As a spectacular re-imagination of an almost European city, Calcutta’s unique position in South Asia as an early progenitor and inheritor of Colonial modernity has registered itself in multiples debates but Calcutta’s role in cultural meaning-making and in constructing a heterotopic cultural memory that connects not languages, ethnicities, race and religion but sites and spaces remains relatively under-addressed. The proposed project hopes to take this enquiry further through a close reading of both the foundational architectural spaces of Calcutta and its complex, problematic endorsement in visual texts and material practices: cinema, photography and other visual records. The project hence proposes to take up visual/photographic representation of the city between mid 19th and mid 20th century. It also hopes to understand ‘photographic memory’ as a visual archiving of the city’s emerging into metropolitan consciousness. The aim of the project is to re-imagine Calcutta and re-contextualise the city’s ambivalent critical and territorial location, the plethora of sites of memory and mourning and the crowding of cultural industry that has emerged around Calcutta’s making and unmaking as a Colonial (and postcolonial) City. And in doing it proposes to map the idea of City with emerging ideas and theories about cultural memory, archaeological materialism, new urbanism, cultural media studies and scopic regimes that much of twentieth century has come to define. In trying to do so, the project hopes to produce fresh and new perspectives about the city’s critical and subjective location within the broader cultural discourse while also contributing to emerging ideas about the contemporary metropolis in the Global South.