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[nirmal saha]

Economy of Meaning and Meaning of Economy: A
re-invocation of a Calcutta based Journal Anya Artha. 

If Anya Artha, a Calcutta based journal in Bengali
constitutes the material, a face to face interview
with its members form the method and an analysis of
various socio-economic-political-cultural factors
responsible for the making and unmaking of the urban
space constitute the process.

Presently a large-scale displacement is being observed
in Calcutta, one of the urban centers in eastern India
in the name of development. It is happening in the
form of hawker eviction and eviction from the area
adjoining the 'canals' without any proper
rehabilitation of the displaced population. The public
rhetoric are in favor of it and the left front
government, the so-called 'champion of the poor' are
planning and executing the same. The 'other voices'
are rarely attaining audible decibel. A complex
process of re-formation is undergoing in the
production of this urban space both in its psychic as
well as in its physical dimensions. 

If one important moment in this process is marked by
the intellectual life of the city, the richness of it
perhaps lies in multiplicity. In Calcutta an important
part of its urban life grew out of its rich 'little
magazine tradition' that bloomed in and around the
various strands of left movements. In the early
seventies we find a moment, which is also
characterized by large-scale displacement, economic
unrest and a rapid erosion of faith in left movements.
A part of the population had given up hope and had
moved towards other spaces, other activities whereas
another more sensitive part would cling onto a more
dogmatic rendition of their ideologies. Very few took
the pain to travel through the terrain of
self-reflexivity in order to organize themselves into
a group; they were as if trying to scrutinize
wholeheartedly the problems of existing theory and
practice. Anya Artha is a production of such rare
effort. Started by a few students of economics
initially, the group developed into a vibrant space
for rigorous discussions on various social issues.
People from different arena of the social sciences
started contributing in the space of this journal. In
the process the trajectories of both theory and
practice keeps moving. A journal of social economy
gets transformed into a journal of social sciences. 

The project aims to analyse the
socio-economic-political-cultural agents responsible
in the re-structuring of urban consciousness through
the lens of this journal. A face-to-face interview
with the help of a non-structured questionnaire to map
the contours and terrain of a growing urban radicalism
has been planned with the editorial members and
contributors in the journal, most of them, now in
their late fifties or early sixties, most of them
intellectuals of repute in the national as well as the
international arena. Apart from the making of the
journal we would like to scan the texts reflecting the
then existing socio-economic structures at the face of
large scale displacement arising out of the war in
neighbouring Bangladesh, emergency in India, and the
coming to power by the left in Bengal. Also we have a
plan to preserve all the issues of this journal in an
electronic format in order to make it accessible to
the general reader. 


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