CHS organises a lecture by Dr. Baishakh Chakrabarti

Centre for Historical Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University,

CHS Seminar Series

Dr. Baishakh Chakrabarti,
Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi

will be delivering a lecture on

‘Bringing Down the House: Historical Shifts in the 'Spaces' and 'Figures' of Gambling’

On 6th March 2024, at 3 PM
in Room No. 326, CHS, SSS-III
 

Abstract: This lecture will trace the production of the ‘common gaming house’ as a legislative, police, and judicial category in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India and British Burma. There was never a blanket ban on gambling as a practice. Instead, legislation like the Public Gaming Act of 1867 and all subsequent anti-gambling acts criminalized certain places in which gambling was conducted. Accordingly, the talk will interrogate why nineteenth-century provincial governments and their officials chose to criminalize a space rather than the practice of gambling itself using the power of legislative language to define with precision what constituted a gaming house—its elements, its nature, and its function. Such legislative efforts, however, were consistently thwarted by the creative practices of gamblers and the proprietors of gaming houses, which resulted in a shift in governmental policy by the early twentieth century, especially when spot betting on commodities like cotton and jute was being popularized as games of chance. So, as the practices of gambling and commodity speculation began resembling one another, the onus of regulation and control on illegal gaming came from discriminatory executive action rather than statutory law.

 
Dr. Baishakh Chakrabarti is a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi.  After having received his M.A. and M.Phil. degrees from the Center for Historical Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Dr. Chakrabarti completed his Ph.D. at the South Asia Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania in 2022. His dissertation titled ‘Bringing Down the House: Gambling, Speculation and the Making of the Small Investor in Colonial India—1867-1943’ explores both the legal and social history of gambling in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India, with a particular focus on its organization by business communities like the Marwaris and Gujaratis. Dr. Baishakh Chakrabarti’s research interests cover political economy and histories of finance capitalism, colonial law, agrarian studies, governmentality, and empire and state making.