Download or read book Calcutta in Urban History written by Pradip Sinha and published by Calcutta : Firma KLM. This book was released on 1978 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Calcutta written by Soumyendra Nath Mukherjee and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social morphology of Calcutta in the nineteenth century. Some essays published previously.
Download or read book Planning the City written by Partho Datta and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1820, an unusual letter was published in the Bengali newspaper Samachar Darpan. It was a plaintive appeal from the rats of the city of Calcutta saying they were being unfairly displaced from their ancient dwellings. Calcutta was indeed going through momentous changes - new roads and neighborhoods were being planned, channels for draining were being dug, new structures were coming up and existing buildings refurbished. These changes were not random. A new spatial order was coming into its own backed by the powerful ideology of town planning. Planning encompassed not only the regulation of physical spaces, but also the multiple concerns of health, policing, and commerce. Planning happened largely in the guise of 'improvement' and the intervention of the colonial government was important. Despite resistance and skepticism, and some reversals, the task of imposing a rational urban order on the city continued. The history of this colonial initiative can be traced through three sets of archival documents which have so far been sparingly used by historians of Calcutta. Lord Wellesley began the process with his prescriptive Minute on Calcutta in 1803, which led to the setting up of the Lottery Committee in 1817 - so called because funds for the city were raised through public lotteries. The investigation of the Fever Hospital Commission followed in the 1830s and, as the name suggests, the locations of epidemic fevers determined areas for urban restructuring. The Municipality, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, had to reckon with bustis which housed the labouring poor. But it was only after the plague epidemic in 1897 that an autonomous organization to plan the city came into being: the Calcutta Improvement Trust was set up in 1911.This book examines and assesses the continuity of colonial urban policy and its impact, particularly in terms of the social costs to the displaced population and its implications for understanding planning history generally.
Download or read book Representing Calcutta written by Swati Chattopadhyay and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the politics of representation and the cultural changes that occurred in the city, this post colonial study addresses the questions of modernity and space that haunt our perception of Calcutta.
Download or read book Birth of a Colonial City written by Ranjit Sen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-03-20 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before Calcutta was ‘discovered’ by Job Charnock, it thrived by the Hugli since times immemorial. This book, and its companion Colonial Calcutta, is a biographical account of the when, the how and the what of a global city and its emergence under colonial rule in the 1800s. Ranjit Sen traces the story of how three clustered villages became the hub of the British Empire and a centre of colonial imagination. He examines the historical and geopolitical factors that were significant in securing its prominence, and its subsequent urbanization which was a colonial experience without an antecedent. Further, it sheds light on Calcutta’s early search for identity — how it superseded interior towns and flourished as the seat of power for its hinterland; developed its early institutions, while its municipal administration slowly burgeoned. A sharp analysis of the colonial enterprise, this volume lays bare the underbelly of the British Raj. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern history, South Asian history, urban studies, British Studies and area studies.
Download or read book The Condition Improvement and Town Planning of the City of Calcutta and Contiguous Areas written by E. P. Richards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By 1900 the British had undertaken various types of urban planning in their colonial territories, but the early twentieth century brought new ideas and the birth of the modern planning movement. In India these new planning ideas inspired several specialized reports after 1900, most of which drew explicitly on British, or occasionally German, ideas. The most complete of these studies was the Richards Report on Calcutta, prepared for the Calcutta Improvement Trust and published in 1914. Its major concerns included the building and widening of roads, slum clearance and improvement, legislation, and suburban planning. As background, it included written and visual documentation of living conditions, through charts, photographs, and maps. Richards emphasized that conditions in Calcutta differed greatly from those in urban Britain, and made some allowance in that regard. In general, however, his report exemplifies the attempt by British planners, along with Indian elites, to impose their vision on colonial cities. Richards’ report was well-received by leading British planners of the day. A notice in Garden Cities and Town Planning claimed that it was "the most complete report on town conditions and possibilities which has yet been issued". While the immediate impact of the report in Calcutta is moot - Richards was highly critical of the past practices of local officials, and his views were unpopular with his superiors - the Richards Reports remains a crucial insight into both the development of modern town planning and the colonial period in India.
Download or read book Architecture and Urbanism in a Contact Zone written by Mark Mukherjee Campbell and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-09 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how histories of migration, cultural encounter and transculturation have shaped formations of urban space, domestic architecture and cultural modernity in Kolkata from the early colonial period to the beginning of the era of India’s economic liberalization. It charts how these themes were manifest in what was an important ‘contact zone’ in the history of globalization and the modern city. Drawing on a wide range of resources and representations, from urban plans and architectural drawings to European travel journals and Bengali literature and cinema, the book investigates the history of Kolkata through an examination of key urban and architectural spaces across the colonial and postcolonial epochs. Through illustrated chapters, it sheds new light on questions of difference and segregation, cultural hybridity, migration, and entanglements of tradition and modernity in the city, analyzing spaces inhabited by a diverse range of cultures, including several neglected in previous studies. Architecture and Urbanism in a Contact Zone offers an instructive contribution to the fields of global architectural history and theory, urban studies and postcolonial cultural studies for scholars, researchers and students alike.
Download or read book Urban History of India written by Deepali Barua and published by Mittal Publications. This book was released on 1994 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urbanization of Dibrugarh, a town in Assam.
Download or read book Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta written by Debjani Bhattacharyya and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete categories of bureaucratic and legal management, was at the heart of colonial urbanization and the technologies behind the draining of Calcutta. The story of ecological change is narrated alongside emergent practices of land speculation and transformation in colonial law. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how this history continues to shape our built environments with devastating consequences, as shown in the Bay of Bengal's receding coastline.
Download or read book The Epic City written by Kushanava Choudhury and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the 2018 Ondaatje Prize Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year A masterful and entirely fresh portrait of great hopes and dashed dreams in a mythical city from a major new literary voice. Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times. After graduating from Princeton, he moved back to the world which his immigrant parents had abandoned, to a city built between a river and a swamp, where the moisture-drenched air swarms with mosquitos after sundown. Once the capital of the British Raj, and then India's industrial and cultural hub, by 2001 Calcutta was clearly past its prime. Why, his relatives beseeched him, had he returned? Surely, he could have moved to Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore, where a new Golden Age of consumption was being born. Yet fifteen million people still lived in Calcutta. Working for the Statesman, its leading English newspaper, Kushanava Choudhury found the streets of his childhood unchanged by time. Shouting hawkers still overran the footpaths, fish-sellers squatted on bazaar floors; politics still meant barricades and bus burnings, while Communist ministers travelled in motorcades. Sifting through the chaos for the stories that never make the papers, Kushanava Choudhury paints a soulful, compelling portrait of the everyday lives that make Calcutta. Written with humanity, wit and insight, The Epic City is an unforgettable depiction of an era, and a city which is a world unto itself.
Download or read book Calcutta written by Krishna Dutta and published by Signal Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the popular imagination, Calcutta is a packed and pestilential sprawl, made notorious by the Black Hole and the works of Mother Teresa. Kipling called it a City of Dreadful Night, and a century later V.S. Naipaul, Gunter Grass and Louis Malle revived its hellish image. This is the place where the West first truly encountered the East. Founded in the 1690s by East India Company merchants beside the Hugli River, Calcutta grew into India's capital during the Raj and the second city of the British Empire. Named the City of Palaces for its neoclassical mansions, Calcutta was the city of Clive, Hastings, Macaulay and Curzon. It was also home to extraordinary Bengalis such as Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel laureate, and Satyajit Ray, among the geniuses of world cinema. Above all, Calcutta (renamed Kolkata in 2001) is a city of extremes, where exquisite refinement rubs shoulders with coarse commercialism and political violence. Krishna Dutta explores these multiple paradoxes, giving personal insight into Calcutta's unique history and modern identity as reflected in its architecture, literature, cinema and music. CITY OF ARTISTS: Modern India's cultural capital; home city of
Download or read book Routledge Library Editions Urban History written by Various Authors and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 2610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volumes in this set, originally published between 1940 and 1994, draw together research by leading academics in the area of welfare and the welfare state, and provide a rigorous examination of related key issues. The volumes examine welfare policy, equality, poverty, class, government, social policy, unemployment, and social services, whilst also exploring the general principles and practices of welfare and the welfare state in various countries. This set will be of particular interest to students of sociology, health, and political studies respectively.
Download or read book Calcutta Old and New written by Evan Cotton and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 1064 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book City Requiem Calcutta written by Ananya Roy and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Housing developments emerge amid the paddy fields on the fringes of Calcutta; overflowing trains carry peasant women to informal urban labor markets in a daily commute against hunger; land is settled and claimed in a complex choreography of squatting and evictions: such, Ananya Roy contends, are the distinctive spaces of a communism for the new millennium -- where, at a moment of liberalization, the hegemony of poverty is quietly reproduced. An ethnography of urban development in Calcutta, Roy's book explores the dynamics of class and gender in the persistence of poverty. City Requiem, Calcutta emphasizes how gender itself is spatialized, and how gender relations are negotiated within the geopolitics of modernity and through the everyday practices of territory. Thus Roy shows how urban developmentalism, in its populist guise, reproduces the relations of masculinist patronage, and, in its entrepreneurial guise, seeks to reclaim a bourgeois Calcutta, gentlemanly in its nostalgias. In doing so, her work expands the field of poverty studies by showing how a politics of poverty is also a poverty of knowledge, a construction and management of social and spatial categories.
Download or read book Calcutta written by Amit Chaudhuri and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding amalgam of memoir, reportage, and history in this intimate, luminous portrait of Calcutta. Chaudhuri guides us through the city where he was born, the home he loved as a child, the setting of his acclaimed novels—a place he now finds captivating for all the ways it has, and, perhaps more powerfully, has not, changed. He shows us a city relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a “self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.” He takes us along vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways; introduces us to intellectuals, Marxists, members of the declining haute bourgeoisie, street vendors, domestic workers; brings to life the city’s sounds and smells, its architecture, its traditional shops and restaurants, new malls and hotels. And, using the historic elections of 2011 as a fulcrum, Chaudhuri looks back to the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, and toward the politics of the present, finding a city “still not recovered from history” yet possessed of a singular modernity. Chaudhuri observes and writes about Calcutta with rare candor and clarity, making graspable the complex, ultimately ineluctable reasons for his passionate attachment to the place and its people.
Download or read book An Urban Historical Perspective for the Calcutta Tercentenary written by Hiren Chakrabarti and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Calcutta 1981 written by Collectif and published by Institut français de Pondichéry. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A city laden with symbolic meaning in the Western mind, Calcutta – with ten million inhabitants today – is much more than the apathetic or violent display of urban destitution in India, as seen by the world at large. This collection tries to reach precisely beyond the cliches, to enable some of those who work in the city as decision-makers, planners or analysts, to speak out and Interpret the multifaceted crisis that has hit this city as it continues to grow, even though its economy is in decline. Their words have all the force as they are derived from first-hand experience. In analysing the laboured evolution of this city, once known as "the most beautiful city east of Suez", we have provided some material on a major case-study for the debate on urban planning and development in the Third World. The planning exercise launched in Calcutta in early 1960s, with support from American experts, hoped also to halt the spread of communism in Bengal. This was a vain expectation, however, as the Communist Party of India-Marxist has been continuously voted into power since 1977. From that date, the Left Front Government has controlled the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority, which provides amenities to the city and metropolitan district with support from, among others, the World Bank. What are henceforth the urban development policies of "parliamentary communism"? What are the problems they are up against when action is necessary on all fronts at once? In the final analysis, for what purpose and for whom are they planning? What should be the priorities? To set up the economy to right first? To provide amenities for the city? Or to improve the daily life of the most underprivileged? When confronted with these realities, what the Left is able to achieve in power? These are some of the questions that the contributors to this collection have, in their own way, been concerned with in creating an image of present-day Calcutta, seen through its own eyes.
