A Collision of Class Cultures urban centres of the pre-colonial period: '... before British administration began in Bengal, cities did not possess a common civic life. Even very big cities were little more than overgrown villages.... There were no corporate towns, no industrial nurseries. There was also no urban middle class/3 (emphasis added) It is this urban middle class that grew and attained its full 'iconography' and 58 cultural paraphamelia in nineteenth-century Calcutta. The Parlour appeared on the cultural scene vis-a-vis the Streets of the lower orders which gave birth to the urban folk culture of Calcutta. It was a new social formation, a maverick in the five thousand-year-old history of India, and so it drew the attention of researchers and historians. Some writers on nineteenth-century Calcutta have studied the scholarly pursuits of the nascent middle-class intelligentsia; some have written on the visual arts of the urban folk, that is, the lower orders; some have discussed in detail the entertainment of the lower orders in the growing city. Even those who wrote on the art movement of the Neo-Bengal School of the early twentieth century, had to trace its roots in the nineteenth century — the romantic vision inherited from the orientalists, the hesitant emergence of patriotism of the law-abiding and English-educated Bengali middle class. Banerjee's book has the distinction of simultaneously analysing the two cultures of nineteenth-century Calcutta which confronted each other in a rapidly changing urban situation; it does this in all the details of their different cultural manifestations. He has shown how the bhadralok, the third in the social hierarchy with the white colonial rulers on the top, suppressed and effectively marginalized the cultural expressions of the lower orders. The first generation of Bengali millionaires — the compradors, the banians, the mutsuddis, etc. — occupied the second rung on the ladder, and the English-educated bhadralok, who grew around them in different professions, occupied the third; the rest of the city population comprised the itarjans, the chhotoloks, that is, the domestic servants, palanquin bearers, water-carriers, men in different trades, living in thatched huts in slums. A large number of them came from villages in Bengal, or from Orissa, Bihar and from other parts of the country. Banerjee observes: It is quite possible that the first labouring class to settle down in the new city were the artisans, as the names of the various localities in Calcutta indicate. Still in use, these names are after the trades practised by the original residents there, as Kumortuli (from 'kumors' or clay-modellers); Sundipadah (from 'sundis' or liquor-vendors); Kansaripada (from 'kansaris' or braziers); Chhutarpada (from 'chhutars' or carpenters). The culture of nineteenth-century Calcutta, whether elite or popular, grew out of heterogenous immigrant groups that flocked to the new urban centre for safety, security and fortune in new trades and professions. They fled the crumbling Mughal order of the late eighteenth century — the lawlessness, the ruined homes and professions. Banerjee Journal of Arts 6' Ideas