Overview

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.

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9780199468102

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Reviews

Banerjee's evocative phrase - every road has a life of its own (p. 13), reminds us to diligently filter minute details from a range of sources - literary to street directories - to include both elites and subalterns. The sources help construct the past, which if only accessed through official archival material would have dulled the vibrant hues of the past and the present, the social and the political, which Memoirs of Roads absorbingly offers. * Nitin Sinha, H-Soz-Kult *

Banerjee's evocative phrase - ""every road has a life of its own"" (p. 13), reminds us to diligently filter minute details from a range of sources - literary to street directories - to include both elites and subalterns. The sources help construct the past, which if only accessed through official archival material would have dulled the vibrant hues of the past and the present, the social and the political, which Memoirs of Roads absorbingly offers. * Nitin Sinha, H-Soz-Kult *

Author Information

Sumanta Banerjee is a historian, journalist, and cultural theorist. He worked with the Statesman in Calcutta and New Delhi from 1962 till 1973, and was later a fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. His previous publications include The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989), Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal (1998), and The Wicked City: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta (2009).

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