Historical conjunctures in Kolkata and Lae 43
PART I
Historical conjunctures in
Kolkata and Lae
At first glance, Kolkata and Lae might appear to have little in common. Indeed, one of the questions I was most often asked during my research was why I chose such different fieldsites. I would answer with another question: what is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Kolkata or Lae? Invariably, the reply would include (among other things) a description of each city’s built environment. Kolkata evoked
images of bastis, poverty, squalor, and decay; Lae prompted discussions of potholes,
crime, security, and settlements. After some discussion, people I spoke with soon saw what I see in both cities: that the built or human-made environment is a distinguishing characteristic of each place. Part I of my thesis explores the historical conjunctures that contributed to the physical and social spaces occupied by the women I worked with. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, habitat and capital, I show how urban
bastis and settlements are products of histories that affect the ways in which women organise collectively to create meaningful lives for themselves and their families (their
quest for being, in Bourdieu’s terms). Part I contributes to my overall thesis aims by
showing how history and social structure impact on the women’s quest for being. By historical conjunctures I mean the particular historical sociocultural moments and combinations of events that shaped the physical and social spaces we inhabit.
Popular images, perceptions and discourses concerning Kolkata’s bastis and Lae’s
settlements, such as those found in media reports, political propaganda and everyday conversations, sometimes overlook or forget that each area has a specific history and instead view those places, and their inhabitants, as “natural” or “just the way things
are”. This is what Bourdieu terms doxa, the taken-for-granted assumptions, received
ideals and commonsense understandings about the world and ourselves. I agree with Bourdieu when he argues that we can break with such perceptions “only through a rigorous analysis of the relations between the structures of social space and those of physical space” (1999:123). Following anthropologists such as Philippe Bourgios (1996), Paul Farmer (2003), Marshall Sahlins (1985) and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992), I am convinced that we cannot understand the present without looking to the past, hence my focus on historical structures.
I discussed habitus and capital in the Introduction to this thesis; here I briefly elaborate on Bourdieu’s notion of habitat. Habitat refers to the human environment, the
44 Part I
way that historical sociocultural structures materialise in the spaces we inhabit. Human beings, according to Bourdieu, occupy both physical and social spaces. Physical spaces are the sites or places we occupy with our bodies, whereas social spaces (or ‘fields’) comprise the sites or positions we occupy in relation to other social agents (Bourdieu, 1999:124). Habitat encompasses both social and physical spaces and provides a way of understanding how social characteristics (capital, habitus, and our position in
particular fields) are geographically distributed in relation to others. “There is no space in a hierarchized society that is not itself hierarchized and that does not express
hierarchies and social distances, in a form that is more or less distorted and, above all,
disguised by the naturalization effect produced by the long-term inscription of social
realities in the natural world,” writes Bourdieu. “Thus historical differences can seem to have arisen from the nature of things” (Bourdieu, 1999:124). One of my aims in Part I is to destabilise any naturalisation effect by highlighting the historical conjunctures that helped shape each city.
Kolkata and Lae have very different histories, colonial experiences, and sociocultural contexts, as I noted above. Focusing on habitat contributes to another of my thesis aims, which is to approach these different sites with a common conceptual framework. The differences between each place will be immediately apparent from the content of the following two chapters. However, my focus on habitat also highlights important similarities in social practices in Kolkata, Howrah, and Lae. I draw out key insights in terms of their connections to hope in the Discussion at the end of Part I.
Chapter 1 focuses on poverty, which is perhaps the most recognisable urban feature of Kolkata and Howrah. My aim is to show that poverty is not “natural” and can be traced to specific historical conjunctures. I discuss how Bengal has a history of prosperity, not poverty, and look at the ways in which trade, colonialism, industrial growth, labour migration, and capital shaped the social and physical spaces of Howrah and Kolkata. I conclude by suggesting that bastis can be viewed as “forgotten places,” habitats at once actively neglected, but deeply inhabited, by the state. Such habitats demand resourcefulness and ingenuity in the context of urban poverty, and provide fertile ground for NGOs such as those described in this thesis to fill the gap left by the state and foster development hope in the process.
Chapter 2 takes us in a different direction. Here I explore the “road to
development,” a common expression in PNG, and discuss how Lae’s habitat has been shaped by colonialism and transportation networks. I show how roads simultaneously act as a form of development hope by increasing the sense of possibilities in life, while at the same time are blamed for contributing to growing social problems such as crime and the spread of settlements. Lae’s potholes, and the poor infrastructure within the
Historical conjunctures in Kolkata and Lae 45
city’s settlements, serve as tangible reminders of government failure to achieve or sustain development.
Before we go to Kolkata, a brief comment on writing about Bengal’s social and political history is necessary. The volume and depth of scholarship on India’s history is overwhelming. Much of this literature is dense, uses concepts in ways sometimes
unfamiliar to Western audiences (e.g. secularism,1 communalism2), and requires
significant prior knowledge (for instance, authors can write about “1757” or “the Mutiny” without further elaboration. I discuss the events leading up to the 1757 Battle of Plassey and the 1857 Mutiny in Chapter 1). There is also a massive amount of work critiquing colonial historiography and debating the political issues involved in
accessing and writing social history.3 On top of this, my experiences in Kolkata
suggested an “enthusiasm for history” (Chakrabarty, 2008:170) deeply embedded in
contemporary Bengali society. To give just one example, the first salwar kameez4 I
purchased, made of hand-woven cotton, prompted comments from my participants as well as other people I met about how nice it was to see me wearing it and did I know
that Gandhi promoted khadi (homespun cloth) during his non-cooperation movement
against the British in the 1920s? I do not pretend to have made use of all the literature available on the topics discussed in Chapter 1 and the account presented here is necessarily partial and selective, limited to issues of direct relevance to my thesis. Nevertheless, it provides a good introduction to some key historical conjunctures that helped make the habitats of Howrah and Kolkata what they are today.
Finally, a note on spelling: as I discussed earlier, I use ‘Kolkata’ to conform with the city’s official designation, ‘Calcutta’ to refer to the city before its 2001 name change, and retain the original spelling when I quote from other sources.
1 The Constitution of India grants every citizen the right to freedom of religion. To uphold this right, and to adhere to the principle of secularism (e.g. separating the state from any particular religion), the independent state of India created legislation on religious as well as social matters, giving each religious group the freedom to live by its own laws. In this way, religious laws (such as the personal laws discussed in Chapter 4) can take precedence over state laws. This notion of secularism differs from standard English uses of the term, as Partha Chatterjee discusses (1994:1769). Secularism in India is the subject of much debate; some texts I found useful include P. Chatterjee (1994, 1995), M. Hasan (1997), Z. Hasan (2010), Nandy (1990), Needham & Sunder Rajan (2007), Sarkar (1997), A. Sen (2005).
2 Communalism is an idea that has changed over time and is not restricted to India (R. G. Fox, 1996). In India, ‘communalism’ has a specific history (Bose & Jalal, 1998:6-7, 142-143; Ludden, 1996:11) and has come to designate politicised community identities, usually along religious lines (e.g. Muslim, Hindu). Differences defining and dividing communal groups, such as religious practices concerning cow slaughter, often form the basis for antagonism and conflict. Like secularism, much scholarship is concerned with communalism in India; some key texts include Breckenridge & van der Veer (1993), Pandey (1990), van der Veer (1993, 1996).
3 Perhaps the most well known body of work in this vein comes from the Subaltern Studies group of scholars whose approach is one of “history from below” (i.e., theorising colonialism and Orientalism and discussing the activities and agency of non-elites rather than those in positions of power). See Chakrabarty (2010, 27 August) or Sarkar (1997) for discussions of the history and development of Subaltern Studies.
4 A three-piece outfit consisting of a kameez (a long tunic) worn over a pair of matching salwar (loose pants), and a dupatta (long scarf) draped across the shoulders.
46 [Interlude]
“Every day in summer, 10 or 12 people die
from diarrhoea”
[Interlude 2. On water]
“One of the biggest problems we have in the basti is diarrhoea,” Amina said to
me during a conversation in January 2006.1 “Every day in summer, 10 or 12 people die
from diarrhoea. The main problem is pani (water). Unclean water carries disease.
Everyone drinks unclean water. For cooking, it’s fine, but the water in the basti is very
bad.”
Amina shuffled into a more comfortable sitting position on the floor of the Howrah Pilot Project (HPP) office, tucking her right leg underneath her petite frame and hugging her left thigh to her chest. I had less success finding comfort on the cold concrete floor despite the mats she had set out for us, and fidgeted. Amina Khatoon was born into a Muslim family in Priya Manna (PM) Basti in 1980 (according to her hospital birth certificate: the year is 1978 on her higher school certificate and 1976 on her Below the Poverty Line card). Today she is coordinator, secretary and head teacher of HPP. HPP is a small, grassroots organisation that runs several community
development initiatives in PM Basti, including a masala (spice)-making enterprise, a
women’s savings scheme, access to family planning services and cataract surgery, and
Talimi Haq School. We were discussing the major problems experienced by the basti’s
residents. Water, illness (from malnutrition, smoke from coal and cloth fires, and poor
sanitation) and inadequate medical facilities were at the top of the list. These problems are as old as the basti.
“2003 was a really hot summer2 and a lot of water was used for drinking, for
cooking,” she continued. “The water was not good and people were very sick. There
were no beds in the hospital. People were dying in their homes. In this basti between 10
and 20 people died every day. Children died, parents died, all of diarrhoea. They needed to boil water to drink it but they didn’t. The children especially got sick. Their mothers go out to work and the children stay and play at home, drinking water without boiling it. They run around and play, then get thirsty and drink without thinking about it. For three months this was a dangerous place to live. Every year
diarrhoea comes to the basti in summer, but 2003 was the worst.”
1 Appadurai (2004:78-79) points out that the absence of toilets and good sewerage systems can make diarrhoea a humiliating as well as dangerous experience in urban slums. See Appadurai (2004) for a discussion of Toilet Festivals and “the politics of shit” in Mumbai’s slums.
2 Severe heat waves in 2003 caused the deaths of thousands of people in India and Europe, with temperatures in West Bengal exceeding 40°C.
Kolkata, City of Crows 47
Chapter 1
Kolkata, City of Crows
“I like crows,” Ramaswamy said as we sat on the balcony of his house in a southern suburb of Kolkata city on a warm winter evening in January 2007. Crows are everywhere in Kolkata, more common than cycle rickshaws or street hawkers, and their cawing is an ever-present feature of the city. During the day their squawks merge with other noise – horns honking, dogs barking, vendors plying their wares, traffic rumbling – and their morning and dusk calls are sounds I associate with the city. I looked at the large crow that had landed near us and captured Ramaswamy’s attention. The eye that searched the balcony was bright but its straggly black feathers were dull and the claws twisted on one foot.
Ramaswamy sipped his tea. “Crows have adapted well to the urban setting,” he continued. V. Ramaswamy is a man of many skills – grassroots organiser, social
planner, educator, writer, business executive, translator – and I had come to talk about
his work as a social activist for basti dwellers in Howrah (or Hāora) and Kolkata cities.
He is also a critical thinker who has written much on life and politics in Kolkata.1
“I have been observing crows for some years now and have noticed how they are starting to be deformed because of all the toxic shit they ingest in the city. It’s a good reflection of the poison going into the environment.”
“They can certainly take a lot of punishment,” I said, surveying the haze of grey that obscured buildings more than a few hundred metres distant. I find the pollution in Kolkata stifling. Unlike when in New Zealand, I have to carry an asthma-relieving inhaler with me to cope with the smoke and fumes and dust that fill my lungs.
“Yes, they are very resourceful,” said Ramaswamy. “They are also scavengers, living off the city’s waste. Actually, they make a good symbol for Kolkata.”
1 Ramaswamy has set up his own discourse on urban renewal, politics and poverty, much of which can be found online at one of his blogs (e.g. Cuckoo’s Call at http://www.cuckooscall.blogspot.com/), at Blogbharti.com (Ramaswamy, 2007), and at websites of educational institutions such as the Asia Society (Ramaswamy, 29 April 2002). Publications in academic journals include Ramaswamy & Chakravarti, (1997b), Ramaswamy (2008) and Ramaswamy et al. (2010).
48 Chapter 1
We went on to talk of other things, but in 2009 Ramaswamy returned to his
thoughts on his blog, Cuckoo’s Call:
The crow is the most commonly seen bird in Calcutta. It is a most resourceful creature, with amazing habits, remarkable persistence and awesome tenderness. But it can also be a most annoying creature. It is first and foremost a scavenger. The crow could be an apt symbol of Calcutta, of its people and its ethos. But that would only be with a touch of irony and pathos: symbolising the degraded condition that the human being has fallen to. The common man in Calcutta has been reduced to being a scavenger. There is a great resourcefulness implicit in that, but that is not what man was destined for. Poverty, apartheid and apathy have reduced the human to the scavenging crow.
(Ramaswamy, 2009) Kolkata’s poverty is world-famous. As Frederic Thomas notes in the
introduction to his book Calcutta Poor, “Almost every book written about Calcutta
begins with extravagant language describing the city’s squalor and putrefaction”
(1997:3). This stereotype of poverty is the subject of John Hutnyk’s book The Rumour of
Calcutta (1996), which turns its gaze on the ways in which Western tourism, charity work and development discourses have represented a particular image of the city. Kolkata’s poverty and human degradation are often assumed to be “natural” or given
(doxa, in Bourdieu’s terms). Discussing how foreigners “with a taste for observing such
horror” were drawn to Calcutta in the 1950s, Krishna Dutta criticises Lévi-Strauss for
implying that the city had always been like this in Tristes Tropiques (1955), pointing out
that “he shows little awareness of the city’s history and complex culture” (2003:179).2
My aim in this chapter is to show that Kolkata’s poverty is not “natural” and can be traced to specific historical conjunctures. History notwithstanding, poverty is an important factor shaping the lives of the women whose stories appear in this thesis. Like Ananya Roy (2003:7), I faced an important question: how could I talk about poverty without reproducing negative stereotypes?
I think Ramaswamy is right; crows are a good metaphor for Kolkata, especially its urban poor. His comments about their resourcefulness and persistence put me in mind of Aesop’s fables. (My connection with literature is no accident. Alongside crows, books are what I associate most with Kolkata, and I later discovered that Aesop’s fables were used as reading lessons in nineteenth century elementary education in Bengal (Sarkar, 1997:14).) Although crows appear in several fables as malicious, boastful and
cunning creatures, The Crow and the Water Jar emphasises their intelligence:
2 In a similar vein, anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s theory of a “culture of poverty” (1970) has been criticised for failing “to note how history, culture, and political-economic structures constrain the lives of individuals” (Bourgois, 1996:16, see also Lister, 2004).
Kolkata, City of Crows 49
A thirsty crow noticed a huge jar and saw at the very bottom there was a little bit of water. For a long time the crow tried to spill the water out so that it would run over the ground and allow her to satisfy her tremendous thirst. After exerting herself for some time in vain, the crow grew
frustrated and applied all her cunning with unexpected ingenuity: as she tossed little stones into the jar, the water rose of its own accord until she was able to take a drink.
This fable shows us that thoughtfulness is superior to brute strength, since this is the way the crow was able to carry her task to its conclusion.
(L. Gibbs, 2002:208) Let me be clear: I do not consider those living in urban poverty to be annoying opportunistic scavengers (as some view crows). Instead, the people I know are
industrious, resourceful, and show strategic agency and a great capacity for survival in the face of disadvantage and deprivation. Such resourcefulness is a necessity for those living in bastis in the twin cities of Howrah and Kolkata (see Figure 2). However, as I discuss later, it is crucial that we do not idealise this kind of resourcefulness and ignore the historical sociocultural structures shaping people’s lives, hence this chapter’s focus on structural factors.
Figure 2. Howrah and Kolkata, West Bengal, India
The Hoogly (or Hugli) river separates Howrah city, which lies along its western bank, from Kolkata city on the east. Both cities are encompassed within a wider metropolis known as the Kolkata Metropolitan Area