The Haunted City: Calcutta and the Legacy of Nostalgia

Abstract

Nostalgia is one of the most persistent windows through which we see our pasts, and yet it is critiqued in literary and cultural discourses for sentimentalism. Interrogating the problem of nostalgic yearning and its discursive liminality, this thesis examines the affective politics of nostalgia in relation to the growth of a colonial city—Calcutta—a metropolis straddling the traces of its colonial modernity and a more recent postcolonial identity as “Kolkata”. My research assesses nostalgia’s multifarious ideological and social embodiments in Bengali literary and political culture. It reads the transformation of Calcutta in literature from colonial to postcolonial times through the critical lens of nostalgia and its changing paradigms across time and space. This nostalgia, I contend, bears a very specific connection to the city’s colonial modernity. By reading the city through literary texts and records, this research addresses the role of nostalgia as an instrument of imperial domination, to its functions in mediating the spatial relationship between city and village in literature, and its association with spectrality and trauma. Here nostalgia simultaneously forms the theoretical framework, and the site of my archive in Anglophone and Bengali literary works from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century on Calcutta. I argue that specific literary works in particular historical and cultural circumstances produce notions of nostalgia in response to the imagined emotional demands made by communities. By placing together the strands of palimpsestic memories of Calcutta this thesis traces two transitions concurrently: one in the narrative of the city and the second in the evolution of nostalgia itself as a cultural aesthetic.