Deriving from the recent discussions on paideia (spiritual exercise), which links knowledge with mores and manners, this article argues that the expurgation of certain extreme tastes from the genteel Bengali palate, in the course of ‘nationalist’ reform in the 19th century, demonstrates the operation of a certain ‘civilizing process’ coterminous with the wider process of westernization. Positing a homology between this and the suppression of the carnivalesque in Europe, it further shows that through the well-known process of the ‘return of the repressed’, the marginalized elements are reconfigured in a new category of anti-food – street-food – consumed by marginal sections of the population. In sum, the historic process of disavowal of the extreme tastes leads to the formation of a new symbolic economy.
Cultural Studies needs to be reinvented for India - a polity where the larger part of the population are disenfranchised non-citizens. The terrain of ‘culture’ here being differently constituted, manners could serve as a useful category for theorizing this difference. Included in ‘manners’ are a different historical formation of subjectivity as well as another ontology of representation. Further, Cultural Studies, so conceived, could productively interrogate that excess of Indian political/public culture which cannot be penetrated by disciplinary political theory. This article is a plea for a Political Cultural Studies.
Man's relation to locations, and through locations to spaces, inheres in his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, thought essentially.-Martin Heidegger Like all great cities, Calcutta has its share of catty rumors, many of which are about Calcuttans themselves. One of these runs as follows: Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897-1999), the noted Bengali Anglophile and man of letters, visited England for the first time sometime in the late 1950s. Out on the streets of London, Niradbabu started navigating his cab like a veteran Londoner. What the driver found incongruous was the fact that Niradbabu mentioned some landmarks which no longer existed. It was explained to him that these had either been demolished or bombed during the War. Now, how did he know about the city so well without ever setting foot in England? By his own admission, he was brought up to consume England as an ever-present entity, "very much like the sky above our head," in his remote ancestral East Bengal village, largely through books, pictures, and newspapers. 1 the past of the modern Chaudhuri was not exceptional in this sense. The colonial Bengali visitors' first impression of England, as we will see, was tainted with a sense of deja vu. 2 For these colonial tourists, travel to England was not so much a journey into the unknown as a confirmation of what was already known about England thanks to 'print capitalism' and 'travel capitalism.' 3 Our travelers were not on the lookout for the marvelous and the unknown-their gaze constantly scrutinized whether the real England measured up to their hyperreal image of England. If it did not, whether the force needed to close the gap could have been productive of a certain 'critique' of colonialism is a question that has recently been 293
This photo-essay analyzes the politics of dwelling of the inhabitants of ‘outcast’ Calcutta - the city that is the nightmare of urban planners and whose squalor, filth and poverty are taken to be indexes of the failure of the postcolonial urbanism as such. The city that turned itself into a barricade during the street-fighting years of the 1960s is now about to turn its back on its own subalterns (migrants from poorer areas), participating in urban cleansing drives that derive from neo-liberal dictates. Showing that the squatters also dwell and forge solidarities underpinned by an ethic of survival, this essay draws attention to non-state political formations emerging out of the negotiations of the City Form with the non-civic but enabling life-forms prevalent in subaltern Calcutta.
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