Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.19
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0641-0652This paper examines the interrelation between the performative spectacle of hatha yogic samādhi in colonial India and its resonances within twentieth-century Bengali crime fiction. The survival of the hatha yogi Haridas after more than six weeks of interment in 1837 attracted widespread attention in England, with echoes discernible even in Stoker’s Dracula. Colonial attempts to rationalise the spectacle led to its equation with human hibernation, a speculative and scientifically tenuous explanation. Curiously, this quasi-scientific interpretation of samādhi was later appropriated in twentieth-century Bengali crime fiction, where it served as a narrative device. Through close reading of selected texts, this paper reveals how ascetic practice, scientific discourse, and literary imagination converged through processes of cultural translation. The works examined are by the popular authors Panchkari Dey and Hemendra Kumar Roy. This study also illuminates the entangled history of colonial episteme and Bengali literary modernity.
Chakraborty, Ayusman. “Samādhi, Human Hibernation, and Bengali Crime Fiction: The Strange Trajectory of an Ascetic Practice.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 312-42, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.19.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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