Claiming the city : protest, crime, and scandals in colonial Calcutta c. 1860–1920

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Urban space, technology, and community

2. Songs, the city, and the everyday

3. Sexuality, scandals, and the urban order

4. Battle for the streets: contesting municipal regimes

5. Criminality, class, and moral anxieties

6. Collective protest and riots

This study on colonial Calcutta charts the history of its urbanization from below in its streets, strikes and popular urban cultures. It offers a close up view of the city's underbelly by drawing on a range of non-archival sources, from illustrations and amateur photographs to street songs, local histories and memoirs which show how Calcutta was not just a problem to be disciplined and governed as the colonialists would have us believe. Instead, it emerges as a remarkably lively and crucial site for the shaping of a discourse of rights and claims to the city by various marginal urban groups. Departing from approaches that see the city as the unproblematic product of British initiative and disciplining, 'Claiming the city' presents the urban processes shaping Calcutta as contested and partially indigenous. In a crucial intervention the work studies how the colonial urban was not just born out of the ordered institutional spaces inscribed by public parks and squares, sewers and water supplies, roads and tramways, but also the more plebeian imprint of their circumvention by the city's inhabitants - through their use of this civic infrastructure, violence, protest and street demonstrations. In the process the book also traces the ways in which the once proverbial City of Palaces turned by the early twentieth century into a city of endemic unrest and political strife. Ghosh breaks new ground by exploring the history of colonial urbanization from below through a wide range of sources, from street songs and photographs to local histories and memoirs, in addition to the more well-known official archives.