ABSTRACT
Rajarhat slipped into the writings of social scientists in the early part of this century as an almost unique story of a harmonious society in which property transfer, peasant dispossession, consensus among political parties about compensation and rehabilitation, and promises of a new life could proceed without much contest and tension. In this book, we have described this variously as an urban legend of consent and have argued why these myths were needed to implement policies of dispossession, accumulation, etc. Yet, it is instructive to note that the myths or legends of the ‘Rajarhat way’ of building new towns entered the writings of social scientists without any inquiry into the contentious history of the present. And, as so often happens, administrators led social scientists by their hand in internalising this myth.
