In this lecture we shall discuss how technology was changing the face of the cities of colonial India. We will take the case of Calcutta in the nineteenth century. The city of Calcutta was founded by traders of the British East India Company in 1690 around a nucleus of Hoogly River villages in the Ganges delta. Calcutta, just like many other cities of the developing countries, have appeared in the setting of the traditional agricultural economy much in advance of the industrial revolution that is supposed to beget the metropolis. Nirmal Kumar Bose had pointed out that in Calcutta the collision of the traditional society with the forces compelling urbanization and industrialization is harsher by virtue of the fact that the city possesses no more than the rudiments of the technological apparatus that makes life possible for the comparable population of the cities of the developed nations.¹ Debjani Sengupta’s article makes the following arguments as it traces the relation between technology and the rise of the 'pre-mature' metropolis.

The main themes of the essay are the following:

• How technology led to new divides and hierarchies in society while at the same time doing away with certain older ones.

• How a public culture emerged through the mass media which, in turn, was influenced by the printing technology and the rise of the public theatre.

• Development of urban infrastructure and the rise of the ‘native’ entrepreneurial activities which catered to the colonial business power.