Producing the Colonial Capital: Calcutta in Handbooks

Bhattacharya, Arunima

Abstract

This chapter explores the specific subgenre of the ‘Calcutta Handbooks’, reading their representation of mid-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century Calcutta, the capital of British India till 1911, as an attempt to produce the historical significance of colonial rule and rationalise it through tropes of sacrifice, progress, and civilisation. In reading the ‘Calcutta Handbooks’ with reference to their prefaces and the heritage policies of the British government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the chapter argues that these texts were part of the literary and cultural investment in pro-imperial heritage construction that emerged as a distinct political tool to counter the nationalist claims of popular anti-colonial insurrections, which viewed the colonial rulers as outsiders. It further traces the workings of territorial anxiety through the constructions of heritage and explores its relationship with nostalgia. The ‘Calcutta Handbooks’ in this reading emerge as a safety valve to quell the territorial anxiety of the city’s white residents and travellers. By contextualising this genre within the time frame (1880–1930) of the turbulent political shifts alongside which it evolved, this chapter aims to reveal how the handbooks depended on omissions of political context and imposed silences to build a curated and controlled version of the imperial capital that was in line with the dominant political ideologies of its time. To this end, the ‘Calcutta Handbooks’ deploy formal and aesthetic experiments that are often at odds with each other and reveal the conflict at the heart of an increasingly threatened empire.

Citation

Bhattacharya, A. (2023). Producing the Colonial Capital: Calcutta in Handbooks. In A. Bhattacharya, R. Hibbitt, & L. Scuriatti (Eds.), Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century (31-60). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1_2

• Online Publication Date: Dec 14, 2022
• Publication Date: 2023
• Deposit Date: Apr 5, 2023
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Pages: 31-60
• Book Title: Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century
• ISBN: 978-3-031-13059-5
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1_2