The afterlife of pre-capitalist spacetime and the urbanisation of Indian consciousness

The article re-reads Kaliprasanna Sinha’s Hootum Penchar Naksha as a formally mediated representation of the uneven transition from precapitalist spacetime to industrial capitalist spacetime in mid-nineteenth century Calcutta. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space, I argue that HPN highlights the persistence of precapitalist spatial practices in an urban order increasingly regulated by a regime of abstract time and rationalised space. These spatial practices, including folk festivals and popular religion, originated in the rhythms of work and leisure in a feudal agrarian mode of production. Since these spatial practices interrupted the routines of the dominant industrial capitalist order, they had to be contained through state coercion and elite reform. The article then traces the phenomenological dimension of the process through which the disorderly political anatomy of the city gave way to a stable capitalistic social order. This process, termed as the urbanisation of Indian consciousness, led to the ideological consolidation of a caste-inflected common sense organised around discipline, productivity and respectability.