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History of Popular Calcutta
Claiming the City: Protest, Crime and Scandals in Colonial Calcutta, c 1860–1920 by Anindita Ghosh, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016; pp 340, ₹ 995.
Anindita Ghosh begins her new history of Calcutta—Claiming the City: Protest, Crime and Scandals in Colonial Calcutta c 1860–1920 with a very clear and unambiguous message that she intends to examine aspects of the history of the city that have been absent or marginalised in much of the existing scholarship. She argues that a significant portion of the existing historiography of Calcutta (currently Kolkata) sees the city through the lens of either statistical urban development or as a site of cultural politics. She announces it as her principal aim to break the dichotomy that Calcutta was either a creation of the British imperial regime or constituted by the practices of the elite Bengali intelligentsia. Instead, the principal thrust of this book would be to refocus the lens of history on the “lower rungs of society,” who are far too often ignored in most conventional histories.
Lower Rungs of Society
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