The Sacred and the Public: Forging a Devotional Collective in Late Nineteenth-Century Calcutta

This paper will examine the role of a civil society organization and its deployment of the “press and the platform” in organizing a religious event in the urban space of Calcutta in 1899—a time when political gatherings were outlawed by the colonial state. It will argue that in the absence of a language of political liberalism, nationalist communities are often forged by deploying the conceptual vocabulary of a sacred collective. Such a collective need not be an outright political one, espousing clearly-articulated political goals. In fact, it may adopt an entirely religious character, and yet be fully modern and nationalist in its potential. The event under consideration is the birth anniversary celebration of an immensely popular Bengali devotional mystic, Chaitanya (1486-1532), which was organized by the Gauranga Samaj (lit. ‘Society of the Fair One’; Gauranga or ‘the Fair One’ was the preferred Bengali name for Chaitanya). This paper will explore the creation of an affective community that purportedly emerged out of the celebrations. How was this affective community represented in contemporaneous publications, such as journals and newspapers? What was the role played by civil society organizations in forging such a community? Can this collective be understood as being simultaneously devotional and national? The paper seeks to address some of the above questions with the aim of investigating anew the relationship between religion and the colonial public sphere.