Dr Sugata Nandi

Visiting Research Fellow

Dr Sugata Nandi (West Bengal State University, Kolkata)

Visiting Research Fellow, September - December 2018

Dr Sugata Nandi is Assistant Professor of History at the West Bengal State University, Kolkata, researching the history of globalisation of Indian magic from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. His research explores how the West orientalised India by appropriating aspects of its religion, culture and forms of entertainment as magic, and how this in turn generated tensions within Orientalism itself.

Project: Indian Magic and Popular Culture in Britain, c.1840 - 1914

While at IASH, Dr Nandi researched how magicians and spiritualists in Britain invented the concept of 'Indian Magic', examining both the invention and subsequent debunking of Indian Magic as a cultural phenomenon by gentleman magicians, and spiritualists’ interpretation of Indian rituals as supernatural. He analysed printed material pertaining to 'Indian Magic' of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, photographs of performance of magic, and posters of magicians advertising 'Indian Magic' as part of their shows, arguing that 'Indian Magic' was a power/knowledge which was carefully employed to construct India as Orient, both exotic and aberrant in the modern world.