Kolkata in Space, Time, and Imagination Vol. I
EDITOR: Anuradha Roy and Melitta Waligora
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INFORMATION
- EDITOR: Anuradha Roy and Melitta Waligora
- HB ISBN: 978-93-5290-786-1
- Year: 2019
- Extent: 358
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This two-volume collection of eclectic essays on Kolkata seeks to explore areas not covered in the earlier works on the city, in terms of both topics and time. Contributors from India, Germany and beyond have used both academic research and lived experiences to reveal the dynamic process of Kolkata’s urbanity rooted in its colonial history and constantly reshaped by its politics, economy and changing socio-cultural norms. The first section of Volume 1 indicates how the city has negotiated space from its formative years right up to the crucial juncture it seems to have reached recently as a result of the drastic shift towards mega-urbanity. The second section provides glimpse into the city in time, through the two global wars in the twentieth century, the Naxalite movement, the rule of the Left Front and beyond. The book seeks to understand the city not only in space and time, but also in imagination, which is highlighted in the second volume. While recognizing that the colonial rulers did play a vital role in the making of the city, the book is primarily about the active native participation in the process of Kolkata’s urban transformation. It highlights the ordinary and the everyday, with special attention paid to the underclasses of the city. It uses a polyscopic perspective and presents the city as a fascinating heterotopia based on a coexistence of the haves and the have-nots, of the old and the new, of formality and informality.
Anuradha Roy is Professor, Department of History, Jadavpur University. Her research is focused on intellectual and cultural history, with special reference to the life of the Bengali bhadralok and bhadramahila (men and women of the educated upper and middle classes). She has authored/edited a dozen books in Bengali and English, most of which are related to the nationalist and communist culture in Bengal. Among the books authored by her are Nationalism as Poetic Discourse in Nineteenth Century Bengal (2003); Cultural Communism in Bengal, 1936-1952 (2014); Bengal Marxism: Early Discourses and Debates (2014), a monograph on the women novelists of nineteenth century Bengal and a collection of essays titled Itihaser Harek Gero (Different Knots of History, 2019).
Melitta Waligora is Assistant Professor at the Seminar for South Asian Studies, Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin. She teaches topics related to South Asia, focusing mainly on Bengal: Bengal Renaissance, its intellectual and cultural history, social structures, gender relations and urban history. She has recently published a book about the city of Kolkata titled Kalkutta: Eine Moderne Stadt am Ganges (2015), and a collection of portraits of women living in Kolkata, based on interviews with them, titled Ich wollte nie so leben wie meine Mutter (2017). She has also edited a book about gender relations titled Draupadi und Kriemhild: Frauen, Ehre und Macht im Nibelungenlied und Mahabharata (2008).