History Of Calcutta

SUMMARY: This article attempts to delineate and plot the contours of the intercultural contributions of Gerasim Lebedev in a linguistic-cultural domain totally alien to him, in early-colonial Calcutta. It also seeks to contextualise the intense polysemy between 'microcosmic' personal and literary journeys and the 'cosmopolitan' acculturation that came with Lebedev's socio-cultural background and travels. Though, as will be seen in the essay, Lebedev's path-breaking maverick effort was largely a shot in the dark, his achievement is seen, in almost the entire theatrical fraternity in West Bengal and Bangladesh, in terms that can be described as larger than life. The essay will seek to understand the extent to which Lebedev's personal and professional choices reflected deep cross-cultural sympathies, thus making him an enthusiast with a difference.

In 1914, the German Foreign Office envisaged a plan to stir up the subject populations of Britain, France and Russia. Colonial Muslims had acritical place in this plan, as contemporary Orientalist thought made the Germans believe these Muslims could easily be encouraged to rebel by a call for Jihad. In particular, the German Foreign Office believed Indian Muslims to be a disgruntled section of a subject population. The German government launched a campaign to spread Jihadi propaganda to incite them into rebellion  against the British imperial governement. This research note contextualises the broader transnational network of the German 'programme for insurrection'. It also examines how it exploited the old Wahabi network for the purpose.

The year 1899 brought much grief to India, and especially to some of its big cities like Bombay (now Mumbai) and Calcutta (now Kolkata). That year, a major bubonic plague pandemic originating in Yunnan, China, reached the major cities of India and the plague devastated the Indian cities one after another. A fair extent of its outbreak as well as its horrific
consequences in Calcutta, where the plague broke out in March 1899, can be reconstructed through a careful survey of the letters, speeches, manifestos and other literature by and on two individuals who were closely associated with the relief work during the plague outbreak: Swami Vivekananda and his Irish disciple Margaret Elizabeth Nobel, who came to be known as Bhaginī Niveditā or Sister Nivedita. This is exactly what the present work proposes to do: it will attempt to construct a coherent narrative of the experience of the epidemic through a close reading of the first-hand accounts of the plague relief work and the sociocultural conditions of the city and the country at large at the time of the outbreak. The accounts of that difficult period, left by both these towering personalities in their passionate and vivid correspondences, as well as the literature produced by their contemporaries and the scholars of the subsequent decades, will be subjected to a rigorous survey following the comparative methodology. This will bring out the different perspectives on the experience of the plague outbreak and the resulting
narrative will serve as a mirror of sorts for the current generations who have been experiencing the outbreak of COVID-19 for the better part of the last one year. Such a reconstruction of specific generations of a people’s experience of an epidemic outbreak helps subsequent generations to reflect on the social, cultural, and psychological dimensions of the same; and that in turn may open newer pathways of understanding the present pandemic-related challenge before humanity and the ways of coping with it.

Keywords: epidemic, pandemic, plague, culture, Swami Vivekananda, Sister Nivedita, COVID-19, comparative methodology, Calcutta, India

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.

In this article I show how certain schemes of infrastructural development of a space often do not produce the desired effect, but instead they set in motion a whole range of activities that brings forth many other issues. Through the study of the building of the New Fort William and the project of construction of a dockyard in Calcutta in the second half of the eighteenth century, I focus on some of the key issues that shed light on the urban settlement in the post-Plassey period. The building of the New Fort William and the dockyard were important projects that shaped the space of the town. But the projects themselves did not have the intended effect on the settlement—the fort took a long time to get completed and the dockyard could not be built in the first attempt. The halted and aborted efforts did leave a mark on the space of the town, brought in new forms of labour regulations and put forth questions of proprietary rights of individual and the Company. These projects also shed light on the relationship between the Company settlement and the rest of the province.

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....

The proliferation of print in mid nineteenth century Bengal witnessed several self-reflexive exercises in writing that tried to capture the incongruence between the colonial administration and indigenous everyday lives. Hutom Pyanchar Naksha (or The Observant Owl) written by Kaliprasanna Sinha (1862) is possibly the closest representation in print of such incongruities. This article focuses on the text of Hutom in relation to visual representations and reports by the colonial administration in contemporary English newspapers like The Hindoo Patriot, The Bengal Harkaru and others. In doing so, it will highlight the sensory world of colonial Calcutta that is so vividly captured in Hutom.

Up to the present day Suhrawardy remains a controversial figure in both parts of Bengal, with Hindus often seeing him as their fierce persecutor and Bangladeshi Muslims hailing him as their country's forefather and preacher of communal unity. This article analyses his actions during the period of his Prime Ministership (1946-1947) looking for the sources of the above dichotomy. It argues that although Suhrawardy displayed a mild communal bias at times, circumstances made him inconsistent, being as he was trapped between right wing of Muslim League, the Hindu masses unwilling to trust him and (until the end of 1946) Congress ambitions to inherit the whole Raj. The need to act quickly due to Viceroy Mountbatten's haste, as well as the PM's lack of social skills were other factors contributing to failure of his last initiative-United Bengal Scheme-despite his genuine efforts towards Hindu-Muslim settlement and agrarian reforms.

The field of travel writing studies is of a recent emergence which must be understood in the context of globalization and the rise of postcolonial studies. Therefore, in India, it has tended to focus largely on ‘West-East’ encounters and the politics of representing the colonized in colonial ‘Imperial Eyes’ or the other way round. It is yet to engage extensively with the significance of travel writing in non-English modern Indian languages like Marathi about other regions on the subcontinent. This essay discusses the depiction of Calcutta in the travel writings of C. V. Joshi, Pu.La Deshpande and Neelima Bhave .These three texts dealing with Kolkata written at three different moments in history, though all of them written before Calcutta became Kolkata, help us to map the changing image of Kolkata in Marathi travel writings. All the three writers come from the elite upper-caste, middle class location, a location that is commensurable with the ‘bhadralok’ of Bengal, but also different in significant ways due to historical and cultural processes. A critical reading of the representation of Kolkata in the three travel writing texts in Marathi, written at three different moments of history, not only reveals the cultural history of Kolkata but also discloses the cultural history of Marathi. While such reading complicates the conventional ‘East-West’ comparisons that inform the understanding of modernity as well as travel writing studies in India, they also divulge the subnational identitarian politics that colour the representation of the self and the other within the larger nationalist imaginings. Such depictions are also inflected by the ideologies of caste, class, and gender.

This analysis also reveals the construction of the Bangla cosmopolis through translations and other mediations like Bengali cinema and music. Travel writings of Pu. La Deshpande and Neelima Bhave also reveal the construction of Bangla cosmopolis through nostalgia and memory which is in tension with violent and often disagreeable social and political realities of contemporary Bengali society

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.

An illustrated sketch of what we know of the maritime life of William Etienne Jackson (1836-1885), master mariner, captain of George Garrett's experimental submarine Resurgam (1879-80), one-time employee of the National Steam Navigation Company, master of ships based in Singapore and Calcutta, and first mate of the government of Sarawak steamer Rainbow, bought for the first Rajah, Sir James Brooke. Jackson is said to have run away to sea at 12, and his eastern adventures include playing an active part in the notorious 'Battle of Mukah' (1862) against Iranun slave raiders, losing his barque Osprey in the Sulu Sea (1863), and transporting Hajj pilgrims from Singapore to Mecca (in the mid-1860s). Captain Jackson drowned off the coast of Spain when he was only 48, leaving a son of 7 and a widow pregnant with their daughter. His descendants inherited all but a few anecdotes to remember him with, but enough to begin to reconstruct the extraordinary life that is outlined here.

One of the less emphasised aspects of a widely-studied phenomenon like the so-called—for right and wrong reasons—'Bengal Renaissance' is that of the intercultural gastronomic spectrum it opened up. The Bengali-speaking elites and subalterns, in their own ways, delighted in being considered 'khādya-rasik'-s (gourmets, connoisseurs of the 'rasa'-s implicit in food, bordering on gluttony) and capable of hybridising 'bileti' (<vilāyati=foreign, European) dishes to suit their epicurean and/or eclectic tastes. This meant that the mid-nineteenth-century English workers' staple 'fish and chips', itself a hybrid fashioned from the original 'pescados fritos' by the Iberian Marrano-s as early as the sixteenth century and first made into a commercial success, in 1860, by “Joseph Malin, a Jewish immigrant newly arrived from Eastern Europe,” became the 'fish-fry' that is one of Bengal's favourite heavy snacks. This paper looks at the ways in which mid- and late-colonial Bengali society practised culinary hybridisation, the products of which were cherished by the hybrid-figure of the Bengali detective, and the extent to which the modern Bengali palate is a composite, even cosmopolitan one.

Since the early years of India’s emergence into a ‘post-colony’, the
possibilities of the popular in Bengali cinema had to be renegotiated
within the complex registers offered by a severely decimated cultural
economy of the region. It could be claimed that by early 1950s, Bengali
cinema’s negotiation of a linguistic and spatial equivalent of ‘disputed’
and ‘lost’ nation led to it trying to constantly spatialize Calcutta, offering
several possibilities to reinterpret the metropolar visuality in and of the
postcolonial city. Calcutta provided Bengali cinema a habitation, a metaphor of modernity and a spatial equivalent of a nation. A substantive share of Bengali cinema’s spatial turn was within the formal configurations of melodrama, the talisman of which was the star figure of Uttam Kumar. Kumar’s effortless urbanity stood vanguard to the popular modern of postcolonial Bengali cinema, while his films also provided a sustained critique of the same. This article interrogates popular cinema from the vantage of the visualized space of the city. Drawing from space theory, melodrama and star studies, it interrogates the nature of the Bengali metropolitan-popular and would hope to provide a new understanding of cinema’s aesthetic institutionalization and narrative function within the scope of melodrama and stardom.

On 8th August 1969, I was thrilled as I entered the portals of modern India's oldest college and the fountainhead of the great Indian awakening, Presidency College, Calcutta. A bright red flag fluttered atop the college from the pole that had hitherto hosted the national flag. Handwritten posters and slogans in bold black ink were plastered all over the walls, proclaiming the arrival of the Indian revolution. There were also large stencil portraits of Chairman Mao on the college walls, though the most overwhelming one was in the canteen. And scrawled in unmistakable thick black letters, both inside the college and outside, were definitive slogans, like "China's Chairman is our Chairman" and "When Order Stands for Injustice, Disorder is the Beginning of Justice".

When the Jewish population of Calcutta realized that the missionaries were trying to convert their children into Christianity, the elders decided to build a Jewish Boys' School and a Jewish Girls' School in the city in 1881; which would provide free education for the Jewish children.

Since there are only 17 Jews left in Calcutta in the present day, the Jewish Girls' School, located in Park Street of Calcutta is mostly comprised of Muslim students; a relationship that is only possible in Kolkata.

History unravels in one of Calcutta's oldest schools and tells the story of an erstwhile community through 138 years.

This article focuses on the bazaars of Calcutta in the late eighteenth century to bring out the tussle between the Company and the landowners over issues of land and customary collection. The debate regarding the bazaar reveals the concerns of the Company about rent and tax. Who had the right to tax, the individual proprietor of the land or the state? What were the limits of landowners' rights? These questions, I suggest, were linked to deeper debates over the meaning of terms and definition of categories. In this article, I explore how Company officials sought to understand the notion of the 'bazaar'. My discussion will develop through a focus on a particular dispute between two landowners in Calcutta where the Company had to intervene. Together, the long discussions in the Council, the examination of the sites, testimonies by the witnesses and the arguments put forward by the proprietors themselves—created a maze of documents, from which the Company tried to glean out the 'bazaar'.

This is from an article written for the British Library's Asia and Africa collections blog: http://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2017/07/a-unique-judaeo-urdu-manuscript-or-13287.html

The British Library’s sole Judaeo-Urdu manuscript is a copy in Hebrew script of the well-known Urdu theatrical work, the Indar Sabha, written by Agha Sayyid Hasan ‘Amanat,’ a poet at the court of Vajid Ali Shah of Awadh. Our manuscript bears a colophon dating its creation to 1887, perhaps by a member of the Baghdadi Jewish community of India. Originating in the Arabic-speaking regions of the Ottoman Empire, the Baghdadi Jewish community settled in India from the late 18th into the 19th-century and was primarily centred in two major urban centres of India, Calcutta and Bombay.

In the early nineteenth century, Calcutta earned the fame of being the “Book Capital of Asia”. Books printed in Calcutta found their way to other colonies in South Asia and to the Far East. The doyens of Bengal Renaissance were all prolific writers who penned path breaking literature, essays and textbooks. This is a timeline on how printing technology took forward the education mission in Calcutta.

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.

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.

Review of Calcutta Yoga by Jerome Armstrong in the Religion of South Asia Journal.

https://doi.org/10.1558/rosa.19253

Review
Calcutta Yoga: Buddha Bose and the Yoga Family of Bishnu Ghosh and Yoga-nanda, by Jerome Armstrong. New Alexandria, VA: Webstrong LLC Publish-ing, 2018. vii + 652 pp., £52 (pb). ISBN 978-0-69211-671-5 (pb)

Religions of South Asia 13.1 (2019) 116–118
https://doi.org/10.1558/rosa.19253
issn (online) 1751-2697
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2021, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX.

This article looks at the recent scholarship on urban property in colonial India. Histories of cities of British India have
been dominated by issues of racial segregation, discourse
of planning, ways of social control as well as negotiation
and resistance of the indigenous population in fashioning
the urban space. The new scholarship brings in economic
considerations of the state and the private actors squarely
to the foreground to argue that land and property was at
the heart of urban governance. Putting forward a materialist interpretation of the production of colonial urban
space, these histories provide a lens to view the complex
and complicated processes through which land turned into
commodity. The article discusses three major issues relating
to urban property regime as have been argued variously in
these writings: first, it looks at the very constitution of the
meaning of property and rights to property; second, it studies the various meanings of ‘value’ of a land; and lastly, it
considers the question of workings of the property market
in relation to housing and rent. The readings suggest that
specific political, socio-economic, and ecological context of
each city shaped much of the deliberations and responses
to the emergence and consolidation of a property regime.

This book examines the politics behind, and the socio-economic and ecological repercussions of, the making of a new township, variously called New Town, Megacity or Jyoti Basu Nagar, in Rajarhat near Kolkata. Conceived by the West Bengal state government in the mid-1990s, in pandering to the vision of urban planners of creating a hi-tech town beyond an unruly, crowded Kolkata, and feeding the hunger of realtors and developers, the city is built on the foundations of coercive, even violent, land acquisition, state largesse and corruption — and at the cost of erasing a self-sufficient subsistence economy and despoiling a fragile environment. Yet, after its completion and departure of construction labour, the new town appears as a necropolis, a ghost city, that belies its promised image of an urban utopia, even as the displaced locals lead a precarious, mobile existence as ‘transit labour’, engaged in odd and informal jobs.　　

Written on the basis of intensive fieldwork, government documents, court records, and chronicles of public protests, this book broadly analyses the politics and economics of urbanisation in the age of post-colonial capitalism, particularly the paradoxical combination of neoliberal and primitive modes of capital accumulation upon which the global emergence of ‘new towns’ is based.

Departing from the dominant styles of urban studies that focus on cultural or spatial analysis of cities, the authors show the links between changes in space, technology, political economy, class composition, and forms of urban politics which give concrete shape to a city. It will immensely interest those in sociology, political science, economics, development studies, urban studies, policy and governance studies, and history.

This article examines the significance of colonial cemeteries and explains why they are sites of neglect and decay in contemporary India. By examining the ideological and affective meanings of a colonial funerary landscape like the Park Street cemetery in Calcutta, it shows how monuments of colonial memories have transformed into signs of temporal ruptures, which disturbs the dichotomy between the colonial and the post-colonial. It argues that the discard and abandonment of colonial cemeteries in the postcolonial landscape stems from the ambivalent meaning that such a heritage site generates. Using three pairs of conceptual constructs – Kristeva's genotext and phenotext; Freud's melancholy and mourning; and tropological metaphor and metonymy – I demonstrate that this ambivalence is located in an intersection between the funerary monument as a cultural product of a colonial ideology, and as a memorial artifact of personal bereavement.

Historians have tended to assume that the boundaries of Calcutta were generally agreed upon before 1794, and that their formalization in that year marked a natural stage in the evolution of the town. The documents published here tell a different story. They show that the southeastern boundary was the subject of heated disputes among British and Indian officials and landholders. They reveal how these disputes gave rise to the demarcation of Calcutta. Finally, they contribute to a larger argument that the 'second city' of Britain's empire took shape from contests over the meaning, use, and ownership of space.

An outpouring of books on the Sundarbans delta and other Bengal waterways immerses us in a new ecological analytic. An amazing liquid world churns at the end of long river systems, the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Meghna and Hooghly. These rivers are sourced in the Himalaya, venerable mountains created when the shifting mass of the Indian subcontinent crashed into the Eurasian tectonic plate, throwing up land that reaches the sky. Snow on the mountains thaws into rivers—more than ever now with climate change—running across rich alluvial plains, depositing ever more silt and producing, on meeting the Bengal Basin, the largest delta area of forest and shifting islands in the world. That the Sundarbans and the rivers themselves confront imminent environmental and ecological catastrophe is a story told in each of the three books under review with a fluent yet turbulent style, wholly appropriate for tempestuous times.

Introduction to volume 17 of Cracow Indological Studies (2015), titled "Crossing over 'on the Birds' Wings': South Asian Literature in Local and Global Contexts".
The current volume is the result of joint efforts of an international team of 14 authors—from Poland, India, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Finland and Latvia who have contributed to the research on the multicultural nature of South Asian, in particular Indian literature. Although the papers invited for this volume followed only very general thematic suggestions from the editors, the outcome reveals notable convergence of topics and approaches in many contributions. All the participants stress the fundamental openness of Indian culture and its ability to find inspirations from most incredible sources. The articles brought together in this volume provide a detailed and deep con/textual analysis of particular cases from literary and cultural history—migration of stories, manuscripts, books, and authors, exchanges of themes and techniques, various adaptations and re-creations of both Indian and foreign texts.