Being Urban: Space, Community, and everyday life in colonial Calcutta (1800-1930)

Abstract

Exploring everyday urban life and urban formation in colonial Calcutta this

dissertation investigates the molding of urban communities through the construction of

space. At the heart of this dissertation are the paras, or the neighborhoods of Calcutta

that offer an on-the-ground view of colonial urbanism. Breaking from much of the

previous urban constitution of scholarship on South Asia that treats the city as a mere

site for politics, economics, and culture, this dissertation explores the para as a sociospatial configuration, both shaping and shaped by historical actions. Through a close

study of its spaces, this dissertation moves away from doctrinal analysis to understand

what people thought urbanization was, and how these ideas informed their everyday

lives. Going beyond the study of maps and town plans, usual in studies of colonial

urbanism, this dissertation then reconstructs a city born in the perceptions of men and

women who lived in its spaces.

Locating urbanism in the everyday spaces of the para, this dissertation argues

that the management of urban space was central to the crafting of urban middle class,

or bhadralok, identity. In the early twentieth century, bhadraloks invented a new code

of Hindu spatial hygiene as their everyday tactic to resist the city-making efforts of the

state. This new science of hygiene informed their supervision of the para,

reconfiguring its spaces. Exploring the bhadralok government in the para, this

dissertation reveals ideas of development that manifested as interventions in conduct.It argues that in the bhadralok discourses on the city, urbanism was as much a bodily

process as it was a spatial intervention. Employing Hindu spatial hygiene, they

reordered the spaces of their para, while also trying to discipline the speech, conduct,

and sexuality of fellow city dwellers.

This dissertation consists of four chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 describe the

authoritarian town planning initiatives of the state, and the gradual fomenting of

everyday resistance in the para. Chapters 3 and 4, show the ways in which the para

molded the bhadralok identity, and was, in turn, molded by it.