ABSTRACT
The standard ‘urban history of Kolkata’ frequently cites public colonial buildings and monuments, such as the New Court House, Government House and the Town Hall, which have become markers on an imperial domain, illustrating the inevitable growth of Kolkata as a British colonial city. 1 Fuelled by interests within the British colonial enterprise, a vast body of textual and visual representations of India was produced during the last two centuries of colonial rule. This body of knowledge, constituting the bulwark of British Orientalism, primarily addressed a European audience, spoke for the Indian, and claimed to represent the authentic India. 2 This material supposedly uncovered an essential difference between the materialistic, rational, progressive West and a spiritual, irrational, and static India. The story rarely revealed contradictions and disruptions integral to the historical experience, and in so doing left out anything that did not fit; what Swati Chattopadhyay has called, the ‘chaos-leads-to-order narrative’. 3 Reinforcing an essentializing colonial discourse, this account perpetuated the binary oppositions of ‘self’ versus ‘other’, ‘us’ versus ‘them’, ‘colonizer’ versus ‘colonized’, and ‘core’ versus ‘periphery’. 4
