Disobedient Students, Dubious Guardians A History of Hostels in Colonial Calcutta

<strong>Centre for Historical Studies School of Social Sciences</strong> a Lecture <strong>Disobedient Students, Dubious Guardians A History of Hostels in Colonial Calcutta</strong> <strong>Bodhisattva Kar</strong> Department of Historical Studies University of Cape Town, South Africa <strong>6th April 2016</strong> In the last few months, student hostels on several educational campuses in India have not only experienced coordinated police action but also drawn a great deal of flak from different quarters for being "dens" of sedition, sexual licentiousness and reckless lifestyle. On one level, through a small history of hostels in colonial Calcutta, this seminar offers a provisional genealogy of such cultures and techniques of discipline and moral censure. On another level, however, it also points at the remarkable (though largely unexamined) analytical fecundity of this specific site to reconsider a question that many scholars have found fundamental to colonial modernity: 'how to live together'. Readapting this Barthesian question for a very different historical assemblage, this seminar charts out some of the ways in which the hostels provide an interesting entry point to the complex and connected histories of changing logics of governance, rhythms of urbanization, architectural idioms, rites of sociality, affective codes and styles of organized politics. Bodhisattva Kar is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. An alumnus of Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, Kar has previously taught and held fellowships at Amsterdam, Berlin, Calcutta, Mexico City, Oxford, and Paris. His research interests, primarily grounded in the northeastern frontier of British India, include histories of development and disciplines; primitivism; connected and comparative histories of frontiers; joint–stock companies; and global governmentality. He has co-edited, with Partha Chatterjee and Tapati Guha-Thakurta, New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014).