The Critical Age: Modern Periodization and Moral Revaluation in Colonial Bengal

My dissertation investigates how a prescriptive discourse on norms lost currency in the early nineteenth century colonial Kolkata, and how a new generation of Bengali intellectuals turned – via European "moral and mental philosophy"– to theories of the moral sense to argue that a different order of norms was necessary. It tracks how the localization of moral authority in the individual, reasoning Self became a key proposition in Bengali public discourse, and explores how reformers relayed this proposition across a growing network of government-backed schools. This was consequential in inspiring a province-wide movement of "social reform" that sought to amend customs deemed unreasonable and immoral. By way of conclusion, it tracks the ways in which the reformist advocacy for a wholesale reform of society lost traction in the late nineteenth century as a generation of "neo-romantic" critics began to argue that the adoption of new, morally reasonable rules by Indians was merely imitative, and began arguing that the true moral autonomy would only be realized through the progressive development of national character.