ancient cities

420 Kolkata (Calcutta), India
Further Readings
Chua, Beng-Huat. 1995. “That Imagined Space:
Nostalgia for Kampungs.” Pp. 222–41 in Portraits of
Places: History, Community and Identity in
Singapore, edited by B. S. A. Yeoh and L. Kong.
Singapore: Times Editions.
Thompson, Eric C. 2004. “Rural Villages as Socially
Urban Spaces in Malaysia.” Urban Studies
41(12):2357–76.
Ko l K a t a (Ca l C u t t a), In d I a
Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, is one of the
world’s most populous cities, with more than
13 million people inhabiting a metropolitan agglomeration
that stretches outward from an urban core
to envelop an expansive peri-urban hinterland,
according to the Census of India in 2001. Known
in popular discourse as the “black hole,” Kolkata
is seen to embody the stereotypes of third world
megacities: crushing poverty, filth and disease, jostling
masses, slums, and underdevelopment. In this
imagination, Kolkata is also rescued by saintly figures,
such as Mother Teresa and her tireless work
for the city’s beggars, lepers, and orphans, and it is
thus also the “City of Joy,” where compassion and
humanity emerge from misery.
Colonial Calcutta
The appellation “black hole” refers to an alleged
incident in 1756 when British prisoners suffocated
to death in a small dungeon of the Nawab of
Bengal. Indeed, Kolkata traces its origins to colonial
battles. The city’s official history begins in
1690 with British trade and settlement. As British
mercantilist interests were transformed into colonial
rule and military occupation, so Calcutta was
declared, in 1772, capital of British India. And
thus it remained until 1911, when a growing
nationalist insurgency pressed the British to move
the capital to the newly constructed and thus more
easily controlled city of New Delhi. In 2001,
Calcutta was renamed Kolkata, after one of the
three tiny villages that dotted the land when British
traders arrived, a renaming that was part of a more
widespread move to reclaim Indian cities from
their colonial legacies.
Colonial Calcutta, like many other colonial cities,
was divided into two distinct areas—the British
“White Town” and the Indian “Black Town.” As
the British White Town was known for its monuments
of government and commerce and open
spaces of leisure, so the Indian Black Town was
known for its claustrophobic poverty. But in colonial
Calcutta, these classic colonial distinctions
between White and Other were more complex and
ambiguous. By the early nineteenth century,
Calcutta was witnessing a “Bengal Renaissance,”
with a flourishing Indian elite, increasingly fluent
in English and more broadly in Western liberal
philosophies. This was also a landowning elite that
invested heavily in the White Town such that by the
mid-nineteenth century, much of British Calcutta,
the so-called city of palaces, was owned by Indians
though occupied exclusively by Europeans (except
for their Indian servants). The homes of rich
Indians themselves in North Calcutta, the erstwhile
Black Town, were often lavish compounds,
indicating the lines of class and caste that cut
through racial formations and calling into question
the image of homogenous Indian poverty and
shantytown life.
Colonial Calcutta was an economy built on the
manufacture of, and trade in, key commodities,
such as jute and paper. Postcolonial Calcutta was
to witness the collapse of these industries and a
steady deindustrialization of its economic base. At
the moment of independence, in 1947, Calcutta
and Bombay were the premier economic centers of
India. Indeed, Calcutta bravely absorbed large
numbers of Bengali “refugees,” rendered stateless
by the partition that accompanied independence.
But by the 1970s, Bombay had cemented its prosperity
while Calcutta was in the throes of capital
flight and soaring unemployment. In the last
decades of the twentieth century, Calcutta persisted
primarily as an informalized economy: a city
of day laborers, informal vendors, and domestic
servants. This informalization was hastened by
continuing migration from a vast rural hinterland
of poverty—the wretched stretches of Bihar and
Orissa and the villages of West Bengal where a
communist government had promised but not fully
delivered on land reforms and redistribution. The
informal city found spatial expression in a landscape
of slums, squatter settlements, and pavement
dwellings, each governed by different forms of