RESTORING CALCUTTA

The Calcutta government has asked the British to help restore Calcutta’s British colonial architecture. “The Marxist government sees the conservation-led regeneration of the city’s neglected colonial past as part of a larger scheme for social and economic revival by promoting it as a business and tourist attraction. It feels the need to alter the city’s image from what Kipling described as the ‘city of dreadful night’ — summoning up the Black Hole and the slums where Mother Teresa worked — to ‘The gifted city’, as it will be promoted, emphasising its rich cultural and architectural traditions.” – The Art Newspaper