If New York had a twin city in the language of urban despair, it is Calcutta. Any American deploring beggars, flight, crime, and homelessness almost reflexively invokes the warning name of India’s huge and hopeless city.Footnote 1
In the colonial and early post-colonial era, Calcutta was one of India’s two most important business centres. It was home to many of India’s biggest business enterprises, the largest concentration of industrial productive capacity, and one of the two most important ports.Footnote 2 At the same time, it was a poor and congested city with a large rural hinterland. It had long suffered from an acute underinvestment in infrastructure and civic services.Footnote 3 From the 1940s, the city also experienced the ill-effects of the Second World War famine, communal violence, partition, and a refugee crisis. However, even as Calcutta failed its many residents who slept on the streets and suffered from hunger, it continued to draw both people and capital. It could be argued that the city was not too different from most others that were magnets for both poverty and opportunity. Calcutta’s urban condition could well have been interpreted then as a sign of success; the city was attracting more people and capital than it could handle. Yet, in the 1960s, of all the ‘world’s beleaguered cities’, it was Calcutta that came to embody a ‘sinister’ urban crisis.Footnote 4 How and why did Calcutta acquire a reputation as the exemplar of urban crisis and failure? And what can the history of this reputation tell us about the politics and practice of urban development in the postwar era?
This article is about how Calcutta emerged as the world’s foremost crisis city from the mid-1950s, how this hyperreal image was received in India and abroad,Footnote 5 and how the hyperreal Calcutta of crisis came to be used by a broad spectrum of experts and politicians globally to push for a variety of positions on urban development. This article is based on the premise that urban crisis cannot be read as a faithful description of social-material reality. But it is not ontologically vacuous either.Footnote 6 Understanding why some cities are seen as being in crisis while others are not, and why one city became the exemplar for urban crisis, requires that we hold both the material and representational aspects of crisis in tension but without privileging either. This is where a global history approach, or in other words, an approach that is attentive to the ways in which the global and local as well as the representational and the material interact over time, can be illuminating. This is to say that Calcutta’s postwar/post-colonial urban crisis was not and could not have been an objective and faithful descriptor of its socio-material conditions. But at the same time, it was not devoid of substance either. A global history of hyperreal Calcutta can help navigate and explore what lies between the two extremes.
This article is divided in two parts. Part I argues that Calcutta’s international disrepute as the world’s foremost crisis city was driven only partly by its undeniable urban problems and, as has been argued by some scholars, the local specificities of the ‘colonial encounter’.Footnote 7 The framing of Calcutta as a crisis city was, as importantly, if not more, the product of a global conjuncture of the mid-1950s. It involved the coming together of five elements—American anxieties about its own cities; the race for the ‘hearts and minds of the Third World’;Footnote 8 the popularity of communism in Calcutta; the self-interested motivations of the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, Western urban planners, and Indian politicians; and Calcutta’s ability to upend the linear temporality of modernization. This section further argues that Calcutta’s crisis challenged the anti-urban bias of global development agencies and governments in the 1950s and the early 1960s. Calcutta, as I will show in this section, became the site of the first transnational development coalition to save an existing (post)colonial city of the Global South. Urban development in the Global South, therefore, this article suggests, was not a natural outcome of the general developmentalist thrust of early postwar era. The emergence of large (post)colonial cities as a development issue as opposed to an improvement issue was a global and contingent process in which the (hyper)real Calcutta of crisis played an important role.Footnote 9
Part II of this article argues that from the mid- to late 1970s, Calcutta also began to engender and contribute to a renewed complacency about cities, especially in the United States. Calcutta’s survival in the face of apparent death became, on the one hand, an example for the influential urbanists associated with the Ford Foundation to argue that cities could survive with very low levels of public services and, and on the other, for the New Right in the United States to advocate for a planned shrinkage and benign neglect of cities under the pretext that they are fundamentally self-correcting. In this way, the making of Calcutta’s crisis-ridden image, the uses it was put to, and its influence both mirrored and in part constructed many of the important milestones in the broad arch of urban development of the postwar era.
Overall, this article highlights the American dimensions of urban development in early post-colonial India and the international/Indian dimensions of the American concept of urban crisis.Footnote 10 It shows, among other things, how the American concept of urban crisis transcended the Global North–South divide to reach Calcutta through American media, institutions, and experts; and how urban crisis travelled back from Calcutta to the United States to become a small but not insignificant part of debates about its own cities. This happened because Calcutta became a means to talk about American cities without explicitly raising the issue of race and immigration.
To be sure, this article does not intend to position Calcutta as a superlative or paradigmatic city, even though, in my assessment, no other city embodied fears about the fate of cities in the 1960s and the 1970s with the same intensity and regularity.Footnote 11 Instead, it seeks to contribute to the field of global urban history by addressing one of its main challenges, which is to show how cities of the Global South have informed and shaped urbanism globally. It does so in two ways. One, just in the way Carl Nightingale has shown how racial segregation in cities was first practiced in Madras and Calcutta in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then taken to its logical conclusion in Jim Crow United States and apartheid-era South Africa in the twentieth century,Footnote 12 this article shows how the back-and-forth between Calcutta/Global South and United States/Global North is vital for making sense of the postwar history of urban crisis and development. Two, it gives one concrete example where a city of the Global South is not being merely acted upon by global forces but is also actively reshaping them.
The hyperreal crisis city
Calcutta has a long history of negative urban representation stretching back to the early nineteenth century. The city’s image as filthy and unhealthy had roots in the ‘colonial encounter’. This encounter, provoked British fears about tropical diseases, native bazaars, and neighbourhoods;Footnote 13 Bengali concerns about the city being a den of immorality;Footnote 14 and a racially charged and ruinous contest between non-official British residents and powerful Bengali landlords for political control over the city government.Footnote 15 However, the colonial encounter by itself cannot explain the city’s post-colonial emergence as the world’s foremost problem city. This is because even in the 1940s and early 1950s when Calcutta was confronted by war, famine, partition, and a refugee crisis, neither the media nor the government conceptualized the city’s poverty, disease, congestion, and slums as an urban crisis or as an urban problem. They thought of Calcutta’s problems as disaggregated sociocultural and economic issues that appeared in this city in a more acute form than elsewhere because it was India’s largest and one of the largest in the Global South. In other words, while there was a long history of anti-urban thought in the United States,Footnote 16 and most Indian leaders romanticized village over city life, the idea that cities could experience an urban crisis did not exist. Simply put, conceptual vocabulary of ‘urban crisis’ was unavailable at the time.
Even in the early 1950s, therefore, Calcutta’s image was overdetermined by the colonial discourse,Footnote 17 with a slight adjustment to account for the economic and humanitarian consequences of the tragedies that shook the city in the 1940s, and India’s partition and independence. But Calcutta’s image began to change rapidly from the mid- to late 1950s, and it soon emerged as a global exemplar of urban crisis. Why? To be sure, the city’s problems with congestion, poverty, sanitation, homelessness, and immigration became progressively worse in this decade. However, for making sense of Calcutta’s crisis-ridden image and its many international lives, the year 1955 is crucial. Three things happened in this year that made crisis talk about Calcutta possible. First, it was only in 1955 that the concept of ‘urban crisis’ was evoked and began to gain traction in the United States when an American social scientist, Frederick Vigman, argued that some of the most important cities of the United States—New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston—were in the ‘throes of urban crisis’.Footnote 18 Second, it was in January 1955—the same month and year when Vigman published his book on urban crisis in the United States—that one of the first major alarm bells about Calcutta as an urban problem was raised by the editor of the venerable Calcutta-based daily, The Statesman. Its British editor, M. A. Johnson, met India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and spoke to him ‘about Calcutta and its troubles, the rumblings below the surface and the occasional explosions, how this terribly overcrowded city, with crowds of unemployed people, lives apparently on the brink of trouble’. Johnson warned the prime minister that something was ‘brewing’ and that ‘things must have come to a pretty pass [in the city] when the wife of a High Court Judge says that all will be well when the Communists are in control’.Footnote 19 The meeting was alarming enough for Nehru to write to West Bengal’s chief minister, Dr B. C. Roy, for his opinion. Third, and most importantly, 1955 marked a major inflection point in the history of the Cold War in the Global South. Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev’s Asia tour in the winter of that year threw open a new front in the Cold War for the ‘hearts and minds of the peoples of the Third World’. In this contest, India emerged as an economic ‘frontline state’, where both the Western and Eastern blocs competed to show the superiority of their development models.Footnote 20
Of all the cities that the Soviet delegation visited in the winter of 1955, their Calcutta visit turned out to be the most dramatic. Political analysts and journalists had expected that the city would give the Soviet delegation a rousing reception.Footnote 21 But what happened stunned American media and even forced Nehru to publicly clarify that India will remain non-aligned.Footnote 22 ‘From Dumdum airport [in Calcutta]’, a New York Times report noted, ‘the Soviet Party launched its way through hundreds of thousands of flag-waving Bengalis and under dozens of welcome arches.’ When the Soviet cavalcade came into the centre of the town ‘the cheering crowds broke through the police lines, surrounded the car, and fought to climb aboard to shake hands with the visitors’. Subsequently ‘[t]he Calcutta police escort pushed its way through to the convertible and hurried the Russians into a van protected by grilled windows’ and it was in this police van that the Soviet leaders, ‘exhausted and obviously stunned by the size of their welcome, drew up to their destination’. ‘Receptions and tours were cancelled but late into the night’, the report lamented, ‘the streets of India’s largest city were jammed with people hoping to get a glimpse of the Russians.’ This was not only the biggest crowd of Khrushchev’s Asia visit, according to the New York Times, but it was also one of the largest in Indian history as two million Calcuttans had turned out on the streets to greet the Soviet leaders.Footnote 23
Analysing the reasons behind Soviet success in Calcutta, the New York Times’s Special Correspondent to India, A. M. Rosenthal—future Pulitzer Prize winner and Executive Editor of that newspaper—wrote that while Queen Elizabeth or President Eisenhower might have received a warm welcome in other Indian cities, they would not in Calcutta. This was alarming because Calcutta was not only India’s largest city but also ‘more vital and representative of India’ than New Delhi. Mirroring George Kennan’s influential observation that communism is a disease that grows on dead tissue, Rosenthal argued that if there ‘were more red flags flying in Calcutta than in Moscow’ it was because Calcutta was India’s most ‘economically degraded city’. The continuation of European racial privileges, combined with millions of unaccounted immigrants with ‘little economic stake in the society’ had made it a happy hunting ground for the communists.Footnote 24
International news reports henceforth began to describe Calcutta as ‘restless’, ‘turbulent’, and ‘volatile’.Footnote 25 One of most striking impacts of the post-1955 discourse on Calcutta can be seen in how Time Magazine reported Calcutta’s 1958 cholera outbreak. While the magazine had blamed the 1945 cholera outbreak in Calcutta on the Indians’ poor sense of hygiene,Footnote 26 the 1958 outbreak provoked an astonishing diatribe on the city. It described Calcutta as ‘a packed and pestilent town’, impossibly crowded, hopelessly poor, and as an assault on the senses. ‘Calcutta shocks the eyes’, with its swarming beggars and starved mothers feeding their babies; ‘[i]t stings the nose’ with ‘mingled odours of garbage, curry, roasted onions, rancid mustard oil, and human sweat;’ and ‘it assaults the ear’ with ‘the cry of hawkers, shriek of cart wheels and incessant din of horns sounded by bearded Sikh cab drivers who hurtle past in ancient taxis as if pursued by many handed Kalis herself’. ‘With the British Raj gone’, the report stressed, ‘the city is more odiferous than ever.’ Calcutta was ‘suffocating under the weight of its own people’ and, to make things worse, it was providing communists the base to build, which was why ‘[w]hen Khrushchev and Bulganin visited Calcutta, the Red apparatus could fill the streets with 2,000,000 screaming enthusiasts’.Footnote 27
Reporting of this kind revealed several anxieties. Khrushchev’s Calcutta visit made some American journalists doubt the efficacy of concentrating American aid in the countryside because it was India’s most populous city that seemed to be providing the ground for communism to ‘breed and grow’.Footnote 28 At the same time, cities within the United States had also started to emerge as a major political and policy challenge. From the mid-1950s, American cities became discursive sites where more general anxieties related to blight, slums, and racial segregation were given a ‘spatial fix’.Footnote 29 In addition, the anxiety about the American city also took on Cold War dimensions. As a historian of the United States has argued,
The seeming failure of U.S. cities to keep pace [with their socialist rivals] bespoke something unnerving about the ability of capitalism … to create a good society for all. An urban civilization like the United States had to demonstrate that it could create great cities on largely capitalist models; to fail … posed a threat not only to domestic tranquillity but also the expansion of American power and influence abroad.Footnote 30
But the American solution to urban woes, urban renewal—a deliberate policy to solve a city’s physical and economic problems by undertaking infrastructural upgrades and slum clearance to attract new private capital investments and increase property prices—was beginning to show signs of failure. Unlike past American successes in the rural areas and dam-building, its model answer to urban problems was contested, and its success, tentative.Footnote 31 Calcutta thus became an example that could be used to push American cities to action. To give one example: in the 1959 Alfred Smith dinner where he squared off against the (soon to be) Democratic presidential candidate Senator John F. Kennedy, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller asked, ‘How can we stir the hopes of the slum dwellers in Calcutta and Jakarta if cities here are too lazy or too fat to clean their own slums[?]’Footnote 32
The World Bank, Hoffman Mission, and the making of a city in crisis: 1959–60
The World Bank played a central, perhaps the most important, role in making Calcutta an object of transnational concern. In 1960, the World Bank appointed a three-member team of experts led by an economist, Michael Hoffman, to assess India’s Third Five-Year Plan. Such assessments were extremely important for India. The World Bank India Consortium of donors, as well as individual donor governments including the United States, relied on these when deciding on the type and the quantum of aid for the fledgling country. Hoffman’s final report, while broadly endorsing India’s heavy industry-led Third Five-Year Plan, singled out Calcutta for special treatment. It noted that, ‘[i]n the Mission’s view, one of the most dangerous weaknesses of the Plan was the continued neglect of the problems of urban development in Calcutta’. ‘Overcrowding, degradation of housing, health hazards, primitive water supplies, lack of space for new industries, traffic bottlenecks, power shortage, a still unresolved refugee problem—all are increasing the cost of moving goods, and of providing the many services that a growing industrial region demands of its metropolis.’ Calcutta, the report emphasized, was ‘putting impediments in the way of economic growth in India’s most rapidly expanding industrial region’. It warned that the city’s conditions ‘nurture[d] the feelings of unrest and malaise in the population which are likely to boil over from time to time in ways that are both destructive and inimical to orderly economic development’. Therefore, the report insisted, something had to be done to reduce the congestion, the cost of doing business from Calcutta, and to improve the city’s civic amenities and infrastructure. India had no choice in the matter as there was ‘no alternative to Calcutta as a port, financial and administrative centre and a major market for heavy and light industries’. As importantly, the report indicated that the city was an ideal candidate for receiving foreign financial aid and technical assistance.Footnote 33
World Bank reports in the 1950s and even 1960s did not usually devote so much space to a city as they did to Calcutta. In the late 1950s, the Bank had, what a scholar has called, an ‘anti-urban bias’.Footnote 34 Bank experts believed, like most economic planners and development economists at the time, that major development initiatives in existing cities of the Global South would only reinforce pre-existing infrastructural and economic advantages that urban areas enjoyed over rural. This would result in an increase in rural to urban migration until the marginal benefits of new improvements are consumed.Footnote 35 The Hoffman Report’s focus on Calcutta then signalled the beginnings of a shift in the World Bank’s attitude which would culminate in its emphasis on urban poverty in the McNamara years (1968–81) and in the Bank’s first ever multi-sectoral loan to an urban development authority in 1972 to Calcutta, followed by Istanbul and Bogotá. The question then is, why did the Hoffman Mission highlight Calcutta’s problems so prominently?
The World Bank had close ties with Calcutta. Its two largest private sector borrowers in India, TATA Steel and the Indian Iron and Steel Company Ltd (IISCO), were both headquartered in this city and operating in its hinterland. Hoffman was convinced that their performance was getting adversely affected ‘by the general inefficiency and waste involved in doing business in and through Calcutta’. Further, the Bank’s financial assistance to the Calcutta Port and the multipurpose hydroelectric project built along the lines of the Tennessee Valley Authority—the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC)—had helped the city. But these were not enough. The Hooghly River on which the Calcutta Port lay was deteriorating rapidly due to heavy silting, partly due to the DVC. The DVC itself was supplying only one-third of the power promised to Calcutta as it was struggling to meet the energy requirements of new heavy industries that were rapidly coming up around the city in eastern India. To make matters worse, Calcutta was ‘neglected’, ‘had little sources of finance except rates’, and was rapidly becoming, if not already, ‘a great, smelly congested impediment to further the growth of the region’.Footnote 36 ‘For these reasons alone’, Hoffman stressed, the Bank should ‘stop deterioration in Calcutta area … because of its importance to several substantial borrowers’, and its general importance to India’s economy. The World Bank’s sister organization, the International Development Association (IDA)—designed to give soft loans to the world’s poorest countries—was due to begin operations from September 1960. Hoffman believed that ‘[i]f we [the World Bank] could do something to help straighten out that mess [Calcutta], IDA would have justified its existence’.Footnote 37
The Hoffman Report was impossible to ignore. In November 1960, Ford Foundation’s influential India representative, Douglas Ensminger, wrote to his colleagues in the New York headquarters that ‘[t]he Michael Hoffman World Bank Mission Report is beginning to reverberate here [in India], especially in Calcutta’. West Bengal’s chief minister, B. C. Roy, had ‘seized the recommendations … and is trying to mobilize Central Government support in acquiring financial and technical aid for a programme to develop Greater Calcutta area’, which was perhaps ‘the greatest urban problem in the world’. The IDA could invest up $20 million on the city’s urban redevelopment if the government of West Bengal could prepare a plan and have it endorsed by the central government.Footnote 38 Indeed, officials in both the Ford Foundation and the World Bank were convinced that if a plan could be prepared, the IDA would ‘finance Calcutta’s development in a big way’.Footnote 39
Calcutta’s crisis goes official, national, and global, 1960–1
B. C. Roy’s interest in securing foreign assistance for Calcutta’s urban development was a marked departure from his position in 1955 when his reply to Nehru’s query about Calcutta’s allegedly ‘explosive situation’ was that he could ‘control’ it.Footnote 40 Even as late as 1958, Roy could be defensive towards criticism of Calcutta. He dismissed the 1958 Time Magazine article on the city as malicious. ‘Calcutta’, Roy thundered in front of his party colleagues, ‘is a glorious blend of both old and new’; the city is ‘full of enthusiasm and with all its shortcomings was the farthest from being derelict’. Furthermore, he asserted, ‘if for the Americans, the gathering of two to three million people to welcome Soviet rulers was a sign of decay’, for Indians, it was a sign of the city’s ‘enduring vitality’.Footnote 41
What Roy’s charge against the 1958 Time Magazine article does not reveal is that his attitude towards Calcutta had started to shift a year earlier following the provincial elections of 1957. In this election he only secured a slender and controversial victory over a Communist Party of India candidate in his central Calcutta stronghold, Bow Bazar. In a letter to Nehru, Roy admitted that in the 1957 election, ‘Congress [party had] lost heavily in the towns and industrial areas mainly because of the question of refugee rehabilitation and slum clearance, and where there was huge concentration of refugees in transit camps, and living conditions were poor.’ He felt that while the Congress had done much in the rural areas, which is why it had won the elections, it had done ‘nothing in the towns’. ‘Calcutta remains the same old dirty Calcutta, as it was years ago’, wrote Roy, ‘only in addition it has become more crowded and more unclean.’Footnote 42
In addition to the fear of electoral reverse, by 1960, there was also the lure of foreign aid. Roy henceforth embraced the ‘crisis’ narrative wholeheartedly. He met with the Ford Foundation’s Douglas Ensminger and demanded that a master-plan for Calcutta and resources to implemented it be prepared, unrealistically early, by the elections of 1962. He also knew the precise language that could sway the Foundation. Roy is believed to have told Ensminger that ‘India is in real trouble with respect to Calcutta.’ If his government failed to improve the city, the Communists may win the next or a subsequent election. Calcutta had to be seen ‘as India’s problem as well as the world’s problem, if particularly the western world was interest in the success of democracy in India’.Footnote 43
However, if it was easy to convince the Foundation’s famously entrepreneurial field representative that Calcutta was the world’s problem, the Foundation’s New York office was more circumspect. In the sphere of urban development, the Ford Foundation’s footprint in India, the rest of the developing world, and, indeed, even in the United States, was modest and tentative. Within the United States, the Ford Foundation’s educational programme had carried out scattered urban-related projects on school improvements. From the mid-1950s, when urban blight and crisis entered into mainstream American imagination, the Foundation began supporting some ‘action-oriented demonstration’ urban projects.Footnote 44 Internationally, in 1959, the Ford Foundation along with the United States International Cooperation Administration, which was the forerunner to the USAID, had got itself involved in General Ayub Khan’s flagship project of building a satellite township for Karachi, Pakistan, called Korangi.Footnote 45 Within India, the Ford Foundation’s most significant urban intervention in the 1950s had been its assistance in preparing a master-plan for New Delhi in 1957–8.Footnote 46 Further, the Ford Foundation tended at this time to mirror the priorities of the governments of the countries it worked in.Footnote 47 Insofar as urban issues were concerned, Indian governments (both central and provincial), as well as governments in most other countries of the Global South, spent their energy on building new administrative and/or industrial cities.Footnote 48 To be sure, the trajectories of each of these new cities was different, and they were a response to a range of urban problems and limitations. In particular, New Delhi presented a different kind of problem compared to other national or provincial capital cities, such as Islamabad, Ankara, and Chandigarh, since the old and new city—that is, ‘New Delhi’ and ‘Old Delhi’—were functionally connected.Footnote 49 But it is important to note that in none of these cities, New Delhi included, were state-led urban planning or the Ford Foundation’s involvement thought of as attempts at saving an existing city from an urban crisis.
Calcutta, then, was a new kind of project for the Ford Foundation, Indian government, and urban planners more generally since the brief was to save a large existing city of the Global South from death and destruction. The Foundation was not sure if it had the wherewithal to contribute to a programme of such magnitude and complexity. But hesitation was eventually overcome by the ‘prestige’ of getting involved in a project of Calcutta’s size—the largest city in India and the eleventh-largest in the world. The political and economic implications arising out of Calcutta’s ‘sink-hole’ status as one of the world’s ‘most congested, socially degrading, and unhygienic cities, if not the foremost in this respect’, along with the possibility of aid from the IDA and the ICA (International Cooperation Agency), proved to be irresistible.Footnote 50 For the Foundation, thus, Calcutta became an ‘experiment’.Footnote 51
As part of the preparation for the Ford Foundation’s programme in Calcutta, in August 1961, Chief Minister B. C. Roy met US President John F. Kennedy at Washington, DC. He also met Senator Hubert Humphrey who would go on to become the US vice president; Eugene Black, the president of the World Bank; and Paul Hoffman, the former president of the Ford Foundation who was responsible for bringing the Foundation to India.Footnote 52 The major point of discussion was aid for implementing plans for Calcutta. It is not clear, however, what Roy’s US visit achieved. Aid for implementation was contingent on the urban plan on which work had not even started. But the one thing Roy’s visit did achieve was that—as an important Ford Foundation urbanist noted—it ‘helped bring Calcutta to the forefront of people’s attention’ in the United States. The ‘Ford Foundation came alive to the project as it hadn’t fully up till then’.Footnote 53 Even the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee became convinced that Calcutta’s revival would help ‘thwart the Communist offensive’ in India and ‘promote the welfare of the people and the strength of their country’.Footnote 54 Coverage of Roy’s attempts to seek American assistance for Calcutta highlighted and reified the idea that the city was in crisis.Footnote 55 The Ford Foundation’s public announcement to help Calcutta’s plan also coincided with Roy’s visit. The Foundation proclaimed that Calcutta was the ‘world’s most serious urban challenge’.Footnote 56 In short, Roy’s unusual and high-profile US visit—it was not common for a chief minister of a state in India to meet with the US president—and the interest shown by the World Bank and Ford Foundation, reinforced Calcutta’s reputation as a crisis city.
A good example of the coverage on Calcutta post Roy’s US visit is the New York Times’s multi-page article titled, ‘Shadow of Catastrophe over Calcutta’, with the byline that India must find solutions to the city if it were to preserve its freedom. It made the same points as the World Bank Mission’s Report but with more dramatic effect and with a view of making the crisis relatable and urgent to its readers in the United States.
To comprehend the crisis of Calcutta just imagine this … New York is the only major port in the United States, except for San Francisco (like Bombay) … The industrial complexes … are all concentrated near Albany. The only highway from there to New York is the Albany Post Road … [t]he Hudson River is … full of silt … [t]he municipal water supply is growing dangerously salty and unsafe to drink. There is one major strike almost every week…[there are] [b]lock long lines of desperate seekers of menial jobs…[i]n the shadow of Waldorf Astoria is a shanty town … Times Square swarms with beggars…There are good and pleasant sides to Calcutta too … [which] excites the heart of a native New Yorker but Calcutta is a … jam packed eyesore … If human frustrations erupt, if the active and well-organized Communist Party seizes control in Calcutta, where is the hope?Footnote 57
In India’s quasi-federal structure, however, the main player that could set the ball rolling on Calcutta was the central government at New Delhi. The issue here was that planners in the powerful Planning Commission, which had substantial control over policy at the time, had little interest in urban planning, and in questions of how national economic planning translated into urban matters.Footnote 58 They could not be faulted as very few top-level economic planners anywhere in the world had seriously given thought to questions such as the cost of urban expansion in developing and advanced capitalist societies.Footnote 59 The main issue that made urban planning incongruent with the prevailing economic planning methods was that neat mathematical models were inapplicable to the urban setting.Footnote 60 Even in countries like the United States, historical data on important variables such as land rents were impossible to develop; and there was no agreement among urban planners regarding ‘what constitute[d] optimal configurations, or which patterns would produce the most efficient communities’. All this made evaluating alternative urban policies, in any rigorous way, unfeasible.Footnote 61 Further, legacy of the colonial era when urban governance was driven by epidemiological concerns meant that government officials of early independent India too, understood urban planning as a health issue, rather than an economic issue.Footnote 62
Given the state of urban research, and its relationship with national-scale economic planning which was obsessed with input-outputs ratios, the influence of the World Bank and the Ford Foundation in convincing the government of India and the Planning Commission that Calcutta was a development problem cannot be underestimated. Indeed, it was in the specific context of the Hoffman Report that the deputy minister in India’s Planning Commission, S. N. Mishra, wrote to Nehru in September 1960 urging him to treat ‘the problem of Calcutta as one of national importance and priority’, since ‘any further deterioration will have explosive consequences’. Calcutta’s problems were ‘unique in its dimension and gravity’. The city had been giving alarming signals from time to time and the government could not afford to ‘let the drama proceed with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy’. Mishra was convinced that if a comprehensive development plan were to be prepared, some international assistance might also be available as indicated by the World Bank Report.Footnote 63
Nehru concurred. He generally believed that ‘the fundamental problem of India is not Delhi or Calcutta or Bombay but the villages of India’.Footnote 64 But Calcutta unsettled this perception. Replying to Mishra, the prime minister wrote, the ‘problem of Calcutta is of high importance’ and the Planning Commission ‘must sit down and consider this’.Footnote 65 He also wrote to his finance minister, minister for planning, and the home minister that he feared that unless something was done to check rapid deterioration of Calcutta, India might have to face far greater difficulties in future.Footnote 66 He admitted that though the problem of Calcutta had been at the back of his mind for some time, it was only due to the World Bank report that ‘his mind reverted to it with a jolt’.Footnote 67 Later in the year, Nehru wrote to his minister for planning, G. L. Nanda, urging his ministry to pay ‘particular attention’ to the ‘problem of Calcutta’ in the Third Five-Year Plan. Nehru now believed that Calcutta presented a ‘dangerous social and political problem’. If the ‘problems of Calcutta City’ were not tackled ‘it could poison the whole of Bengal and, to some extent, the rest of India’. Nehru admitted that he had come to recognize the scale of Calcutta’s problems only recently. ‘Perhaps, some of us getting used to things do not worry about this [Calcutta] enough.’Footnote 68
Indeed, Calcutta’s crisis had thrown the government of India into a quandary. This can be sensed from Nehru’s confusing deliberation on the matter: ‘[w]e cannot allot large sums of money’ for Calcutta, or indeed ‘any considerable sum’. ‘If possible, it will be good to allot a relatively small sum … But perhaps [even] this may not be feasible.’ But ‘something has to be said and some hope has to be given …’Footnote 69 All that Nehru could do was to declare in the meeting of the National Development Council in January 1961 that Calcutta was a ‘nightmare experience’. ‘It will be a terrible tragedy if it were allowed to go to pieces.’ And therefore, Calcutta is a ‘national responsibility’.Footnote 70 As a token measure the central government set aside a small sum for implementing proposals that might result from the ‘surveys’ undertaken by the Ford Foundation team.Footnote 71
In this way, by 1961, an elite transnational consensus that Calcutta was in the midst of an urban crisis took root. And as part of this consensus, a transnational urban renewal effort coalesced around Calcutta. The anti-urban bias of international development of the 1950s therefore was, at the very least, unsettled. Once the Ford Foundation, World Bank, and the government of India and the government of West Bengal decided that something had to be done about Calcutta, urban planners moved in to cash in on the opportunity.Footnote 72 Calcutta presented the first instance when American experience with city redevelopment and urban renewal could be tried out outside of the North Atlantic zone. Urban planning firms of international repute like Doxiadis Associates tried to get an entry into the Calcutta programme by projecting themselves as most suitable for dealing with a city that ‘faces the worst conditions in the world … [and] one of the most difficult [urban problems] ever encountered.Footnote 73 No wonder then, that a Pittsburgh-based urban planner wrote that Calcutta was a ‘Ford-sent opportunity to expand and deepen’ the profession of urban planning.Footnote 74
Hyperreal Calcutta enters the global imagination
Soon, the Ford Foundation-appointed experts flew down to Calcutta to prepare a revival/renewal plan for the city. This was uncharted territory for all parties—politicians and government officials in India, experts in the Ford Foundation, and the elites of Calcutta. Progress was slow. The Foundation’s Calcutta Advisory group faced many setbacks and made many mistakes.Footnote 75 It could unveil its plan for the city only in 1967, more than half a decade after it started working in Calcutta. By this time, concern with urban crisis in the United States acquired an even greater urgency and the discourse moved from a focus on the physical city to an emphasis on civil strife, race, urban poverty, and political radicalism.Footnote 76 In the meantime, Calcutta’s economy entered into a recession more severe than the one in the rest of the country. And soon after the publication of the Foundation’s plan, the very forces that Calcutta’s urban renewal was meant to stall—the communists—came to power. To make the situation even more volatile, Calcutta and West Bengal began to be rocked by the Maoist/Naxal movement which sought to overthrow the Indian state. The situation in neighbouring East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) started to become volatile which meant that a steady stream of refugees kept entering West Bengal. It is in the local, national, and global context that Calcutta sealed its reputation as the world’s crisis city.
In January 1967, the Ford Foundation assembled a group of some of the world’s leading Western urban experts in Calcutta to discuss the Calcutta Metropolitan Plan that it had helped prepare.Footnote 77 The concluding statement by the planners, circulated the world over, emphasized that Calcutta’s crisis was much worse than a famine or a flood and could be the future of all cities in the world:
We have not seen human degradation on a comparable scale anywhere in the world. This is a matter of one of the greatest urban concentrations in existence rapidly approaching the point of breakdown in terms of its economy, housing, sanitation, transport, and the essential humanities of life. If the final breakdown were to take place it would be a disaster for mankind of a more sinister sort than any disaster of flood or famine. It would be a confession of failure, at the first major confrontation, of mankind’s ability to organize the vast, rapidly growing urban concentrations into which humanity seems inevitably destined to move.Footnote 78
As the Ford Foundation pushed hard to show that it had a plan which could be implemented, and the communists established themselves as Calcutta’s most important political force, the city began to generate a fresh wave of anxiety. A good example would be a 1968 op-ed published in the New York Times, titled ‘A “Sinister” Urban Crisis’, which stated that ‘[o]f all the beleaguered urban centres, Calcutta is the most wretched, the most desperate, and probably the most crucial in terms of the broad national and international interests it might affect’.Footnote 79 This op-ed was written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and future executive editor of the New York Times, Joseph Lelyveld. But it was the result of a ‘discussion’ between Foundation officials in Calcutta, the chief of Ford Foundation-financed urban-planning body the Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Organisation (CMPO), and Lelyveld himself. Ford Planners in Calcutta like Colin Rosser were particularly pleased that ‘this editorial has attracted much attention in the [United] States judging by the letters we have had … on the matter’.Footnote 80 Later in the year, Joseph Lelyveld also wrote that Calcutta was ‘not one disaster, but many’; it was ‘the world’s worst city’.Footnote 81
In 1955, the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, had been forced to abandon his car and take a police van via the city’s back alleys to escape adoring crowds on his way from Calcutta’s Dum Dum Airport to the Raj Bhavan (Governor’s Palace). Thirteen years later, in 1968, another important world dignitary, Robert McNamara was to make the same journey. He, too, would be forced to abandon his car, but not due to adoring crowds. He was, instead, met with fierce anti-Vietnam War protestors who blocked all exit routes from Calcutta’s airport. McNamara thus had to be airlifted from the airport to the Raj Bhavan. The New York Times bristled that the ‘rude reception’ that Calcuttans gave to McNamara, who had assumed the ‘commanding role in the international war on poverty’, showed that Calcutta was the ‘heart of enemy territory, the epitome of worldwide problems of hunger, poverty, and want’. ‘The violence that the World Bank head [had] encountered … was commonplace in the world’s most miserable city.’ And this could be the ‘shape of things to come’ the world over if McNamara failed in his ‘mission of hope’.Footnote 82
The same year the Australian Financial Review declared Calcutta the ‘World’s Problem City’;Footnote 83 the British journalist Geoffrey Moorhouse wrote his book Calcutta: The City Revealed which cemented the phrase ‘Calcutta way’, as a shorthand for urban crisis and despair; and, the French documentary maker Louis Malle shot his documentary, Calcutta (more on this below). The screening of this documentary in Britain angered the Indian government so much that it threw the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) out of India for a year, thus dragging Indo-British relations to a new low.Footnote 84 Soon, Calcutta began to stand in for urban crisis globally. It was now enough to call Naples, the ‘Calcutta of Europe’;Footnote 85 Cairo and Johannesburg feared that they might become the ‘Calcutta of Africa’;Footnote 86 and one of the issues with war-torn Saigon in the mid-1970s was that it had become ‘reminiscent of Calcutta’.Footnote 87 Even for Bombay, in the early 1970s, the main anxiety was whether it was ‘doomed to become another Calcutta’.Footnote 88 Calcutta thus came to embody what the UN general secretary in 1969 called the ‘world crisis in urbanization’.Footnote 89
By the 1970s, Calcutta’s urban crisis began to be used by a broad political spectrum. As I have shown, Calcutta became a means in sections of American media and development institutions to make a case for focused state- and aid-led interventions in cities to solve urban infrastructural problems and alleviate urban poverty. But for the communists in Cuba, Calcutta became a baseline that could be used for highlighting the relative success of the communist system. In 1970, Havana screened Louis Malle’s Calcutta in three theatres. An Indian diplomat posted in Cuba felt that the documentary showed Calcutta as a city of ‘horror, misery and hopelessness’. He was convinced that Fidel Castro had deliberately screened the film as he wanted to use Calcutta’s plight to assuage growing discontentment over food rationing, meat shortages, and planning failures in Havana. The diplomat conceded that Castro may also have succeeded as he overheard someone in audience remark that in ‘comparison to Calcutta, Cuba was heavenly bliss’.Footnote 90
However, Castro was not alone in using hyperreal Calcutta for other ends. In 1970, Indian officials could be found scrambling to persuade local authorities in cities such as Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Vienna, and Berlin to stop Calcutta’s screening, or at very least, censor ‘objectionable’ portions.Footnote 91 Ironically, by this time, the Indian government itself had little objection at ‘the prospect of Calcutta’s miseries being hawked around the world in an effort to secure assistance’.Footnote 92 It also helped that, by highlighting that Calcutta was a ‘massive development problem’ and that there were ‘few cities in the world where there is such abject poverty’, the Indian government could draw attention to the simmering political discontent and strife in East Pakistan that was pushing refugees to India.Footnote 93
That said, if for American organizations, Indian leaders, and Cuba’s communists, Calcutta had a relatively straightforward purpose, for intellectuals with a liberal and/or leftist worldview, the city emerged as a contradiction-ridden emotional problem. Take, for example, the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist Gunter Grass. Grass was so shocked and moved by Calcutta on his first visit in 1975 that he wrote a surreal piece in his novel The Flounder in which he recommended the city to honeymooners while at the same time describing it as ‘a pile of shit that god dropped and named Calcutta’. He even compared his journey to the city with Saul’s journey through Damascus.Footnote 94 A decade later Elisabeth Bummiler—who went on to write a book on women in India—wrote:
To a newcomer, Calcutta is a numbing shock. “How could this have happened?” Is often the first question. Then guilt sets in. Strolling through Calcutta is like walking on to the site of a plane crash…Then, after a time, the guilt gives way to fascination.Footnote 95
In this way, Calcutta emerged as ‘the awful example, held out to frighten planners, governments and municipal authorities all over the world’. It became ‘the ultimate image of a megalopolis in decay and in despair’; a city ‘postponing the day of reckoning by the skin of its teeth’.Footnote 96 Calcutta therefore upended the temporality of modernization theories. It was ‘underdeveloped’ and thus behind Western cities. This why American/Western intervention to save it was urgent and necessary, and a model American city worthy of emulation had to be found—the Ford Foundation decided in the early 1960s that this city was Pittsburgh. At the same time, Calcutta was ahead of all cities of the world as it was the ‘first in line’ to confront the life-and-death battle that all cities were destined to face. To make matters more alarming, as the planners assembled by the Ford Foundation in Calcutta in 1967 concluded, there was a real possibility that Calcutta could lose this battle. It should come as little surprise then that a World Bank economist would write in the early 1970s that ‘[f]or one concerned about what is happening in cities, a first visit to Calcutta must be a sort of perverse counterpart of a Muslim’s first view of Mecca’.Footnote 97
The conflicted legacies of Calcutta’s ‘refusal to die’
In the 1960s there was a genuine belief, globally, that through well-designed interventions the world’s most pressing problems could be solved. Calcutta was a test case of whether the urban planners and governments could ‘save’ cities from disaster and death. Naturally, the ‘Calcutta experiment’ and the difficulties of planning, finding resources to implement plans, convincing various stake holders of the importance of urban development, and coalition-building for urban transformation had a profound impact on urban planning. In his memoirs, Arthur Row, a Yale professor and urbanist who headed the Ford Foundation’s Calcutta Advisory Group from 1969 to 1974, wrote that Calcutta had turned the conventional view that urban planning should be ‘above politics’ and the positivist ideal ‘that for every ailing urban area there existed a single right answer which would only be revealed by disinterested investigation’ on its head. ‘After Calcutta, and in large part because of it’, Row believed, ‘the comfortable dichotomy between planning and implementation’ broke down and attempts at implementable improvements became the norm as opposed to comprehensive large-scale urban planning. ‘This … philosophy’, Row suggested, ‘engender[ed] a fundamental change in the way that international agencies, governments and the urban professionals approach[ed] issues posed by the phenomenon of urbanization in the Third World.’ Planning could no longer remain separate from questions of ‘getting things done’ and the production of design gave way to ‘design strategies for achieving development action.’Footnote 98 The World Bank’s focus on urban poverty rather than urban renewal and physical infrastructural improvement in the 1970s was arguably a part of this shift.
Row however was not the only planner to have been transformed by Calcutta. In 1971, the Ford Foundation commissioned three planners—Jack Robin, Frederick Terezo, and Colin Rosser, all part of the Calcutta Advisory Group in the 1960s—to conduct an international urbanization survey based on which the Foundation would craft its future intervention in cities, especially of the Global South. The planners visited several cities in all the major continents of the world. In their final report, they paid a tribute to their Calcutta experience. They noted that had they ‘not had the Calcutta experience … [and] were urbanists fresh from the U.S. and the U.K. or had enjoyed … the high[er] standards of the Latin American cities … [they] would have submitted a very different Survey Report in both tone and substance’.Footnote 99 Their experience of working in and from Calcutta, the city’s crisis, predictions about its doom and death, and yet the city’s very survival in the face of inaction, had turned them ‘against the search for urban Utopias’. Calcutta had encouraged a ‘guarded realism in their understanding of global urban issues’. The city had shown that it was possible ‘for urban life to survive and to endure at incredibly low levels of public service and public security’.Footnote 100 As a result, the authors of the report were willing to accept that ‘there is always a chance that human ingenuity and human endurance will find ways in which some urban order and some element of urban beauty will survive’.Footnote 101 All this meant that while the world was experiencing and will experience urban problems, the planners were convinced that these would not lead to urban disaster and death.Footnote 102 The world would cope with its urban problems in its usual ‘muddle through way’ and, as Calcutta had demonstrated, it would be ‘incorrect to say that the cities of the world are about to collapse and that their populations are to “crash” in a biological die-off’.Footnote 103 After this report—but only partly because of it—the Ford Foundation did not attempt another Calcutta-style exercise in urban-renewal planning and implementation in any other city of the world.
The idea that cities could muddle along, however, was taken to its logical limit by the American New Right. Calcutta’s refusal ‘to give in’ came to be cited as an example of how ‘[c]omplex urban processes … tend to be self-correcting’,Footnote 104 which was another way of stressing non-intervention in urban affairs. In a similar vein, in an influential 1976 op-ed by Professor Roger Starr—a former New York City official, NYU professor, and one of the most influential New Right proponents of ‘planned’ or deliberate ‘shrinkage’ of cities—argued for a downsizing of New York City because it ‘would be better to have a smaller vibrant city of five million than a Calcutta of seven’.Footnote 105 Written in the context of New York City’s municipal crisis, it would seem that for some, Calcutta was the ‘fear city’ of the ‘fear city’, as New York was called by many in the 1970s.
Following Wall Street’s takeover of New York City after the collapse of its city government in the mid-1970s, and in particular from the 1980s, cities the world over began to repackage and rebrand themselves to attract financial investments.Footnote 106 Being an object of aid could help draw in international funds, but being a subject of the negative urban representation that came with it could deter private-sector capital investments. Calcutta’s representation, as a result, started to change, somewhat. ‘Mention Calcutta and most Americans think of beggars, poverty, slums and the Black Hole’, a 1981 op-ed in the Washington Post noted. ‘All that is true’, but ‘in many ways’ the op-ed continued, ‘Calcutta suffers from a bad press. In fact, it is a lively, vibrant city, perhaps the most stimulating in India.’Footnote 107As if on cue, ‘the city of crisis’ of the 1950s, 1960s, and the 1970s began to try to refashion itself into ‘the city of joy’—an epithet drawn from French novelist Dominique Lapierre’s eponymous novel on the life in Calcutta’ slums. The City of Joy was a euphemism for the same issues of urban crisis and poverty that had brought both aid and infamy to Calcutta in the preceding decades. Nevertheless, it was embraced by a city that did not wish to be associated with crisis and death any longer. But that did not stop the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, from declaring in 1985 that Calcutta was a ‘dying city’.Footnote 108
Calcutta’s singular association with poverty, beggars, slums, and homelessness thus continued. A 1989 commentary on the Democratic African American mayoral candidate for New York City argued that while O. Henry had called New York ‘“Baghdad on Hudson” nowadays it’s more like Calcutta.’ New York’s bridges and roads were crumbling; its public schools were ‘holding pens for the young’; extreme poverty and wealth were ‘separated only by the smoked windows of limousines’, and its crime had a ‘component of stunning racial or class rage’.Footnote 109 In 1991, the Washington Post carried another piece on New York City’s condition, titled ‘Calcutta on the Hudson’. Written by the Post’s New York bureau chief, Michael Specter, it focused on the city’s homeless. Specter wrote:
Seeing the homeless always puts me on the edge now. That means I’m always on edge. It would be simplistic to call it conscience, but it’s hard to read the presence of a vast horde of semi-clad street people as anything other than a constant anguish that even wealthy New Yorkers must confront each day. It was … like Calcutta, the price you pay to live in the most interesting city in America.Footnote 110
But if Calcutta was the price that the elites paid for living in New York City, who and what was responsible for it? The answer: federal welfare for the urban poor. In 1995, House Republicans passed a bill that would ‘cut spending on social welfare programs by $69 billion’ and ‘replace Federal programs like family assistance, child care and school lunch subsidies with lump-sum payments that states could use as they wished to aid the poor’.Footnote 111 This alarmed the Democrats enough to argue that the bill would adversely affect 9 million children that were dependent upon federal government aid and force them to beg on the streets. ‘Do we just have another Calcutta, have kids begging on the corner?’ asked the Democratic senator Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill).Footnote 112 However, conservative economists like Charles Murray argued that while the Democrats feared that the Republican welfare reforms would push a million children into poverty and transform American cities into ‘Calcutta on the Hudson’, American social workers and police were already dealing with ‘the Calcutta we already have behind the gates of the public housing projects’. It was the American left, with decades of welfare spending, that had created ‘Calcutta’ in the first place and the Republican welfare reforms were a measure to reverse that and to make ‘[t]wo parent families once again … the norm in low-income communities’.Footnote 113 Here, there is an unmistakable reference to America’s poor urban Blacks.
To be sure, Calcutta was by no means central to the debates about American cities. But given how American-centric scholarship and debates on these issues are, that a city like Calcutta ever figured in conversations on the crisis of American cities is significant. How then can we make sense of Calcutta’s place in postwar American conversations on cities? To many Americans and indeed Europeans, Calcutta of the postwar era, with its poverty, hunger, congestion/overpopulation, and radical politics, appeared to be on the brink of a Malthusian catastrophe. This is why it was understood as being on the verge of a ‘biological die-off.’ Indeed, if Mother Teresa of Calcutta did not exist, the world would need to invent her. Embedded in the fears of a Malthusian catastrophe, however, as Mathew Connelly has shown, lay deep-seated anxieties about how migration from the Global South to the North could upset the racial order in host countries.Footnote 114 Malthus helped mask racial fears about immigration and allegedly higher birth rates among non-whites. Hyperreal Calcutta in the postwar era played a similar role. Its alleged confrontation with life and death, its hunger, poverty, and homelessness, could not only frighten policymakers (as mentioned) but could also help mask the divisive issues of race and immigration in discussions about American cities in particular and Western cities, more generally. This made hyperreal Calcutta convenient for pushing a variety of urban agendas and building a broader support for them. The city could be and was used to both argue for greater urban intervention and argue against it too! Should it then come as a surprise that it was the racially diverse East Harlem of New York City that was most commonly likened to Calcutta?Footnote 115
However, to unmask the association of hyperreal Calcutta with race and immigration, we need to leave the United States and go to Naples, Italy. Naples was once referred as the ‘Calcutta of Europe’ but, for some of its residents, Calcutta is more limited to certain parts of the city. As a recent commentary on Naples has noted:
Under the shadow of Vesuvius, the most shattering eruption lately has been that of African refugees … Among the white Neapolitans, a nasty euphemism has spung up. A Facebook post will complain at times that blocks around the train station turn into “Calcutta.” Over cappuccino, a man down the bar will grumble that he can no longer shop in the Vasto, the neighborhood of Elena Ferrante; these days it is Calcutta … In Naples, a literary tourist who sought to explore Elena Ferrante’s old territory would instead find herself in a new locale, under a new name: Calcutta.Footnote 116
Clear here is the association of Calcutta, a South Asian city, with those parts of Naples, a European city, that are home to immigrants from Africa.
Conclusion
Calcutta had many international lives. As this article has shown, many global urban solutions in the second half of the twentieth century—urban renewal, physical planning, focused attack on urban poverty, and even non-intervention in urban affairs to name a few—were imbricated with the history of hyperreal Calcutta. This is because, for influential sections in global media, politics, and policy, post-colonial Calcutta was the exemplar of urban crisis, death, misery, and, in a perverse way, even hope.
Two distinct versions of urban crisis emerged in the postwar era. In the better-known and better-studied example of the North, urban crisis discourse took the form of fears about population decline, fiscal unsustainability, racial tension and segregation, violence, crime, poverty, and blight. In the Global South however, urban crisis was concerned with the opposite problem of over-population, housing shortages, hunger, congestion, disease, and communism. It may therefore appear that ‘urban crisis’ in the North and South were autonomous developments and that each sought to capture and respond to vastly different urban contexts, dynamics, and anxieties. This article, however, through the history of postwar/post-colonial hyperreal Calcutta, has shown that urban crisis in both the North and South were not autonomous but that they developed in close interaction with one another. The so-called American concept of urban crisis may have been initially conceptualized in the United States in the mid-1950s, but it quickly travelled to Calcutta. In Calcutta, the idea of urban crisis expanded to include concerns relevant to cities of the Global South, and at the same time kept informing and changing urban thinking in the United States (New York City), parts of Europe (Naples), as well as the rest of the Global South. Put another way, both urban crisis and urban development in the postwar era were conceptualized globally, produced globally, and circulated globally. And in this process, hyperreal Calcutta played a vital role.
Global urban history fashions itself as ‘encompassing any effort to think of cities as creations or creators of large-scale or global historical phenomena’.Footnote 117 This article contributes to this mission by showing how post-colonial Calcutta was shaped by global forces and how the hyperreal Calcutta so created, in turn, expanded the postwar concept of urban crisis to include urban dynamics of the Global South and transformed ideas of urban development around the world.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to John Shovlin and Andrew Sartori for reading early drafts of this article; Uma Tara Bakshi for helping me prepare the final manuscript; the anonymous reviewers and the journal editor Elisabeth Leake for their suggestions; and the managing editor Dr Kirsten James for her assistance in getting this article ready.
Financial support
None to declare.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Gaurav C. Garg is an Assistant Professor of History at Ashoka University, India. His research has previously appeared in the Comparative Studies in Society and History; Journal of Historical Geography; and South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies. His first book, Agents of Inertia: Business, Urban Crisis, and Economic Decline in Twentieth-Century Calcutta is under contract with Cambridge University Press and will be published in 2026. He is currently working on two full-length book projects—one on the history of Ford Foundation in India and the other on a global history of Indian mountaineering.
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