Sumanta Banerjee is a historian, journalist, and cultural theorist. He worked with the Statesman in Calcutta and New Delhi from 1962 till 1973, and was later a fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. His previous publications include The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989), Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal (1998), and The Wicked City: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta (2009).
Banerjee's evocative phrase - "every road has a life of its own"
(p. 13), reminds us to diligently filter minute details from a
range of sources - literary to street directories - to include both
elites and subalterns. The sources help construct the past, which
if only accessed through official archival material would have
dulled the vibrant hues of the past and the present, the social and
the political, which Memoirs of Roads absorbingly offers.
*Nitin Sinha, H-Soz-Kult *
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
