The Hospitality of Ghosts: Remembering Epidemics in Modern Bengal, c. 1880–1980

Abstract

Memory studies have long demonstrated the need to critically assess the way societies remember significant, and particularly traumatic, events. The overwhelming focus of these studies has been on conquests, political riots, wars and holocausts. Very little account has been taken of the way epidemics are remembered. Yet, epidemics produce similar social disruptions and anxieties about the future as the varied episodes of political violence. Societies need to grapple with loss of life, grief, insecurity and their own reproduction through the stabilization of mnemonic frames. One of the most potent forms of social memory is engendered in ghost lore. In this article, I track one set of such ghost stories circulating in Bengal in the wake of the ravages of cholera and malaria in the late nineteenth century. By tracking the reframing of these stories, I show how the meanings and values conveyed through them changed over nearly a century. I argue that since the very basis and structure of the social collective invoked and reflected in these stories changed in the period, it is better to think of the collectives as multiple spectral communities sharing the same historical trauma rather than a single, unchanging society. Finally, I urge historians to rethink when epidemics end by paying greater attention to their long mnemonic and social afterlives that continue to unfold long after the cessation of the biological events.