The South Asian Studies Council presents
Thomas Newbold, Assistant Professor of History, BRAC University in Dhaka:
“Good People and New Times: Historical Break and the Transformation of the Moral Question in Eastern Bengal.”
In 1871, Rajeshwar Gupta, a school principal in Chittagong, announced in a pamphlet that a ‘time of great darkness’ was ending and a new age lit by knowledge and reason was at hand. Rajesh’s claim was not singular: across towns throughout East Bengal, members of a new class of ‘Bhadralok’ – a nineteenth century Bengali neologism compounding the terms for ‘good’ and ‘person’ – had begun contesting previously cherished and yet increasingly morally dubious customs, demanding that they be ‘arraigned at the bar of reason’. It was not only those seeking change who diagnosed the dawn of the new age: the reformers’ adversaries similarly acknowledged that a new willingness to question once-revered practices had engendered a generalized sense of epochal rupture. The past and the present could no longer coincide. In ‘Good People and New Times’ I seek to account for the provincial spread and actualization of the argument that made the morally reasonable individual the pre-eminent source of good norms, even in far off Chittagong - and to understand the purchase of propositions tying the rise of a new kind of ‘good person’ with a break between past and present.
Thomas Newbold’s 2022 dissertation ‘The Critical Age: Modern Periodization and Moral Revaluation in Colonial Bengal’ investigates how a prescriptive discourse on norms lost currency in early nineteenth century Bengal and how, simultaneously, the localization of moral authority in the individual, reasoning Self became a key proposition in public discourse. He has published on the literary history of modern Bangladesh and of colonial Bengal.