A Hygienic City-Nation: Space, Community, and Everyday Life in Colonial Calcutta

ISBN-13: 9781108489898 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 236 str.

Nabaparna Ghosh

Opis

Calcutta, the centre of British imperial power in India, figures in scholarship as the locus of colonialism and the hotbed of anti-colonial nationalist movements. Yet, historians have largely ignored how the city shaped these movements. A Hygienic City-Nation is the first academic work that examines everyday urban formations in the colonial city that informed the broad global forces of imperialism, nationalism, and urbanism, and were, in turn, shaped by them. Drawing on previously unexplored archives of the Calcutta Improvement Trust and neighbourhood clubs, the author uncovers hidden stories of the city at the everyday level of neighbourhoods or paras, where kinship-like ties, caste, religion, and ethnicity constituted new urban modernity. Ghosh focuses on an emergent discourse on Hindu spatial hygiene that powered nationalist pedagogic efforts to train city dwellers in conduct fit for the city-nation. In such pedagogic efforts, upper-caste Bengalis were pitted against the lower-caste working poor and featured as ideal inhabitants of the city: the citizen.

Recenzje

'A groundbreaking study of colonial Calcutta from the perspective of its Indian neighborhoods and everyday life. Ghosh delivers skillful analysis of the gritty spaces of urban modernity and resistance, and explores the colonial spatialization of hygiene and race with fresh insight. Well written and engaging, the book is a must read for scholars of South Asian cities and global urban history in general.' Rosemary Wakeman, Fordham University

Spis treści

List of Figures, Tables, and Boxes; List of Abbreviations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. The Black Town, Spaces of Pathology, and a Hindu Discourse of Citizenship; 2. The Calcutta Improvement Trust: Racialized Hygiene, Expropriation, and Resistance by Religion; 3. A City-Nation: Paras, Hygiene, and Swaraj; 4. A New Black Town: Recolonizing Calcutta's Bustees; Epilogue; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.