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The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta

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Few works have attempted to intrepret and explain aesthetic and artistic movements among poor and subaltern groups. By focusing on the development of rivalry of popular and elite culture in Calcultta, Banerjee's The Parlour and the Streets, was a groundbreaking work which posits how lower classes or castes mock the elite culture, and in turn create their own meaning. His interpretation of how elite culture responded to subaltern culture, by reinforcing its dinstiveness as in the choice of new bhadralok toward Western education. The originality of Banerjee's work is his explanation of how the elite in Calcutta managed to turn from an initial disdain and outright struggle with lower social groups into a hegemonic position in which the elite learned to expropriate, promote and expand folk culture as an apartheid system of cultural division. It is equally an antedote to Eurocentric theories of history and aesthetics as it is testament of the ability of subaltern groups to make their own history through resilience.