Calcutta \ Kolkata

Who would have thought that a common sea snail would one day be worth its weight in human lives? Found in abundance in shallow tide pools in the Indo-Pacific region, the ‘Cypraea’ type of sea snail, or the ‘cowrie’ (kaudi), was the engine that drove the slave trade in Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta) and in Bengal.

The killing of George Floyd had sparked a furore worldwide about identifying the long and tangled history of slavery and the symbols it has left behind. Kolkata, as well Bengal, and India too, have their scars, obscure though they may be.

Read on my article....

This is a brief article written for a non-academic webzine. It provides an overview of the colonial police officer Priyanath Mukhopadhyay's literary output, considering the strategies and techniques adopted by him to render his first-hand experience of crime investigation into the literary codes of the detective narrative. This article will be of interest to researchers working in the fields of criminology and police history, detective and crime fiction, urban studies and governmentalities.  The article pays attention to his representation of Kolkata and his negotiation of the colonial apparatus.

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.

As Calcutta approaches its tricentury (1990), and urbanologists and forecasters  quarrel  over its future, nostalgia rules the day  for  a dedicated band of historians, researchers and simple Calcutta-lovers. Anthologies, histories, sketches and hitherto unknown facets of the city's chequered past are churned out with persistent regularity. The latest book on old Calcutta is mainly a reproduction of the writings of two famous 19th century British commentators who lived and worked in this city, and is profusely annotated and edited by an Indian expert....

Government College of Arts and Crafts is the oldest Art-Institute in India and had played a vital part in many modern art movements in South Asia. Sadly, this century old art-institute recently completed its sesquicentennial anniversary without the attention it deserved – the reason lays with its current decline. The present text will attempt an intimate discussion on the current degradation of this great art-institute and also endeavor to find some possible solutions.

Jenny Gupta is an Individual Kolkata escorts girl who is passionate about her modeling. She is an interested in travel, fashion show and sports. View More : http://jennygupta.com Jenny Gupta Call and Whatsapp: +91-9830414129
http://www.ishikarajput.com
http://www.ishikarajput.com/gallery
http://www.aninditaroy.com
http://www.prernasharma.com
http://www.topqualityescorts.net
http://www.jaisvirajput.com
http://www.aishagupta.com
http://www.snehabasu.com
http://www.escortskolkatacallgirls.com
http://www.ayeshamansur.com
http://www.siyanishabazz.com
http://www.cityofescorts.com
http://www.hotwomenescorts.com
http://www.juicyescorts.org
http://www.escortsinla.com
http://www.allgirlescorts.com
http://www.bijouescorts.com
http://www.jennygupta.blogspot.com
http://www.kolkatarajput.blogspot.com

The figure of the socially-engaged detective who transcends his – a high- ly gendered agency operates here – generically-sanctioned roles as a glorified intellec- tual mercenary or “gumshoe”, solver of conundrums and “tangled skeins”, champion of the rule-of-law and keeper of the last resort, while attempting to uphold a universe of moral and ethical values that, simultaneously, do not stray too far from the high road of societal and political acceptability, is a figure to conjure within the literary history of Bengal in the twentieth century. In the present essay, the attempt will be made to study, through a comparativist’s prism, this gravitas, endowed by society, which is associated with the image of the successful private investigator in Bengal; often, his is a voice striking a blow for the spirit of rational enquiry, as with Feluda, and, in other cases, he upholds the dignity of the traditional order/s, while exposing its/their soft under- belly of moral corruption and criminal collusion, as with Byomkesh Bakshi.

This paper considers the importance of examples from India in the text of Marx’s Capital. In tracking Marx’s preoccupations, it is possible to show the relevance, especially for today, of his critique in a global frame, as political economy pivots and returns to its sources. Along the way, countering misreading and mistranslation, it becomes possible to see why studies of the agrarian, trading route and subaltern histories of capital in relation to the subcontinent, as well as of market spaces and early commercial exchange in Asia, are crucial for rethinking Marxist approaches to urbanism today. Targeting the archetypal corporate entity of his time, and its ideological supporters, the themes of tribute, exoticism, animals and the slave trade restore a reading practice that owes as much to Marx’s biography as to any one Marxist mode of analysis. The idea of a postcolonial, vegetarian or saffron Marx is not on the cards—since Asia is not simply a place to which Marx goes—but a more careful and at
the same time experimental reading can perhaps restore enthusiasm for the critique of political economy and provide ways of teaching old texts that remain relevant, and by remaining relevant, indicate what is to be done.

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.

When preparatory works for publishing last volume of Rabindra Bharati Patrika hundred-fiftieth birth anniversary yearof Jagadish Chandra Bose just ended, hundred-fiftieth birth anniversary year of Rabindra Nath Thakur & Prafulla Chandra Roy started. Also it was hundredth year of Einstein’s professorship. Now birth centenary ofSubrahmanyan Chandrasekhar is going on. As a tribute to luminaries an article entitled ‘Kabir Satya, Bijnanir Satya’ (Truth of Poet, Truth of Scientist) was published in last volume of Rabindra Bharati Patrika. This article, written by same author,  is a tribute to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Indian born Scientist; who invented ‘Chandrasekhar’s Limit’ for which he has been awarded Nobel Prize.

Next to agriculture, the economic condition of the largest number of people in Bengal depended on cottage industries. Yet this important branch of the economy remained neglected for a long time with the result that many cottage industries decayed and many more were in a moribund condition. The Bengal Home Industries Association, founded in 1917 by Lady Carmichael, aimed at the revival and regeneration of cottage industries of the Presidency. This article tends to explore the organization of production, marketing of products, and other activities of the Bengal Home Industries Association during 1917 to 1940.

December, 1921. The Calcutta race course. Backers and bookmakers were screaming themselves hoarse as the thundering phalanx of horses drew closer to the post. The steward discreetly observed the Prince of Wales mopping his regal brow, as frenzied punters broke into hysterics. ‘Galway Gate’ streaked past the winning post — nose, neck, hood, head and all length.

A little later, the beaming owner led his mount in and made a slight bow before the grandstand. With confident steps, he strode up to the smiling prince, while the crowd cheered lustily. Shaking hands with the KingEmperor's son, he received the coveted Prince of Wales Cup from the Royal Heir himself and held it high for the adulating race goers to see. Turning around, he casually informed His Royal Highness that he was making over the entire stake money to him — for charity!

The following is the introduction to my recently published book The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kālīghāṭ and Kolkata (Oxford University Press, 2018).  This book is about what temples do for Hindus in the modern era, particularly those who belong to India’s diverse and evolving middle classes. While many excoriate these sites as emblematic of all that is backward about Hinduism and India, many others work to modernize them so that they might become emblems of a proud heritage and of the nation’s future. I take Kālīghāṭ Temple, a powerful pilgrimage site dedicated to the dark goddess Kālī, in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) as a case study in the phenomenon by which middle-class Hindus work to modernize temples. At the height of the colonial era in the 1890s, they wrote books and articles attaching this temple to both rationalist and spiritual forms of Hinduism. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, they filed and adjudicated lawsuits to secularize and democratize its management structure. Today, in the wake of India’s economic liberalization, they work to gentrify Kālīghāṭ’s physical spaces. The conceptual, institutional, and physical forms of this religious site are thus facets through which middle-class Hindus produce and publicize their modernity, as well as their cities’ and their nation’s. The use of Kālīghāṭ as a means to modernization is by no means uncontested. The temple plays a very different role in the lives and livelihoods of individuals from across the class spectrum. The future of this and other temples across India thus relies on complex negotiations between actors of multiple class backgrounds who read their various needs onto these sites.

PK Roy was a protege and lifelong friend of Satyendra Nath Bose. He did his PhD in particle physics under Abdus Salam, the future Nobel laureate, at Imperial College in London from 1957 to 2959. He was also a brilliant Marxist, but one who followed the Trotskyist rather than the dominant Stalinist line. He was slowly and painfully handicapped by a degenerative disease and died at age 50 from the effects of the misguided cure. This article traces his work in physics against the broader background of the university, the city, and the Bengali culture he so loved. This article originated as a short contribution to "CU Physics 100," a book of retrospective essays that Calcutta University published in early 2016 to mark the 100th anniversary of physics at the university.

The article engages with the question of an exclusivity, an 'otherness' of the Bengali culture, in the available representative modes of Indian cinema. It studies the socio-cultural dynamics through which this 'otherness' can be found reorienting itself in recent years in a globalized perspective. It takes two contemporary films, Kahaani (Hindi, 2012) and Bhooter Bhobishyot (Bengali, 2012) to dwell upon. The analysis aims to historicise the construction of a cultural stereotype called 'Bengali-ness' in Indian cinema by marking some significant aspects in the course of its historical development. Using the films as cases in point, the article attempts to develop a framework in which the changing landscape of the city of Kolkata, shifting codes of the cultural habits of the middle class and reconfigured ideas about a 'Bengali nation' can be seen operating to develop a refashioned relationship between the state of Bengal and the rest of the country. It suggests that the global cultural inflow, along with the localized notions of the new, globalized Bengali-ness, are engaged in developing a new politics of representation for the city and the Bengali society in the cinemas of India.

Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) cannot escape its imperial legacy. In 1990, the city celebrated its 300th birthday on the anniversary of Job Charnock’s creation of the factory for the East India Company. Domes and columns of British architecture dominate the city’s centre. The most well-kept among them is a memorial to Queen Victoria, who reigned when India first became the jewel in the imperial crown with Calcutta as its capital. Along with Chennai and Bombay, the imperial and then colonial project set the terms upon which this city would function and define itself. Yet there is another narrative of Kolkata that hearkens to a different past - an indigenous Hindu past that centres around Kalighat, a temple and pilgrimage site located on the southern side of the city. Through writing history, circulating rumours and engaging in urban renewal projects centred on this religious site, prominent Kolkata citizens point to an urban legacy that reaches far beyond the British city. The chapter argues that Kolkata’s imperial past encourages the creation of a counter-legacy and that religious forms like Kalighat are ripe to be taken up in such creations. Thus, religion is not only something that takes place in the urban environment or that refuses to disappear in the postcolonial city, but something that can be levied to work against its raison d’étre.

This layered personal memoir will be published online on Dr. Jael Silliman's site "Recalling Jewish Calcutta". A version with all multimedia content integrated with the text can be found here: https://sharongubbayhelfer.wixsite.com/sanantonio2020/post/between-shadow-and-light

In this article I examine informal street vending in Istanbul and Calcutta in comparative perspective, drawing on field research, secondary sources, and a close reading of Orhan Pamuk's novel A Strangeness in my Mind.
In many cities in the West, large-scale street vending was seen to be unclean, disorderly and undesirable within a modern city. These perceptions of city space made it to many other cities in the Global South, where to be clean and modern was to get rid of the matter-out-of-place that street vending represented. At a time when these cities are aligning themselves with the greater privatization of space, crackdowns on street vendors have increased. Yet, in the West, after many years of the removal paradigm, street life in many avatars, from the local market to the food truck, is now being revitalized and celebrated. So in the cities of the Global South one ends up with piecemeal and uneven adoption of contradictory impulses – removal and celebration – all at the same time, yet both often shaped and targeted by paradigm shifts in Western planning and ideas of the city and urban space. I argue for alternate imaginaries of cities which do not contain a desire to excise street life in favor of mall-ification. In this, perhaps cities in the Global South can begin to dialogue with and consider each other. The orientation and imaginary should not always be towards Western cities, but rather towards other urbanities with some shared, and some divergent experiences.

Public–private partnership (PPP) is the most prominent urban housing policy that has emerged in the last decade in India. Housing reforms in Kolkata, under the flagship of PPP has taken the city into a different league after decades of ineffective housing policy. This paper investigates the dynamics of PPP policy in Kolkata, where public housing agencies have assumed both facilitator and regulator roles within a socialist institutional setting to achieve a balance between market forces and the needs of the low-income people. At the performance level, the joint sector brings together the efficiency in production and technical and marketing expertise of the private sector with the accountability and righteousness of the public sector. However, and despite some reform attempts, at the operational level, major bottlenecks are identified including antiquated legislation, besides high municipal taxes, stamp duties and sanction fees. Housing production under the PPP model to date is impressive in terms of costs and quality, but minuscule in terms of numbers. It is still early to comment on the likely long-term success of such partnerships. However, given the huge housing stock deficiency, high proportion of low-income groups in the city and slow pace of regulatory reforms, it is argued that future success is contingent upon the inclusion of low-income communities, which comprise half of the population of Kolkata.

In early April 2008, a wooden idol of Lord Viṣṇu was unearthed from a pond at Goda of Bardhaman in West Bengal, and was primarily shifted to the local Police Station. The sculpture, presumably made of Śāla-timber, is assignable to c. tenth-twelfth century AD. It shows the lord on his mount Garuḍa in Bhogāsana. Such an iconography is not very common in Bengal, as most of the Viṣṇu-images here have been depicted in Sthānaka-form. Only a few abrupt exceptions are in view at Asutosh Museum of Indian Art (Kolkata), Bangladesh National Museum (Dhaka) and Varendra Research Museum (Rajshahi). But, in terms of material and scale, the one from Goda differs widely from this group...

When ​ Cafe Dissensus asked us to edit a special issue on the Beats and the Hungryalists, we were very unsure about the kind of response we might receive. But, during the next few months, we received a stream of submissions and solicited works from writers, photographers, poets, artists, Beatniks, Hungry generation enthusiasts and academic researchers alike. It was indeed an enriching experience to go through the pieces, to learn about the new areas that have remained unexplored, to acquaint ourselves with some critical questions that require attention within the scope of the Beat and the Hungryalist literature, and to trace the mutual connections and differences between the two schools, their triumphs and follies. For this special issue on the Beat and the Hungry Generation, in his superb essay, " Spring and Oblivion " , Indran Amirthanayagam revisits Allen Ginsberg's ​ Howl and Other Poems ​ through his personal memory of the poet (who was close friends with his father), their interactions, the copy of the book gifted to his father by Allen and Ginsberg's readings that Indran had attended. Poet and Beat researcher, Marc Olmsted's essay investigates Ginsberg's source and commitment towards Tibetan Buddhism and tries to find how he balanced it with his political views/socialism. While Marc Goldin (writer and Beat researcher) traces Burroughs and his pals, their days of haze and hallucinations all the way up to Tangier – its magic and influence on their writing, Uttaran Das Gupta's " Performing the hobo in Jack Kerouac's On the Road​ " questions if Kerouac was indeed a hobo and investigates if playing the hobo itself was an art of some sort,

This paper explores the tensions and resonances between academic and non-academic approaches to scholarly knowledge through fieldwork conducted at an NGO that promotes the rights of lesbian, bisexual, and female-to-male transgender people in Eastern India. I analyse both productive and frustrated exchanges between activists and academics from the activists' point of view and make the following two arguments: Firstly, I argue that interpretations, developments, and uses of knowledge instigated by non-academics must be taken seriously by academics even when they are in tension with the dominant academic understanding of that knowledge. Secondly, and expanding upon this argument, I go on to suggest that academics should consciously seek to write in a style and tone that does not assume extensive shared specialist knowledge, in order to open up fertile scholarly ideas more fully for engagement with those outside academia or within different disciplines and sub-specialisms of scholarship.

Raj Kamal Jha has so far produced two novels: The Blue Bedspread (1999) and If You are Afraid of Heights (2003) from Picador, England. The paper is an attempt to evaluate his second novel If You are Afraid of Heights from thematic and stylistic perspectives. It also examines how it echoes from the first novel and how it departs from it.

Dans cet article, l’auteur s’interroge sur les conditions de possibilité d’une sociologie de la globalisation du rock, dans la mesure où les musiques populaires sont le plus souvent envisagées comme des systèmes symboliques fortement localisés. Le terrain de la musique populaire occidentale, sous la forme du rock, à Calcutta a fourni l’opportunité de saisir la circulation de cette forme culturelle à partir d’un lieu que l’imaginaire contemporain associe à la misère et exclut a priori du grand mouvement de la globalisation. Or, Calcutta résonne encore des échos du be-bop ou du rock psychédélique du Grateful Dead. Qui plus est, la ville montre une belle créativité en matière de rock depuis le début des années 1990, que ce soit dans ses formes les plus typiquement américaine ou britannique, mais aussi dans des innovations stylistiques proprement bengalies, comme la jibonmukhi music ou le Bangla Rock. Seul un décentrement ethnographique par rapport aux flux issus des industries culturelles multinationales permet ainsi de saisir les modalités de l’appropriation locale des formes culturelles globales en circulation.

ABSTRACT This article takes a deep look into the heart and soul of Mother Teresa of Calcutta and sheds light on her mystical communion with God. It discusses the Saint's impressive private vow of 1942, her momentous inspiration or 'call within a call' of 1946, and her long and painful experience of interior darkness.

I simply cannot recall when I first met Sunil Gangopadhyay, because like many others of my generation, we inherited him as part of our intellectual and rebellious legacy. Krittibas Goshti was not a literary movement to us : it was a way of life, to those who could not understand how to live with ‘slow’ and 'sleepy' Rabindra Sangeet and with listless, archaic poetry or even (in the age of revolution) with feudal Khayal, Thumri, Tappa or Dadra. Sandipan, Shakti Chattopadyay, Sunil Gango, Sankho Ghosh and Tarapada Ray……their outbursts, their angst, their literary outpourings and their Bohemian life-style were more relevant and more realistic. How many outrageous and exaggerated tales hasn’t one heard of them, especially about Shakti da?