The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Helen Thomas
legacy of the city’s complex origins, rose from the urban middle class, called
the bhadralok. Distanced from popular culture, its members, like the Orientalists,
dreamed of a mythical past and at the same time criticized Hindu
practices such as suttee. Many of the heroes of the Bengal Renaissance had
some connection to the Orientalist Fort William College set up by the governor-general,
Lord Wellesley (1797–1805). By the middle of the century,
however, the interests of the bhadralok were changing. In 1861 a Society for
the Promotion of National Feeling rejected all that represented the English
and cultural oppression, from the English language to Western clothing,
food, games, and medicine; by the end of the nineteenth century, this intellectual
resistance was beginning to be perceived as a threat by the British.
Division of the land became again the means to control, and in 1905 the
British drew a line down the middle of the map of Bengal that dispersed and
isolated the potentially volatile bhadralok.
KNOWING (DREAMING)
Story 4
The Story of the First Partition of Bengal—the Victoria Memorial on the
Maidan in Imperial Calcutta at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
The significance of Calcutta had fundamentally changed by the turn of the
twentieth century. No longer simply a port whose rights as a trading post
had to be defended, it had become the focal point of a vast territory and its
population, an empire. It could no longer be controlled at a distance simply
by the military force that, principally for economic reasons, had protected
the forts; to preserve this empire, the British turned to mechanisms based
on the ownership of knowledge rather than of territory. This far more abstract
system allowed a small number of people to govern and, more important
administer India from the Writers’ Buildings around the site of the old
Fort William.
In 1899 Lord Curzon arrived in a restless Calcutta as viceroy of India,
intent on implementing British control through rigorous administration.
In order to maintain stable and secure conditions both for the British
living in India and for those back in London depending on India’s trading
potential, he needed to adjust the balance of power, which was becoming increasingly
vulnerable under attack by the bhadralok. He was forced to this
realignment by the inevitable tension of empire, identified by Bhabha as
straining “between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination—the
demand for identity, stasis—and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of
history—change, difference.” 33 By the time Curzon arrived, the territory of