The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Helen Thomas
through censuses as well as lands contained by maps are two examples discussed
by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities. 1 This concept of
gaining ownership and control by using description to create knowledge is
discussed especially in “Knowing (Dreaming),” story 4. A story about the
nineteenth-century idea of “total history,” it delineates the limits of an act
of description imagined to be absolute and objective in a time when the
“narratives of origin, journey and destination can no longer be heroic myths
of conquest.” 2
One of my aims here is to question the singular, complete, and
global histories of imperialism inherent in this action, as I show that a piece
of land can support multiple descriptions, each of which tells a new story. In
an attempt to move beyond purely textual sources, such as letters by travelers,
local histories, scholarly papers, journals, and newspapers, I have combined
factual information gleaned from texts with lived experience and
memory. This has been augmented by films, guidebooks, photographs, museums,
paintings, and recordings. The use of evidence has been influenced
by Anderson’s approach in Imagined Communities, where he starts to uncover
the power of maps, atlases, diaries, letters, and travel books. He looks at the
ways that they have created the false conceptions of unity, nationhood, stability,
and political division on which the dreams of imperialism have been,
and still are, based.
All of the stories are connected to the idea of territory, both as a
physical reality and a conceptual entity. In this sense the construction of
knowledge and the dreams inherent in the acts of owning the Maidan and
reclaiming it are intrinsic parts of these stories, which constantly fluctuate
between the real and the imaginary. Some of these themes have already been
explored in the field of literary criticism as it overflows into critiques of
space and physical places. Seen from inside the imaginary world of the text,
the world as represented in novels such as Kim, Beloved, Shame, and The Heart
of Darkness becomes ever more enclosed. As Matthew Sparke points out, the
“turn of the academic gaze from . . . the ‘real world’ . . . towards the . . . now
seemingly more fashionable ‘real book’” is increasingly common. 3 My intention
here is to shift the focus slightly, from the reality represented in the
imagination of the creative writer reflecting on his or her world to other
sorts of invention that result from description as an act of recording, an act
more directly concerned with a lived reality.
These issues are nowhere more intensely present than in Calcutta,
a city produced, used, and understood in various and often very diverse
ways. Its ambiguities and contradictions are concentrated within the history
of the Maidan as a landscape that is neither urban nor rural. Built upon
strategically advantageous but physically untenable swampy marshland, it