Where is Rajarhat?

How Does One Locate a Place: A New Town? In India, for various reasons, two types of urban imagination have held sway. Imaginations of Mumbai and Kolkata have alternatively become models of the city. Kolkata, the city of culture, intellectuals, renaissance, theatre, poets, old Victorian buildings, the river, missionaries, labouring coolies from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, and faraway corners of Bengal, and a place where discussion never stops, the adda, the permanent workshop of ideas. And Mumbai is the place of massive mills, hardworking, no-nonsense people, the sultry impact of the sea, the civilised wealth of the Parsis, film studios, contacts with the Urdu literati mediated by films, labour mobility, and big money, big wealth, and big commerce. Obviously, none of these profiles is pure. Both cities are much more complicated as real places. Yet, as imagined places of ideal cities, modern India has grown up with these two ideas of urbanity. This is so partly because both cities have escaped the past, by past we mean here the middle ages, and have very little royal heritage or traces of feudal power to boast of. Cleansed of the past, grown up as centres of colonial modernity, these are the dream cities of a republican India. They are cosmopolitan, democratic places of an imagined equality — equal as wage worker or the supposed equal access for citizens to the cultural virtues of life. No other city in India till date can boast of this status. No other city in India has produced citizens in the way these two cities have.