Simulating the “city of joy”: state choreography and the re-appropriation of public spaces in Kolkata

ABSTRACT

Videos of what seems like enforced and orchestrated solidarity, performed by celebrities from the film industry in Kolkata, each scene blending into another, each upper-class urban home-space resembling the other, each envisioning a brighter future, rendering the same song in multiple voices, with metaphors of cities smiling again, circulated through social media are problematic in the erasures of particularities, “of the presence of the poor, of crime, of dirt, of work”. While the nature of public spaces and performances of the public gathering is evolving amidst a pandemic, this paper, probing primarily into the state-sponsored strategic public performances in COVID-affected Kolkata, argues that the simulation and performance of state-envisioned “joy” by a postcolonial neoliberal city to mimic the imagined global city, to embody “the ageographia, the surveillance and control, the simulation without end” has frightfully familiar echoes of coloniality and hegemonic control.

KEYWORDS:

• Ageographia
• state choreography
• simulation
• colonial mimicry
• neoliberal Kolkata

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Kolkata earned the epithet after the 1985 novel based on Calcutta (present-day Kolkata), City of Joy, by the French author Dominique Lapierre.

2 A local derivative of Hollywood, the Kolkata film industry is commonly referred to as Tollywood, since the film studios are localized in the neighborhood of Tollygunge. Quite ironically, the neighborhood itself was named after an Officer of the British East India Company, Sir William Tolly. Later, the neighborhood was heavily populated by an influx of refugees coming in from East Pakistan (present Bangladesh) after the Partition in 1945 (Chaudhuri, 1995).

3 An adda over cha, roughly translated as tea over conversations, is an integral part of the city and the Bengali culture. From literature to popular culture portrayals of Bengalis, having intellectual, political, philosophical and spiritual discussions without much agenda in roadside tea stalls, or in front of house facades, have been inextricably linked with community relations and congregations, something that the “global city” with its neoliberal capitalistic pursuits tries to prevent.