Heritage movements in the postcolonial city: Contestations between middle-class activisms and urbanisation processes in Kolkata

This PhD research seeks a critical understanding of postcolonial heritage meanings and processes as produced through middle-class urban activism in Kolkata, India. It locates the increasingly important position acquired by heritage within urban developmental processes of the postcolonial Indian city by focusing on three aspects. First, it unpacks the modalities of an urban middle-class activism that has produced a dominant heritage discourse in Kolkata and the ensuing development of a state-led heritage policy within municipal law. Secondly it undertakes a remapping of the city’s spatial developmental logics through these heritage actions and subsequent redefining of state-society relationship. These logics are explored through the third aspect, which is the spatial transformations occurring through distinctive heritage-led urban regeneration programs. Through these discussions, this thesis intersects three important scholarly foci- middle-class activism, postcolonial heritage notions and their intertwining within southern urban practices. It explores postcolonial heritage through the concept of urban assemblage to go beyond essentialist and dichotomous heritage meanings between elite v/s popular, official v/s unofficial, tangible v/s intangible and state v/s civil society. The critical analysis of heritage activisms also lends itself a nuanced understanding within middle-class relationships with a focus on the oft neglected older, post-independence era middle-class group in the contemporary Indian context, called bhadralok. Using a spatial lens to understand the relational power networks of middle-classes, the thesis unpacks the appropriation and mobilising of heritage meanings and their implications as seen through emergent spatial politics. This spatial politics is analysed by tracing the forms of urban regeneration practices undertaken differentially in northern (older and traditionally heritage identity) and southern (emerging newer forms of heritage identity) parts of the city. In doing so, the thesis asserts an emergent paradoxical role played by heritage, one that is rooted in a simultaneity of hypervisibility and invisibility that have produced a specific form of urban developmental logics in Kolkata. Through these empirics the thesis argues for an expansion of southern urbanism meanings, understood through the politics of heritage. Additionally, it informs ontological politics of heritage meanings by noting it as a dynamic, fluid and transient process, that is continually assembled and disassembled in the heterogenous postcolonial urban context.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

PhD

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

De Montfort University

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Ghoshal, Arunima

Licence

• https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/8daa14aa-c71b-4844-af70-9d84fc14abb2/download