Munisipal Darpan: imagining the embodied state and subaltern citizenship in 1890s Calcutta (original) (raw)
Related papers
Dialectical Anthropology, 2011
More than 35 years ago, Steven Lukes reminded us that power is never a simple and superficial thing. It is never enough to know or explain what happens in ''smoke filled rooms''; we need to also ask who was and was not there, and most importantly, how their various interests and preferences were shaped and expressed. This continued the tradition from Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, which sought to penetrate how knowledge itself and its construction could be used to control and exploit. Foucault went so far as to imply that power was knowledge and vice versa, while Bourdieu made the ''symbolic capital'' of the state the center of his analysis of political rule. In a beautiful encapsulation of these visions, James Scott demonstrated that the lenses through which the state ''saw'' the society around it (censuses, maps) shaped the definition of aspirations and the design of policies. How one sees determines what one does. Bandyopadhyay's article demonstrates the value of such insights and forces us to ask questions about how the liberal dreams of markets and democracy play out in the streets of the developing world. To the ''poverty tourist'' being shown the folkloric local color of the Calcutta streets, the social and political distinctions between the hawkers and dwellers she might encounter would be invisible. The gap between the observer and the two objects of her gaze is so great as to make the lived differences of those selling goods and those merely living on the streets apparently inconsequential. Both disappear in the morass of poverty and apparent powerlessness. The opening of any path open to political participation, any space left for self-realization and communal protection would seem progress. But democratic action comes in many guises, and democratic waves do not necessarily lift all ships. Bandyopadhyay shows us that even within powerlessness, there are hierarchies and strategies and that some subaltern groups
Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 2023
In the Post-Independence era, the prolific playwrights of India started using the aesthetic form of theater to contest authoritarian structures, and to voice their anti-establishment dissent. Utpal Dutt, a pioneering figure in Modern Indian Theater, used the medium of drama for propaganda and political conscientization of the oppressed. The indefatigable thespian contributed significantly towards the formation of modern Bengali theater, as his plays voiced his intransigent protest against the authoritarian government and concurrently, showed his impressive experimentation with different dramatic techniques, theatrical devices and theatrical genres. Dutt’s anti-establishment play, Nightmare City presents a fastidious account of the turbulent years of late-1960s and early-1970s Bengal gripped by Naxalite violence and police brutalism. Set against the backdrop of Naxalite insurgency, the play savagely exposes the ideological hypocrisy of the autocratic government leaders of the time and their violent hooliganism. However, the playwright, in sync with his earlier plays, has not only portrayed the tumultuous socio-political ambiance of the 70s Calcutta, but has also constructed a soul-shattering voice of resistance to the political oppressions perpetuated by the state apparatuses. The objective of this paper is to study the revolutionary propaganda of Dutt and redefine his concept of “political theater” with special reference to his intricately structured political satire, Nightmare City.
Journal of People's History and Culture, Volume 6 Number 2, 2020
'Pacification' of a colonized territory is usually seen through the perspective of coercion and police as the tool of that process but this article argues that even the issue of security, a matter of coercive social control can be a space of conciliatory state-society relationship. The 18 th and 19 th century Bengali natives similarly developed a space of state-society conversation centering on the issue of security. This article argues that the Bengali educated elites addressed the issue of security through petition, newspaper articles and satirical literature but as the space of political expression was limited by colonial nature, the target of these political attacks were native policemen who were socially and culturally backward compared to the educated natives. As these native policemen were racially and socially stereotyped as inefficient in both official and native narratives, they remained as voiceless mimics.
When the Indian subcontinent was colonized, a complex process of labeling and conferring of identities was initiated by the colonial powers to control and to make sense of the huge mass of complexity facing them, where appearances, languages, and cultural traits seemed diverse and kaleidoscopic in nature. Yet contemporary ethnographic efforts to come into direct contact with such entities more often than not ends up in the realization that most of the so-called boundaries are ephemeral and often dissolve into nothingness, and people seem to have been moving, sharing, marrying, and absorbing each other and evolving identities that seem more dynamic than static and more situational than primordial. In anthropology, creation of boundaries had been reinforced by theoretical perspectives that were both engendered by and nurtured in corroboration of the colonial rule.
International Journal of Urban Sciences, 2015
It is a commonplace in Indian history that the decision to move the colonial capital from Calcutta to New Delhi was spurred by the political landscape of Calcutta: anticolonial nationalism had made Calcutta ungovernable. What is rarely asked is exactly what aspect of the urban attributes and political landscape of the city prompted this reaction? What made it difficult or impossible to carve out a twentieth-century imperial diagram in Calcutta? Based on readings of the nationalist and terrorist movements launched in Calcutta (and Bengal) during the first two decades of the twentieth century, I argue that what was at stake was the spatial legibility of the state. If New Delhi produced a clear description of the imperial state, making it visually explicit, Calcutta defied this legibility of the state. Anticolonial nationalism fundamentally altered the political geography of Calcutta as the capital city of empire: the colonial archives tell a story of a spatially beleaguered state. The story describes the process through which city space, even those that display the most authoritative diagram of power, is appropriated and disarticulated to produce a new political field.
Space of Deprivation :The 19th Century Bengali Kerani in the Bhadrolok Milieu of Calcutta
Asian Journal of Social Science, 2017
A much neglected section of the 19th Century imperial bhadrolok population during British rule in India was the Bengali clerk or the kerani. While his English education and caste identity likened him to the middle-class gentleman, his pattern of work, low salary, lack of opportunities for improvement, pushed him closer to the labour class. But was this neglected section of the “bhadrolok” always without his representational space? In this paper, I shall study examples from clerks’ memoirs and from contemporary literature and read them alongside the violently repressive The Clerk’s Manual published in 1889, to see if the clerk was secretly discovering a heterotopia of his own.
Contemporary South Asia, 2020
This article explores the irreverent and supposedly irrational actions of two protagonists, Prahlad and Shanta, characters that the authors encountered during the course of their extended fieldwork in Kolkata. Prahlad is an Oriya migrant plumber who passionately seeks god at the cost of making money, and resists adhering to rational economic behaviour in the city. Shanta is a grieving mother who relentlessly seeks justice for her son’s disappearance during a revolutionary movement that consumed the majority of urban youth in the 1970s. Family, friends, neighbours and employers describe and at time dismiss rgen as pagla or insane. This article foregrounds these expressions of paglami or madness in Kolkata. We ask: how does close ethnographic attention to quotidian madness – its articulations, exploitations and resistances – enable us to rethink urban lives? We argue that dissension, alienation and ‘unreasonable fixations’ are affective thresholds of a changing city. They corroborate the ways in which the city’s transforming political landscape impinges on its ordinary lives.