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  • Singing in a New World: Street Songs and Urban Experience in Colonial Calcutta
  • Anindita Ghosh (bio)

Calcutta in the late nineteenth century was a melting-pot of migrant workers, artisans, servants, boatmen, labourers, petty traders and shopkeepers and an army of clerks, besides of course the better-known and more frequently studied residents, the educated Bengali classes. As the administrative and commercial capital of British India, the city was the quintessential harbinger of modernity in the sub-continent. And yet we know rather little of the responses of its more humble inhabitants to these tumultuous developments. What was the reaction of these people to the changing world around them? Contemporary songs about Calcutta, some of which were later captured in print, provide possible entry-points into the mental world of the city’s lower social orders. This article is an investigation of urban experiences in the colonial metropolis as articulated in its street song culture. It looks at how singing and songs in Calcutta in the late nineteenth century animated the urban domain with widely shared discourses on the city – on women, material changes, natural disasters, and sexuality – validating the quotidian experience of a recently urbanized world. The incidents and experiences narrated in the songs offered common reference points around which public debate could crystallize and urban sensibilities were shaped. This study therefore also traces the emergence of an urban public that was visible and vocal, and quite organically located in the city’s open public spaces – streets, markets, open grounds – just beneath the more educated layers of society.

In extant historical literature colonial Calcutta is overwhelmingly defined by the experiences of the educated male Bengali middle classes or bhadralok, and viewed as a product of liberal western governmentality, modern civic institutions and a cultural regeneration.1 With the notable exception of the highly influential work of Sumanta Banerjee who paints a vibrant picture of street cultures in the nineteenth century – although he is more interested in tracing their demise than their survival – the wider groups of Calcutta residents remain confined within narratives of labour or nationalist mass protest, riots, and epidemics.2 This is also perhaps because serious scholars of social and cultural history, while routinely using Calcutta as a backdrop for tracing historical processes, have rarely made it the focus of their attention.3 The present study is deliberately strung lower to take into [End Page 111]


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Fig. 1.

Colonel Turner’s house, 6 Wood St, after the 1865 cyclone. From Anon, 48 Photographs Showing the Effects of the Great Cyclone of 1864, Calcutta, 1865, Plate 13.

Courtesy, National Library, Calcutta


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Fig. 2.

The Floating Howrah Bridge over the Hooghly, postcard, Calcutta, c. 1910.

© British Library Board, Asia, Pacific and African Collections, PDP 1170 1(29).

[End Page 112]

account not just the experiences of these educated groups, but also various other layers of city life – equally representative and sentient, but not so strongly visible in historical literature. Popular culture aired scandals and sensational topical themes alongside serious social and political concerns. This brought together such lower and middling social groups in shared constituencies for reflection, critique and questioning of the contemporary urban experience.4

In all the songs discussed here, the city is the fundamental organizing category of the subject matter, and in their presentation the producers assumed shared interests between the listener, performer and writer. Both the specificity and the temporality of the songs made them unique, not as fleeting moments of city life, but as critical experiential frames through which city dwellers could capture the tremendous social and material changes occurring around them. In a recent essay Ranajit Guha talks of the significance of the ‘everyday’ in Calcutta’s colonial urban life.5 Recurrent emphases on the everyday, the ordinary and routine, in the midst of the major events being described, offer mundane but extraordinarily piquant images of life in the city. Songs were sometimes sung extempore or from handwritten song-sheets, sometimes printed for performance and sale. Both genres were highly stylized and faithful to traditional formats of composition, but also very distinct as newer ‘urban’ variants, as evident in...

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