Of Treasures and Earthquakes: The Material Ghosts of New Town, West Bengal
The article builds on two ethnographic vignettes, the fear of earthquakes that the construction of tall buildings evokes and a story of treasures under a massive housing estate, to argue the presence of material ghosts in New Town, West Bengal, a planned and developing town east of Kolkata. Through these two ethnographic accounts, the article foregrounds the weird and the eerie present in the city in plain sight and mundane articulations. The supernatural city, the article argues, need not be teeming with traditional ghosts. Rather, the supernatural in the city can be found in imaginations, articulations and relationalities of the material. The presence of the immaterial across time and space is evoked through the material relationalities of the city. The city, in the article, is presented to be resolutely enmeshed with a range of immaterial imaginaries.
Read Of Treasures and Earthquakes: The Material Ghosts of New Town, West Bengal