The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

A place, like any fact, is open to interpretation. The place to be interpreted
here is a strange and special phenomenon, a vast empty plain situated right
at the heart of a big city. The purpose of this collection of four stories is to
explore the relationships between the intentions that defined the limits of
this emptiness in the middle of Calcutta and the interpretations made of it
through both representation and inhabitation. The physical nature and spatial
logic of Calcutta align with specific events within its history as a postcolonial
Indian city. Some of the best-known of these occurred on and around
this grassy expanse at its center, known as the Maidan, a word that means
“open land.” Within the heaving, polluted reality of late-twentieth-century
Calcutta, the Maidan lies between the banks of the Hooghly River and the
principal artery of Chowringhee Road, which runs almost parallel to the water
along a north-south axis. To its north lies what was known during the
time of British colonization as the “Black Town,” or native town, while to
the south and east spread the spacious properties of the “White Town.”
Interpretation enacts itself and the four stories; “Describing (Deciding),”
“Knowing (Dreaming),” “Owning (Resisting),” and “Dreaming
(Knowing)” are each allocated in their titles two verbs, which are acted out
within the stories. The actions are not, of course, exclusive to the stories,
since all of these verbs are interconnected. Describing facilitates owning, for
example, while deciding, an empowered act, requires knowledge and can be
an act of resistance. Dreaming is an impetus to owning, to which knowing
is a means. In story 2, for example, dreaming is based on memory. Its substance,
defined by the knowledge of past experience, produces feelings of
nostalgia and hope in a strange place. These are the forms of dreaming here.
Particular verbs take precedence, though, and their ascription to specific
stories is intended to suggest an interpretation of the story’s possible meaning.
Knowing has two principal meanings in the stories: that which is empirical,
and that which is invented through processes of acquisition and
definition. In story 2 the first meaning is dominant, while in story 4 it is the
second meaning that takes precedence.
Story 1 is concerned with my own position in relation to the Maidan.
It is broached through questioning the processes of describing and deciding
that are inevitable in writing about a place. Describing is never innocent; it
is itself a form of owning. This idea is also important in story 3, where the
act of resistance facilitates the condition of ownership and allows the full
meaning of describing limits to come into play, as the edges of the Maidan
are literally demarcated. Describing, then, can be both a literal and a conceptual
means of territorialization, where description defines boundaries of
knowledge. Sometimes these imaginary boundaries make contexts, or realities,
for physical phenomena. Populations made into nations and separated