Welcome to Kolkata!

The Kolkata Explorer is an exercise that encourages students to think of the city in spatial terms. The idea is that each student follows characters on their journey through the city, accessing a wide range of resources on the way, ranging from academic texts to video clips and photographs. The students can then store these resources and refer back to them, and use them creatively in their writing.

All the characters are composites, but they are based on anthropological and sociological research. There are ethnographic texts reflecting many of the structural and social relationships in other cities as well.

The following characters live and work in Kolkata:

• Mina Bera, a 36-year old maidservant and mother of five
• Sanjay Banerjee and his wife Madhubanti, upwardly-mobile parents of one
• Anita Das, a student in Calcutta with her cousin Ambika
• Fatima Khatun, a Muslim schoolgirl living in a slum
• Farukh Khan, Fatima's father and an auto-rickshaw driver
• Vinay Bhuteria, a Marwari businessman, married to Preeti

In the first instance, each student chooses two of the characters above as informants, then takes a tour of the locations that relate to those characters, gathering information about their daily lives. Their task is to write approximately 1000 words about the characters' lives and movements in the city, using the biographical data, scholarly articles and other resources that they find around the city to construct the narrative.

Later in their course, the students return to the Explorer to address more specific subjects areas, such as education, gender roles or marriage, within the urban context.

Start exploring Kolkata

Last modified 20 Feb 2007 by Steve Bond