Book review: Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure, Property, and Political Culture in Twentieth Century Calcutta

Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure, Property, and Political Culture in Twentieth Century Calcutta, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022; 305 pp.: ISBN: 978-1-00-910011-3, £75.00 (hbk)

The 21st century has witnessed an unencumbered process of accumulation and crisis. Cities continue to swallow up urban commons and farmlands for capital’s unending desire for territory and circulation. These processes have exposed and aggravated an ongoing and disruptive climate crisis that is turning urban spaces into heat islands, promoting new forms of urban life and disrupting historic relations. The 21st century in the Global South is characterised by rampant peri-urbanisation through flyovers, highways, expressways, neoliberal transformations, abject infrastructures and the retreat of the commons. But it is also the era of mediatised publics, urban politics and renewed articulations for the right to the city.

Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay’s Streets in Motion takes us to the foundational logics of the contemporary urban through the triadic formulation of property, territory and accumulation. Streets in Motion weaves a rich history of public culture, political life and urban transformations in Calcutta, India, serving as a vital addition to studies of the long 20th century, especially in India (Barua, 2021; Nair, 2005).

With the street as a main character, Bandyopadhyay sees obstruction as the equal other of motion as a capitalist fetish. Rather than an aberration, ‘Obstruction—as a domain of human subjectivity and diversity—continuously modifies motion. Accessing motion through obstruction unmasks and hence de-naturalises motion and unravels social relations in it’ (p. 16). Through this, obstruction adds historical contingency to motion, unravelling the constitutive ways in which people inhabit and make space in the city (p. 14). The book therefore investigates and unpacks this motion–obstruction dialectic through Calcutta’s long 20th century.

The book is divided into five empirical chapters book-ended by an Introduction and Epilogue. Chapter 1 charts a history of the modern street as automobile-friendly through the development of asphalt roads, and the simultaneous burgeoning of street hawking and popular nationalist agitations. Chapter 2 investigates the rise of communal violence and the onset of segregation in the city. This coincided with the Calcutta Improvement Trust’s policy of recoupment that brought about propertied transformations, a housing crisis and a rise in land prices. As Marwari populations came to dominate land and property, Chapter 3 takes us to the interwar decades that saw the entrenchment of a communally demarcated city in official correspondence. Mass politics and violence thus laid the groundwork for a ghettoised early post-colonial Calcutta. Encountering a divided, congested city, Chapter 4 examines suburbanisation as an attempt to bring ‘wastelands’ into circuits of capital. Here, we also see the de-commodification of property in the postcolonial period through encroachment, revealing the tension between ‘private property, public property, and the commons’ (p. 160). The last chapter addresses the history of Calcutta’s people’s economy, through organised footpath hawking. Bandyopadhyay draws attention to the ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ practices utilised by hawkers to negotiate with the state and capital to lay claims to the city, thereby expanding the idea of people as infrastructure (Simone, 2004).

Rather than proceeding chronologically, Streets in Motion weaves together the intricate histories of the motion–obstruction dialectic through the street. As Asef Bayat reminds us, streets are crucial sites for reproducing economic and cultural life, where conflicts are shaped and expressed, collective identities are forged and symbolic utterances play out (Bayat, 2012: 119–120).

The modern street emerged to accommodate the automobile, the vehicle of speed, and to facilitate the flow of goods for the jute industry on the city’s fringes. This, however, required the reconfiguration of the city through the removal of settlements of the urban poor and bringing property into circulation. This new street and pavement emerged to produce consumers of upcoming markets and protect property through a buffer zone. However, the reconfigured landscape invited commoners and agitators who utilised the street for habitation, trade and nationalist assertions, often bleeding into European quarters and posing a threat to property. To address such obstructions, the colonial administration escalated its urban renewal and gentrification initiatives underway since the late 19th century. Bandyopadhyay shows how the Calcutta Improvement Trust’s projects led to a spectacular rise in property prices and rampant speculation, displacing the middle class and the urban poor, especially Muslims, to the fringes of the city. These developments facilitated the rise of Marwari (trading community) property owners who replaced Bengal’s old rentier class.

The transformation of demography through the property market laid the groundwork for a religious reorganisation of space through communal conflicts from the early 20th century. Between 1910 and 1926, similar to instances across other Indian cities, the city witnessed regular Hindu–Muslim violence around religious sites and festivals, and attacks on Marwari properties. Communal riots, along with urban renewal and gentrification, began contributing to a gradual Hinduisation of the city. Marwaris began driving out Muslims from particular neighbourhoods, replacing Muslim labour with that of up-country non-Muslim migrants (pp. 75–100).

By this time, the city was read through its religiously demarcated neighbourhoods that were to be policed and controlled, institutionalising a polarised city. Communal violence and police action were shaped by ‘the spatial and architectural order of the city’ (p. 123). ‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’ neighbourhoods across Indian cities were demarcated by the streets that established boundaries (Haynes and Rao, 2013; Parveen, 2021), and emerged as sites of conflict, interaction, policing and labelling (pp. 123–127). This set the foundation for Calcutta’s Civil War in 1946 which led to the territorial defeat of the Muslims and Calcutta’s transformation into a Hindu-majority city. After 1947, Hindu Partition refugees from East Bengal utilised jabardakhal or collective encroachment to lay claims to the city. Using spatial tactics and socio-political networks, these ‘citizen-refugees’ (Sen, 2018) transformed Calcutta’s urban landscape through squatting, negotiation and hawking (pp. 178–188). The dark side to this ‘obstruction as community’ was the concerted displacement and ghettoisation of Muslims.

However, here, Bandyopadhyay’s lens becomes slightly restrictive. The discussion of police officer NH Khundkar’s testimony on the 1946 violence highlights the contradictions of the planning–practice dialectic (pp. 127–139). Localised knowledge of police officers and populations betrayed the neat boundaries of official divisions. Although street names were intended to make the city more legible and easier to police, urban dwellers navigated the city through a local knowledge of districts (Harris and Lewis, 2012). Colonial efforts to enumerate, record, and fix populations in time and space were disrupted by Khundkar’s elaborate descriptions of ‘houses, buildings, shops, residential quarters, streets, lanes, and mosques’ (p.134). While revealing the complexity of communal distribution in the area, the testimony revealed the strategic and mobile geographies of mobs that established and traversed ‘interfaces’ and ‘sanctuaries’ (Feldman, 1991). Here, we can think about neighbourhoods which, more than streets, served as sites of mobilisation and as safe havens during moments of conflict. For Bandyopadhyay, however, the neighbourhood appears more incidental than essential to urban life. The discussion on territorialisation could have been enriched by engaging with Jim Masselos’s (1991) idea of ‘accustomed space’ i.e. familiar neighbourhoods, streets or particular routes that are defined, disrupted and reconfigured through everyday acts and monumental events. Such disruptions constantly redefine spatial and symbolic boundaries in the city.

Nonetheless, Streets in Motion is a meticulous examination of accretive processes of property, political culture, and violence that have produced contemporary Calcutta. Encountering spaces and infrastructure built for the circulation of goods, bodies and capital, pavement dwellers, hawkers, refugees and the urban poor have repeatedly utilised and transformed urban streets to lay claims to the city and the nation. With its capacious timespan and interdisciplinary approach to unveil the myriad articulations of ‘struggles in and about the urban space’ (Bayat, 2012), Streets in Motion serves as an important empirical and methodological contribution to studies of the 20th century city.

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