The Bazaar as a Public Domain of Cultural Contests at Colonial Cuttack, 1870–1940

Abstract

By choosing the bazaar at colonial Cuttack for a narrative of ‘recreation, social interaction, transport and economic activity’, the present article draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty and Anand Yang’s bazaar studies in South Asia. For Chakrabarty, the bazaar was an arena of evolving contest between modernity and tradition, while Anand Yang sees it as a place where people increasingly acquire notions of identity and community. The present study, concentrating on a provincial town, seeks to combine both perspectives and to provide a wider perception of bazaar as a site of compressed display of an area’s way of life, being a place of exchange and negotiation and of circulation and redistribution—in short, of extra-community or supra-community connections and institutions. In such a situation, the image of bazaar/market, as it emerges, goes much beyond the one conceived by Christopher Bayly for the bazaars in the cities of early colonial North India as an inert place where everything seemed to be peaceful with little conflicts, a respectable and orderly autonomous place than a place of contest and competition.