Exploring the Non-Human and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Writings Colonial Idols in British Curation and Culture

SECTION I: Idol-Objects in Sites of Display: Encountering, Exhibiting, Entertaining

Chapter 1: “[A] spangled bit of cloth/Cast round an ugly doll”: Idol-Objects, Histories of Perception, Networks of Display

Chapter 2: Victoria and Albert Idol-Collections: Foreign Acquisitions and Debates of Transposed Value

Chapter 3: “Gods were looking down upon us from various shelves”: Aura, Attachment, Affect, and the Idols of the LMS Museum

SECTION II: Idols in Fiction of Unease: Fear, Friction, Fascination

Chapter 4: “The Gods of the Heathen are Stone and Brass”: A Prefatory Note

Chapter 5: The Idol-Machine of Late-Victorian Literature: The Angry Goddess and Foreign Automatons in Richard Marsh and F. Anstey

Chapter 6: “The plaything of . . . a tribe of fetish-worshipping savages”: ‘Freak’ Mysteries, Disabled Deities, and Imperialist Cupidity in Richard Marsh and H. Rider Haggard

Biography

Shuhita Bhattacharjee is Associate Professor of English literature and Gender/Sexuality Studies in the Department of Liberal Arts and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Design at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. She earned her PhD from the University of Iowa, and her research on nineteenth-century literature, critical cultural representations of gender/sexuality, and the South Asian diaspora has appeared in a range of journals and edited collections. Her first monograph (Postsecular Theory, 2023) examines the (post-)colonial construction of the 'religious-secular' binary, with particular attention to nineteenth-century writing. Bhattacharjee recently spearheaded the formation of the Nineteenth-Century Diversities Research Network (NCDRN), South Asia chapter, and is the founder-coordinator of IIT Hyderabad’s Centre for Public Humanities, through which she works on implementing inclusive sex education and eliminating gender-based violence. 

Bhattacharjee's book connects an impressive range of sources—museum catalogues and periodical advertisements to fiction and art—examining idol-objects and their unexpected appearances in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Bhattacharjee shows how idol-objects complicated and disrupted cultural hierarchies, moving across boundaries/categories with varying levels of agency and power.

~Carolyn Oulton, Professor of Victorian Literature, Co-Director, International Centre for Victorian Women Writers, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK


Bhattacharjee's exhaustively researched volume is a masterful study of British responses to Hindu art and offers a wealth of new resources and original insights. No one invested in museum history, Indian material culture, transimperial literature, or the psychology of cross-cultural exchange can ignore this uniquely informative work.

~Florence Boos, Professor Emerita, University of Iowa, USA

This book is a veritable treasure trove of “idol objects” which bring social, economic, political, and cultural histories alive in myriad ways. If anyone doubts that material culture is positively charismatic, they have only to dig into the rich, unsettling archive Bhattacharjee makes available here.  Her investigation of the texts and spaces animated by a wide range of hybrid artifacts illustrates how the British imperial project gave rise to a dominion of things: a magical, monstrous universe with the power to enthrall and bedevil in metropole and colony alike.

 ~Antoinette Burton, Professor of History and Swanlund Endowed Chair, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Class of 2025; Department of History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign