus values, juxtaposing a semantics of English tea's authenticity with a semiotics of its surplus enjoyment. This article makes a larger observation on English tea culture, with one of its leitmotifs as the United Kingdom Tea Company's advertisements, which were published in leading periodicals such as The Illustrated London News, Th…
Lord Ram's Own Sethu: Adam's Bridge envisaged as an aquapelago
Taking the current geological, environmental and religious controversy around the iconic Adam's Bridge or Ram Sethu (as it is referred to in Hindu sacred mythography) and the proposed Sethusamudram canal project - which has been delayed since the late-20th century over several administrative terms, due to litigious procedures and protests by religious groups - this article examines the Ram Sethu as an aquapelago. The Ram Sethu is an aquapelagic z…
A Study in Furniture: The Moonstone ’s “Detective Fever” and Pharmacy of Deduction
This article challenges notions of furniture as being merely figures of speech in Victorian fiction, through what is here demonstrated in an archetypology of furniture based on Wilkie Collins’s novel, The Moonstone (1868). Taking the story beyond its allegory of imperial psychology, I chart the functional aspects of furniture, viewed as archetypes. The Moonstone inspired the interiors of detective plots in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and …
The Case for Regional Cooperation in Trade and Investment Finance for Asia
This article reviews the evolution of the role of export credit agencies (ECAs) and their impact on trade and investment. We argue that regional cooperation in Asia would foster regulation and facilitate access to trade and investment finance. Regional cooperation could take the form of regulation aiming at levelling the playing field; or it could go further, with the creation of a multilateral agency that would leverage the industry’s best pract…
Decolonising from London. An Indian psychogeography around Victorian railway spaces (1870-1914)
While the expansion of the London Underground coincided with that of the Indian Railways, an Indian psychogeography was quietly emerging in the marginal geographies of the Victorian imperial capital. In their memoirs, Pothum Ragaviah, Mukharji, Jang, Malabari, Pillai and Pandian, among other Indian travellers, engaged with London’s railway spaces to renegotiate their colonial subjectivity. As London neighbourhoods assumed an Asiatic character, In…
The Story of our Experiments with London: The Victorian City in Indian Imagination (1870-1900)
This paper argues for a hermeneutic shift in interpreting accounts of Victorian London in Indian travelogues written between 1870 and 1900, taking the founding of the Indian National Congress (1885) and the climate of anticolonial agitation as a political fulcrum for a new aesthetic drive in the ways in which the imperial capital was imagined as a new psychogeography by its colonial subjects. Drawing on travelogues by Pothum Ragaviah, Trailokyana…
The Science of the Andamans and The Sign of the Four: The distorted racial hierarchy of British imperial anthropology
This article examines the dichotomous relationship between racial hierarchies effected by imperial science, on the one hand, and the subversive potential of the scientific knowledge gleaned from the Andaman Islands, on the other, in Victorian Britain. Knowledge about the Andaman Islands and its 'savage' aboriginal tribes had been etched onto British consciousness since the establishment of Britain's naval base in Greater Andaman (present-day Port…
Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of Theosophy: Spiritual Underpinnings of the Science of Deduction
Sherlock Holmes is often oversimplified as a secular modern professional, with a remorselessly scientific outlook. This hypothesis overlooks late-nineteenth-century English society’s pursuit of new social possibilities for spiritualism, following challenges from Darwinist biological determinism to orthodox biblical mythology and morality. If we see Holmes in a default empirical scientism affiliated to imperial ideologies, we will remain blind to …
Do you believe in Ram Setu? Adam’s Bridge, epistemic plurality and colonial legacy
The Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project, whose construction was halted by a 2013 judgment of the Supreme Court of India due to religious sensitivity, has become a domestic and international strategic flashpoint. The religious and epistemic conundrum around the Sethusamudram project and Adam’s Bridge is a colonial-era legacy. Without understanding how the British colonial state saw Adam’s Bridge, we may wrongly infer that today’s Indian nationali…
The Gastromythology of English Tea Culture: On the UKTC's Advertisements and Making Tea a "Fact" of English Life
In Victorian England, tea culture became "a fact of life" as advertising appropriated the imperial commodity's surplus values, juxtaposing a semantics of English tea's authenticity with a semiotics of its surplus enjoyment. This article makes a larger observation on English tea culture, with one of its leitmotifs as the United Kingdom Tea Company's advertisements, which were published in leading periodicals such as The Illustrated London News, Th…
Lord Ram's Own Sethu: Adam's Bridge envisaged as an aquapelago
Taking the current geological, environmental and religious controversy around the iconic Adam's Bridge or Ram Sethu (as it is referred to in Hindu sacred mythography) and the proposed Sethusamudram canal project - which has been delayed since the late-20th century over several administrative terms, due to litigious procedures and protests by religious groups - this article examines the Ram Sethu as an aquapelago. The Ram Sethu is an aquapelagic z…
The Case for Regional Cooperation in Trade and Investment Finance for Asia
This article reviews the evolution of the role of export credit agencies (ECAs) and their impact on trade and investment. We argue that regional cooperation in Asia would foster regulation and facilitate access to trade and investment finance. Regional cooperation could take the form of regulation aiming at levelling the playing field; or it could go further, with the creation of a multilateral agency that would leverage the industry’s best pract…
Decolonising from London. An Indian psychogeography around Victorian railway spaces (1870-1914)
While the expansion of the London Underground coincided with that of the Indian Railways, an Indian psychogeography was quietly emerging in the marginal geographies of the Victorian imperial capital. In their memoirs, Pothum Ragaviah, Mukharji, Jang, Malabari, Pillai and Pandian, among other Indian travellers, engaged with London’s railway spaces to renegotiate their colonial subjectivity. As London neighbourhoods assumed an Asiatic character, In…
The Story of our Experiments with London: The Victorian City in Indian Imagination (1870-1900)
This paper argues for a hermeneutic shift in interpreting accounts of Victorian London in Indian travelogues written between 1870 and 1900, taking the founding of the Indian National Congress (1885) and the climate of anticolonial agitation as a political fulcrum for a new aesthetic drive in the ways in which the imperial capital was imagined as a new psychogeography by its colonial subjects. Drawing on travelogues by Pothum Ragaviah, Trailokyana…
The Science of the Andamans and The Sign of the Four: The distorted racial hierarchy of British imperial anthropology
This article examines the dichotomous relationship between racial hierarchies effected by imperial science, on the one hand, and the subversive potential of the scientific knowledge gleaned from the Andaman Islands, on the other, in Victorian Britain. Knowledge about the Andaman Islands and its 'savage' aboriginal tribes had been etched onto British consciousness since the establishment of Britain's naval base in Greater Andaman (present-day Port…
A Study in Furniture: The Moonstone ’s “Detective Fever” and Pharmacy of Deduction
This article challenges notions of furniture as being merely figures of speech in Victorian fiction, through what is here demonstrated in an archetypology of furniture based on Wilkie Collins’s novel, The Moonstone (1868). Taking the story beyond its allegory of imperial psychology, I chart the functional aspects of furniture, viewed as archetypes. The Moonstone inspired the interiors of detective plots in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and …
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and the Consumerist Utopia
Twenty-six years ago, Aditya Chopra’s film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) biblicized the neoliberal romantic fantasies of India and the global Indian diaspora with an adventurous romantic plot, against the backdrop of diasporic and ethnic settings, global brand placements and émigré Indians embodying traditional values. Reviewing the film’s mediascapes as an index of India’s middle-class subjectivity through the prism of neoliberal consumer c…
Mapping Icons of Victorian Femininity: Engendering London in Nineteenth-Century Indian Accounts
Indian travelers in Victorian London began engaging with questions of nationhood, modernity, family, home, and gender roles within the ambit of reproducing the city’s imperial geography on increasingly gendered and sexist lines. The rise of Indian feminists like Sarojini Naidu, Cornelia Sorabji, Rukhmabai, and Princess Sophia notwithstanding, Indian men redrew London’s patriarchal contours. Drawing on a legacy of accounts by nineteenth-century In…
“Soft thick carpet under your feet”: The Indian eye on Victorian London’s homes
Indian visitors to late-Victorian London like Mukharji, Pandian, Baijnath and Pillai, whose accounts carefully essayed the city’s Victorian homes, have been hailed as agents of cosmopolitan and aesthetic subjectivity in the history of Indian nationalism. Though their accounts have been read as the evidence of growing Indian suitableness for Home Rule, bonds of colonial hospitality, and London’s contestability as a colonial space, the Indian eye’s…
Do you believe in Ram Setu? Adam’s Bridge, epistemic plurality and colonial legacy
The Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project, whose construction was halted by a 2013 judgment of the Supreme Court of India due to religious sensitivity, has become a domestic and international strategic flashpoint. The religious and epistemic conundrum around the Sethusamudram project and Adam’s Bridge is a colonial-era legacy. Without understanding how the British colonial state saw Adam’s Bridge, we may wrongly infer that today’s Indian nationali…
Oriental Dressings, Imperial Inhalations: The Indian Hookah in British Colonial Culture
Over the course of its Anglo-Indian career, the hookah began as an archetype of colonial hybridity in eighteenth-century Bengal, before entering nineteenth-century London and its consumer sensorium as a seductive Oriental artefact, through travelogues, hookah clubs, Indian-styled diwans and a massive cataloguing of Eastern artefacts culminating in the Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851) and the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886). Hookahs appeared…
The Gastromythology of English Tea Culture: On the UKTC's Advertisements and Making Tea a "Fact" of English Life
In Victorian England, tea culture became "a fact of life" as advertising appropriated the imperial commodity's surplus values, juxtaposing a semantics of English tea's authenticity with a semiotics of its surplus enjoyment. This article makes a larger observation on English tea culture, with one of its leitmotifs as the United Kingdom Tea Company's advertisements, which were published in leading periodicals such as The Illustrated London News, Th…
Lord Ram's Own Sethu: Adam's Bridge envisaged as an aquapelago
Taking the current geological, environmental and religious controversy around the iconic Adam's Bridge or Ram Sethu (as it is referred to in Hindu sacred mythography) and the proposed Sethusamudram canal project - which has been delayed since the late-20th century over several administrative terms, due to litigious procedures and protests by religious groups - this article examines the Ram Sethu as an aquapelago. The Ram Sethu is an aquapelagic z…
Jiddu Krishnamurti and the Problem of Conscience
Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) remains an enigma for philosophers, historians and lay audiences. Being chosen to be made “World Teacher” by the Theosophical Society (Adyar), Krishnamurti renounced his demi-godhood, in 1929, and went on to become a spiritual teacher. Krishnamurti’s vexed life has increasingly come under scrutiny, in the last three decades, owing to his perceived acts of immoral behavior. This correlates to the growing culture of p…
The “decline” of London’s curry houses invented tradition, authenticity, gastromythology
Curry houses are among Britain's most prominent historical, cultural, and gastronomic links with Asia. Recent developments in the context of Britain's "declining" curry culture suggest that the industry's challenges cannot be explained through watertight analyses of immigration controls, the allegedly latent racism of British society, its aggravation by the Brexit discourse, shrinkage of South Asian talent and the turn towards healthy and green c…
Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of Lucid Dreaming: The Place of Oneirogenesis in the Science of Deduction
This article examines a much-underrated aspect in the Holmesian canon: dreams and the potential for dream-rehearsals by virtue of the brain’s “dream drugstore” faculty. Frequently described as “dreamy-eyed” or the “dreamer” of Baker Street, Holmes possesses powers of visiting scenes of crime “in spirit,” exhibiting powers of oneirogenesis. This unorthodox criminological strategy marks him as a critic of Western rationality, placing him in a genea…
Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of Theosophy: Spiritual Underpinnings of the Science of Deduction
Sherlock Holmes is often oversimplified as a secular modern professional, with a remorselessly scientific outlook. This hypothesis overlooks late-nineteenth-century English society’s pursuit of new social possibilities for spiritualism, following challenges from Darwinist biological determinism to orthodox biblical mythology and morality. If we see Holmes in a default empirical scientism affiliated to imperial ideologies, we will remain blind to …
Mythologizing late Victorian tea advertising: The case of the Illustrated London News (1890–1900)
Late-Victorian popular culture discourses around tea advertisements by companies like Lipton's Mazawattee, and United Kingdom Tea Company constitute an essential archive of Victorianism's ideological moorings. Following a revolution in Victorian tea retail, in the 1890s, tea advertisements became complex aesthetic performances of mythologizing and reconditioning the semiotics of Englishness rather than simply marketing tea for consumption. The vi…
Pothum Janakummah Ragaviah’s “Fairy-land”: A “Hindoo Lady of Madras” in Victorian London
Ram Setu and Delusions of Archaeological Grandeur: The Politics of Obscuring a Sacred Geology
This article discusses the Indian film Ram Setu (2022) against the backdrop of 21st century public discourses, geological debates, legal proceedings and the general surge of politics revolving around the eponymous tombolo - Ram Setu/Adam's Bridge (understood by geologists as a stretch of 103 patchy reefs or shallow shoals connecting India's Rameswaram Island with Sri Lanka's Mannar Island). It is important to question the locus standi of not only…
G.F. Kellner and the making of an imperial state apparatus in the Indian railways
This paper attempts to chalk an account of the rise and decline of G.F. Kellner & Co., a hospitality and merchandizing firm affiliated to the Indian railways, to primarily demonstrate how its culinary provisioning contingently took on the role of an imperial state apparatus. Drawing on archival sources, the paper argues that Kellner’s created imperial mobile spacetimes to reinforce colonial hierarchies of taste, authenticity, provenance, civility…
Latour Against “Freeze- Framing”: A Sacred Indian “Monument” in the Anthropocene
This paper attempts to reconsider a previously studied bulk of archival material and contemporary cultural debates, around— what is considered by a multitude of Indians as— a symbolic “monument,” in the light of some of Bruno Latour’s influential writings and concepts. Latour’s spirit looms large in inspiring us (even in his physical absence) to redefine the secular in terms of the freedom to historicize the geological as a key to disrupting the …
The 19th Century Colonial Archetype of the Indian Crocodile: The aquapelagic roots of Rudyard Kipling's 'Muggers
This article studies the archetype of the Indian crocodile (also called by the British as 'mugger,' derived from the Hindi word magarmachh, meaning aquatic monster') in late-19th century colonial anthropological and zoological accounts. These constitute a vital archive of imperial views of environmental others, especially within Indian lacustrine contexts. I attempt to explore the historicity of the crocodile-archetype-that Rudyard Kipling, for i…
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · History (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (8 works) · Archaeology (7 works) · Colonialism (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Art history (6 works)