Animesh Chatterjee
Contact
chatterjee@pg.tu-...
Work
S4|23 11
Dolivostr.15
64293
Darmstadt
Animesh Chatterjee is a historian of colonial Calcutta, researching the multiple and multifaceted political and cultural meanings of electric supply and electrical technologies – lighting, fans and meters – as they were introduced into Calcutta from the West (mainly Britain and USA) in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
As a postdoctoral researcher at Technische Universität Darmstadt in the European Research Council-funded project “Global History of Material Culture and Technology, 1850-2000,” he will prepare his book manuscript, tentatively titled “The Global and Social Lives of Electricity in Colonial Calcutta, c.1875-1945”. The book studies from different textual, cultural and political angles the interpretations of electricity that historical actors in colonial Calcutta produced through their engagements with the material of politics — British colonialism, Anglo-Indian and Bengali middle-class gentlemanly or bhadralok identities, and nationalist and class politics — and the politics of material — oil and gas lamps, punkahs, electric lighting and fans, and electric meters. When reflecting on the history of electricity in colonial Calcutta, the book points to the necessity of paying attention to both the small, everyday examples of material culture, and the global connections that transcend traditional cultural, political and national boundaries. Chatterjee’s research brings into conversation strands from diverse disciplines, approaches and geographies in exploring how the production and consumption of electric supply and technologies, and the social and cultural engagements with and responses to energy transitions were fostered at the intersections of various transnational and regional trajectories.
Chatterjee received his PhD in History from the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies at Leeds Trinity University in July 2020.
In addition, Animesh is also working on developing a new research project in environmental and climate history. The project, titled “Weathering Colonial Calcutta”, presents a history of the social construction of the weather by examining “weather” both as a noun and a transitive verb. In this sense, the research offers critical insights into the historically contingent nature of scientific and literary knowledge of the weather, and the braiding of daily lives and “weathering” practices.