Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure, Property, and Political Culture in Twentieth‐century Calcutta. Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2022, pp. xiv + 305. ISBN 978‐1‐009‐10011‐3 (hbk).

South Asian streetscapes are home to diverse activities, like squatting, begging, hawking, waste disposal, and ablution, as well as sites for religious shrines, protests, religious and political processions and rallies, and a plethora of other affairs (Chakrabarty, 1992; Banerjee, 2023). Streets are spaces of direct state action as well as of spontaneous resistance of the 'counterpublics' (Cassegård, 2014), and of informal and extra-legal occupation. In Streets in Motion, Bandyopadhyay traces the making of Calcutta from the nineteenth century to present times and depicts how the street produces as well as is produced through different forms of politics, sociality and subjectivities. Bandyopadhyay attends to a range of what he calls 'urban craftsmen' (p. 254), the planners, and technocrats, as well as vendors, agitators, and houseless population, and charts how their visions, interventions and resistance shaped not just how the city is built and lived, but also urban politics. Following a postcolonial tradition of writing, the chapters defy a linear chronology in their progression. Each of the five chapters engages with the pivotal theme of the book, how forces of motion/obstruction are mediated by urban agents and forces, by focusing on five themes: how creative obstructions of agitators and commoners mediate motion, how the dual and often inextricable logics of rationality and violence produce urban space, how zoning and segregation from above stall motion and produce territories for greater surveillance, how motion of accumulation and obstructionism of deaccumulation reconfigure capitalist logic and property laws, and how various configurations of obstructionism produce new forms of motion and capital circulation, generating inclusive forms of politics of the street (and the city). The street is both material and metaphorical; that connects as well as disrupts connection, that enables mob movement during riots and is a conduit for mob management, that displaces populations in its construction as well as produces new forms of living and dwelling through encroachment. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book weaves historical and anthropological analysis. Chapter 1, explicates the actors and factors that set spaces in motion. Calcutta Improvement Trust, formed in 1911, embarked on a street building project to connect various parts of the city for smoother flow of people and vehicles, and establish contact with planned suburbs, to decongest dense precincts, open new circuits of capital accumulation as the road would increase land and property value along its way, to facilitate better surveillance and to make the city ready for import of automobiles. Roads led to the birth of sidewalks, which began as cover for drains and a buffer zone between properties and streets, but soon came to be occupied by a wide array of users: pedestrians, hawkers, squatters, and subsequently agitators both in colonial and postcolonial Calcutta. The latter group of urban agents posed obstruction to the conceived plans of mediating motion. Bandyopadhyay makes an important distinction here— between public space and urban commons; the former is conceived by 'architects of motion' as a 'property-bound relationship between public authority and members of the public', the latter is based on usage rather than ownership (pp. 55–56). Drawing on Heidegger, Bandyopadhyay argues that commoners build the street through dwelling. This is an important distinction for spatial politics and contributes to the discourse on right to the city (street). In Chapter 2, Bandyopadhayay depicts how motion and obstruction constitute the urban. He argues that the drive for motion is engineered from above while obstruction is posed from below. The street schemes of Harrison Road and Central Avenue, envisioned decongestion and smoother flow but produced unequal displacement. However, in the interwar period, influx of migrants from rural to urban areas resulted in rapid increase in suburbanization and a high rental market for suburban housing. The exorbitant rental market resulted in the eviction of small traders and property owners. Concomitantly, the removal of tanneries and meat factories from residential districts to outlying areas of the city not only displaced these warehouses but also the working-class population from minority communities like Muslim, Anglo-Indian and Chinese. The Trust's plan for a graded population dispersal took the form of a communally graded dispersal from the city and exacerbated communal tension, resulting in two successive riots in the city, in 1918 and 1926. Bandyopadhyay's nuanced analysis in these parts is brilliant as he depicts how the rioters were often not communally segregated, and some ephemeral connections were forged in seeming acts of vengeance. Chapter 3 opens with the depiction of the Bakr-Id communal riot in 1910. The narrative charts the emergence of 'isolated and sporadic mob action', where groups of men would emerge from and vanish in the 'labyrinths of small lanes and gulleys' (p. 123), illegible to the colonial authorities. Management of this 'goonda' or rowdy element led to two crucial legislation—the Bengal Act I of 1923, that gave Calcutta Police the power to intercept people 'in apprehension' of trouble; and the Presidency Area (Emergency) Security Bill, 1926, which granted 'exceptional powers' to the local government in times of 'emergency' (p. 124). The state also aimed to alter the built form of the city to make spaces more legible. The decline in Muslim population and influx of Hindu refugees solidified territorial segregation of communities and the draconian colonial laws targeted Muslims disproportionately in post-partition India. The Muslim ghettos have subsequently become sites of police violence where youths and community leaders are rounded up by the police in anticipatory action. Chapter 4 shifts our attention to frontiers, which were regarded as sites of lawlessness and therefore had to be tamed into sanitized and ordered suburbs for the upper-caste and middle-class Bengali intellectuals. Suburbanization happened through two modes of urbanization—first, through planned expansion that led to accumulation by builders, contractors and new factories and dispossession of native users of the land, and second, through mass appropriation (or jabardakhal), without accumulation. The second mode of urbanization chronicles a counternarrative of movement from below. The influx of partition refugees and migrants from other districts of West Bengal (formed in postcolonial India) in the Southern fringes of Calcutta, caused a 'suspension of private property' (p. 179) in suburbs since they encroached on unoccupied private houses and lands. Two circuits of capital formation were set in motion—one that facilitated 'de-commodification of private and public properties, and the other, where refugees and migrants transformed erstwhile "wastelands" into usable, and hence, exchangeable properties by encroaching on them' (p. 181). In 1951, the government provided legal sanction by acquiring these lands for public purposes and giving credits to regularize the refugee holdings, which were to be returned in 20 years. Thus, jabardakhal led to a freezing of land markets in these regions for nearly four decades and refugees got land titles in the 1990s. The conceived plans of enclosures and sanitized spaces were thwarted by incremental urbanization through jabardakhal and the sidewalks of the ordered districts soon came to be encroached by footpath hawkers, that continue to thrive today. Chapter 5 extends the metaphor of jabardakhal politics to the historical operation of street hawking in Kolkata. The chapter stands out in its fine-tuned analysis of the dyad of motion and obstruction, where obstructionism creates its own logic of motion. On one hand, motion is obstructed through a counter-pedestrian logic, and obstructionism provides a different optic, beyond a mobility-centric understanding of the street. On the other, street vendors support the marginalized to survive on low wages, thereby mediating circulation of capital and economy. Street hawking became one of the most important sources of livelihood for the refugees, migrants and other marginalized communities in the 1950s and remains one of the dominant occupations for the urban poor. However, the principal grievance against street-vending operate on their halting logic to pedestrianism which led to many eviction drives in Kolkata, including the infamous 'operation sunshine' in 1996–97. Hawker Sangram Committee, an organization formed in the aftermath of Operation Sunshine played a stellar role in the subsequent decades in positing the plethora of hindrances posed by other presences on the street, thereby writing history from below. In conclusion, this book makes an excellent contribution to urban studies—in various strands of urban theory like infrastructural turn, urban commons, occupancy urbanism, and urban history. Bandyopadhyay's key contribution lies in teasing out the logic of motion in obstructionism of the subaltern. The various mechanics of obstruction, through commoning, rioting, jabardakhal and counter-pedestrianism, enable different forms of motion, producing checkered practices and realities of urban flow, and thwarting the homogenizing logic of motion imposed by neoliberalism and political extremism. In the context of the suppression of political dissent and anti-democratic trends today, Bandyopadhyay's activist provocation generates hope, that 'frictionless motion is really no motion at all, only slippage…obstruction is immanent to the city and must function as a positive category in urban studies' (p. 72).