Memoirs of Roads
Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization
Price: 895.00 INR
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ISBN:
9780199468102
Publication date:
19/09/2016
Hardback
192 pages
Price: 895.00 INR
We sell our titles through other companies
Disclaimer :You will be redirected to a third party website.The sole responsibility of supplies, condition of the product, availability of stock, date of delivery, mode of payment will be as promised by the said third party only. Prices and specifications may vary from the OUP India site.
ISBN:
9780199468102
Publication date:
19/09/2016
Hardback
192 pages
Sumanta Banerjee
In seventeenth-century India, the fates of three little hamlets were forever changed when East India Company officials chose them to be developed into a city suitable for their settlement. Thus was born Calcutta. In Memoirs of Roads, Banerjee journeys through time and narrates the story of three of the arterial roads of British India’s first capital. And through their story, he presents an engrossing history of the development of this remarkable urban landscape, which became a melting pot of Indo-European lifestyle and architecture. He imagines the city as an extended joint family, where the matriarch, Bagbazar Street, watches over the future generations of lanes and by-lanes. Theatre Road is imagined as a midwife, helping to birth the hybrid cultural milieu that characterizes the city. Rashbehari Avenue’s rise to prominence is likened to a middle-class Bengali housewife’s tentative steps into the limelight of modern society. The author focuses on this family of roads as a site of protests, living spaces, and locations of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures. Using official archives and popular perceptions, Banerjee scrutinizes the imprints that technology, settlement patterns, transportation, and demography have left on this city.
Rights: World Rights
Sumanta Banerjee
Description
In seventeenth-century India, the fates of three little hamlets were forever changed when East India Company officials chose them to be developed into a city suitable for their settlement. Thus was born Calcutta.
In Memoirs of Roads, Banerjee journeys through time and narrates the story of three of the arterial roads of British India’s first capital. And through their story, he presents an engrossing history of the development of this remarkable urban landscape, which became a melting pot of Indo-European lifestyle and architecture.
He imagines the city as an extended joint family, where the matriarch, Bagbazar Street, watches over the future generations of lanes and by-lanes. Theatre Road is imagined as a midwife, helping to birth the hybrid cultural milieu that characterizes the city. Rashbehari Avenue’s rise to prominence is likened to a middle-class Bengali housewife’s tentative steps into the limelight of modern society.
The author focuses on this family of roads as a site of protests, living spaces, and locations of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures. Using official archives and popular perceptions, Banerjee scrutinizes the imprints that technology, settlement patterns, transportation, and demography have left on this city.
About the Author
Sumanta Banerjee is a historian, journalist, and cultural theorist. He worked with the Statesman in Calcutta and New Delhi from 1962 till 1973, and was later a fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. His previous publications include The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989), Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal (1998), and The Wicked City: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta (2009).
Sumanta Banerjee
Table of contents
List of Maps viii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
- Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City: Calcutta and Its Roads 18
- A Tale of Three Towns: Black, White, and South 37
- Bagbazar Street: The Grandmother 81
- Theatre Road: The Midwife 114
- Rashbehari Avenue: The Bengali Middle-Class
Homemaker 134
Conclusion: Towards a Future Megalopolis 155
Select Bibliography 165
Index 169
About the Author 176
Sumanta Banerjee
Sumanta Banerjee
Description
In seventeenth-century India, the fates of three little hamlets were forever changed when East India Company officials chose them to be developed into a city suitable for their settlement. Thus was born Calcutta.
In Memoirs of Roads, Banerjee journeys through time and narrates the story of three of the arterial roads of British India’s first capital. And through their story, he presents an engrossing history of the development of this remarkable urban landscape, which became a melting pot of Indo-European lifestyle and architecture.
He imagines the city as an extended joint family, where the matriarch, Bagbazar Street, watches over the future generations of lanes and by-lanes. Theatre Road is imagined as a midwife, helping to birth the hybrid cultural milieu that characterizes the city. Rashbehari Avenue’s rise to prominence is likened to a middle-class Bengali housewife’s tentative steps into the limelight of modern society.
The author focuses on this family of roads as a site of protests, living spaces, and locations of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures. Using official archives and popular perceptions, Banerjee scrutinizes the imprints that technology, settlement patterns, transportation, and demography have left on this city.
About the Author
Sumanta Banerjee is a historian, journalist, and cultural theorist. He worked with the Statesman in Calcutta and New Delhi from 1962 till 1973, and was later a fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. His previous publications include The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989), Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal (1998), and The Wicked City: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta (2009).
Table of contents
List of Maps viii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
- Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City: Calcutta and Its Roads 18
- A Tale of Three Towns: Black, White, and South 37
- Bagbazar Street: The Grandmother 81
- Theatre Road: The Midwife 114
- Rashbehari Avenue: The Bengali Middle-Class
Homemaker 134
Conclusion: Towards a Future Megalopolis 155
Select Bibliography 165
Index 169
About the Author 176 Read More
