Calcutta in Urban History PDF Download

Author: Pradip Sinha
Publisher: Calcutta : Firma KLM
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Author: Soumyendra Nath Mukherjee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Calcutta (India)
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Social morphology of Calcutta in the nineteenth century. Some essays published previously.

Author: Partho Datta
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788189487904
Category : City planning
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
In 1820, an unusual letter was published in the Bengali newspaper Samachar Darpan. It was a plaintive appeal from the rats of the city of Calcutta saying they were being unfairly displaced from their ancient dwellings. Calcutta was indeed going through momentous changes - new roads and neighborhoods were being planned, channels for draining were being dug, new structures were coming up and existing buildings refurbished. These changes were not random. A new spatial order was coming into its own backed by the powerful ideology of town planning. Planning encompassed not only the regulation of physical spaces, but also the multiple concerns of health, policing, and commerce. Planning happened largely in the guise of 'improvement' and the intervention of the colonial government was important. Despite resistance and skepticism, and some reversals, the task of imposing a rational urban order on the city continued. The history of this colonial initiative can be traced through three sets of archival documents which have so far been sparingly used by historians of Calcutta. Lord Wellesley began the process with his prescriptive Minute on Calcutta in 1803, which led to the setting up of the Lottery Committee in 1817 - so called because funds for the city were raised through public lotteries. The investigation of the Fever Hospital Commission followed in the 1830s and, as the name suggests, the locations of epidemic fevers determined areas for urban restructuring. The Municipality, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, had to reckon with bustis which housed the labouring poor. But it was only after the plague epidemic in 1897 that an autonomous organization to plan the city came into being: the Calcutta Improvement Trust was set up in 1911.This book examines and assesses the continuity of colonial urban policy and its impact, particularly in terms of the social costs to the displaced population and its implications for understanding planning history generally.

Author: Swati Chattopadhyay
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415343596
Category : Calcutta (India)
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Exploring the politics of representation and the cultural changes that occurred in the city, this post colonial study addresses the questions of modernity and space that haunt our perception of Calcutta.

Author: Mark Mukherjee Campbell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429829213
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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This book explores how histories of migration, cultural encounter and transculturation have shaped formations of urban space, domestic architecture and cultural modernity in Kolkata from the early colonial period to the beginning of the era of India’s economic liberalization. It charts how these themes were manifest in what was an important ‘contact zone’ in the history of globalization and the modern city. Drawing on a wide range of resources and representations, from urban plans and architectural drawings to European travel journals and Bengali literature and cinema, the book investigates the history of Kolkata through an examination of key urban and architectural spaces across the colonial and postcolonial epochs. Through illustrated chapters, it sheds new light on questions of difference and segregation, cultural hybridity, migration, and entanglements of tradition and modernity in the city, analyzing spaces inhabited by a diverse range of cultures, including several neglected in previous studies. Architecture and Urbanism in a Contact Zone offers an instructive contribution to the fields of global architectural history and theory, urban studies and postcolonial cultural studies for scholars, researchers and students alike.

Author: Ranjit Sen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429638981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Long before Calcutta was ‘discovered’ by Job Charnock, it thrived by the Hugli since times immemorial. This book, and its companion Colonial Calcutta, is a biographical account of the when, the how and the what of a global city and its emergence under colonial rule in the 1800s. Ranjit Sen traces the story of how three clustered villages became the hub of the British Empire and a centre of colonial imagination. He examines the historical and geopolitical factors that were significant in securing its prominence, and its subsequent urbanization which was a colonial experience without an antecedent. Further, it sheds light on Calcutta’s early search for identity — how it superseded interior towns and flourished as the seat of power for its hinterland; developed its early institutions, while its municipal administration slowly burgeoned. A sharp analysis of the colonial enterprise, this volume lays bare the underbelly of the British Raj. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern history, South Asian history, urban studies, British Studies and area studies.

Author: E. P. Richards
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317616995
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 565

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By 1900 the British had undertaken various types of urban planning in their colonial territories, but the early twentieth century brought new ideas and the birth of the modern planning movement. In India these new planning ideas inspired several specialized reports after 1900, most of which drew explicitly on British, or occasionally German, ideas. The most complete of these studies was the Richards Report on Calcutta, prepared for the Calcutta Improvement Trust and published in 1914. Its major concerns included the building and widening of roads, slum clearance and improvement, legislation, and suburban planning. As background, it included written and visual documentation of living conditions, through charts, photographs, and maps. Richards emphasized that conditions in Calcutta differed greatly from those in urban Britain, and made some allowance in that regard. In general, however, his report exemplifies the attempt by British planners, along with Indian elites, to impose their vision on colonial cities. Richards’ report was well-received by leading British planners of the day. A notice in Garden Cities and Town Planning claimed that it was "the most complete report on town conditions and possibilities which has yet been issued". While the immediate impact of the report in Calcutta is moot - Richards was highly critical of the past practices of local officials, and his views were unpopular with his superiors - the Richards Reports remains a crucial insight into both the development of modern town planning and the colonial period in India.

Author: Deepali Barua
Publisher: Mittal Publications
ISBN: 9788170995388
Category : Cities and towns
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Urbanization of Dibrugarh, a town in Assam.

Author: Kushanava Choudhury
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 163557157X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Shortlisted for the 2018 Ondaatje Prize Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year A masterful and entirely fresh portrait of great hopes and dashed dreams in a mythical city from a major new literary voice. Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times. After graduating from Princeton, he moved back to the world which his immigrant parents had abandoned, to a city built between a river and a swamp, where the moisture-drenched air swarms with mosquitos after sundown. Once the capital of the British Raj, and then India's industrial and cultural hub, by 2001 Calcutta was clearly past its prime. Why, his relatives beseeched him, had he returned? Surely, he could have moved to Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore, where a new Golden Age of consumption was being born. Yet fifteen million people still lived in Calcutta. Working for the Statesman, its leading English newspaper, Kushanava Choudhury found the streets of his childhood unchanged by time. Shouting hawkers still overran the footpaths, fish-sellers squatted on bazaar floors; politics still meant barricades and bus burnings, while Communist ministers travelled in motorcades. Sifting through the chaos for the stories that never make the papers, Kushanava Choudhury paints a soulful, compelling portrait of the everyday lives that make Calcutta. Written with humanity, wit and insight, The Epic City is an unforgettable depiction of an era, and a city which is a world unto itself.

Author: Ananya Roy
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816639328
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Housing developments emerge amid the paddy fields on the fringes of Calcutta; overflowing trains carry peasant women to informal urban labor markets in a daily commute against hunger; land is settled and claimed in a complex choreography of squatting and evictions: such, Ananya Roy contends, are the distinctive spaces of a communism for the new millennium -- where, at a moment of liberalization, the hegemony of poverty is quietly reproduced. An ethnography of urban development in Calcutta, Roy's book explores the dynamics of class and gender in the persistence of poverty. City Requiem, Calcutta emphasizes how gender itself is spatialized, and how gender relations are negotiated within the geopolitics of modernity and through the everyday practices of territory. Thus Roy shows how urban developmentalism, in its populist guise, reproduces the relations of masculinist patronage, and, in its entrepreneurial guise, seeks to reclaim a bourgeois Calcutta, gentlemanly in its nostalgias. In doing so, her work expands the field of poverty studies by showing how a politics of poverty is also a poverty of knowledge, a construction and management of social and spatial categories.