The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Helen Thomas
knowledge—which was a vital part of the institution of empire. British control
was manifest first through the act of defining the nature of knowledge,
and then in becoming its guardian: collecting, categorizing, and distributing
that knowledge. As an archive of Calcutta’s past and present, the Victoria
Memorial collection itself was produced for the British imagination; no
more of its place than like the buildings at the edges of the Maidan, it was an
invention, a fantasy of knowledge generated from a nineteenth-century positivism.
Paintings describing the authority of the British in India, room
upon room of samples of Bengal’s produce for trade, and tableaux of various
indigenous living conditions indicate the limits of the “universal knowledge”
contained by the British narrative of India. This final public display
of artifacts represents a very particular understanding of India; and in displaying
the desperate splendor of an unstable empire, it held within itself
the seeds of modernity. The desire for a utopia conceived of as universal and
justified through the momentum of “civilization” was enacted in an impulse
to determine history and make the future known.
In this pursuit of separation and distance, begun in the eighteenth
century and driven by a desire for permanence and stability precisely when
it became impossible, the British lost Calcutta. Another (British) interpretation
is that Calcutta lost the British. Following the partition, which was
partially revoked as the British lost heart, the Maidan was flooded by riots.
The Indian capital was transferred to a reinvention of the traditional center
of Indian sovereignty, New Delhi, in December 1911. Dreams of power, total
knowledge, control, and permanence represented in the presence and
history of the Maidan were lost to Calcutta forever as it moved beyond its
hybrid origins to become a place in its own right, looking for means to define
its own contemporaneity and memory.