Calcutta in Urban History
Author: Pradip Sinha
Publisher: Calcutta : Firma KLM
Published: 1978
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13:
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Planning the City
Author: Partho Datta
Publisher:
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 9788189487904
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 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.
Representing Calcutta
Author: Swati Chattopadhyay
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 9780415343596
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExploring 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.
Urban History of India
Author: Deepali Barua
Publisher: Mittal Publications
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9788170995388
DOWNLOAD EBOOKUrbanization of Dibrugarh, a town in Assam.
Architecture and Urbanism in a Contact Zone
Author: Mark Mukherjee Campbell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2023-08-09
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 0429829213
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis 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.
The Epic City
Author: Kushanava Choudhury
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2018-01-09
Total Pages: 380
ISBN-13: 163557157X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKShortlisted 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.
Calcutta
Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2013-09-10
Total Pages: 321
ISBN-13: 0307962172
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding amalgam of memoir, reportage, and history in this intimate, luminous portrait of Calcutta. Chaudhuri guides us through the city where he was born, the home he loved as a child, the setting of his acclaimed novels—a place he now finds captivating for all the ways it has, and, perhaps more powerfully, has not, changed. He shows us a city relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a “self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.” He takes us along vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways; introduces us to intellectuals, Marxists, members of the declining haute bourgeoisie, street vendors, domestic workers; brings to life the city’s sounds and smells, its architecture, its traditional shops and restaurants, new malls and hotels. And, using the historic elections of 2011 as a fulcrum, Chaudhuri looks back to the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, and toward the politics of the present, finding a city “still not recovered from history” yet possessed of a singular modernity. Chaudhuri observes and writes about Calcutta with rare candor and clarity, making graspable the complex, ultimately ineluctable reasons for his passionate attachment to the place and its people.
Calcutta in Colonial Transition
Author: Ranjit Sen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-03-14
Total Pages: 235
ISBN-13: 0429576110
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book brings home the story of how three clustered villages grew into a primate city, in which a garrison town, a port city and the capital of an empire merged into one entity—Calcutta. This and its companion volume Birth of a Colonial City examine the geopolitical factors that were significant in securing Calcutta's position in the light of growing influence of the East India Company and subsequently the British Empire. A definitive history of Calcutta in its nascent years, this book discusses the challenges of city-planning, the de-industrialization at the hands of British imperialists, the catastrophic fall of the Union Bank, the advent of British capital, and the rise of the Bengali business enterprise in the colonial era. It also underlines how Calcutta facilitated the development of a political consciousness and the pivotal political and cultural role it played when the movement for independence took hold in the country. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, British Studies, city and area studies.
Routledge Library Editions: Urban History
Author: Various Authors
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-02-25
Total Pages: 2610
ISBN-13: 1351137174
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe volumes in this set, originally published between 1940 and 1994, draw together research by leading academics in the area of welfare and the welfare state, and provide a rigorous examination of related key issues. The volumes examine welfare policy, equality, poverty, class, government, social policy, unemployment, and social services, whilst also exploring the general principles and practices of welfare and the welfare state in various countries. This set will be of particular interest to students of sociology, health, and political studies respectively.
Birth of a Colonial City
Author: Ranjit Sen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-03-04
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 0429638981
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLong 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.
