The blue urban: colouring and constructing Kolkata

Since 2012, Kolkata’s ruling political party has mobilized the colours blue and white in a concerted effort to rejuvenate the city by referencing big urban ambitions, corporate capital and cheerfulness. Opponents, however, assert that as a state imposed colour, blue limits freedom and makes the city un-alluring. This article suggests that Kolkata’s contemporary blue urban gathers momentum as a political force. Colour mediates political power, creating new constituencies via construction and maintenance. Through a close correspondence between the state’s blue (colours of government offices, public infrastructures, urban lattices), the real estate’s blue (promising middle class residential living) and the widespread use of blue as an everyday urban colour (in slums, shutters, tarpaulin and corrugated boundary walls), the city’s contemporary colours undoes its prior forms. Following blue’s differing shades, patterns, and textures, in public spaces, elite residences, construction sites, and slums, I demonstrate how landed families, resettled artisans, and slum dwellers embrace blue as a colour of hope, while grappling with its corrupt and exclusionary forces.