Introduction

Summary

… the scandalous alleys disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise by the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else…. The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere! The same economic necessity that produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place.

—Friedrich Engels

O what a dream of dreams I had one night!

I could hear Binu crying out in fright,

‘Come quickly and you’ll see a startling sight:

Our city's rushing in a headlong flight!’ …

Rolls on the Howrah Bridge

Like a giant centipede

Chased by Harrison Road

Breaking the traffic code …

—Rabindranath Tagore

When I entered the dusty ‘record room’ of the Calcutta Improvement Trust3 for the first time in 2011—exactly a century since its inception—and began to discover Calcutta in the early-twentieth-century planning documents, land acquisition records, and files of property disputes, these two quoted texts gave me a perspective: a study of the city is a study of the social production of ‘motion’.

In mechanics, motion refers to the phenomenon by which matter changes position over time. It marks displacement and distance, change and acceleration of objects along the coordinates of time and space. In a historical materialist enquiry—on the other hand—motion stands for ‘impersonal’ forces operating within a mode of production in a given time and space that enact social change, movements of bodies, capital, migration, and displacement.

People's relationship with motion is marked by differential access based on class, caste, gender, ethnicity, race, and generational hierarchies. Therefore, a critique of motion must track its politics in generating ‘mobile subjectivities’ and differential mobilities. More importantly, it ought to identify how one social group's access to motion may actively exclude or disable that of others. In my story, the ‘modern’ urban street is a central actor and a key mediator between such mobilities and materialities.

The quote by Engels that opens this book situates the modern avenue-style urban streets in the context of the capitalist mode of production that consolidated itself in space during the second half of the nineteenth century after many decades of urban insurrections in Europe and in the colonial world.