Kolkata (Calcutta), India

Colonial Calcutta

The appellation “black hole” refers to an alleged incident in 1756 when British prisoners suffocated to death in a small dungeon of the Nawab of Bengal. Indeed, Kolkata traces its origins to colonial battles. The city's official history begins in 1690 with British trade and settlement. As British mercantilist interests were transformed into colonial rule and military occupation, so Calcutta was declared, in 1772, capital of British India. And thus it remained until 1911, when a growing nationalist insurgency pressed the British to move the capital to the newly constructed and thus more easily controlled city of New Delhi. In 2001, Calcutta was renamed Kolkata, after one of the three tiny villages that dotted the land when British traders arrived, a renaming that was part of a more widespread move to reclaim Indian cities from their colonial legacies.

Colonial Calcutta, like many other colonial cities, was divided into two distinct areas—the British “White Town” and the Indian “Black Town.” As the British White Town was known for its monuments of government and commerce and open spaces of leisure, so the Indian Black Town was known for its claustrophobic poverty. But in colonial Calcutta, these classic colonial distinctions between White and Other were more complex and ambiguous. By the early nineteenth century, Calcutta was witnessing a “Bengal Renaissance,” with a flourishing Indian elite, increasingly fluent in English and more broadly in Western liberal philosophies. This was also a landowning elite that invested heavily in the White Town such that by the mid-nineteenth century, much of British Calcutta, the so-called city of palaces, was owned by Indians though occupied exclusively by Europeans (except for their Indian servants). The homes of rich Indians themselves in North Calcutta, the erstwhile Black Town, were often lavish compounds, indicating the lines of class and caste that cut through racial formations and calling into question the image of homogenous Indian poverty and shantytown life.

Colonial Calcutta was an economy built on the manufacture of, and trade in, key commodities, such as jute and paper. Postcolonial Calcutta was to witness the collapse of these industries and a steady deindustrialization of its economic base. At the moment of independence, in 1947, Calcutta and Bombay were the premier economic centers of India. Indeed, Calcutta bravely absorbed large numbers of Bengali “refugees,” rendered stateless by the partition that accompanied independence. But by the 1970s, Bombay had cemented its prosperity while Calcutta was in the throes of capital flight and soaring unemployment. In the last decades of the twentieth century, Calcutta persisted primarily as an informalized economy: a city of day laborers, informal vendors, and domestic servants. This informalization was hastened by continuing migration from a vast rural hinterland of poverty—the wretched stretches of Bihar and Orissa and the villages of West Bengal where a communist government had promised but not fully delivered on land reforms and redistribution. The informal city found spatial expression in a landscape of slums, squatter settlements, and pavement dwellings, each governed by different forms of [Page 421]regulation, negotiation, and political barter, but all signs of the hollowing out of the city's formal economy.

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