Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization

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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

Sumanta Banerjee, born in 1936 and educated in Calcutta, was formerly with The Statesman newspapers. He is best known for his The Simmering Revolution: The Naxalite Uprising and The Thema Books of Naxalite Poetry, two seminal texts on the Naxalite Revolt. His milestone study, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta was published by Seagull in 1989. He is at present based in New Delhi, doing research on the popular culture and religion of Bengal.

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Bibliographic information

Title
Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization
Author
Edition
1st. ed.
Publisher
ISBN
0199468109, 9780199468102
Length
x+175p., Maps; 23cm.
Subjects