ABSTRACT

This chapter explores historical layering of space by forces of capital, and the deployment of multiple canvases of public gesture in the production and access of historical sensation. In the landscape, on the west bank of the river Hooghly, many layers of colonial and postcolonial economic energy had left its traces. Sometimes, such layerings of history were spoken out loud at public meetings as public figures gestured toward actors of larger historical scale, and appropriated historical luminosity of nationalism or colonialism to imbue their neighborhood or town with. The familiar and intimate bearing evidence of the distant, impersonal happenings of the larger historical canvas, seem to be the crux of his historical enthusiasm. Uluberia continues to interrogate history through give-and-take with the river. In the process, the ‘futures past’ – the exhilarating, now dead, possibility of being at a front stage of history in the form of a colonial capital – is harnessed in everyday life through text and rhetoric.