Memoirs of Roads

Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization
Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-946810-2
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 192 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 142 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 340 g

In seventeenth-century India, the fates of three little hamlets were forever changed when East India Company officials chose them to be developed into a city suitable for their settlement. Thus was born Calcutta.

In Memoirs of Roads, Banerjee journeys through time and narrates the story of three of the arterial roads of British India's first capital. And through their story, he presents an engrossing history of the development of this remarkable urban landscape, which became a melting pot of Indo-European lifestyle and architecture.

He imagines the city as an extended joint family, where the matriarch, Bagbazar Street, watches over the future generations of lanes and by-lanes. Theatre Road is imagined as a midwife, helping to birth the hybrid cultural milieu that characterizes the city. Rashbehari Avenue's rise to prominence is likened to a middle-class Bengali housewife's tentative steps into the limelight of modern society.

The author focuses on this family of roads as a site of protests, living spaces, and locations of 'high' and 'low' cultures. Using official archives and popular perceptions, Banerjee scrutinizes the imprints that technology, settlement patterns, transportation, and demography have left on this city.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Banerjee, Sumanta

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Kolonialismus, Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Humangeographie Historische Geographie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Historische Geographie, Landkarten & Atlanten

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- List of Maps viii

- Acknowledgements ix

- Introduction 1

- 1: Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City: Calcutta and Its Roads 18

- 2: A Tale of Three Towns: Black, White, and South 37

- 3: Bagbazar Street: The Grandmother 81

- 4: Theatre Road: The Midwife 114

- 5: Rashbehari Avenue: The Bengali Middle-Class Homemaker 134

- Conclusion: Towards a Future Megalopolis 155

- Select Bibliography 165

- Index 169

- About the Author 176

Über Autor(innen)

Sumanta Banerjee is a historian, journalist, and cultural theorist. He worked with the Statesman in Calcutta and New Delhi from 1962 till 1973, and was later a fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. His previous publications include The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989), Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal (1998), and The Wicked City: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta (2009).