Table Of Contenti
Time, Space and Capital in India
AtthiswesterncorneroftheconfluenceoftheBayofBengalandthebusyriver
Hooghly, West Bengal in eastern India lies a geography that has hosted many
outsiders – traders, merchants, colonial masters, missionaries, and wanderers.
Thisbookisfundamentallyconcernedwiththerelationsamongthetheoretical
categories of time, space, and capital in India and shows registers of temporality
andspatialitygeneratedbyhistoricalphasesofinteractionwithindustrialcapital.
Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Howrah, the author examines the
form of urbanism that is not linked to the city-form of spatial organization, a
‘hinterland urbanism’. The book brings out theoretical implications by showing
the relations among time, space, and capital. Through a series of encounters and
interceptions with a number of voices arising, the book sheds light on the issue
and identifies the state of an ethnographer who is ensconced in the field – in
wonder, conceit, and sometimes physical discomfort. This book is, thus, an
exploration of such historical layering of space by forces of time and speed
afforded by the logics of capital, through limited acts of witnessing of production
and access of historical sensation.
An invitation to scholars and students of cultural anthropology to consider the
question of scale in the making of ethical, political, and aesthetic selves, this
book is an intervention in political anthropology that connects aesthetics, desire,
and emotion to political imagination and action. The book makes a significant
contribution in anthropology of space, urban anthropology, and anthropology of
capital as well as urban studies.
Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist currently based in Bangalore, India.
Routledge Research on Urban Asia Series
Routledge Research on Urban Asia publishes high quality, original scholarship
on cities and urban areas in Asia. The series welcomes research on the individual
countriesofAsiaaswellascomparativeworkfromnewandestablishedscholars
acrosstheworld.Themesincludecitycultures,urbanpolicyandplanning,mega-
cities,urbanisationprocesses,sustainability,migrationsandmobility,development
patterns,civilsociety,politicsandpower,urbanhistory,representationsofthecity,
climatechange,housing, gentrificationand ghettoisation, socialstratification,and
disaster risk.
Welcoming research from a wide range of disciplines, this series will be of
interesttoscholarsofAsianStudies,UrbanStudies,Sociology,Politics,Geogra-
phy, Cultural Studies, History, Economics and Development Studies.
Jakarta
Claiming Spaces and Rights in the City
Edited by Jörgen Hellman, Marie Thynell and Roanne van Voorst
Time, Space and Capital in India
Longing and Belonging in an Urban-Industrial Hinterland
Atreyee Majumder
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
asianstudies/series/RRUA
iii
Time, Space and Capital
in India
Longing and Belonging in an
Urban-Industrial Hinterland
Atreyee Majumder
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v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Hideout 20
3 Capital 30
4 Space/time 51
5 Text/talk 73
6 Hero 99
7 Evidence 120
8 Epilogue 141
Acknowledgments 146
References 147
Index 154
1 Introduction
Of dreamworlds and catastrophe
Let us now praise famous men in scholarly tradition, and as Agee and Evans
(1941) would have us do, while navigating lives of others who know history
to be prophecy, live through the present in an attitude of a patient cynicism.
And maybe, learn a bit of wisdom that is not our own, while we are at it.
How is structural violence of industrial capitalism experienced? How are capi-
tal’srepeatedpatternsofcrisisrememberedandnarrated?Inthecourseofwriting
thisbook,Ilearnedagreatdealfromtheoristsofcapital.ButasIclosedmywriting
journey,Ifoundsomethingwasamissinthesuturingofmytheoreticalunpacking
andthe voicesofmyinterlocutors fromtheurban-industrial district ofHowrahin
easternIndia,asIheardthem.Iconclude,onlynow,thattheyassumedarelation-
shipoffriendshipandintimacywithcapitalasitmadeseveralforaysintotheirdis-
trict across the twentieth century. This friendship had brought them into jerky,
pleasurable journeys and left them in an abyss of lost potentiality. This long and
traumaticremembranceofafriendshipwithcapitalandviolentdesertionofprom-
isesandenergiesthatthesepeoplehadtakentobepartoftheirbiographyisthere-
foreunderstoodtobeahumiliatingdefeat.Ifdefeatisametaphorofbattle,thenI
useitinengagingthenarrationofcapital’sviolentfriendshipinabraveassumption
of equality of strengths despite a backstage of innate wisdom that there actually
exists no such equality. So, the narration of defeat is one that adopts a defensive
tone. I take my ethnographic narrative to be a defense of the defenses adopted
bymyinterlocutors–aletteredeliteofdecliningeconomicandpoliticaladvantage,
who live in this urban-industrial hinterland.
The hauntings of history are at the center of the pages I have written. It is
driven, though, by a primary concern about futurity, the impulse to inhabit and
straddle times further away, and the fear that historical obstacles will jeopardize
thetravelintofutures,whichareattheverycoreofbeingintheurban-industrial
pocketsofHowrah,acrosstheriverHooghlyfromthecolonialcapitalcityofCal-
cutta. Let us imagine this place for a moment, without a map or other historico-
political pointers. Let us listen to the wise and helpless chanting of people that
live amidst debris of over a century of capital’s dance. Remaining physically
trapped, they scream, “I want out!” while conspiring to build tunnels along the
2 Introduction
corridors of history. It is not unlike my fear of spatial incarceration as a bored
middle-school kid in middle-class Calcutta in the 1990s. The historical leap,
afforded by fantastic friendships, of camaraderie and acrimony with Steve Jobs
and dead communists and amoral Bollywood, I believe, made for tunnels out
of one’s suffocating terrestrial immediacy. Scale and its play came to shape
such an aesthetic and political repertoire.
Asphyxiation/defeat
MyfriendsandassociatesinHowrahhadmaterialgoals,practicalgoals,andfrus-
trations. And endeavored daily to chalk out a place of escape – release, expanse
(freedom?) –in the harnessing of history and historical chargeinto the cracks of
theimmediate.Arivershowedthemthepossibilityofflowandescape,evenasit
congealedexpectationandpathosontotheruinousindustrialbodiesonthewest-
bank. The awareness that containment and congealing of flow – water, capital,
destiny – onto landscape is at the core of the experience of history here.
Knowing history through patterns and rhythms informs a sense of flux and
scale with which futurity is assessed. The shiny cellphone is contemplated with
suspicionandanxiety.Itismostlikelygoingtobringandsufferthesametravails
ofdestinythatthejutemillsandshipyardsherehavesuffered.Theebbsandflows
of capital show marks on the structures of speech and affect here, as well as on
the stripped-down walls of obsolescent industrial undertakings. The river is
watched as a divider and connector, connections which are to be participated
in,withcaution.Calcutta,thesupposedblue-eyedboyofhistory,iswatchedcare-
fully from across the river. Its colonial pride is mistaken for a confident stride in
the neoliberal corridor. Calcutta seems to provide a conveyor belt into Bombay
and New York and beyond. In all of this, the work of making place and place-
based identity as political work, continues. Specters of communists, saints, and
archeologists form thecurrencyin which political energyandexpectationis cul-
tivated and distributed. Attention is strategically moved from the mundane dis-
gruntlements of state-subject relations of rights and entitlements and attached
tobroader,grandertropes.Todeviateattentionfromthehumiliatingoutmaneuver
of politics and history, pasts are imagined and harnessed as antidotes for current
wounds. As a result, being spreads out onto wider tapestries offered by history.
Ideological bickerings, while retained in their intensity, are flipped over as con-
tainers of broad, wide, reflective selves.
Anthropology enters the realm of space to interrogate the interaction of state-
mediatedreadingsofgeography(intermsofdevelopment,progress,andestimated
distancefromagoalofalandscapeperfectlyalignedtorulingideology)andlived
narratives of space. In Howrah, the marking of country, town, and city, by plan-
ning mechanisms, bureaucracy, and non-government agencies, are affirmed, tin-
kered with, and flipped over in speech and affect. The life of a village that
expresses itself through the tremors of a highway that cuts through it is one that
refuses identities offered to it by the jurisdiction of a panchayat or an NGO.
Busterminuses,railwaystations,billboards,cinemas,footballgrounds,highways
Introduction 3
markspacesandshapespatialbeing.Layeredhistoriesofspacesareappropriated
and rendered live in grammars of speech, affect, movement, densities, and
intensities.
I havebeenaskedrepeatedly,ifmyemphasisonthehistorical filter offeredby
capitalisanerasingmove,onethatremovesthemarkingsofotherhistories.Iper-
ceived across this landscape a join-the-dot project – of persons, acts, speeches,
rituals, memories, archives, monuments – made legible to me by the reading of
the logic of twentieth century industrial capitalism across this space. The land-
scape may offer other suturings – that intertwine with the one I perceived.
Perhaps the timbre of other grids and stories are somewhat muted and subsumed
bythedrumbeatsofcapitalonanindustrializedgeographyontheperipheriesofa
colonialcapital.Itiswidelyknownthattheoutsider’sarrival,asfarbackasBud-
dhistmonksatthemouthoftheriver,madethislandscapewell-versedinanopen-
ended conversation with wider, distant worlds and the politics these arrivals har-
bored(Eaton1993;see generallySen1998).RimiB.Chatterjee’snovelTheCity
of Love (Chatterjee 2007) brings to life a fourteenth century encounter of love
betweenaPortuguesepirate–Fernandoandatribalgirl–Baijja,inthebackdrop
of Humayun’s invasion of Bengal, Portuguese colonial expansion across South
East Asia (andtowardBurma,Assam,Tripura,andBengal) andHinduandBud-
dhist Tantric practice. This is a different Bengal. Not the one overdetermined by
the Battle of Plassey and the accession of power to the Company, the advent of
the bhadralok, and the permanent yoking of a large and complex region to the
nineteenthcenturystoryofacapitalcity.Iamnotterriblyinvestedinemphasizing
that BengalisnotCalcutta (although,thepointisnotmadeoftenenough).But, I
found stories such as Rimi Chatterjee’s embedded in the westbank of the lower
Hooghly – that have had long-drawn conversations with many outsiders, many
sovereigns, and many knowledge projects, crucially through the mouth of the
Hooghly as it flows into the Bay of Bengal. I am only here to report the join-
the-dot exercise I perceived; perhaps other such exercises are possible.
Ruin1
I returned home to do anthropology, home being Calcutta – the colonial capital
cityacross theriverHooghly.2TheprovinceofWestBengalhadrecentlyunder-
gone a political spectacle, and a thirty-year-old regional communist government
was overthrown in the historic elections of May 2011.3 I found an ugly, con-
gested, lamenting corner of home, across the river to call as my friend – the
field.Thefield,itseemed,wasyearningforthepresenceoftheoutsider.Theout-
sider had struck on its shores repeatedly for centuries. Docked their ships.
Smoked opium. Sought women. And moved downstream to the eastbank of
the river to bestow Calcutta with colonial and postcolonial glory.
I went to graduate school to think and write about the immediate politics of
state-mediated land acquisition. Digging into land (or landscape) invariably
yields some bones, I figured. The search from the earlier chapters of Bengal’s
relationship with industrial capitalism took me to the deserted Growth Centers
