The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Maidan, Calcutta
Bengal had incorporated a number of provinces. Beside Bengal proper it included
Bihar, Chota Nagpur, and Orissa; its total population was 78 million.
Each province was distinct historically, subracially, and culturally.
Curzon’s Partition of Bengal in 1905 used the territory of Bengal
itself, or rather its division, as a means of control through separation. In
“Dreaming (Knowing),” this device was discussed at the scale of the city;
here, the scale is much vaster. The diversity of Bengal’s people and cultures
created an administrative nightmare for a system based on the collection
and classification of information—which provided the ostensible reason for
the first partition. But this version of the story ignores the political goal
whose achievement Curzon believed fundamental to the continuance of the
empire: the isolation of the bhadralok, trapped by the very cultural hybridity
of the city. East Bengal was principally Muslim, and Bengal in the west
Hindu. In Calcutta the Hindu bhadralok found themselves outnumbered
by Oriyas from outside Bengal and by Hindus with whom they shared nothing
but religion. They were therefore separated from most fellow Bengalis
and bhadralok, and surrounded by people of alien traditions with whom
they could not communicate. The partition was a success.
These invisible mechanisms of control that were so useful to Curzon—the
maps, censuses, and museums discussed by Benedict Anderson in
Imagined Communities—developed from the search for a knowledge and understanding
of the indigenous culture initiated by the Orientalists. Subverted
in intention and form, however, this knowledge became a means for
domination, and authority was maintained by creating an image of India defined
through Britain’s presence there. A facet of this phenomenon has already
been explored in “Dreaming (Knowing)”; the reverse side is described
by “Knowing (Dreaming).” Here the story is about a quest for knowledge
bound up with the hopes of an empire. Dreams for a lost future are embodied
in the solitary existence of the Victoria Memorial, placed squarely within
the spaciousness of the Maidan and visible from afar.
In the same way that the military rule represented by Fort William
was no longer the means to controlling the territory of Bengal, the Maidan
no longer described in itself British authority. Now opened up to all of Calcutta’s
inhabitants, it became the site for the last great effort by the British
in Calcutta to assert, through the building of a permanent monument, their
position of governance. The foundation stone of the Victoria Memorial was
laid in 1906 by George V. Designed by the then-president of the Royal
Institute of British Architects, Sir William Emerson, it was constructed
grandly in the classical style and clad in white marble. While splendid, the
museum was also a physical incarnation of another facet of British influence—the
production and maintenance of information as fragments of