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| 1 |
ID:
177944
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| Summary/Abstract |
This afterword reflects on the intellectual life of Chanchalkumar Chattopadhyaya who died at the age of 89 in 2004. Mr Chattopadhyaya, who lived in a small flat in north Calcutta, taught himself Greek, Latin and French, and it was the learning of the Italian language which introduced him to his life's great love, Dante. His other great love was western classical music. Mr Chattopadhyaya, who I refer to in this text as Chanchalbabu, represents a lost sensibility which was once integral to the culture and history of Calcutta. Despite being scoffed at, he, along with the other marginal characters in this anthology who are navigating, moulding and defying mainstream aesthetic narratives in Calcutta, remained committed to the passionate pursuit of knowledges which drew upon the best of European culture.
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| 2 |
ID:
183177
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This article focuses on the Sealdah railway station in Calcutta, West Bengal, as a site of refugee ‘settlement’ in the aftermath of British India’s partition. From 1946 to the late 1960s, the platforms of Sealdah remained crowded with Bengali Hindu refugees from East Pakistan. Some refugees stayed a few days, but many stayed for months, even years. Relying on newspaper reports, autobiographical accounts and official archives, this article elaborates how a busy railway station uniquely shaped the experiences of partition refugees. Despite severe infrastructural limitations, the railway platforms of Sealdah provided these refugee residents with certain opportunities. Many preferred to stay at Sealdah instead of moving to any government facility. However, even for the most long-term residents of Sealdah, it remained a temporary home, from where they were either shifted to government camps or themselves found accommodation in and around Calcutta. The article argues that by allowing the refugees to squat on a busy railway platform for months and years, the state recognised a unique right of these refugees, their right to wait, involving at least some agency in the process of resettling.
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| 3 |
ID:
075667
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2006.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the impact of the anti-Bolshevik surveillance network created by the colonial state on the urban political milieu of Calcutta during the late 1910s and the early 1920s. The first socialists in Calcutta (1921-24), predominantly Muslims, emerged from the ranks of urban intellectuals and political activists. The article argues that the state's insistence on labelling various social and political segments, including early socialists, as political tools of Moscow demonstrated its inability to grasp the local responses to an international current. It is shown that despite enforcement of various strategies, which tried to anticipate and prevent the spread of socialism, the colonial state failed to counter the emergence of the left in the city.
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| 4 |
ID:
169994
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In the industrial sector of Kolkata’s Salt Lake township, the spires, shikaras and domes of religious sites that are interspersed throughout the city proper are absent, and high-rise glass and metal buildings housing multinational corporations, hotels and shopping malls take their place. But religion is not absent there. Instead, management professors and business leaders transform those buildings into temples by framing the labour that takes place within them as a sacrificial act of worship. With this case study, I demonstrate that Hindu theologies are actively shaping and being reshaped by neo-liberal capitalism and its urban topologies.
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| 5 |
ID:
133739
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Chinese community has been settled in India for more than two centuries. Its relationship to the host society and to the authorities, first British and then Indian, has gone through different stages with different forms. It is important to examine the lives, traditions and attitudes of the Chinese community to understand its development and its changing character. This study argues that it is misleading to present this community as one that has always been marginalised and discriminated against in India. It examines the applicability of concepts such as 'sojourning', 'corridors' and 'middleman minority' to the community and its different sub-groups, both in British India and in post-independence India.
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| 6 |
ID:
188403
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The mid twentieth-century Bengali ghost story has a distinct urban form. From haunting Gothic mansions, ominous bungalows and thickets of trees, the ghosts of mid twentieth-century fiction show up in the streets of Calcutta, on motorised omnibuses, in urban movie theatres and even selling cocaine in the docks of the city. In this paper, I explore why Bengali ghost stories in the twentieth century predominantly choose the city as a motif to situate their hauntings. I analyse two spectral texts from the mid twentieth century, ‘Kankal Sarathi (The Skeleton Chauffeur)’ by Hemendra Kumar Ray (1888–1963) and ‘Andhakre (In Darkness)’ by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay (1899–1970), and juxtapose them alongside the official urban archive. Significant changes took place in Calcutta’s urban planning at the turn of the twentieth century. Committed to ‘improving’ the city, planners sought large-scale demolitions of existing buildings, which resulted in massive displacement of individuals and communities. Historians have recorded the deep disquiet these changes induced in the city’s inhabitants. What I demonstrate are the ways in which ghost stories responded to these infrastructural alterities. Spectral narratives emerged as a new literary strategy through which the city’s new journey towards infrastructural modernity was critiqued. The larger methodological question I wish to explore is whether it is possible to treat the genre of horror as an extended archive of historical inquiry.
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| 7 |
ID:
157485
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This article on the history of neighbourhoods (para) of colonial Calcutta considers the processes through which this peculiar spatial unit emerged in the colonial city, where community identities were fostered as well as contested. Seen as a place, a secured, stable location which helped in forming the community in an alien atmosphere, the para was a liminal space, neither a purely affective unit nor an administrative category, and neither a purely public or private domain. Borrowing liberally from each register to generate a unique spatial experience, paras were at the same time deeply exclusionary and also starkly patriarchal zones. The article brings forth these various strands in the history of the neighbourhood to enrich the understanding of colonial urbanism, Bengali society and culture.
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| 8 |
ID:
157124
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| Publication |
New Delhi, Life Span Publishers and Distributors, 2015.
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| Description |
v, 284p.hbk
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| Standard Number |
9789381709832
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Copies: C:1/I:0,R:0,Q:0
Circulation
| Accession# | Call# | Current Location | Status | Policy | Location |
| 059286 | 954.0353/BLU 059286 | Main | On Shelf | General | |
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| 9 |
ID:
129014
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| 10 |
ID:
121980
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The paper discusses the effective operation of money and credit among Europeans in Calcutta around 1800, arguing for the importance of informal processes and ties of friendship that facilitated, regulated, and enforced agreements, helping both to tide over individuals in times of economic stress and to underwrite the provision and transfer of capital. The argument is advanced by a detailed case-study of debts owed by one resident-Aaron Upjohn-to another, the diarist, Richard Blechynden, amid a web of acquaintance, officialdom, and law that variously ensured that the debts were honoured. It is defined as a support system among acquaintances, necessitated in part by shortage of money and abundance of risk.
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| 11 |
ID:
121979
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Although the misreading of Hyderabad's early nineteenth century banking firm, Palmer and Company, as scandalous, illegal, and usurious in its business practices was contested at the time in Hyderabad, and at the highest levels of the East India Company in both Calcutta and London, such conspiracy theories have prevailed and are here challenged. The Eurasian William Palmer and his partner, the Gujarati banker, Benkati Das, are best understood as indigenous sahukars or bankers. Their firm functioned like other Indian banking firms and was in competition with them in the early nineteenth century as Hyderabad State dealt with the increasing power of the British East India Company and its man-on-the-spot, the Resident. Historians need to look beyond the English language East India Company records to contextualize this important banking firm more accurately.
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| 12 |
ID:
162470
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the late 1970s, a photo-documentation project titled ‘People of Calcutta’ aimed at bringing about positive social change through imaging the everyday lives of ordinary Calcuttans. These photographs responded to a post-colonial situation and created a ‘counter-narrative’ of the agency of the urban poor. Weaving together photographs and their intellectual history, this paper charts the ways in which this visual documentation invested deeply in human development while providing a ‘positive image’ of the urban poor.
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| 13 |
ID:
025049
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| Publication |
Bombay, Oxford University Press, 1989.
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| Description |
ix, 408p.Hbk
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| Standard Number |
195623517
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Copies: C:1/I:0,R:0,Q:0
Circulation
| Accession# | Call# | Current Location | Status | Policy | Location |
| 030856 | 923.154/GOP 030856 | Main | On Shelf | General | |
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| 14 |
ID:
179988
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| Summary/Abstract |
The closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decade of the twentieth century were marked by an unprecedented rise in the practice of spiritual exercises in domestic séances amongst the cultural elites in Calcutta. This paper demonstrates how the sacrosanct character of these circles of grief came under suspicion when the supposedly ‘psychic’ component of spiritual matters became tainted by eroticised interactions with the dead. In this context, the afterlife was poised to become a site for the expression of female sexuality, normally repressed by a fragile politics of domineering enlightened male intellectualism.
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| 15 |
ID:
184362
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| 16 |
ID:
102315
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