Author: Krishna Dutta
Publisher: Signal Books
ISBN: 9781902669595
Category : Calcutta (India)
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
In the popular imagination, Calcutta is a packed and pestilential sprawl, made notorious by the Black Hole and the works of Mother Teresa. Kipling called it a City of Dreadful Night, and a century later V.S. Naipaul, Gunter Grass and Louis Malle revived its hellish image. This is the place where the West first truly encountered the East. Founded in the 1690s by East India Company merchants beside the Hugli River, Calcutta grew into India's capital during the Raj and the second city of the British Empire. Named the City of Palaces for its neoclassical mansions, Calcutta was the city of Clive, Hastings, Macaulay and Curzon. It was also home to extraordinary Bengalis such as Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel laureate, and Satyajit Ray, among the geniuses of world cinema. Above all, Calcutta (renamed Kolkata in 2001) is a city of extremes, where exquisite refinement rubs shoulders with coarse commercialism and political violence. Krishna Dutta explores these multiple paradoxes, giving personal insight into Calcutta's unique history and modern identity as reflected in its architecture, literature, cinema and music. CITY OF ARTISTS: Modern India's cultural capital; home city of
Finding Calcutta
Author: Mary Poplin
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830868488
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Book Description
Mary Poplin's chronicle of her volunteer work with the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta provides an inside glimpse into Mother Teresa's life of service to the poor. Transformed by the experience, Poplin discovered how all of us can find our own places of meaningful work and service.
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830868488
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Book Description
Mary Poplin's chronicle of her volunteer work with the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta provides an inside glimpse into Mother Teresa's life of service to the poor. Transformed by the experience, Poplin discovered how all of us can find our own places of meaningful work and service.
City Requiem, Calcutta
Author: Ananya Roy
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816639335
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
Housing developments emerge amid the paddy fields on the fringes of Calcutta; overflowing trains carry peasant women to informal urban labor markets in a daily commute against hunger; land is settled and claimed in a complex choreography of squatting and evictions: such, Ananya Roy contends, are the distinctive spaces of a communism for the new millennium -- where, at a moment of liberalization, the hegemony of poverty is quietly reproduced. An ethnography of urban development in Calcutta, Roy's book explores the dynamics of class and gender in the persistence of poverty. City Requiem, Calcutta emphasizes how gender itself is spatialized, and how gender relations are negotiated within the geopolitics of modernity and through the everyday practices of territory. Thus Roy shows how urban developmentalism, in its populist guise, reproduces the relations of masculinist patronage, and, in its entrepreneurial guise, seeks to reclaim a bourgeois Calcutta, gentlemanly in its nostalgias. In doing so, her work expands the field of poverty studies by showing how a politics of poverty is also a poverty of knowledge, a construction and management of social and spatial categories.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816639335
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
Housing developments emerge amid the paddy fields on the fringes of Calcutta; overflowing trains carry peasant women to informal urban labor markets in a daily commute against hunger; land is settled and claimed in a complex choreography of squatting and evictions: such, Ananya Roy contends, are the distinctive spaces of a communism for the new millennium -- where, at a moment of liberalization, the hegemony of poverty is quietly reproduced. An ethnography of urban development in Calcutta, Roy's book explores the dynamics of class and gender in the persistence of poverty. City Requiem, Calcutta emphasizes how gender itself is spatialized, and how gender relations are negotiated within the geopolitics of modernity and through the everyday practices of territory. Thus Roy shows how urban developmentalism, in its populist guise, reproduces the relations of masculinist patronage, and, in its entrepreneurial guise, seeks to reclaim a bourgeois Calcutta, gentlemanly in its nostalgias. In doing so, her work expands the field of poverty studies by showing how a politics of poverty is also a poverty of knowledge, a construction and management of social and spatial categories.
The Epic City
Author: Kushanava Choudhury
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 163557157X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Book Description
Shortlisted for the 2018 Ondaatje Prize Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year A masterful and entirely fresh portrait of great hopes and dashed dreams in a mythical city from a major new literary voice. Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times. After graduating from Princeton, he moved back to the world which his immigrant parents had abandoned, to a city built between a river and a swamp, where the moisture-drenched air swarms with mosquitos after sundown. Once the capital of the British Raj, and then India's industrial and cultural hub, by 2001 Calcutta was clearly past its prime. Why, his relatives beseeched him, had he returned? Surely, he could have moved to Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore, where a new Golden Age of consumption was being born. Yet fifteen million people still lived in Calcutta. Working for the Statesman, its leading English newspaper, Kushanava Choudhury found the streets of his childhood unchanged by time. Shouting hawkers still overran the footpaths, fish-sellers squatted on bazaar floors; politics still meant barricades and bus burnings, while Communist ministers travelled in motorcades. Sifting through the chaos for the stories that never make the papers, Kushanava Choudhury paints a soulful, compelling portrait of the everyday lives that make Calcutta. Written with humanity, wit and insight, The Epic City is an unforgettable depiction of an era, and a city which is a world unto itself.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 163557157X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Book Description
Shortlisted for the 2018 Ondaatje Prize Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year A masterful and entirely fresh portrait of great hopes and dashed dreams in a mythical city from a major new literary voice. Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times. After graduating from Princeton, he moved back to the world which his immigrant parents had abandoned, to a city built between a river and a swamp, where the moisture-drenched air swarms with mosquitos after sundown. Once the capital of the British Raj, and then India's industrial and cultural hub, by 2001 Calcutta was clearly past its prime. Why, his relatives beseeched him, had he returned? Surely, he could have moved to Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore, where a new Golden Age of consumption was being born. Yet fifteen million people still lived in Calcutta. Working for the Statesman, its leading English newspaper, Kushanava Choudhury found the streets of his childhood unchanged by time. Shouting hawkers still overran the footpaths, fish-sellers squatted on bazaar floors; politics still meant barricades and bus burnings, while Communist ministers travelled in motorcades. Sifting through the chaos for the stories that never make the papers, Kushanava Choudhury paints a soulful, compelling portrait of the everyday lives that make Calcutta. Written with humanity, wit and insight, The Epic City is an unforgettable depiction of an era, and a city which is a world unto itself.
Calcutta on the Eve of Her Tercentenary
Author: Asok Mitra
Publisher: Abhinav Publications
ISBN: 9788170172703
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Book Description
The Author S Professional Involvement With Calcutta Began With His Census Taking Of The Primate City In 1951 And Continued Through His Work In The Development And Commerce And Industries Departments Of West Bengal Up To 1958.Thereafter, The Census Of India In 1961, Followed By Two Long Spells In The Planning Commission And Another Nine Years Of Teaching And Research In Jawaharlal Nehru University During 1973-83 Enabled Him To Widen And Deepen His Perceptions. The Ten Essays Together With The Preface Selected From Among Two Dozen Papers Presented On Various Occasions Between 1959 And 1989 Bring Out The Eve Of Her Tercentenary In 1990. They, As The Preface Spells Out, Have A Unity Of Focus And Concern On The Role And Future Of The City In The Context Of West Bengal And The Eastern Region.
Publisher: Abhinav Publications
ISBN: 9788170172703
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Book Description
The Author S Professional Involvement With Calcutta Began With His Census Taking Of The Primate City In 1951 And Continued Through His Work In The Development And Commerce And Industries Departments Of West Bengal Up To 1958.Thereafter, The Census Of India In 1961, Followed By Two Long Spells In The Planning Commission And Another Nine Years Of Teaching And Research In Jawaharlal Nehru University During 1973-83 Enabled Him To Widen And Deepen His Perceptions. The Ten Essays Together With The Preface Selected From Among Two Dozen Papers Presented On Various Occasions Between 1959 And 1989 Bring Out The Eve Of Her Tercentenary In 1990. They, As The Preface Spells Out, Have A Unity Of Focus And Concern On The Role And Future Of The City In The Context Of West Bengal And The Eastern Region.