Book review: Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay,Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure,Property,and Political Culture in Twentieth-century Calcutta

Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay’s Streets in Motion fills up many proverbial gaps in the existing literature on South Asian urbanism. First, Bandyopadhyay illuminates an otherwise forgotten period in Indian urban historical studies—the twentieth century. Evidently, the ‘long nineteenth century’ captured the urban historian’s critical lens to such an extent that its successor was largely left unexplored. The other technical reason the author details in the introduction is also not to be discounted: urban historians have often expressed reluctance to tread beyond the colonial period, leaving the postcolonial city wide open for ‘contemporary’ urban investigations. Thus, by undertaking the formidable task of writing twentieth-century Calcutta’s history, Bandyopadhyay invites us to re-evaluate the scope and methodological limits of urban historical writing.

The street emerges in this book not merely as an object of analysis but one that is uniquely suited to weave together a century that is otherwise splintered into multiple institutional and ideological contingencies. By sheer design, the street as a form of circulatory infrastructure makes the urban legible—it integrates the city and also distinguishes it from neighbouring and outlying non-urban spaces. Indeed, street schemes lie at the heart of urban space-making practices that delineate the boundaries between private properties and public premises. Infrastructure studies’ growing interest in multiform technologies facilitating collective life, urban or otherwise, suggests that the street will continue to be the focus of many more academic interventions. Bandyopadhyay’s book introduces two key optics that will certainly motivate future scholarship in the field.

One, as the title of the book announces, Bandyopadhyay brings before us a history of streets in motion. Here, motion alludes to the ceaseless movement of capital, goods, labour, and information that animate urban life. Likewise, in Making the Modern Slum, Sheetal Chhabria (2019) had introduced the concept of flows that vitalised colonial Bombay, routinely circulating its ‘good’ elements and rejecting the ‘bad’. To an extent, Streets in Motion follows a similar argument but then Bandyopadhyay reminds us that while the street can be an ideal conduit for mobility and circulation, it can also be brought to a halt through concerted political action—whether it be from below, as seen in mass strikes, agitations, and blockades or from above, as with police barricades for containing mass movements. In so doing, the book develops a motion–obstruction dialectic to illuminate the calibrated rhythm of motion, one that is not uniform, autonomous, or homogeneous, but instead responds to and is contingent upon the scale and range of obstruction. Obstruction in this dialectical fashioning is not outside of motion but one that continuously orchestrates and punctuates motion towards specific ends.

The book’s second important contribution develops from the motion–obstruction dialectic. Using the three-pronged analysis of property, territory, and accumulation, Bandyopadhyay shows us how extant scholarship has so far only highlighted the publicness and privateness of property. On the one hand, these studies have illuminated the exclusionary nature of goods and infrastructures that are ostensibly ‘public’. Additionally, these works have traced a direct link between the possession of private properties, and the fuelling of bourgeois rights discourses. But what if we were to think of property, beyond the logics of accumulation and the proprietary nature of ownership, in the principle of communal holdings? Streets in Motion presents a third contentious register, the urban commons, to think through those urban spaces that are routinely used, inhabited, and maintained by street hawkers, pavement dwellers, and refugees, in short, figures who have been historically identified as ‘encroachers’ in official narratives. Seen thus, commoning becomes shorthand for the variegated modes of obstructions which threaten the frictionless utopia of a twentieth-century post/colonial city. To be sure, the commons do not operate outside the scope of formalised property regimes, but rather emerge as the unintended products of such formalisations.

Following the blueprint of urban spatial mapping through concerted segregation, ghettoisation, and dispossession, the book charts the ways in which populations deliberately cast out of the emerging city’s planning of imaginary repossessed city spaces. These populations were neither homogeneous nor did they observe similar reclamation tactics. Across five chapters, drawing from an eclectic range of archival and ethnographic material, the book illustrates the many ways in which the street witnessed itinerant urban publics ‘counter narratives of dispossession induced by primitive accumulation of capital’ (p. 257). As readers, we are often swayed by statist views which sweepingly describe these variegated acts of reclamation as illegal and unlawful appropriation of public/private property. Bandyopadhyay shows us that from a commoner’s vantage point, obstruction via encroachments, protests, riots, and agitations are not merely anarchic displays of the urban poor—they speak of the power of street politics that reinstates its masses back into the pages of history. As direct products of capitalism’s accumulative tendencies, Bandyopadhyay’s historical actors staged multiple encroachment initiatives, once as an economically distressed class to snatch from the state and the elite, and again, as members of majoritarian communities to aid the Hinduisation of urban spaces by pushing Muslims and Dalits out into the city’s ghettoised wastelands.

Streets in Motion does not romanticise the idea of obstructions that led to violence, raids, pilferage, and riots in the city of Calcutta across the twentieth century. But it does illustrate that the work of accumulation through the twin tasks of dispossession and enclosures inevitably produces fault lines of economic distress, precarity, and destitution. By posing obstruction as a positive category, the book challenges us to think through the possibilities that emerge from the street not just as a site for politics but presents the street itself as politics. Not only does the book highlight the deeply political nature of technoscientific and engineering works that facilitate a few at the cost of the many, it shows us that the street itself is imbued with politics. Bandyopadhyay reminds us that in this hyper-neoliberalised world where technocracy has dangerously impinged upon political culture, any conversation on meaningful social change needs to begin by re-evaluating the relationship between the state, society, and the public. Streets in Motion enriches our understanding of urban complexes by introducing new vocabularies to grapple with the tumultuous twentieth century. In a refreshing epilogue, Bandyopadhyay charts out the ways in which the twenty-first-century streets have emerged with a whole new range of technologies, surveillance apparatuses, and its own itinerant public. The twentieth-century street may be long dead, as Bandyopadhyay reminds us, but it may still hold some answers to how we may start building inclusive urban futurities.