ABSTRACT
Studies of modern Indian cities generally revolve around the creation and transformation of urban space, propelled by long term historical change. The Second World War came very close to Bengal and, for the first time, Calcutta experienced modern warfare as Japanese bombs fell on the city, creating panic. Along with war came a killer famine, scattering rotting corpses all over city streets. It was followed immediately by a violent communal holocaust which, in its turn, presaged a cataclysmic partition, when the rivers and villages of the first poem were lost to the people of Calcutta. Times which put the very survival of lives and norms at stake also threw up an immensely diverse and creative cultural world. Independence and the recovery of the national homeland had left millions homeless: at Sealdah Station, at rudimentary camps, in colonies. The struggle for land was led by the communists among refugees.
