The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Maidan, Calcutta
came principal justifications for segregation. 24 In 1805 Henry Roberdean
reported that “Black Calcutta does not at all interfere with the European
part, a great comfort, for the Natives are very dirty and their habitations are
straw huts.” 25 But when considering the idea of spatial separations in Calcutta,
we must also acknowledge the overlaps that occurred. As discussed
above in “Dreaming (Knowing),” Calcutta’s population did not consist
simply of mutually exclusive British and native peoples. The mix was far
more complex. Different communities sometimes inhabited specific areas,
and developed their own spatialities, but the properties of wealthy natives
were distributed throughout the north and south of the city. Contrary
to what one might expect, for example, Clive’s house was situated in the
north at Dum Dum. As the north took on the character of the “Black Town,”
superimposed on it, large estates were subdivided many times into a type of
slum called bustees, rather than being kept intact as garden houses.
The role of the Maidan was ambiguous in this process of spatial division
within the city during the eighteenth century. As a regulatory space
of control, defense, and segregation, it was a brutal assertion of conquest and
power. At the same time it was a place for sports, leisure, and exhibition,
principally of the upper classes. It was beginning to have an important presence
in the minds of all Calcuttans, however, including the inhabitants of
the more ambiguous Grey Town that was developing to the west. The physical
differences between British and other territories were not just spatial;
they were material as well. A notion of permanence essential to British
buildings was inherent in their puckah construction, a term that defined a
durable masonry structure built from of a mixture of brick dust, molasses,
and hemp. The native buildings tended to be far more ephemeral and vulnerable
to the exigent Calcutta weather; they were made of cutchah, a mud
and thatch combination. The British evidently considered permanence and
display in furnishing their interior spaces as well. This was quite different
from the more minimalist, flexible approach to inhabiting the Indian interior,
where functions were not fixed and spaces both domestic and public remained
far more fluid in definition and use.
These physical separations were reflected culturally and intellectually—both
within the British attitude toward India, as seen in a clash between
tradition and reform, 26 and in the inherent differences between the
indigenous and the colonizing inhabitants of Bengal. The East India Company’s
intellectual history of rule traditionally is viewed as having two
phases: the “Orientalist,” instigated by Warren Hastings and discussed at
great length by Edward Said in Orientalism, and the “Anglicist,” instituted
by Hastings’s successor, Lord Cornwallis. Hastings valued and promoted
knowledge of Indian languages, law, culture, and tradition as different from