IISER MOHALI

Abstract: Colonial history is often looked at from a mononational perspective, say in relation to England alone in the case of South Asia, but as I have argued elsewhere, colonialism has actually been rather multinational and 'polycolonial', involving multiple colonial players simultaneously. This talk will discuss what I call 'polycoloniality', with reference to early modern Bengal, to reassess the somewhat inadequate mononational 'postcolonial commonsense'.