[Extract …] In explaining the mystery of capital’s origins, Marx introduced the idea of “primitive accumulation” as the “process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.”1 The history of this expropriation of the peasantry, Marx argued, “assumes different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different periods.”2 The “classic form” occurred in England. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, tillage land was enclosed into pastures “under circumstances of reckless terrorism,” and the displaced peasantry forced into industrial towns as wage laborers. The obverse of this “clearing” of the countryside was the emergence of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century country house; the large estates in the countryside would be transformed from pastures to pleasure grounds and parkland. Marx offered the example of the Duchess of Sutherland’s clearing in Scotland as a poignant demonstration of the culmination of primitive accumulation in the conspicuous consumption of nature.3
Primitive accumulation, however, was realized differently in the distant colo- nies than in the metropole. The mystery of capital’s origin in Bengal is a story of the necessary twist – necessary contradiction of capitalism – that produced a landscape fundamentally different from the Scottish countryside.4 Taking the example of the elite residence in the Bengal countryside as the material expression of social and political domination, I want to explore this difference in configuration.
One could argue that, as in Scotland, the country house in British colonial Bengal may be seen as a culmination of capital’s processes and fortunes, the emblem of a modernized agricultural system and “improvement.” The Bengal country house was indeed a modern building type, and yet it is difficult to sustain the image of the country house as a tool and manifestation of “improvement.” The very idea of “improvement” was so inflected in Bengal by the peculiarities of colo- nial possession and dispossession, and the continuation of precolonial practices, that the country house came to function very differently in both everyday practice and popular imagination than one might expect in Britain. In fact, the term “country house” was rarely used to refer to this building type in Bengal. In popular parlance it was the “garden house.”
A recognition of the peculiarities of the colonial context of Bengal is neces- sary to understand the process by which the garden house came to stand for multiple, often contradictory, values. Specifically meant to invoke a “country” image, it ended up representing the dominance of the city over the country, harboring and proliferating a range of conflicts and contradictions: between the landed gentry and the poor villagers, land in its productive capacity and in its aestheticized version as landscape; exclusive enclaves removed from the nation’s masses and the creative locus of an anti-colonial nationalist culture, and between native values and received, foreign values. In Bengali literary imagination these contradictions became crystallized by the late nineteenth century. Garden houses came to be seen as haunts of a city-based elite who were completely estranged from the culture and social life of the countryside, even as these spaces continued to be used by the nationalist elite as “rural” retreats.