ABSTRACT
At the heart of Kolkata, between the brown-green stretches of the Maidan (with the floodlight platforms for the Eden Gardens cricket ground rising in the distance) on one side and a multi-lane traffic-spewing thoroughfare on the other, stands the memorial to the soldiers killed in the First World War (Figure 14.1). Flanked on either side by the statue of a soldier marked by his Saxon features and Western military uniform (not visible in Figure 14.1), the memorial at once invites and resists assimilation into the cultural fabric of the city. Between memory and the monument falls the shadow, at once of colonialism and of class. The statues of the British Tommies and the Latin dates inscribed on the memorial are for the people of the city symbols of the Great European War; they are also symptomatic of the strange gap in much of Indian middle-class metropolitan memory (except in places such as Punjab) about the country’s own role in the conflict.
