The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Helen Thomas
and along the riverbank many water tanks and ghats, which give access to
the water for ritual bathing and serve as a place to land. Each one of these
tells a particular tale about the Maidan’s origin and meaning, and springs
from a different moment of its past. A history is a description that presents
and interprets collected evidence. Its form is determined by two factors—
the evidence available and what the person creating it is able to see in this
evidence before consciously selecting from it. The sources are varied. The
initial catalyst for the present investigation came from personal observations,
but the evidence is amassed from the imaginations of others. The necessary
information was available principally in institutions set up by the
British to record and know their empire, and thus it is highly selective—as
are the imperial histories of India. By making histories of a particular place
that is rarely described in itself—the Maidan usually exists only as a backdrop
to its most important artifacts, Fort William and the Victoria Memorial—I
intend to question how these “true” histories on a larger scale were
constructed. Hidden in the gaps—between what is represented in official
histories, atlases, and national legends, whose intentions and imaginary
limits construct particular visions of the city, and the subjective observations
that create different types of evidence—are keys to other stories.
My interest in the stories behind the physical existence of the
Maidan was provoked by the two images reproduced here, which highlight
different scales of inhabitation and gather within them the space of the
Maidan and its means of confinement (explored below). Their nature as evidence—both
tangible and as memory of experience—gave them added significance.
There was something immediately discordant and provocative
about the space they represented; it seemed to lie in the contradiction between
the alien character and original reasons for the existence of particular
artifacts and place-names and the ways in which those places and artifacts
have been interpreted and appropriated. On the one hand, these intentions
are legible through the logic of the spatiality of division of an English Victorian
city. These separations include those between classes and functions
produced by zoning, as well as the gendered divisions between public and
private, home and work. On the other hand, an alternative reading is offered
in the much more cohesive indigenous semirural spatiality, which is evident
in the way that the public places of this English city, the streets and parks,
are used for private domestic rituals and events by the different inhabitants
of the city. Subsequently large parts of the city do not appear urban. Special
words label particular types of participants in this strangely nonurban condition
such as bidesia (a migrant living within the physical interstices of
Calcutta) and muflisia (someone existing within a street economy that is
entirely local). 5 The use of the spaces of the Maidan was consequently not in-