Calcutta's gods and the modern metropolis
In 1880 the Bengali writer Durgacharan Ray published a novel called Debganer Martye Aagaman (The Gods Visit Earth). In it Brahma, the Creator in Hindu mythology, travels with other gods by train to Calcutta, at that time the capital of British India. Varuna, the Rain God, is their guide.
The gods are dazzled. They see big ships on the Ganges, factory chimneys pouring out smoke, bridges, monuments and shops stocked with an enormous range of goods. They are so impressed that they decide Heaven needs a Museum and a High Court of its own.
The visit also unsettles them. Brahma is cheated into buying cheap spectacles, and he is baffled by shoe-sellers who each call the others swindlers. The gods meet thieves, deep poverty and wretched housing. What disturbs them most is that caste, religious and gender identities seem to be blurring, so that social divisions they had taken as natural are falling away.
Ray's gods felt what many nineteenth-century Indians felt about cities, wonder and bewilderment at the same time. The city placed wealth beside poverty, splendour beside dirt and opportunity beside disappointment. Both London and Bombay show this double face.
Other Indian writers recorded the same mixed experience. Kali Prasanna Singh's satire of Calcutta around 1862 describes a crowded Saturday evening on which English shoes and fine scarves make it impossible to tell people of high and low status apart.
Writing before his death in 1895, G.G. Agarkar described Bombay's grand mansions, streets wide enough for six carriages, train whistles, factory smoke, haggling shoppers and people of every caste taking the air by the sea at sunset.
Towns and cities are ancient. The first ones grew up in river valleys, at places such as Ur, Nippur and Mohenjodaro, and they could only appear once food supplies were large enough to feed many people who grew none themselves. Cities became the seat of political power and administration, of trade and industry, of religious institutions and of intellectual life. They supported groups such as artisans, merchants and priests.
The development of a city or town.
Cities vary a great deal. Some are small urban centres with a few functions. At the other extreme stands the modern metropolis.
A big, densely populated city, often the capital of its region, that combines political and economic functions for that whole region and holds a very large population.
The modern city in this sense has existed for only about 200 years. Three historical forces shaped it most:
- the rise of industrial capitalism
- colonial rule over large parts of the world
- the growth of democratic ideals
London, the largest city on earth in the nineteenth century and the heart of an empire, and Bombay, one of the most important modern cities of the Indian subcontinent, show all three forces at work. Industry pulled migrants into both, colonial rule set the layout of Bombay, and demands for votes and union rights filled London's streets.
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