A Market Society in Formation and Its World of Print

Cuttack , 1895-1905

Abstract

Railways arrived in Cuttack in the last decade of the nineteenthcentury. With the arrival of the railways, the town’s integration into the British world system gathered particular pace. Accepting the advent of the railways as an important marker, this essay seeks to reconstruct a short cultural history of Cuttack’s integration into the British world system, broadly between 1895 and 1905. The cultural study I propose to offer is confined to one specific strand of this history. As it integrates with the imperial world system, the local world of Cuttack offers a portrait of complex transition from an ancient regime to a market society. Transition here does not mean a linear teleological movement from one sort of social formation to another. Rather, it refers to a social formation, a way of life wherein features of both the ancient regime and the market society coexist and overlap. This market society in formation had a symbiotic relationship with the local world of print. It is in the local urban public sphere of Cuttack that early discourses on consumer, entrepreneur and markets began to evolve and circulate. The paper studies the formation of some such early discourses in the Odia language and traces their engagement with Odia short story and popular poetry of the period. It thus throws light on an under studied aspect of colonial modernity in Odisha.