City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty by Ananya Roy

Author:Ananya Roy
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780816639335
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Published: 2002-10-23T21:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.3. A plot in the Jamunanagar colony, complete with CMDA toilet and self-built mud homes.

evicted but resettled here by Kanti Ganguly, a prominent CPM leader. “We pleaded with the party every day,” said Anila, a middle-aged widow, as she meticulously sliced the vegetables for the evening meal. Her hut was at the western edge of the settlement. Beyond it stretched green meadows glistening in the hot afternoon sun. She continued: “We would go to the party office in Santoshpur and wait there all night. Finally, Kantibabu told us to demolish our own shacks. Within two months, he brought us here. He himself supervised the lorries being loaded with our possessions.”

Each of the resettled families were given 1.25 kathas7 of land on which they were allowed to build their own hut. What was most striking about these narratives was that, unlike other squatter stories, the descriptions of settling at Jamunanagar involved few instances of struggle for land. Instead, I was treated to a host of what I came to call “frontier stories,” detailed portrayals of how the families tamed the land and made it habitable. Ranen, a man in his thirties who works jogar, described the state of the settlement ten years ago:

We were brought here by Kanti babu. But the area was jungle. It was crawling with snakes. And it was all wetland. We had to dig for months, filling the marshes with earth, before we could even begin to build our huts. All of this time, we slept in tents. This infrastructure that we now have—these roads, corporation taps, tubewells, electricity—none of this was there. All of this was only provided to us last year. We lived all of this time without anything.

Like Jamunanagar, the other two colonies I studied, Sahid City and Mukundapur, were also established by Kanti Ganguly in the early 1980s through the resettlement of central city squatters, most of whom were originally landless migrants from South 24-Parganas district. In Mukundapur each household was given a land allotment of between 2 and 2.5 kathas. Party cadres confirmed that the residents had no dalils, titles of ownership, but that they would not be evicted.

The colonies embody a particular combination of formality and informality, of party and state. This is most apparent in the patronage politics of mid-level CPM leaders such as Kanti Ganguly, who also hold governmental positions, in this case Mayor in Council.8 On the southeastern fringes, Kanti is omnipresent. One asks which squatters were relocated from Jadavpur to the colonies, and the answer is “Kanti’s people.” Why is the bazar at Jadavpur, at which most of the colony residents are merchants, still standing? And the pat answer: “Kanti.” How is it that some families are stretched across multiple colonies and squatter settlements, maintaining claims to all of these plots of land? “Kanti. He has blessed them.” This geography of patronage—the barely visible colonies, the gossamer webs that link Jadavpur to Jamunanagar, and one colony to another—is Kanti territory. Kanti Ganguly’s patronage politics indicates the

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