It was soon enough, however, that woodcuts that illustrated the Bengali books of the nineteenth century, and the Ka]ighatpats that started developing into a secular medium of communication amongst the masses, had to give way to the block-making process—a new technology for making more durable metal blocks, and faster reproduction. A technology that came too early. The Calcutta woodcuts could not develop new visual idioms as did the Ukiyo-e prints in their 250 years of an undisturbed growth in Japan. The Kalighatpats that had imbued the Calcutta woodcuts with a native pictorial aesthetics died a natural death in the nineteen-thirties : at a time when the publishing business started flourishing and innumerable books, periodicals and newspapers came to be printed to meet the demand from a growing urban literati in an overall changing political situation.
The City of Calcutta
The woodcuts andpats appeared in Calcutta at a particular point in its history, with its peculiar problematic, as an expression of a new mass-culture. The period itself is important. This was when British merchant capital was being fast transformed into industrial capital in England, and when imperialism finally manifested itself in economic terms as colonial policy. What were 'settlements' in the eighteenth century now became colonies.
This 'colonial being' of the new urban centre—Calcutta—had deep political and cultural implications for its people. What started as zemindari of the East India Company, depending on the grant of the Mughal Emperor in the late seventeenth century now became one of the pivots of a worldwide British empire in the nineteenth century. Calcutta's urbanisation has been a quirk in the history of urbanisation in India. It was never a seat of power before the East India Company made it the centre of its trade and commerce. Nor was Calcutta a medieval business centre or a place for pilgrimage with roots in ancient times. By a chance of events, this malarial swamp near the mouth of the Ganges was found convenient for the inland and sea-borne trade of the Company. If I remember Kipling right. Chance erected/Chance directed/Laidandbuilt/on the silt/ palaces, bower, hovel/Poverty and pride/Side by side.
Over two centuries the population of this small harbour increased steadily, reflecting a deep dislocation in the traditional economy of the country. The growth of Calcutta is "related to the push from the stagnant rural sector and the pull from its dynamic urban sector and to the disruption of old social ties and the birth of new class relationships".'
The social historians who are prone to connect technological revolution with urbanisation would be baffled at the growth of Calcutta as a nineteenth century urban centre. Urbanisation in the Third World has had a different run in history, and Calcutta's urbanisation may be called 'subsistence urbanisation'—meaning "an urbanisation of very high density of individuals living under conditions that may be even worse than the rural areas from where they have come, of not having available the kinds of work or means of support which
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