In this paper, we will track the life of a street in the archives of Calcutta, during the time of the First World War and its immediate aftermath. We will show how such an exercise gives us an introduction to the rental geography of a city. In the period under review, an ambitious street scheme...

The Dissertation titled "Negotiating Informality: Changing Faces of Kolkata's Footpaths, 1975-2005" understands city-making and urbanism in the postcolonial world. It develops a set of techniques to study the unfolding of the state on the street. The street margins are of particular importance...

The history of mass political formation in postcolonial metropolitan India has generally been narrated through the optic of ‘competitive electoral mobilisation’ of the poor. How then are we to explain cases of successful mobilisation in the terrain of ‘political society’ when the poor do...