Towards a history of Calcutta as a port city – Prerna Agarwal

To write about Calcutta as a port city is to first shift attention away from the concerns of the middle class Bengali-speaking elite, also known as the Bhadraloks, that has dominated the history writing of the region. For the Bhadraloks, ponds, boats and rivers loomed large, whereas the sea, ships and sailors were entirely neglected, which perhaps has something to do with their marginalisation in the shaping and shares of imperial trade. Situated adjacent to some of the city’s main landmarks, the dock neighbourhoods have remained beyond the pale up until today; these seedier neighbourhoods, predominantly housing labouring and migrant populations, have attracted scant scholarly attention. This paper is an exercise in excavating the history of a subterranean world, which somewhat emerges in intelligence, police reports and oral history accounts, and which also impacted the larger social and political developments. It brings into focus a different set of themes: crime and punishment, migration, religion and mobility, and subaltern militancy and labour policy. This swirling, volatile world saw crime, labour policy and anticolonialism interact with one another to shape the trajectories of the urban history of Calcutta.