War, Migration and Alienation in Colonial Calcutta: the Remaking of Muzaffar Ahmad (original) (raw)
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Refugee Watch, 2020
So much of this write up concentrates on the 19th and early 20th centuries, the second half of the 20th century being marked primarily by partition refugees from the present Bangladesh. The 21st century is also the time when that lover of Calcutta, P. T Nair went back to Kerala—having once followed in the footsteps of Madhavan, the hero of O. Chandumenon’s Indulekha, the first novel in Malayalam, who travelled to Calcutta in the 1880s in search of a job and witnessed a man entering a tiger’s cage at Alipore Zoological Gardens. Calcutta architecture bears testimony to all the different migrations that it has housed and assimilated—the mansions on Central Avenue and Vivekananda Road housing both the central courtyard native to indigenous buildings, Corinthian cornices, louvre windows and the Marwari jaffrey—the Calcutta baroque. The Islamicate architecture of the mini Lucknow that the last nawab of the kingdom of Oudh, Wajid Ali shah created in Garden Reach is slowly being eroded by forces of history and of politics. A note on the migrant city therefore cannot bypass the current political clime that seeks to define who is a citizen—bringing to the fore once again the claims to the space of the nation state and the ones who are refused citizenship.
Since the 1970s, the Greek term ‘diaspora’ was increasingly being used to denote almost every people living far away from their ancestral or former homeland. In his seminal article ‘Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas’, John Armstrong applied the term straight-forwardly “to any ethnic collectivity which lacks a territorial base within a given polity.”1Martin Baumann says, “The definition places emphasis on the enduring, often glorifying identification of a group of people with a cultural-religious point of reference outside the current country of living.”2It is C.D. Verma who clearly states in his The Exile-Hero and the Reintegrating Vision in IndianEnglish Fiction, that “The central characters in these (diasporic) novels experience interaction between two socio-cultural environments, at times resulting in disillusionment both ‘here’ and ‘abroad’. A human consequence of such an experience is the heightened awareness of the central character.”3This “heightened awareness” in turn gives rise to the so-called ‘victim tradition’, as Robin Cohen puts it—“All scholars of diaspora recognize that the victim tradition is at the heart of any definition of the concept.”
Partition Literature: An Open Praxis. School of Humanities, NSOU, 2016
Immediately after the Partition of Bengal (1947), the uprooted people from the other side of Eastern border built up " Jabardakhal Colonies ". A cluster of such colonies sprang up in & around Kolkata without any Government help. Within a short span they became currish in front of the indigenous people as well as the then ruling party. This vulnerable situation forced them to build their own associations, political identity, & ultimately formed a bigger anti Government movement. The traditional method of writing history of these events, comprising diaspora, settlement & conflict, written by the writers like Hironmoy Bandopadhyay, Prafulla Kumar Chakraborty, Anil Singha, Tushar Singha & others may be marked as a meta narrative of the refugee history of West Bengal. During our present investigation among the colonies of Kolkata & suburb, some facts came into surface that not only go against the aforesaid meta narrative, but as local narrative which seek to challenge & sometimes reject the meta narrative totally. Issues like division, discontinuity, rupture, diversification, internal conflicts etc. during the course of refugee movement & colony establishment bring, as a signal, the so called theory of unilinear progress under a cloud. Historical facts, their origin & genesis have similarly faced an identical problem. All these have called for rewriting a new history of refugee colonies of Kolkata & suburb.
Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of "White Town" in Colonial Calcutta
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2000
Scholars assume colonial Calcutta was a dual city split into "black" and "white" towns. The critical aspect of colonial Calcutta, however, did not lie in such divisions, but in the blurring of boundaries between the two. The rhetorical categories of "white" and "black" towns were used to sustain the British desire to maintain difference in a city in which everyday life compromised such distinctions. The central argument of this essay rests on an analysis of a clearly distinguishable "pattern" of nineteenth-century colonial buildings that borrowed from indigenous as well as foreign sources. It is only by juxtaposing the spatial analysis with written and pictorial documentation that we can understand how these spaces operated in everyday practice. The attempt is to bridge the gap between rhetoric and practice, and to suggest that the spatial structure of Calcutta, from the building scale to the city scale, spoke of the hybrid condition...
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....
Community and Neighbourhood in a Colonial City: Calcutta’s Para, South Asia Research, 38 (1), 2018
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.