City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty

by Ananya Roy,  2003

Housing developments emerge amid the paddy fields on the fringes of Calcutta; overflowing trains carry peasant women to informal urban labor markets in a daily commute against hunger; land is settled and claimed in a complex choreography of squatting and evictions: such, Ananya Roy contends, are the distinctive spaces of a communism for the new millennium—where, at a moment of liberalization, the hegemony of poverty is quietly reproduced. An ethnography of urban development in Calcutta, Roy's book explores the dynamics of class and gender in the persistence of poverty.

City Requiem, Calcutta emphasizes how gender itself is spatialized, and how gender relations are negotiated within the geopolitics of modernity and through the everyday practices of territory.

Permanent Black Interview with Partha Chatterjee

Partha Chatterjee

Permanent Black

Q: Your concept of ‘political society’ in your book The Politics of the Governed and now in your next work, The Lineages of Political Society, adds a new dimension to our understanding of how non-Western democracy functions. Could you explain this concept simply, and how you came upon it?

The politics of the governed: reflections on popular politics in most of the world

The second chapter from this book, 'Populations and Political Society' is online here. The entire book is online here.

In this brilliant set of essays, Partha Chatterjee develops an original thesis about what used to be called the Third World. Contrary to accepted wisdom, he argues that the growth of democracy there does not depend primarily on the strengthening of "civil society" (where modern citizens exercise their rights in relation to one another and to the state) but on something else: the increasing entry of the rural and urban poor into "political society." This is the space of governmentality, in which marginal population groups are able to compel the post-colonial state to negotiate their entitlements -- often in illegal ways. The Politics of the Governed is a deeply thought-provoking book, skillfully combining rich ethnographic detail with important theoretical insights. It moves effortlessly from describing the political struggles of shanty-town dwellers in India to analyzing the contradictory effects of global capitalism and discussing the moves of American imperial power around the world. No one who is seriously concerned with understanding the political predicament of the contemporary world can afford to miss this humane and illuminating work.
 (Talal Asad, distinguished professor of anthropology, City University of New York