Kolkata as a Postcolonial “Global City” A Critical Representation of Kolkata’s Transition in Select Fictions and Films

Abstract

This paper aims to critically explore Kolkata as a postcolonial “global city” through the interpretation of Satyajit Ray’s film Mahanagar (1963), Amitav Ghosh’s two novels The Shadow Lines (1988) and The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), and Sujoy Ghosh’s film Kahaani (2012) as the pivotal texts that relinquish the tangled process of Kolkata’s postcolonial reinvention and its emplacement in the global urban array. Representation of Kolkata from the perspectives of a “global city” exclusively relying on fictions and films has been very sporadic and staggeringly sloughed off in the mainstream literary and cultural confabulation. This research endeavours to replenish this void by demarcating the city’s historical incubation and canvassing the repercussions surrounding its transmogrification into a “global” exurb. Postcolonial disciplines on “global cities” delineate how the colonial legacies and contemporary global coercions have contoured its urban terrane, social accession, and cultural congruities. Kolkata’s transformation from a small cluster of three villages, namely “Sutanati,” “Kolikata,” and “Govindapur,” to an important “global” center of socioeconomic, cultural, and political spheres during the postcolonial regimes and its emergence from colonial subjugation into a vibrant center of intellectual, literary, and cultural life is unanimously heeded. This investigation peruses assorted temperament, unequivocally the vignette of Tridib as a “global” persona in The Shadow Lines (1988) and the study of Kolkata’s irresistible journey to the apex of science, knowledge, and mysticism in The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), which are emanated through the magnifier of Antar’s inquiries of Ronald Ross’s unearthing of the “Malaria parasite.” Alongside these two novels, this study will scrutinize the cinematic portrayals of the city’s global reach through Arati Majumder and Vidya Bagchi in Mahanagar (1963) and Kahaani (2012) respectively, demonstrating Kolkata’s status as a crucible of postcolonial globalism.