The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Helen Thomas
but valid alternatives to their Western counterparts. The Asiatic Society,
which he set up in 1783 on the borders of the Maidan, promoted and maintained
the concept of “the Orient” as understood throughout the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. The Anglicist phase, which reacted against this
belief in the value of “native” learning, was grounded in an intention to
reform and reconstruct Indian society along Western lines—in other
words, to “civilize” it. At the same time Cornwallis introduced fundamental
changes into the form of rule of Bengal that were very British in conception,
including a replacement of zamindar rights by rights of land
ownership. This Eurocentric ideal was based on a belief that there can only
be one standard of rationality and civilization, naturally Western in origin.
The Anglicist approach was vulnerable in its rigidity, which made
it incapable of assimilating the complex nature of reality in the Indian city.
Within this weakness lay the roots of resistance, both political and cultural,
to domination by the British; such resistance became more noticeable
within the city of Calcutta and the Maidan in particular. The street names
used demonstrated one subtle form of opposition emerging. Originary
names came from villages, natural forms, and local families. During the
British Empire, streets named after soldiers and civil servants represented
municipal history but following Independence, congressmen, national heroes,
and cultural references became the points of reference for street
names. 27 Spaces like the Maidan began to be appropriated more and more for
popular use. The railings surrounding part of the Maidan were finally removed
in the middle of the nineteenth century, allowing access to all. 28
Markets and rallies sprang up, as did religious celebrations, such as the
celebration for the goddess Kali reported by Bishop Heber in his diaries of
1824. 29 Sports such as football, which involved Indian players and Bengali
teams, were established on the Maidan as early as the 1880s. Its size and position—at
the center of the city, close to the seats of power—also made the
Maidan an optimum site for strikes. 30
While the ways that the Maidan was used and inhabited clearly
manifested resistance, there was no accompanying self-conscious production
of the physical environment, in the form of buildings and metropolitan
plans for urban reform. 31 It was not until the early twentieth century that
some attempt was made to deal with the urban problems stemming from
the inequality of the city’s social divisions, and even that came from the
outside. Patrick Geddes made several plans for Calcutta that attempted
to deal at a local scale with the problems of the bustees as social units. The
Metropolitan plans produced by the Calcutta Improvement Trust in 1911
took a very different approach; they were more concerned with cutting