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City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty, by Ananya Roy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 288 pp. $68.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-8166-3932-9. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8166-3933-7.
For one who suffers Calcutta as a necessary inconvenience, the descent from an aseptic airplane to Howrah station is fraught with sociological disruptions. "Why are they cooking near the train tracks? Why is she begging? Why is it dirty?" Questions flow from the five-year old, before the train is greeted with a whoop of delight for a journey into the night on the top bunk of the sleeper. How then is one to weave the story of structural imperatives-of rural poverty, migrations, and urban employment, and the personal will to survive? Roy's book answers these questions.
Calcutta is the capital of West Bengal, India's longest running left-front ruled state government. Among other things, it is a cultural center and an industrial city, and it was British India's first capital. However, it is also a city that beckons to the rural landless to migrate for an opportunity to survive. Indeed, who are these men, women, and children who make their lives on street pavements, or in precarious dwellings on the edges of railway tracks, a hairbreadth away from a thundering train? Why do...