Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination)
Krishna Dutta
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1566564883
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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 and the second city of the British Empire during the Raj. Named the City of Palaces for its neoclassical mansions, Calcutta 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 refinement rubs shoulders with 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.
education for India and the total rejection of the Oriental learning that had been supported by Hastings, Jones and others in the last decades of the preceding century, which Macaulay believed to be worthless nonsense. Like Macaulay, if for somewhat different reasons, the Hindu College graduates believed passionately in the beneficial effect on Indians of western education, despite the fact of British colonial exploitation. They actively aspired after the western liberal and democratic values
God, but not Death, who thought none below him but the base and unjust, none above him but the wise and virtuous.” Back in London the East India Company erected a handsome memorial to Jones in St. Paul’s Cathedral, in which he is depicted as a Brahmin resting his hands upon a tome of Hindu scripture with a four-armed image of god Vishnu on the pediment - an example of Britain’s initial love affair with India. The quaintest grave architecture is the black granite monument erected over the
Indians greater political power. Indian forces fought bravely in Europe and elsewhere on the Allied side; the Indian National Congress supported the war effort on the assumption that the British would repay its loyalty with substantial political concessions after the war; and even Gandhi toured Indian villages urging peasants to join the British army. In Calcutta, sporadic anti-British terrorism continued in spite of rigorous intelligence surveillance and severe punishment. A Bengali public
spectacular. Let us now go back to the foundation of Calcutta in 1690 by the East India Company near the fishing village of Kolikata and follow how it grew into the second city of the British Empire. Company Calcutta Early European navigational maps of the Bay of Bengal, such as Thomas Bowrey’s of 1687 and George Herron’s of 1690, do not show Calcutta or the fishing village of Kolikata, but they do show neighbouring Sutanuti (Chuttanuty/Soota Loota), a weavers’ village, on the
on its way.” There was a massive exodus from the city. More than 100,000 people left by road and rail that week. About the same number lost their homes. So many people went missing that The Statesman published a poignant notice on 21 August: “Information would be welcome about those Indian members of The Statesman staff in Calcutta who have not been in the office since 16 August. Would those whom the recent events still preclude from returning from duty please send news of themselves?”