The fourth edition of The City as a Museum, a 10-day festival of art, culture, and history held across various sites and neighbourhoods, will begin on November 16.

This year the festival will be held at state archives, colonial houses, the river front, an art college and various other places.

It will have sessions on the Tebhaga Movement focussing on the agrarian rebellion as it investigates the narratives of the resistance in the different districts of Bengal and
also women’s participation in it with academic Kavita
Punjabi.

The festival, put together by DAG — the country’s leading art company— then moves on to a 140-year-old publishing house at Sovabazar, PM Bagchi and Company, to trace the map-making practices both of indigenous mappers as well as colonial practitioners of 18th and 19th century.

The event titled — Mapa Theke Manchitra — will also include a walk through the Sovabazar neighbourhood that will reveal more about publishing maps in those times.

A Night on the Riverfront will explore the history of the “other” Europeans like artist F.B. Solvyns who were outsiders to the colonial machinations.

Arranged at the Bengal Paddle, a steamer that runs with paddles of the 1940s, the White Other will showcase some of Solvyn’s landscapes.

The festival for the second time will feature a new production by the alternative theatre group — Birati Samuho Performers Collective.

The play, E Ek Ashcharja! Kalikata Kalankini: Athaba Chaaper Naksha Prahashan, will explore the participation of working-class women in the public sphere in the 19th century and the print culture, reading between the lines of Battala texts.

The play will be staged at Sovabazar Natmandir and will have multiple shows.

Art historian Sampurna Chakraborty will explore the history of reforms and dissent in art pedagogy and practice in the colonial art school as well as outside of it.

She will trace the independent initiatives of art institutions, collectives and publications at the turn of the 20th century during her talk at the Government College of Art and Craft.

The festival will conclude with a mehfil of thumri at Khelat Ghosh’s residence where performers and scholars will dwell on the interstitial position of thumri in classical music along with stories of baijis and tawaifs.

Vocalist Sanjana Chakraborty, kathak performer Ashimbandhu Bhattachary and scholar Shantanu Majee will conduct the evening.

“Over the last three editions of The City as a Museum, we have charted some unusual routes and paths through the city and beyond. This year we hope that we can trace these routes with a heightened awareness of how we navigate through the city, what position we occupy within it and what happens when we flip our understanding of what is the periphery and taking inspiration from artists, activists, scholars and citizens who have traversed these paths before us,” said Sumona Chakravarty, vice-president, Museums, DAG.