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The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

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<strong>The</strong> Maidan, Calcutta<br />

ropean the spaciousness of the plain offered a protected <strong>and</strong> safely artificial<br />

form of nature pushing against the wild foreigness beyond. Although<br />

strange tales of fishing by the natives following a gale, when fish fell with<br />

the rain, <strong>and</strong> sightings of exotic birds <strong>and</strong> boar hunting are among events of<br />

the Maidan recorded in various diaries <strong>and</strong> letters, 13 it contrasted vividly<br />

with the tiger-ridden jungle <strong>and</strong> marshl<strong>and</strong> that surrounded the city outside<br />

the Maratha Ditch (an ineffective defensive construction described below<br />

in “Owning [Resisting]”).<br />

Bordering on a denial—where, as Gail Ching-Liang Low puts it,<br />

“white (w)as the invisible norm” 14 —the images of power, civilization, <strong>and</strong><br />

familiarity constructed by the British around the Maidan were based in the<br />

urban <strong>and</strong> corresponded to what Bhabha calls a “desire for a reformed, recognisable<br />

Other.” 15 To the native imagination, however, the origin of Calcutta<br />

was rural. <strong>The</strong> social <strong>and</strong> cultural reality of the city was subsequently played<br />

out in a double-sided game of mimesis between the metropolitan center <strong>and</strong><br />

the newly invented place. <strong>The</strong> Maidan holds an example of a literal formal<br />

hybridity in the Ochterlony Monument constructed in 1828. This Greek<br />

column on an Egyptian base with a Turkish cupola is used by the police as<br />

a watch tower during rallies on the Maidan. This juxtaposition of multiple<br />

communities <strong>and</strong> various imaginative capacities 16 within Calcutta was what<br />

enabled new, fantastic spaces such as the Maidan—which was neither rural<br />

or urban, entirely public or private—to be transformed into something<br />

complex <strong>and</strong> opaque in meaning.<br />

<strong>The</strong> concept of the urban as civilized <strong>and</strong> civilizing predominated<br />

in the eighteenth century both in Europe <strong>and</strong> its colonies. By the nineteenth<br />

century, however, an ambivalent attitude toward the idea of the city as a<br />

place of civilization was gaining strength, <strong>and</strong> Calcutta did not escape. Its<br />

reputation as a center of squalor <strong>and</strong> degradation grew, <strong>and</strong> it became famous<br />

as a place of chaos, crowds, death. Once the <strong>City</strong> of Palaces, it became<br />

Rudyard Kipling’s “<strong>City</strong> of Dreadful Night.” <strong>The</strong> Other city (Black Town)<br />

so carefully hidden in images of the <strong>City</strong> of Palaces (White Town) started to<br />

emerge from its concealment, threatening the illusion of permanence <strong>and</strong><br />

total control. In 1857 the First Indian War of Independence (or the Indian<br />

Mutiny), while barely affecting Calcutta, shocked the complacent British;<br />

as Franz Fanon observed “the colonised man is an envious man. And this the<br />

settler knows very well; when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly, always<br />

on the defensive, ‘<strong>The</strong>y want to take our place.’” 17 This jealously<br />

guarded place was that of the civilized, the privileged; its Other—the<br />

splendid, the cruel, <strong>and</strong> the sensual—lived in the imaginary space of the<br />

East, which, Edward Said points out, provided the West with “one of its<br />

deepest <strong>and</strong> most recurring images of the Other.” 18 This space was not nec-

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