D Santo Datta focuses on the particular stage of social dynamics when out of the heterogeneity of the native population there appeared a homogenous elite group that distanced itself from the urban folk. The Parlour and the Streets is a 'pre-history' of the polarization between the two cultures, between two social groups not yet conscious of themselves as distinct 'classes', but showing signs of being threatened, one by the other. Throughout the book it is 59 evident that the reason for writing it was neither to add an offshoot to that early orientalist romanticism, nor love of 'colonial exotica' of the Archer kind. The book is divided into five chapters: Introduction', 'Economy and Society in Nineteenth Century Calcutta', "Nineteenth Century Calcutta Folk Culture', 'Elite Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta' and 'Conclusion'. The author, to the delight of future researchers in the field, has gone through a surprisingly wide range of archival material (census reports, official documents and records, municipal reports). He has analysed printed literature, oral records and visual reproductions such as paintings and prints popular at the time. He has referred to numerous reports in contemporary newspapers and periodicals for the chapter on 'Nineteenth Century Calcutta Folk Culture'. For, Banerjee points out, While the culture of the nineteenth century Bengali elite is well recorded in a host of novels, dramatic literature, songs, etc., that of the lower orders had to be collected from secondary sources.7 The number of popular songs he has collected and translated for this chapter and the fascinating details ofjatra, kobi gan, kobiwala, tarja, Shop kirtan and khemta nautch, that he has used for content analysis and defining the culture of the Streets can make a comprehensive monograph on the subject. The tools and methodology Banerjee has used for this 'phenomenology' of two cultures, though derived from historical materialism, avoid the conventional Marxist approach to the theory of culture. He works out an approach specifically suited to the complex social groups and their cultural manifestations in day-to-day social interaction. In the Introduction' he clears up the confusion sown by earlier Marxist theoreticians: ... the conventional Marxist concept of a pure feudal-capital division, which often influenced the evaluation of cultural forms, did not quite apply to the social and economic situation prevailing in nineteenth-century Calcutta. The tendency to identify the new elite as a bourgeoisie with 'progressive' social and cultural ideas compared to the backward-looking ideology of the rural-oriented feudal society ... may not lead us to an objective evaluation of the tensions and contradictions that prevailed in the cultural field. . . . The Bengali elite was not a class of independent industrial entrepreneurs. The patrons as well as the artistes of the elite culture were primarily employees in the tertiary sector of a colonial set-up. Number 22