Book review: Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay. 2022. Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure,Property,and Political Culture in Twentieth-century Calcutta

Streets in Motion is a well-written and expansive book that attempts to cover the shifting social and political terrain of 20^th-century Calcutta. In doing so, it takes streets as an entry point to engage with the city and its ever-evolving dynamics. It begins with the author’s evident discomfort with ‘motion’, which has defined the Western modernity in myriad ways—via the mobilities, materialities and circulation of capital. ‘Motion’ becomes even more forceful within the modern imaginary of the urban, which, the author argues, is nothing but a case of ‘the social production of “motion”’ (p. 2). By citing various incidents and processes that occurred in Calcutta (officially renamed ‘Kolkata’ in 2001; here I have followed the author’s usage) throughout the past century, Bandyopadhyay makes a case for the exceptions that need to be accommodated within the narrative of unhindered ‘motion’ to understand the specificities of the late colonial and postcolonial urban forms. The author identifies the differential mobilities that punctuate motion as obstruction, which he sees as being dialectically opposed to motion (p. 207). Obstruction produces the worldview of ‘obstructionism’, which is the primary modality through which the colonial subject, the refugees and the other marginal peoples of the city are seen to have engaged with the state.

The ‘logistical and political-cultural centrality’ (p. 4) that the street assumes in Bandyopadhyay’s framework nonetheless gives way to delightful and deeply informative social histories of the city beyond the confines of the street itself. While one learns about the politics of street-making at the interface of the colonial administration’s preoccupation with ensuring legibility and unfettered circulation with the native subject’s predicament over the erasure of familiar modes of dwelling, stories around streets meanders into processes that unfold on and around its fringes. The author demonstrates how street-building by technocrats saw the simultaneous ‘commoning’ of spaces by marginal subjects, typically viewed as ‘encroachment’ by the administration. Encroachment as obstruction, literally and metaphorically, becomes the primary modality of the subjects’ negotiations of the colonial state till the decisive moment of Independence, when a ‘citizen crowd’ (p. 68) potentially emerges in Calcutta. Bandyopadhyay also shows the concurrent development of a rent economy, which quickly turns into the prime mode of accumulation in the interwar years. Primarily the stronghold of the Marwari community, land speculation and rent became a precursor to communalisation in the city in subsequent years.

The chapters on the postcolonial history of Kolkata are particularly engaging, exposing the dynamics that ultimately contributes to the predominant Bengali bhadralok (middle class) imaginary of the city. By dwelling on the destinies of different marginal groups, Bandyopadhyay draws attention to the frameworks of othering prevalent. Of particular significance is their politics, which makes claims to the city using means which invariably involve some form of obstruction. Jabardhakhal (forced encroachment) by refugees from East Pakistan, street-vending by hawkers, mob-action by impoverished migrants, are all viewed as concerted actions that involve offering impediment to the usual movements of capital. Such action, located in everyday practice, is seen to lend the city its peculiar political culture. The author, whose own politics often spills through the narrative, rues the transitions brought about by neoliberalism, which has given rise to new imaginaries of the urban, centred around middle-class perceptions of the civic, in which the figure of the ‘pedestrian’, ‘urban citizen’ and the like, have variously assumed centre stage. The technology-driven, digitised city that has expanded via the information technology (IT) industry has reinvented rent, subjecting streets to a ‘new mining regime’ (p. 258), within which app-governed ‘motion’ has transformed complex urban environments into machine-readable data, reducing streets into abstract geolocational identifiers (p. 259). This has greatly constricted the possibilities held by the streetscape of the 20^th century.

Given its vast scope, the book can be read at many levels. An attempt at social history, the author has used hitherto unexplored archives which bear deep informational and methodological significance in understanding the city. The Hawker Sangram Committee archives, in particular, draw attention to how marginal groups can write alternative histories of their own experiences outside of the legitimation offered by the historian. The author, however, also draws from a number of sociological and anthropological methods – including surveys, interviews and ‘ethnographic vignettes’ – to corroborate his findings. While informative, such a wide-ranging array of methods employed in various degrees can potentially baffle the reader as regards the predominant disciplinary orientation of the book. Reading some chapters as stand-alone articles obviously averts this issue. Conversely, the book could also be read as an instruction on the complementarity of diverse methods. One cannot but help revisit the deeply evocative sections on a sensorial anthropology of the 20^th-century city and commentaries on ‘dwelling’, reminiscent of Tim Ingold, in the experiences of multiple social groups eking out a living by negotiating diverse infrastructures of the city.

The narrative is meticulously developed, and Bandyopadhyay pays great attention to detail, evident in the thoroughly referenced text and its detailed footnoting. Nonetheless, some issues which could have perhaps done with a more detailed engagement include the following. In the enduring dialectic between the elite and the marginalised, experiences of the middle classes, who bear a layered relationship with the street, often recede into the background. Also, perhaps because of the overt focus on subaltern politics and alternative modes of political assertion presented by postcolonial urbanism, one finds substantial presence of concepts drawn from Western social and political theory. One wonders if insights offered by social anthropological literature on the South Asian City – involving emplaced understandings of crowds and conviviality, diversities and familiarity – might have complemented the narrative. A more liberal use of sketch maps would have been useful. Lastly, a brief elaboration on what is meant by the titular ‘Streets’ would have been clarificatory, given that the potentialities presented by lanes and bylanes, and bypasses and flyovers, greatly vary when compared to the inner city’s thoroughfares. That said, the book stands out as one of the most insightful and engaging texts on the contemporary social history of Kolkata, and its people, politics and culture, with an allusion, howsoever brief, to the transformations underway in its urban fabric in the 21^st century.