Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata: From a Colonial to a Post-Marxist City by Siddhartha Sen (review)

The bulk of Calcutta/Kolkata’s urban history in the twentieth century was written by sociologists, anthropologists, and amateur historians.¹ Architectural historians found little of significance in Calcutta; a handful of the city’s mansions and public buildings were pressed into the service of generating larger narratives of Indian architecture and urbanism.² Even in the early 1990s, there was only one published plan of a Calcutta building: Government House. The city’s vernacular architectural history was entirely ignored, except for studies that dealt with the city’s slums. This state of affairs has changed in the last two decades as scholars have undertaken rigorous field and archival research and expanded the scope of inquiry to include a wider range of social issues as well as a larger repertoire of buildings. Book-length treatments of the city’s built environment, however, remain few.³ Siddhartha Sen’s Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata contributes to this growing literature.

The scope of the book is self-consciously “ambitious.” It begins with the founding of the city in 1690 to become the capital of the British empire in India and concludes with its turn of the twenty-first century history as the provincial capital of the state of West Bengal (21–22). Since this includes a treatment of the city’s much-neglected post-independence planning history, the title of the book builds expectation. Organized in five chapters, including chapter 1, “Overture,” the book provides a broad chronological overview of the city’s built environment. The four central chapters of the book delineate a four-part division of the city’s urban history, with the analyses in each chapter connecting the city scale with the building scale (233).

Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to colonial urbanism. Chapter 2, “Colonizing Kolkata,” concerns the “unplanned” phase from 1690 to the turn of the nineteenth century. Here Sen sets the founding of Calcutta by Job Charnock within a larger scenario of European settlements in India and Bengal, including references to Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, and French settlements that served as predecessors and models for English colonizers in Bengal (40–48). The description of the nascent urban fabric of Calcutta in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is useful, as most historians of the city give short shrift to this aspect of the city’s growth. The rest of the chapter is devoted to the emergence of Calcutta as a “city of palaces” in which architecture and planning were deployed as symbols of power. This story is placed within the context of the eventual demise of rival colonial powers in the Bengal delta. Chapter 3, “Building a Neo-Classical, Beautiful, and Clean City,” takes the building of a new Government House in 1805 as a key moment in the phase of British colonial planning that saw the transformation of a straggling city into an imperial metropolis. Sen describes the many initiatives unfurled to produce an urban order, beginning with the Lottery Committee Report (1817) and ending with plans of the Calcutta Improvement Trust (CIT), particularly E. P. Richards’s Plan for the Trust (1915).

Chapter 4, “Decolonizing Kolkata,” tackles the post-independence (post-1947) history of architecture and planning. This period of the city’s urban history begins with American-style planning and the establishment of the Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Organization in 1961, followed by the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority in 1970. Sen argues that the fear of communism drove the American model of planning and provides a good sense of the politics of post-independence planning within a larger nationalist view of city planning as embodying the modernity of the new nation-state. Chapter 5, “Globalizing Kolkata,” addresses the shift in planning paradigms after the liberalization of India’s economy. The Left Front Government that came to power in the state of West Bengal in...