ancient cities

egulation, negotiation, and political barter, but all
signs of the hollowing out of the city’s formal
economy.
Modern-Day Kolkata
Urban Renewal Under the New Communists
Kolkata is the capital of the state of West Bengal,
which is ruled by the world’s longest-running,
democratically elected communist government, the
Left Front, which has been in power since 1977. As
the twentieth century ended, the Left Front adopted
a new economic policy meant to liberalize the
West Bengal economy and attract global investment,
primarily in the sectors of real estate and
high technology, to Calcutta. With this New
Communism came new imperatives for urban
renewal and redevelopment. Informal vendors
who had long occupied the city’s sidewalks were
rapidly evicted; the peri-urban fringes of the city,
inhabited by squatters and sharecroppers, were
now earmarked for suburban subdivisions and
new townships. The New Communists had rather
obvious ambitions to place Calcutta on the map of
globalization.
The eviction of informal vendors, in 1996, from
the sidewalks of Calcutta happened under the banner
of a municipal drive with an Orwellian title:
Operation Sunshine. It was an eviction conducted
to reclaim the bhadralok city, the gentlemanly city
of order and discipline. However, the term bhadralok
has deep roots in the cultural politics of the
region. It refers to a Bengali urban intelligentsia
that emerged in the crucible of colonialism, formed
by English education and yet shaped by opposition
to colonialism, a genteel and refined elite that
stands in opposition to the poor and the proletariat
but that is also the heart and soul of Bengali leftism.
According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, the bhadralok
are the bearers of a distinctive “Bengali
modern” and the inhabitants of a bourgeois public
sphere, including one that is being revived through
the practices of New Communism.
Ethnic Division of Economic
and Political Power
The bourgeois public sphere of Kolkata warrants
closer scrutiny. A distinctive feature of
Kolkata’s elite structure is an ethnic disjuncture
Kolkata (Calcutta), India
421
between economic and political power. In broad
terms, while political power is held by the Bengali
bhadralok, economic power is vested in the
Marwaris, an ethnic group with roots in the state
of Rajasthan. The Marwaris are not a new presence
in Kolkata. Important traders during the
nineteenth century, the Marwaris were to become
industrialists in the twentieth century, establishing
pan-Indian dominance in key industrial sectors.
However, they were to rarely participate in the
political life of Kolkata. In the colonial city, representative
rule was introduced to the Calcutta
Municipal Corporation in 1875. The Bengali bhadralok
took up this form of rule. Today, Kolkata is
governed by a mayor-in-council system with the
Kolkata Municipal Corporation as an apex body and
the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority as
a regional authority. The Bengali dominance of the
municipal corporation and regional authority has
continued in uninterrupted fashion. The split
between economic and political power also continues,
with political institutions dominated by the
Bengali bhadralok and economic life dominated by
Marwari industrialists and merchants. It has been
argued that Kolkata Marwaris draw upon the idioms
of lineage, kinship, and community rather
than on the imaginary of a bourgeois public sphere.
Kolkata’s cultural and political life—cinema, art,
theater—then is animated by a distinctive Bengali
radicalism, at once socialist and bourgeois, at once
nationalist and modern.
The Bengali Middle Class
There is more to the bhadralok city than its
public guise. The making and remaking of the
Bengali (sub)urban middle class is a story not only
of urban renewal and peri-urban frontiers but also
a story of domestic labor. In Kolkata’s informalized
economy, domestic servants, mainly poor
women, are a prominent feature. Raka Ray has
pointed out that just as European colonialists had
to negotiate the spatiality of their Calcutta homes
and spatial proximity of their Indian servants, so
today’s middle class has to make itself in relation
to the domestic subaltern. But it is also here that
political life in Kolkata far exceeds the bourgeois
public sphere. Through a rich repertoire of contestations
and entitlements, the rural–urban poor
claim space, services, livelihood, and voice. This