[Reader-list] 4th posting: Urban entertainment in Kolkata

[sovan tarafder]

Dear all

 

This is my 4th posting, and, this time onwards I'm basically going to share with you my reflections on the field works which I have done in the course of this research.

 

Now I'll be elaborating on three sites of entertainment in Kolkata, namely, City Centre (residential-cum-commercial complex), Swabhumi (heritage park) and Aquatica (water theme park)

 

I would like to start with a little historical investigation, since all three sites here, despite being spatially located in present day Kolkata, are in essence caught in a queer time-knot, so to say. Swabhumi is the re-creation of a colonial 'past' as was seen in Kolkata. Aquatica, the water theme park, on the other hand, can well be considered as a negation of the spatial history of the piece of land where it is situated. This is because this space has been entirely revamped in order to make it feasible for a purpose which is completely different from the one which was associated with the land so far. This is a site that invokes, and maybe incarnates the future of the city's entertainment scenario. In between, stands City Centre, a typically in-fashion shopping hub cum residential complex that spells, and sells too, a futuristic vision but which nonetheless claims to have a finger on the traditional aspect of the city also. So, all the three tenses are there in these three
 enetertainment sites. The tenses have, in a sense, become commodities that turn out to be the USP of the sites concerned.

 

Now, as Mark Cousins writes, historical investigation "must deal with problems of identity and difference....Phenomena must fall under the same class as other phenomena, or they must differ from them...In this sense, historical investigation must establish differences. But the differences which it establishes and represents must have a limit...For something to support a history there must be a space of sufficient identity. Historical writing is then caught up in the play of representing differences through identities which differ from each other." (Cousins 1987; 128)

 

As I'll be trying to write something like a fragmented history of the contemporary Kolkata, my writing too, will be dealing with this interplay of identity and difference. The point here is simple: the identity of each of these three urban entertainment sites is predicated on a difference in the sense that 1) each of them claims to be different from the similar sites of entertainment in their own respective ways and 2) more importantly, each of them claims to have built up a site where either history is re-created or it just ceases to be any more. Somewhere the undoing of history is the selling factor, while there are places that take pride in re-doing the History as it was. 

 

Any historical writing on the present day entertainment scene in Kolkata, then have a responsibility to investigate the identity of each space vis-a-vis the history of the space concerned and the wider matrix of the spatial history of the city too.

 

In that sense, all these three sites of entertainment are located onto spaces that, even in not-too-distant past, was outside the reach of traditional urban sector. So, what they all share is a lack of urban history. The history which they have does not even involve land also. The entire eastern fringe part of Kolkata, now called 'Salt lake' or 'Bidhannagar' (named after the legendary Congress chieh minister of West Bengal Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy), was literally a salt lake, a wetland, which began to be developed during the tenure of Dr. Bidhan Roy only to emerge much later as one of the most posh spaces in the city of Kolkata.

 

Is it just coincidental that the future of the city's urban entertainment gets built up on a space that virtually has no history of human habitation?

 

So, free from the burden of the pastness, City Centre and Aquatica try to project themselves on a germainating present continuous space which seeks to flaunt the splendor of the space concerned and hide the squalor. Apparently, there is nothing wrong in it. The target consumer group of these entertainment sites being the upper and upwardly mobile classes of the city, the squalor should not ideally be there. Yet when, in the brochure, they provide maps of the area, the glaring absence of what Ashis Nandy would call the 'unintended city' proves to be striking. Earlier, I brought this Ashis Nandy term in my second posting, but I prefer to repeat it since nowhere in the present cityscape is the simultaneous existence of the intended and the unintended city more glaring than it is here, around these three entertainment sites.

 

The maps I was referring to have, expectedly, the significant urban pointers but they carefully smuggle the huge urban slums under the carpet. Within a few hundred yards from both Swabhumi and City Centre, there is a thickly populated area of slum dwellers. And Aquatica is literally encircled with the slum and village-turned-slum areas. Most of the people residing at those places, in effect, live unimaginably distant from those spaces of entertainment.

 

These are the persons who can rightfully claim themselves to be the sons (and daughters) of that soil. After the wetland entered the map of the urban proper, they had to make way for the richer people and in stead, they could only find, lawful and mostly unlawful shelter in slums on both sides of the sprawling Dattabad Road that connects Salt Lake area to the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, the much-touted 'road to the future' in the city.

 

This 'road to the future' then carries people to the spots where they can transport themselves to time past and time future. Swabhumi, the very name of the space indicates that this is the space of the past. The past of the urban middle class, the Babus of Kolkata, sprinkled as they were with the firangi culture.

 

The city thus becomes a huge cauldron where different temporalities get interpenetrated before the gaze of the consumer. What all these entertainment sites do is to defamiliarize the space and precisely this process of defamiliarization involves the twist of time. Swabhumi seeks to create a replica of the past, while City Centre and Aquatica those of the future. 

 

Since at present the city is undergoing a massive developmentalist change (or face-lift, as it is fondly called!), a tension starts looming large. Traditions are thrown out and simultaneously re-incarnated by the very same people. Aquatica is happy to call itself a space unprecedented in the cultural history of Kolkata. So it marks a break in the history of urbanity here. Swabhumi, as was already said, is just the opposite. City Centre tries to keep a balance in between. On one hand, it is futuristic in the architecture and modernized (read ‘Americanized’!) in the services it offers (multiplex, food court, shopping mall), while on the other, the resident architect of the project informs that the horizontal structure of the building is inspired by the traditional street-side bazaar of Kolkata. 

 

In a sense, Aquatica and Swabhumi too are not monolithic spaces, as far as the temporality of the spaces is concerned. Aquatica recreates the visuals of the seashore and waterfall, i.e. things that are normally considered to be traditional. Even more than that, eternal. 

Through these, the past makes its entry into the present which is an image of the future. Swabhumi is futuristic in the smart packaging of the past. 

 

 

Cousins, Mark : The practice of historical investigation, Post-structuralism and the question of history; Attridge, Bennington & Young (eds.), Cambridge University press, 1987

 

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