Twentieth-century India, and in this specific context Calcutta, experienced and participated in some of the most crucial political and economic transformations that academia and even those outside would continue to discuss for decades. The city witnessed the freedom struggle for an independent India, three post-colonial decades, the 21-month-long Emergency period under the governance of Indira Gandhi, and finally, the onset of liberalization with the implementation of the New Economic Policy in 1991. Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, an Indian historian, sheds light on some of these metamorphic events in his newly published book Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure, Property, and Political Culture in Twentieth-century Calcutta, published by the Cambridge University Press in 2022. This piece of excellent writing appeals to not only social scientists interested in the politics of a fast-changing city but also urban designers who work with squatter communities and footpath dwellers and how urban spaces are a space of negotiation between various social categories like class and religion. The overarching theme that came across as I read the book was a detailed study of how social production of motion takes place in the predominantly urban context of twentieth-century Calcutta.

The book takes the readers through various underlying themes, such as the fetishization of motion in urban locales since motion, for the bourgeoisie, represents progress and positivity. In a dialectic contradiction to motion is obstructionism which includes acts (like political mass mobilizations) that goes against the normative and disrupts the ongoing motion of the city. As the title of the book suggests, infrastructure, property, and political culture are the key aspects that the author looks at.

Bandyopadhyay gives us five chapters, each providing prolific insights into the workings of the city supported by well-researched and in-depth data. The three main actors we meet in the first chapter are the engineers, the commoners, and the agitators. The one common thread that connects the three groups is the ‘street’ which came about in the nineteenth-century ‘urban insurrections’ and developed in a twentieth-century context of the automobile revolution accompanied by a mass political culture that often took to the streets of Calcutta. The street is the framing device, not just in the present text but in reality, as well. The street is an intermediary space shared by buildings, dwellings, bridges, and the humans that occupy these. As a result, the street plays a crucial role in determining social life in the urban context. The engineers design the street, the commoners commute it, and the agitators use it to raise their voices against the dictates of the rulers. In this motion-driven urban city whose development becomes the sole goal of the Improvement Trust from 1911 onwards, the agitators, street dwellers, hawkers, etc., become the obstruction. The author attempts to demystify motion and make readers realize how obstructions are a vital part of urban motion. Interestingly, what the authorities (the British initially and then the State government) did by making broader roads as part of the development project ended up fueling an entire culture of agitators in the form of protestors as well as hawkers creating their own space in the streets.

The author argues that the aim of the Improvement Trust and the Municipal Corporation was to gentrify the streets by getting rid of the many refugee bustees dwelling on the street and pushing the working-class population to the margins. The effects of this were felt mainly by the poor Muslims of the city who were relegated to occupy spaces in the suburbs despite the high property prices there. The wealthy Marwari business owners replaced the bustees with their plush residents and in areas like Bara Bazaar, with commercial shops. This instantly gave birth to a stringent communal polarization but the sources of obstruction did not become invisible. Instead, they took to the streets of Calcutta which was then redrawn by communal violence.

I especially found the chapter on hawkers interesting. Having grown up in a city where spaces like New Market, Hati Bagan, Sealdah, and Gariahat have been a part of my student life due to the affordable prices at which one could buy an end number of goods from clothes to other essentials, Bandyopadhyay’s historical account of the struggles of the hawkers provides a context which I was unfamiliar with. The Jabardhakal movement, wherein hawkers made a space for selling goods on the footpaths despite dissent from the authorities in the form of Operation Sunshine and the elites residing in the nearby areas, had a lasting impact on the urban space and the politics that ensued. The hawkers lay their claim to public property and created an alternative vocabulary around the usage of such property to meet livelihood necessities. Their collective movement over the years was carried out through resistance against the bourgeoisie property laws of the State. The Hawker Sangram Committee and their struggle of creating livelihood for the hawkers of Calcutta provide ample opportunity to imagine a more ‘inclusive urbanism’ through obstructionism of motion.

Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure, Property, and Political Culture in Twentieth-century Calcutta is a far more detailed book than I have probably portrayed it to be in this brief review. Mobilization of space in twentieth-century Calcutta is at the heart of the text and as the author very rightly points out ‘the next generation will read this book and come to know about a century that they had not experienced’. In my case, I also came to know of my city, Kolkata, from an era that I did not live through.   

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Sudatta Ghosh is a PhD research scholar in the Department of Sociology, South Asian University (SAU), New Delhi.