Imagining Empty Land in the Construction of Rajarhat

Katie Hepworth

Nestled in between the vast expanse of an azure sky and the verdant earth at Rajarhat Township, Hiland Woods comes across as a unique effort of modern urban community development. With the best of contemporary residential facilities set against an idyllic landscape, this cluster of dwellings promises a unique living experience for people from all walks of life. … Among the woods that surround this complex, one will certainly find a refuge that is stable, secure and lively. […] We build for you… we build communities.

Hiland Group, Rajharat Township

Sound mapping Sector V and Rajarhat

Anja Kanngieser

The sounds of a place reveal much of its conditions. By listening to a place we get a sense of the complex and shifting terrains that make up its unfoldings, the sudden flashes of activity, the lulls, the transversals of animate and inanimate beings. Listening closely allows us to hear for its topologies – those continuous tones and harmonics that hum throughout moments, events and passages as they articulate themselves. Through concerted listening we are able to encounter sound as a way of ‘knowing’, as an acoustemology.

Ranabir Samaddar

The way a new town was planned for Rajarhat indicates the evolution of governmental techniques. It was not initiated as a technology park, but as one by the Housing Department. Planning is essential for all such partitions and reorganisation of spaces. In all of the cases I narrate here one can see that the agenda of physical planners goes against the logic of the old space marked by ‘integrated’ cities and outlying villages. It seeks to reverse the earlier territorial division and specialisation. If there is an opening up of space, there is a new closure too, whereby all sub-(advanced) economic entities have to be subordinated to the newly emerging hi-tech space. Planning in this sense does not mean, as usually thought, direct state control of commanding economic activities, but it means guiding the latter to the pre-determined goal. New towns are thus planned not by entrepreneurs, but by governmental bodies. The aims are: to open cities to world economy, to synchronise urban economy with macro-economic reforms, to close or scale down the old manufacturing base of the city, to make the city a centre of tradable services such as health care, education, new skill formation, etc., to make the city a servicing centre in the interest of finance, trade, hospitality, culture, health care, data processing and programming. The old idea of national economic development takes a back seat.

Fieldwork in Rajarhat-New Town (located on the north-eastern shoulder of Kolkata, West Bengal) carried out by the Transit Labour Research Platform concluded with the Transit Labour Workshop. It remained primarily focussed on the case-study of Rajarhat, with at least four formal presentations exclusively dedicated to the theme. Lateral connections with other material and geographical contexts — China (Shanghai), for example, but also the UK and the USA among others — were, of course, productively drawn and the upshot was a more nuanced understanding of transit labour and how it operates in the space of new townships. Changing patterns of labour and mobility, its precariousness, were discussed conjointly with deliberations on ‘newness’: new political spaces, new processes of global-economic integration, new modes of urban reckoning. However, the discussion spilled beyond the confines of a purely logistical and formal engagement with transit labour to embrace knotty questions of identity-reckoning and belonging, dispossession and resistance, loss and re-deployment of livelihood opportunities. Such a denial of theoretical formalism had to, perhaps inevitably, be the fate of a research orientation which began with a concept: transit labour. For, as Georges Canguilhem tells us in La formation du concept de reflex aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, concepts are “theoretically polyvalent”; the same concept can function in quite different theoretical contexts. Ineluctably, then, discussion of a concept presupposes a distinction from standard discussions that merely trace a succession of theoretical formulations. If this is conceded, the workshop was a success.