Wounds of Empire: Psychic Trauma, Anglo-Indian Writing, and Colonial India

In this lecture, Dr. Gaura Narayan will identify the ways British encounters with Indians and India formed a complex wound that the British expressed in narrative prior to administrative and territorial control. She will discuss an incident called the Black Hole of Calcutta incident. The Black-Hole of Calcutta incident involved the incarceration of 146 English people during the night of the 20th of June 1756 in Calcutta by Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal. Twenty-three people survived and told tales. The events of the night of the 20th of June 1756 are unconfirmed in sources other than the survivor narratives. These narratives, however, assumed historic centrality as they provided evidence of Indian malevolence, and a putative point of origin in the history of British territorial imperialism. She will also discuss Romanticism’s complicity in the discourse of empire, arguing that the survivor narratives emerging from the Black-Hole preemptively mobilized several affective tropes of Romanticism such as melancholia and sincerity in responding to an event that threatened the status quo of British power in India.