Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of "White Town" in Colonial Calcutta Author(s): Swati Chattopadhyay Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 154-179 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/991588 Accessed: 19-09-2016 20:16 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Society of Architectural Historians, University of California Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians This content downloaded from 128.59.129.95 on Mon, 19 Sep 2016 20:16:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Blurring Boundaries The Limits of "White Town" in Colonial Calcutta SWATI CHATTOPADHYAY University of California, Santa Barbara O ne of the enduring assumptions about colonial culture penetrated the insularity of both towns, although at cities of the modern era is that they worked on the different levels and to varying degrees. As an examination of basis of separation-they were "dual cities" the residential pattern of the white town will demonstrate, divided into "black" and "white" towns.1 Obviously, the the story is more complicated.5 degree of separation between black and white inhabitants The description of colonial Calcutta as a city divided varied according to the particularities of the context.2 How- into black and white rests on scant evidence, on a static ever, by emphasizing the duality of black and white one reading of urban plans (a reluctance to move between the misses the idea that the critical aspect of colonial cities city scale and the architectural scale), and on a lack of crit- resided not in the clarity of this duality, but in the tension ical attention in reading the change in density over time.6 of blurred boundaries between the two.3 In the case of Cal- The notion that these building ideas were completely cutta, the idea of black and white towns is seemingly based imported from England, for example, is based on the neo- on the perception that European residents of the town classical "look" of the buildings, with no attempt to docu- inhabited an area that, in terms of layout, density, architec- ment and examine plans and sections. The only published ture, and everyday life, was fundamentally different and plan of Calcutta's colonial architecture is the plan of Gov- divorced from that of the native inhabitants. Scholars have ernment House. In other words, the existing scholarship is emphasized the distinctiveness of the architecture of the remarkably nonspatial. I address this lacuna here by explain- white town-the European neoclassicism brought by the ing the organization of house plans as a means to supply a colonizers. From such a perspective, the emergence of speculative market in which the functions of buildings a neoclassical vocabulary in eighteenth- and nineteenth- changed frequently and residences were used for nonresi- century India is seen as a rather straightforward transplan- dential purposes and vice versa. The blurring of boundaries tation of English ideas on Indian soil, attenuated or lies in the heterogeneous use as well as the heterogeneous disfigured (depending on one's point of view) by vagaries of population who inhabited the buildings. If the terms black local labor and availability of building materials.4 In this town and white town were used frequently in the nineteenth essay I examine the so-called white town to argue that such century, we need to understand why they were used and the racial divisions were neither complete nor static. The black nature of the inclusions and exclusions they implied in order and white towns were far from being autonomous entities; to sustain an imperial narrative of difference and European the economic, political, and social conditions of colonial superiority. This content downloaded from 128.59.129.95 on Mon, 19 Sep 2016 20:16:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The "White" Town colonial government, this area became the sought-after In 1794 the Governor General of Calcutta issued alocale procla- for European entrepreneurs. Large auction houses mation fixing the limits of the town between the Hooghlyand taverns commanded substantial spaces and chose prime River to the west and the inner side of the Mahratta spots Ditch on the main thoroughfares to attract customers with to the east, and between Dihee Birjee to the south theand latestthe arrival of "Europe goods." These large commer- Chitpur nullah (creek) to the north.7 Even before cial such enterprises were interspersed with petty shops and boundaries were drawn, Indian and European investors dwellings of various sizes occupied by Indians and Euro- bought large tracts of land and built on them, anticipating peans alike. From streets bearing names of distinctly indige- a wide range of uses and renters.8 They invested in nousbazaars, origin, such as Cossitola Street (derived from warehouses, residential buildings, shops, bustees (tenanted kassai-tola, or butcher's neighborhood) and Nuncoo land), godowns (large storage spaces), and garden Jemadar'shouses.9 Lane, European wigmakers, milliners, carriage The commercial and administrative activity in the makers,city had and undertakers offered the best services money attracted approximately 200,000 inhabitants by 1820, could bybuy.12 While many of the entrepreneurs lived above which time landed property had become a lucrative the busi- shops, smaller entrepreneurs, such as oyster sellers and ness.10 Building costs were high, as basic building materials hairdressers, worked from their own houses. European like brick, stone, and durable wood had to be imported business from spilled from this area eastward and northward, outside the city. Consequently rents were exorbitant replicating and the pattern of gradual accretion of retailers and pucka (masonry) buildings could be fruitful investments. petty entrepreneurs around the bazaars and wholesale mar- Only a few wealthy inhabitants could afford the luxury kets. of Beyond a the administrative center, the major arteries large house in a spacious garden; many more settled formed for a series of superblocks, the outside edges of which smaller apartments and cheaper dwellings. The majority developed mixed use, with commercial activities predomi- lived in single-room dwellings and huts. Property nating,changed while the interior of the blocks became primarily hands frequently, and it was common for Indians residential.to rent property to Europeans and vice versa.11 In the early days English of visitors to late-eighteenth-century and nine- colonial rule, it mattered little with whom the owners teenth-century were Calcutta asserted that there was a white town dealing, as long as there was money to be made. as well as a black town.13 The former was represented by the By the 1830s the salient features of nineteenth-century fine rows of houses surrounding the maidan, while its coun- Calcutta's morphology had been established. terpart, They the black town, was seemingly situated somewhere included: ribbon development along main arteries, beyond. with aBut while most agreed about the existence of these preponderance of narrow rectangular lots, demonstrating entities, few could concur on the boundaries between the the importance of having streetfront property; the numer-two domains (Figure 2). The population distribution of the ous ghats (steps for landing) along the edge of the differentHooghly ethnic groups in the various localities undoubtedly River, indicating the importance of the river for commerce shifted between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but and communication; the network of bazaars; and the any admin- strict demarcation was arbitrary. Such boundaries were istrative center between Esplanade Row and the Old actually Fort. quite fluid; at no time did the white town form a The older north-south arteries such as Chitpur Road homogeneous and space of European inhabitants. Historians Chowringhee Road were reinforced by new ones suchhave frequentlyas pointed out that the most significant distin- Strand Road and Wood-Wellesley-College-Cornwallis guishing feature of these two "towns" was the density of the Street, intersected by a host of east-west streets that urban con- fabric-the sparsely distributed buildings of the white nected the wholesale bazaars and warehouses located in town as opposed to the close-knit fabric of the black town.14 convenient proximity to the ghats, with the retail outlets This in characterization, however, does not withstand close the city's interior (Figure 1). The three-tiered commercial investigation. The area of sparsely distributed single network of import-export, wholesale bazaars, and retail detached dwellings around Chowringhee Road, typically markets created a mutually supportive geography. seenThe as representative of the white town, was an exception, administrative center of the city was defined by the Mint, not the rule. Much of the so-called white town had a higher the Customs House and warehouses along the river's edge, density and a closely knit urban fabric that embraced the the Writers' Building on the north, and Government House street. In fact, well into the 1830s the area around Tank and the Supreme Court on the south (maidan) edge. Square, the administrative center of the city, was regarded as Because of its proximity to the port and the offices of thethe fashionable European district and Chowringhee was THE LIMITS OF "WHITE TOWN" IN COLONIAL CALCUTTA 155 This content downloaded from 128.59.129.95 on Mon, 19 Sep 2016 20:16:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Figure 1 Map of nineteenth-century Calcutta Boundaries as indicated by William Baillie, 1792.