ABSTRACT
One of the enduring assumptions about colonial cities of the modern era is that they worked on the basis of separation – they were “dual cities” divided into “black” and “white” towns.1 Obviously, the degree of separation between black and white inhabitants varied according to the particularities of the context.2 In the case of Calcutta, the idea of black and white towns is seemingly based on the perception that European residents of the town inhabited an area that in terms of layout, density, architecture, and everyday life was fundamentally different and divorced from that of the native inhabitants. Scholars have emphasized the distinctiveness of the architecture of the white town – the European neo-classicism brought by the colonizers. From such a perspective, the emergence of a neo-classical vocabulary in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century India is seen as a rather straightforward transplantation of English ideas on Indian soil, attenuated/disfigured (depending on one’s point of view) by vagaries of local labor and availability of building materials.3 In this chapter I examine the so-called white town to argue that such racial divisions were neither complete nor static. The black and white towns were far from being autonomous entities; the economic, political, and social conditions of colonial culture penetrated the insularity of both towns, although at different levels and to varying degrees. As an examination of the residential pattern of the white town will demonstrate, the story is more complicated.4 One of the factors that contributed to this complication was the discrepancy between the norm of residential living that British visitors to the city expected to find, and the ones that they met with. As the unfamiliar spatial rules reconfigured them as subjects, they found it necessary to articulate their subjectivity in a new vocabulary.
