Beyond Kolkata

This book examines the politics behind, and the socio-economic and ecological repercussions of, the making of a new township, variously called New Town, Megacity or Jyoti Basu Nagar, in Rajarhat near Kolkata. Conceived by the West Bengal state government in the mid-1990s, in pandering to the vision of urban planners of creating a hi-tech town beyond an unruly, crowded Kolkata, and feeding the hunger of realtors and developers, the city is built on the foundations of coercive, even violent, land acquisition, state largesse and corruption — and at the cost of erasing a self-sufficient subsistence economy and despoiling a fragile environment. Yet, after its completion and departure of construction labour, the new town appears as a necropolis, a ghost city, that belies its promised image of an urban utopia, even as the displaced locals lead a precarious, mobile existence as ‘transit labour’, engaged in odd and informal jobs. Written on the basis of intensive fieldwork, government documents, court records, and chronicles of public protests, this book broadly analyses the politics and economics of urbanisation in the age of post-colonial capitalism, particularly the paradoxical combination of neoliberal and primitive modes of capital accumulation upon which the global emergence of ‘new towns’ is based. Departing from the dominant styles of urban studies that focus on cultural or spatial analysis of cities, the authors show the links between changes in space, technology, political economy, class composition, and forms of urban politics which give concrete shape to a city. It will immensely interest those in sociology, political science, economics, development studies, urban studies, policy and governance studies, and history.

The present volume is the result of an international seminar organized on March 25, 2000 in Calcutta.

Beyond Metropolis builds on studies conducted during the 1990s under the Centre for Human Settlements at the University of British Columbia.

In recent years there has been a significant reorientation in India's policy towards its Northeast region. Yet, Indian policy thinking has been insulated from the virtual intellectual revolution in the last one decade to study armed civil conflicts and ways to manage, resolve, and transform them. This volume lays emphasis on the term 'rethinking' and offers new ways of understanding the conflicts, and of ways to resolve them. The chapters discuss wide-ranging issues which include the multilayered nature of the conflict in the Northeast, and how democratic politics and the world of armed rebellions intersect in complex ways in this region. An analysis of the Naga war and its nation-building project is discussed. How the Northeast figures in postcolonial India's national imagination, how Assamese society engages with the term 'terrorist', and how state-society conflicts are muted in Mizoram have been argued. The role of ideas in conflict transformation, and an alternative vision of development in Mizoram have been argued. The role of ideas in conflict transformation, and an alternative vision of development in Arunachal Pradesh have also been discussed.

`Beyond Appearances? provides a dynamic fourm for the main exponents of the anthropological turn in studies of South Asian popular visual culture, and will prove an inspiration for a generation of emerging scholars' - The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute A striking feature of modern-day society is the ubiquity of the visual or the image in everyday life. Modernity seems to be marked by the hegemony of its vision, with everything being measured by its ability to show or be shown. But how does this linking of the visual to the modern stand up to scrutiny when placed within the contexts of the complicated picture-worlds, print-complexes and image-cultures of India? This is the principal question that Beyond Appearances? investigates. The 11 essays in this book analyse the material and political work of a wide array of artefacts, media, and habits with the aim of understanding the principal contours of the visual practices and ideologies that distinguish an Indian modern. Recognising the enormous power contained within images to transform and mobilise the self and the community, the contributors focus on a variety of visual media including calendar art, photography, theatre, popular cinema, documentary films and propaganda videos, maps and fine art. In the process, they also examine the inter-visual dialogue between these diverse media, exploring their underlying technologies of production and modalities of circulation and exchange. The volume is also crucially concerned with understanding the role of visuality (broadly understood as regimes of seeing and being seen) in the constitution of national, ethnic, religious and community identities in modern India. The contributors contended that visuality does not lie outside history, culture or politics, and that the visual is constitutive of both the social and the political. Overall, this volume draws attention to the fact that the visual can no longer be treated as a mere supplement to knowledge derived from written texts but constitutes a distinct field of enquiry. Multi-disciplinary, comprehensive and informative, this fascinating volume will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of visual culture, sociology, anthropology, art history, political science and media studies.

In addition to rigorous academic research, this volume also pools in case studies, live discussions and interviews, drawing from the experience of a wide spectrum of professionals and organizations working with sex workers.