Nandini Gayen
Research Scholar, Department of English, Banaras Hindu University.
10.21659/9788197513022.06Abstract
Kallol (1923-1929), a prominent literary magazine of Bengal published under the joint editorship of Dineshranjan Das and Gokulchandra Nag, became a mouthpiece for challenging the dominant Bhadralok hegemony in the Bengal Presidency. As the colonial capital and centre of modernisation, Kolkata was both a place of hope and frustration for young migrants arriving from mofussil towns in search of better lives. However, the Bhadralok account, disseminated by the city’s bourgeoisie, tended to overlook the realities experienced by the underbelly. Kallol, as a cultural and literary movement in Bengal, portrayed Kolkata as a city of stark contrasts, defined by fragmented spaces and marginalised lives. Drawing on Lefebvre’s conception of space as a political construct and Certeau’s framework of tactics versus strategies, this paper analyses how Kallol’s stories, poems, and essays expose the city’s “third spaces” of resistance, where marginalised clerks, labourers, and migrants navigate oppressive urban hierarchies. By closely reading the texts that appeared in Kallol, this article examines how the cityscape of Kolkata becomes a place where illusions of progress are subverted by economic exploitation, poverty, and the erosion of human dignity. These urbanscapes in Kallol stand not only for physiographic locations but also for psychological topographies that bring to the fore the desperation of clerks confined to demeaning jobs, labourers exploited in industrial areas, and families suffering from squalor and uncertainty. This portrayal underpins the attempt to constitute Kolkata as a fractured entity, where the relentless pace of modernisation left its residents in disconnection, disillusionment, and confinement within its dystopian boundaries. This paper will trace the contours of an uncompromised critique of Kallol in reimagining Kolkata as a dystopian space that reveals the human cost of colonial modernity and rapid urbanisation.
Keywords: Urban Dystopia, Elite Hegemony, Spatial Politics, Colonial Urbanism, Resistance, Subaltern Agency, Fragmented Cityscapes.
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Urban Imaginaries and Indian Cities in Literature
Table of Contents
Urban Imaginaries and Indian Cities in Literature: An Introduction
Dr. Neethu P Antony and Dr. Arpana Venu
Olivia Joseph
Multilingual Metropolis: The Politics of Language and Belonging in Guwahati Through Sheelabhadra’s Fiction
Sangeeta Bhagawati
Spatial (re)orientations and Epic structures of the urban in Fareeda Mehta’s Kali Salwaar
Elroy Pinto
Between Tramline and Traffic Jam: Mapping Indian City through Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar and Anurag Basu’s Life in a…Metro
Trisha Sengupta & Dr. Sanghamitra Baladhikari
Reimagining Kolkata: Subaltern Narratives and the Colonial Urban Dystopia in Kallol Magazine’s Literature
Nandini Gayen
Walking, Writing and Resisting the City: Spatial Tactics and Postcolonial Reimaginings in Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches
Parvin Sultana
Mimesis, Montage and Mapping: A Spatial Analysis of Gangtok City Scapes in the Select Works of Satyajit Ray and Prajwal Parajuly
Dr. Sudakshina Bhattacharya, Dr. Sulagna Mohanty, and Dr. Ankusha Bandyopadhyay
