The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

lies on an artificially created topography of ditches and infill, constructed in
defense against the invasion both of water and of living aggressors. Because
of its physical location as well as its mythical status, the Maidan is a place
especially susceptible to the accumulation of different explanations, meanings,
and translations. It is surrounded by a city whose reason for existence
is postcolonial, its origin ambiguous. Artificial from its inception, Calcutta
was neither British in location nor Indian in intention. Along with Madras
and Bombay, it was one of the three great Indian ports founded by the English
East India Company; no substantial native settlement existed on its
marshy site. So without memory or tradition connecting it to its location,
the city was from its beginning a place of ambivalence and defiance. This
British point of exchange, essential to Eastern trade, was a new and alien territory
set up outside the control of the Moghul emperor at Delhi.
DESCRIBING (DECIDING)
The Maidan, Calcutta
Story 1
The Story of a Strange Place—the Maidan in the Mind of the Visitor in Postcolonial
Calcutta of the Late Twentieth Century
Describing the Maidan required much selection. The following three stories
originate in part from myths that make up our Western understanding
of Calcutta. One of the most powerful myths about the city, and about India
in general, is that of the Black Hole of Calcutta. This legend is fundamental
to the existence of the Maidan, and only recently have different
interpretations of the event been articulated. These form the basis of story
3—“Owning (Resisting).” Dreams of home, the creation of tradition, and
the impetus to power ubiquitous within any process of colonization are explored
in stories 2 and 4, about the never-certain relationship between
dreaming and knowing. They involve my own choices and depend on the
thought of others, the evidence available, and the possibilities for interpretation
within my imagination. In themselves they are compounded of other
people’s words, images, and memories. They depend nearly always on what
Salman Rushdie in Imaginary Homelands calls the “stereoscopic vision” of the
migrant writer, 4 which can be described as a particular understanding, neither
of here (London) or there (Calcutta), of the present or the past. For him
and for many whose voices are present here, it is a fiction of memory produced
from an experience of more than one homeland.
A strange place—not street, square, or contained park—the Maidan
fascinated me though I visited it only briefly. At first sight empty, it is
sparsely populated by various artifacts: a few buildings, some monuments,