The Book of Job (Charnock)

Partho Datta teaches history at Zakir Husain Evening College, University of Delhi, and has published essays on labour and medical history. His Planning the City: Urbanization and Reform in Calcutta, c. 1800 – c. 1940 is being published this month by Tulika Books, Delhi. 

In 1820, an unusual letter was published in the Bengali newspaper Samachar Darpan. It was a plaintive appeal from the rats of the city of Calcutta saying they were being unfairly displaced from their ancient dwellings. Calcutta was indeed going through momentous changes – new roads and neighbourhoods werebeing planned, channels for draining were being dug, new structures were coming up and existing buildings refurbished. These changes were not random. A new spatial order was coming into its own backed by the powerful ideology of town planning. Planning encompassed not only the regulation ofphysical spaces, but also the multiple concerns of health, policing and commerce.

Planning happened largely in the guise of ‘improvement’ and the intervention of the colonial government was important. Despite resistance and skepticism, and some reversals, the task of imposing a rational urban order on the city continued. The history of this colonial initiative can be traced through three sets of archival documents which have so far been sparingly used by historians of Calcutta.

Lord Wellesley began the process with his prescriptive Minute on Calcutta in 1803, which led to the setting up of the Lottery Committee in 1817 – so called because funds for the city were raised through public lotteries. The investigation of the Fever Hospital Commission followed in the 1830s and, as the name suggests, the locations of epidemic fevers determined areas for urban restructuring. The Municipality, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, had to reckon with bustis which housed the labouring poor. But it was only after the plague epidemic in 1897 that an autonomous organization to plan the city came into being: the Calcutta Improvement Trust was set up in 1911.

This book examines and assesses the continuity of colonial urban policy and its impact, particularly in terms of the social costs to the displaced population and its implications for understanding planning history generally.

In our History and Urban Studies sections, in hardback, 348 pages. Rs 650. ISBN: 9788189487904

Oceans of Wisdom

Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar, a leading figure in the Bengal Renaissance, was responsible for transformations in everything from Bengali prose style and printing techniques to Sanskrit curriculum and Hindu social practice. His seminal book,  Hindu Widow Marriage has been made available in a new Complete Translation with an Introduction and Critical Notes by Brian A. Hatcher from Permanent Black. Hatcher is Professor and Packard Chair of Theology in the Department of Religion at Tufts University. His research centres on Hinduism in modern India.  

  

Vidyasagar, being one of the great Sanskrit scholars of his time and anxious to deploy  ancient Sanskrit scriptures to buttress his radical argument, wrote his two tracts advocating widow marriage in a highly sanskritized Bengali which, in the original, poses difficulties even to some of the major Bengali scholars of history today. Tanika Sarkar, Partha Chatterjee, and Sumit Sarkar are among the very many who have welcomed the appearance of this book. It makes available to every modern student, for the first time, one of the profoundest classics of India's social reform and gender discourse.

Before the passage of the Hindu Widow’s Remarriage Act of 1856, Hindu tradition required a woman to live as a virtual outcast after her husband’s death. Widows had to shave their heads, discard their jewellery, live in seclusion, and undergo acts of penance. Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar was the first Indian intellectual to successfully argue against these strictures. Renowned Sanskrit scholar and passionate social reformer, Vidyasagar was the leading proponent of widow marriage in colonial India, urging his contemporaries to reject practices that caused countless women to suffer.

Vidyasagar’s strategy involved a rereading of Hindu scripture alongside an emotional plea on behalf of the widow, resulting in the reimagining of Hindu law and custom. He made his case through a two-part publication, Hindu Widow Marriage, a tour de force of logic, erudition, and humanitarian rhetoric. In this new translation, Brian A. Hatcher makes available in English, for the first time, the entire text of one of the most important nineteenth-century treatises on Indian social reform.

An expert on Vidyasagar, Hinduism, and colonial Bengal, Hatcher enhances the original treatise with a substantial introduction describing Vidyasagar’s multifaceted career, as well as the history of colonial debates on widow marriage. He also provides an overview of basic Hindu categories for first-time readers, a glossary of technical vocabulary, and an extensive bibliography.

In our History section, in hardcover, 270 pages, Rs 650. ISBN:  9788178243504