Table of Content

Salient Features

• The book primarily focuses on urban poverty, class and gender using Calcutta as a case study.
• The author talks about how on the one hand, while Calcutta is urbanizing at a frantic pace, the villages of the southern delta appears to ruralize.
• In the wake of the recent violence in Singur and Nandigram, the author highlights, how the city is gradually getting transformed; peasants are refusing to be replaced; and political struggle is becoming prominent in the city, which was earlier unknown of. This has led to new forms of middle-class rule.