Drainage as a Spectacle: Modernity,Phantasmagoria,and Infrastructural Polity in Nineteenth- to Early Twentieth-Century Calcutta

Abstract

The drainage infrastructure of Kolkata is more than 160 years old at present. Its establishment was a project of European modernity to make the town habitable and serve as an economic enterprise. In what follows, I trace its inception since the nineteenth century as a spectacle that continues to survive to this day. I employ Benjamin’s idea of spectacle to explore the infrastructural polity of the city’s chthonic network. By contextualizing the wish image and dream image notions of the infrastructure, the study maps Calcutta’s drainage infrastructure in the broader discourse of modernity beyond its Enlightenment project. Its phantasmagoric character emerged out of social forces that shaped governmental politics, epistemological entanglements and became a site of asserting right and citizenship. I analyze its nature as an unstable spectacle through notions of governmentality, materiality, and resistance in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century by referring to archives. Through an ethnography of the archives, the essay brings to fore the social, politico-legal narratives that make the drainage infrastructure of Calcutta one of the oldest and most turbulent underground infrastructures in India’s historical encounter with modernity. By reading the past into the present, I argue that the infrastructure of drainage in Kolkata, today, is a spectacle still fulfilling a project of modernity.