Calcutta in Colonial Transition

Calcutta in Colonial Transition PDF Author: Ranjit Sen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429576110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This book brings home the story of how three clustered villages grew into a primate city, in which a garrison town, a port city and the capital of an empire merged into one entity—Calcutta. This and its companion volume Birth of a Colonial City examine the geopolitical factors that were significant in securing Calcutta's position in the light of growing influence of the East India Company and subsequently the British Empire. A definitive history of Calcutta in its nascent years, this book discusses the challenges of city-planning, the de-industrialization at the hands of British imperialists, the catastrophic fall of the Union Bank, the advent of British capital, and the rise of the Bengali business enterprise in the colonial era. It also underlines how Calcutta facilitated the development of a political consciousness and the pivotal political and cultural role it played when the movement for independence took hold in the country. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, British Studies, city and area studies.

Calcutta in Colonial Transition

Calcutta in Colonial Transition PDF Author: Ranjit Sen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429576110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book brings home the story of how three clustered villages grew into a primate city, in which a garrison town, a port city and the capital of an empire merged into one entity—Calcutta. This and its companion volume Birth of a Colonial City examine the geopolitical factors that were significant in securing Calcutta's position in the light of growing influence of the East India Company and subsequently the British Empire. A definitive history of Calcutta in its nascent years, this book discusses the challenges of city-planning, the de-industrialization at the hands of British imperialists, the catastrophic fall of the Union Bank, the advent of British capital, and the rise of the Bengali business enterprise in the colonial era. It also underlines how Calcutta facilitated the development of a political consciousness and the pivotal political and cultural role it played when the movement for independence took hold in the country. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, British Studies, city and area studies.

Kolkata — The Colonial City in Transition

Kolkata — The Colonial City in Transition PDF Author: Sumana Bandyopadhyay
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000603717
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
This book explores the spatial characteristics of the city of Kolkata in India in terms of the physical, economic, social, political, and environmental aspects of urban geography, and focuses upon the inherent processes that impact its transformation. It discusses different facets of urban geography and highlights the contemporary challenges of a major primate city in South Asia, which represents the conflicts between the traditional and the modern, the rich and the poor, the skyscrapers and the shanties. With its detailed empirical research and mapping exercises based on real-time remote sensing data, the book offers an understanding of a range of contemporary urban issues. It examines the spatial consequences of urban sprawl, land-use changes, ecological crisis, climate change, critical disasters, dynamics of the peri-urban interface, neighborhood restructuring, debates around heritage conservation, housing poverty, gray spaces, governance and the political landscape of the city. This book will be useful to students, teachers, and researchers of geography, especially human geography and urban geography, urban studies, urban development and planning, regional planning, social geography, governance, ecology, economics, and South Asian studies. It will also benefit urban planners, development professionals, and those interested in the study of the city of Kolkata and its transformations.

Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata

Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata PDF Author: Siddhartha Sen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789462981119
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Figure 41 - An artist's depiction of the Black Town: The Chitpore Road, Calcutta. Coloured chromolithograph by William Simpson, 1867

Calcutta

Calcutta PDF Author: Tanika Sarkar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351581724
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
The period (1940s to 1950s), was chaotic and turbulent in Calcutta, yet, this was also a time of significant creativity in literature, art, films and music in the city. The originality of the work lies in blending poetry with historical writing, retaining the essence of both forms against the backdrop of the tumultuous events of the critical decades. This historical method together with twenty-one papers give the reader a sense of the pulse of this complex city ‘emerging creatively and chaotically from its colonial past’. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

From Little London to Little Bengal

From Little London to Little Bengal PDF Author: Daniel E. White
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421411644
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
How literary and religious traffic between Bengal and Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries impelled a complex and contested cosmopolitan imperial culture. From Little London to Little Bengal traces the traffic in culture between Britain and India during the Romantic period. To some, Calcutta appeared to be a “Little London,” while in London itself an Indianized community of returned expatriates was emerging as “Little Bengal.” Circling between the two, this study reads British and Indian literary, religious, and historical sources alongside newspapers, panoramas, religious festivals, idols, and museum exhibitions. Together and apart, Britons and Bengalis waged a transcultural agon under the dynamic conditions of early nineteenth-century imperialism, struggling to claim cosmopolitan perspectives and, in the process, to define modernity. Daniel E. White shows how an ambivalent Protestant contact with Hindu devotion shaped understandings of the imperial mission for Britons and Indians during the period. Investigating global metaphors of circulation and mobility, communication and exchange, commerce and conquest, he follows the movements of people, ideas, books, art, and artifacts initiated by writers, publishers, educators, missionaries, travelers, and reformers. Along the way, he places luminaries like Romantic poet Robert Southey and Hindu reformer Rammohun Roy in dialogue with a fascinating array of lesser-known figures, from the Baptist missionaries of Serampore and the radical English journalist James Silk Buckingham to the mixed-race prodigy Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. In concert and in conflict, these cultural emissaries and activists articulated national and cosmopolitan perspectives that were more than reactions on the part of marginal groups to the metropolitan center of power and culture. The British Empire in India involved recursive transactions between the global East and West, channeling cultural, political, and religious formations that were simultaneously distinct and shared, local, national, and transnational.

The Transition to a Colonial Economy

The Transition to a Colonial Economy PDF Author: Prasannan Parthasarathi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521570428
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
According to widespread belief, poverty and low standards of living have been characteristic of India for centuries. Challenging this view, Prasannan Parthasarathi demonstrates that, until the late eighteenth century, labouring groups in South India, those at the bottom of the social order, were in a powerful position, receiving incomes well above subsistence. The decline in their economic fortunes, the author asserts, was a process initiated towards the end of that century, with the rise of colonial rule. Building on revisionist interpretations, he examines the transformation of Indian society and its economy under British rule through the prism of the labouring classes, arguing that their treatment by the early colonial state had no precedent in the pre-colonial past and that poverty and low wages were a product of colonial rule. The book promises to make an important contribution to the economic history of the region, and to the study of colonialism.

Calcutta

Calcutta PDF Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307962172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
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.

Pilgrimage and Politics in Colonial Bengal

Pilgrimage and Politics in Colonial Bengal PDF Author: Imma Ramos
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351840002
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
From the late nineteenth century onwards the concept of Mother India assumed political significance in colonial Bengal. Reacting against British rule, Bengali writers and artists gendered the nation in literature and visual culture in order to inspire patriotism amongst the indigenous population. This book will examine the process by which the Hindu goddess Sati rose to sudden prominence as a personification of the subcontinent and an icon of heroic self-sacrifice. According to a myth of cosmic dismemberment, Sati’s body parts were scattered across South Asia and enshrined as Shakti Pithas, or Seats of Power. These sacred sites were re-imagined as the fragmented body of the motherland in crisis that could provide the basis for an emergent territorial consciousness. The most potent sites were located in eastern India, Kalighat and Tarapith in Bengal, and Kamakhya in Assam. By examining Bengali and colonial responses to these temples and the ritual traditions associated with them, including Tantra and image worship, this book will provide the first comprehensive study of this ancient network of pilgrimage sites in an art historical and political context.

From the Colonial to the Postcolonial

From the Colonial to the Postcolonial PDF Author: Dipesh Chakrabarty
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
This volume addresses some of the key issues marking the process of decolonization in India and Pakistan. It looks at decolonization as a long-term process and highlights some of the historical complications involved in nations born under the aegis of the colonial rule evolving into postcolonial polities. It concentrates on particular aspects of the social and political processes involved in the transition from the colonial order to postcolonial regimes. The contributors include a range of distinguished scholars from North America, the United Kingdom, South Asia, and Australia. They approach the issue of decolonization in different but mutually reinforcing ways, through constitutionalism, sports, regionalisms, housing, gender, minority issues, mass-politics, and class formation, The contributors include Dipesh Chakrabarty, David Washbrook, Barbara Metcalf, Ian Copland, Gynaesh Kudaisya, and Anumpama Rao.

Birth of a Colonial City

Birth of a Colonial City PDF Author: Ranjit Sen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429638981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
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.