Epilogue

Summary

Every true history is contemporary history

—Benedetto Croce

We are coming to the end of one tradition, and the new tradition has scarcely emerged

—E. P. Thompson

In this book, I have tried to demystify the ideology of motion in the twentieth century's capitalist urban context by narrating the making of Calcutta through its streets. Drawing on specific instances from Calcutta's twentieth-century archives, the book reveals that the street is not a mere engineering object outside the realms of ideology and politics (in fact, no engineering object is ever outside the realms of ideology and politics). In our story, the street is not just a metaphor or a vehicle for politics. Neither is the street merely the setting for politics, existing outside of and separate from it. Here the street itself is the product of politics and politics, in turn, a product of the street. In fact, I have argued that the street is politics inasmuch as politics is the production of space—whether by states or their subjects, whether in pursuit of capitalist accumulation or not. I historicized and theorized the street as a framing device of my story and an apparatus of city-making—a master infrastructure. In this journey, we met some remarkable urban craftsmen—agitators, rioters, commoners, raiders, hawkers, cops, and engineers—and wrote a local history of Calcutta from their perspectives. I read their diverse crafts of city-making through the ‘dialectical twining’ of capital's spatial mobilization and the everyday struggles of city dwellers—structure and agency.

Together, these five chapters tell us a story. At once mundane and monumental, the streets are matters that move matters and thus enable motion's distribution in space. The violence of planned street and infrastructure building valorized urban land as it became the prime outlet of capital in the interwar years. Ultimately it produced an indistinction between rent and interest, with interest rate becoming crucial for both the Calcutta Improvement Trust and developers. In short, rent became the prime count of wealth and a new image of profit as surplus profit transformed into ground rent.

This process unfolded in the separation of the urban poor from their sites of production and social reproduction as ‘congested’ neighbourhoods and bustees in the inner city made way for viable neighbourhoods as ‘land’ in the market