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Goondas Towards a Reconstruction of the Calcutta Underworld
Case studies.
105 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1996
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February 11, 2026
At its core, this book is a study of classification. Who is a criminal? Who gets named as one? Who survives the label, and who is crushed beneath it? The authors’ central intervention lies in their insistence that “goondaism” was never merely a social pathology but a political technology—one that emerged at the intersection of colonial governance, urban transformation, economic precarity, and state paranoia.
The book convincingly demonstrates that the Calcutta underworld was not an alien growth on the city’s body, but something grown ‘from within it’, shaped by the same forces that built trams, docks, mills, and bureaucracies.
Rereading the book today, with Kolkata having long outlived its colonial architecture but not its inequalities, one realizes how uncannily contemporary many of its observations feel.
The goonda is not a historical curiosity. He is a recurring figure—rebranded, reskinned, digitized perhaps, but structurally familiar. Das and Ray’s achievement lies in showing us the ‘conditions of possibility’ for this figure, rather than offering us a gallery of criminal types.
One of the most striking aspects of ‘The Goondas’ is its reliance on police files—documents that were never meant to be read empathetically, let alone historically. These “Goonda Files,” housed in Lalbazar and other police repositories, are instruments of surveillance, not storytelling. They reduce lives to charges, suspicions, aliases, and physical descriptions. Yet Das and Ray approach them neither with naïve trust nor with easy cynicism. Instead, they read them symptomatically, aware that every file is a performance of state authority.
This is where the book quietly aligns itself with postmodern historiography, even as it resists full surrender to postmodern relativism. The authors recognize that the archive does not give us the past as it was, but as it was ‘processed’.
Crime here is not an objective category but a discursive one, produced through bureaucratic repetition and legal abstraction. The goonda is “more described than defined,” a phrase that lingers long after one closes the book. Description replaces explanation; enumeration substitutes for understanding.
In this sense, ‘The Goondas’ invites comparison with works like Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish’, but with a crucial difference. Where Foucault theorizes from above, Das and Ray work from below, from the messy paperwork of a colonial police force trying—and often failing—to impose coherence on an unruly city.
The Calcutta police emerge not as omnipotent agents of control, but as anxious clerks of disorder, endlessly producing files to reassure themselves that chaos could be catalogued.
The postmodern reader is tempted to deconstruct these files entirely, to dismiss them as fictions of power. But the authors resist this temptation. They insist—rightly—that despite their distortions, these documents contain sedimented truths about social relations, urban fear, and state practice. History, they remind us, is never pure. It is assembled from compromised materials.
A major strength of the book lies in its sustained attention to Calcutta as a city in flux. The goonda does not appear here as a timeless archetype, but as a product of rapid urbanization. Migration, overcrowding, unemployment, and the collapse of traditional social networks created what the authors describe as a fertile ground for criminal networks.
But crucially, they refuse the lazy equation of poverty with crime. Not all goondas were poor; not all poor were criminals. The relationship is structural, not moral.
This is where ‘The Goondas’ enters into conversation with global urban histories of crime—from Victorian London to Haussmann’s Paris. Like Gareth Stedman Jones’s ‘Outcast London’ or Louis Chevalier’s ‘Dangerous Classes’, Das and Ray show how the modern city generates both opportunity and exclusion.
Calcutta, as the second city of the British Empire, combined imperial wealth with colonial neglect. Its racial and class segregation—white town and native town, elite neighborhoods and slums—created zones of vulnerability where informal economies flourished.
The goonda emerges as an intermediary figure in this urban ecology. He is neither fully inside nor entirely outside society. He operates in the cracks: between legality and illegality, respectability and survival. In many cases, the book shows, goondas provided services—protection, enforcement, mediation—that the state either could not or would not provide.
This complicates any simplistic narrative of crime as pure deviance. Criminality here is relational; it responds to unmet needs and uneven governance.
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of ‘The Goondas’ is its examination of the relationship between criminals and political actors. Das and Ray meticulously document how goondas were recruited, protected, and sometimes discarded by political parties—both during the late colonial period and after independence.
The boundary between political activism and criminality proves to be alarmingly porous.
The Goondas Act of 1926 occupies a central place in this story. Enacted by the British administration to maintain order, it allowed for preventive detention and externalization of individuals labeled as “habitual offenders.”
The authors show how this legal framework functioned less as a neutral instrument of justice and more as a flexible weapon of control. It was used not only against criminals in the conventional sense, but against political dissidents, labour organizers, and communal leaders whose activities threatened colonial authority.
What is particularly disturbing—and relevant—is how seamlessly this colonial legal apparatus survived into post-independence India. The rhetoric of public order replaced that of imperial security, but the mechanisms remained intact.
The book’s discussion of “political goondas” exposes how Left activists were often criminalized to delegitimize their movements, while those aligned with ruling parties enjoyed protection. Law here is not blind; it is selectively sighted.
In this regard, ‘The Goondas’ invites comparison with contemporary debates on sedition laws, preventive detention, and the criminalization of protest. The colonial past, the book suggests, is not past at all. It persists in statutes, policing cultures, and administrative reflexes.
The second half of the book, composed of detailed case studies drawn from police files, is both its most compelling and most ethically fraught section. These are lives narrated through accusation: Sheikh Bachchu, Babulal Khatik, Basanta Kumar Saha, Santosh Kumar Pal, Phoolchand Kahar, Bhulu Das, Dinabandhu Dutta, Lakshminarayan Paul, Bhanu Bose, and many others. Each appears as a dossier, a sequence of arrests, releases, externalization orders, and character assessments.
What makes these case studies powerful is not their sensationalism, but their monotony. Crime here is not glamorous; it is repetitive, exhausting, and often petty.
Many of these men drift in and out of jail, accumulating records but rarely achieving anything like notoriety. Their lives are marked by broken families, failed livelihoods, communal violence, and addiction. One senses the grinding inevitability of their trajectories.
Yet the authors are careful not to sentimentalize these figures. Violence is not excused; victims are not erased. Instead, the book insists on holding two truths simultaneously: that goondas committed harm, and that they were themselves products of harm.
This refusal to resolve the tension is one of the book’s ethical achievements.
From a postmodern perspective, these case studies also raise questions about voice. We hear the police speaking ‘about’ these men, but rarely the men speaking for themselves.
The authors acknowledge this limitation and gesture toward oral history as a corrective, even as they recognize its difficulties. Silence, here, becomes part of the historical record.
One of the most chilling sections of ‘The Goondas’ deals with the communal riots of 1946 and their aftermath. The book documents how the violence of Direct Action Day and subsequent clashes pushed many young men into organized gangs, often under the banner of community defense.
Figures like Gopal Mukherjee (Gopal Pantha) emerge as both protectors and predators—men who mobilized violence in the name of communal survival and later turned that capacity toward criminal enterprise.
This section complicates any clean separation between political violence and criminal violence. The same skills—organizing men, acquiring weapons, intimidating opponents—were transferable across contexts. When communal fervour subsided and political support dried up, many of these groups found themselves with arms, training, and no legitimate outlet. Crime became continuity by other means.
The book’s refusal to romanticize this process is important. Communal violence is shown not as an eruption of ancient hatred, but as a catalyst that reshaped urban power relations. It created heroes and villains, often in the same body. In this sense, ‘The Goondas’ resonates with studies of paramilitarization in other contexts—from post-partition Punjab to contemporary urban militias.
It must be acknowledged that ‘The Goondas’ is not an easy read. Its prose is dense, its references numerous, its arguments layered. Casual readers may find its academic rigor intimidating. This is not a narrative history meant for mass consumption; it demands patience, familiarity with historiographical debates, and a willingness to sit with ambiguity.
Yet this difficulty is also part of the book’s integrity. The authors do not simplify their findings to court readability. They respect the complexity of their subject, even at the cost of accessibility. In an era increasingly dominated by quick takes and digestible histories, this commitment feels almost radical.
That said, one might wish for a more extended engagement with the postcolonial period. While the book gestures toward continuities after independence, its archival base remains heavily colonial.
A deeper exploration of how goondaism evolved in postcolonial Kolkata—through trade unions, political parties, and informal economies—would have enriched the analysis. This absence, however, feels less like a flaw and more like an invitation for future research.
Rereading ‘The Goondas’ today, one realizes that its true subject is not crime, but governance. It is about how states imagine threats, how cities absorb violence, and how marginal lives are written into history—often against their will.
The book reminds us that underworlds do not exist in isolation; they are shadows cast by systems of power.
For scholars of urban history, criminology, or South Asian studies, this book remains indispensable. For readers invested in Kolkata’s past and present, it offers a sobering mirror.
The city’s struggles with inequality, political muscle, and informal power structures did not emerge overnight. They have deep roots, carefully traced here.
In the end, ‘The Goondas’ does not offer closure. It leaves us with questions—about justice, memory, and responsibility. And perhaps that is its greatest strength. History, the book suggests, is not a court of final judgment. It is a space of reckoning.
There are books that explain a city, and there are books that ‘listen’ to it. ‘The Goondas: Towards a Reconstruction of the Calcutta Underworld’ belongs uneasily to both categories, and it is precisely this unease that gives the monograph its enduring power.
On rereading it, one is struck less by the sensational promise of its title—goondas, underworld, crime—and more by the quiet, methodical patience with which Suranjan Das and Jayanta Kumar Ray allow the archive to speak, falter, repeat itself, contradict itself, and sometimes betray its own anxieties.
This is not a book that romanticizes criminality, nor one that moralizes it. Instead, it performs a careful historical excavation of how deviance was produced, named, administered, and periodically forgotten in colonial and early postcolonial Calcutta.
Give it a go, indeed—especially if you are a Calcutta buff. But more than that, give it time.
This is a book that reveals itself slowly, like the city it studies, layer by contested layer.
Most recommended.
The book convincingly demonstrates that the Calcutta underworld was not an alien growth on the city’s body, but something grown ‘from within it’, shaped by the same forces that built trams, docks, mills, and bureaucracies.
Rereading the book today, with Kolkata having long outlived its colonial architecture but not its inequalities, one realizes how uncannily contemporary many of its observations feel.
The goonda is not a historical curiosity. He is a recurring figure—rebranded, reskinned, digitized perhaps, but structurally familiar. Das and Ray’s achievement lies in showing us the ‘conditions of possibility’ for this figure, rather than offering us a gallery of criminal types.
One of the most striking aspects of ‘The Goondas’ is its reliance on police files—documents that were never meant to be read empathetically, let alone historically. These “Goonda Files,” housed in Lalbazar and other police repositories, are instruments of surveillance, not storytelling. They reduce lives to charges, suspicions, aliases, and physical descriptions. Yet Das and Ray approach them neither with naïve trust nor with easy cynicism. Instead, they read them symptomatically, aware that every file is a performance of state authority.
This is where the book quietly aligns itself with postmodern historiography, even as it resists full surrender to postmodern relativism. The authors recognize that the archive does not give us the past as it was, but as it was ‘processed’.
Crime here is not an objective category but a discursive one, produced through bureaucratic repetition and legal abstraction. The goonda is “more described than defined,” a phrase that lingers long after one closes the book. Description replaces explanation; enumeration substitutes for understanding.
In this sense, ‘The Goondas’ invites comparison with works like Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish’, but with a crucial difference. Where Foucault theorizes from above, Das and Ray work from below, from the messy paperwork of a colonial police force trying—and often failing—to impose coherence on an unruly city.
The Calcutta police emerge not as omnipotent agents of control, but as anxious clerks of disorder, endlessly producing files to reassure themselves that chaos could be catalogued.
The postmodern reader is tempted to deconstruct these files entirely, to dismiss them as fictions of power. But the authors resist this temptation. They insist—rightly—that despite their distortions, these documents contain sedimented truths about social relations, urban fear, and state practice. History, they remind us, is never pure. It is assembled from compromised materials.
A major strength of the book lies in its sustained attention to Calcutta as a city in flux. The goonda does not appear here as a timeless archetype, but as a product of rapid urbanization. Migration, overcrowding, unemployment, and the collapse of traditional social networks created what the authors describe as a fertile ground for criminal networks.
But crucially, they refuse the lazy equation of poverty with crime. Not all goondas were poor; not all poor were criminals. The relationship is structural, not moral.
This is where ‘The Goondas’ enters into conversation with global urban histories of crime—from Victorian London to Haussmann’s Paris. Like Gareth Stedman Jones’s ‘Outcast London’ or Louis Chevalier’s ‘Dangerous Classes’, Das and Ray show how the modern city generates both opportunity and exclusion.
Calcutta, as the second city of the British Empire, combined imperial wealth with colonial neglect. Its racial and class segregation—white town and native town, elite neighborhoods and slums—created zones of vulnerability where informal economies flourished.
The goonda emerges as an intermediary figure in this urban ecology. He is neither fully inside nor entirely outside society. He operates in the cracks: between legality and illegality, respectability and survival. In many cases, the book shows, goondas provided services—protection, enforcement, mediation—that the state either could not or would not provide.
This complicates any simplistic narrative of crime as pure deviance. Criminality here is relational; it responds to unmet needs and uneven governance.
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of ‘The Goondas’ is its examination of the relationship between criminals and political actors. Das and Ray meticulously document how goondas were recruited, protected, and sometimes discarded by political parties—both during the late colonial period and after independence.
The boundary between political activism and criminality proves to be alarmingly porous.
The Goondas Act of 1926 occupies a central place in this story. Enacted by the British administration to maintain order, it allowed for preventive detention and externalization of individuals labeled as “habitual offenders.”
The authors show how this legal framework functioned less as a neutral instrument of justice and more as a flexible weapon of control. It was used not only against criminals in the conventional sense, but against political dissidents, labour organizers, and communal leaders whose activities threatened colonial authority.
What is particularly disturbing—and relevant—is how seamlessly this colonial legal apparatus survived into post-independence India. The rhetoric of public order replaced that of imperial security, but the mechanisms remained intact.
The book’s discussion of “political goondas” exposes how Left activists were often criminalized to delegitimize their movements, while those aligned with ruling parties enjoyed protection. Law here is not blind; it is selectively sighted.
In this regard, ‘The Goondas’ invites comparison with contemporary debates on sedition laws, preventive detention, and the criminalization of protest. The colonial past, the book suggests, is not past at all. It persists in statutes, policing cultures, and administrative reflexes.
The second half of the book, composed of detailed case studies drawn from police files, is both its most compelling and most ethically fraught section. These are lives narrated through accusation: Sheikh Bachchu, Babulal Khatik, Basanta Kumar Saha, Santosh Kumar Pal, Phoolchand Kahar, Bhulu Das, Dinabandhu Dutta, Lakshminarayan Paul, Bhanu Bose, and many others. Each appears as a dossier, a sequence of arrests, releases, externalization orders, and character assessments.
What makes these case studies powerful is not their sensationalism, but their monotony. Crime here is not glamorous; it is repetitive, exhausting, and often petty.
Many of these men drift in and out of jail, accumulating records but rarely achieving anything like notoriety. Their lives are marked by broken families, failed livelihoods, communal violence, and addiction. One senses the grinding inevitability of their trajectories.
Yet the authors are careful not to sentimentalize these figures. Violence is not excused; victims are not erased. Instead, the book insists on holding two truths simultaneously: that goondas committed harm, and that they were themselves products of harm.
This refusal to resolve the tension is one of the book’s ethical achievements.
From a postmodern perspective, these case studies also raise questions about voice. We hear the police speaking ‘about’ these men, but rarely the men speaking for themselves.
The authors acknowledge this limitation and gesture toward oral history as a corrective, even as they recognize its difficulties. Silence, here, becomes part of the historical record.
One of the most chilling sections of ‘The Goondas’ deals with the communal riots of 1946 and their aftermath. The book documents how the violence of Direct Action Day and subsequent clashes pushed many young men into organized gangs, often under the banner of community defense.
Figures like Gopal Mukherjee (Gopal Pantha) emerge as both protectors and predators—men who mobilized violence in the name of communal survival and later turned that capacity toward criminal enterprise.
This section complicates any clean separation between political violence and criminal violence. The same skills—organizing men, acquiring weapons, intimidating opponents—were transferable across contexts. When communal fervour subsided and political support dried up, many of these groups found themselves with arms, training, and no legitimate outlet. Crime became continuity by other means.
The book’s refusal to romanticize this process is important. Communal violence is shown not as an eruption of ancient hatred, but as a catalyst that reshaped urban power relations. It created heroes and villains, often in the same body. In this sense, ‘The Goondas’ resonates with studies of paramilitarization in other contexts—from post-partition Punjab to contemporary urban militias.
It must be acknowledged that ‘The Goondas’ is not an easy read. Its prose is dense, its references numerous, its arguments layered. Casual readers may find its academic rigor intimidating. This is not a narrative history meant for mass consumption; it demands patience, familiarity with historiographical debates, and a willingness to sit with ambiguity.
Yet this difficulty is also part of the book’s integrity. The authors do not simplify their findings to court readability. They respect the complexity of their subject, even at the cost of accessibility. In an era increasingly dominated by quick takes and digestible histories, this commitment feels almost radical.
That said, one might wish for a more extended engagement with the postcolonial period. While the book gestures toward continuities after independence, its archival base remains heavily colonial.
A deeper exploration of how goondaism evolved in postcolonial Kolkata—through trade unions, political parties, and informal economies—would have enriched the analysis. This absence, however, feels less like a flaw and more like an invitation for future research.
Rereading ‘The Goondas’ today, one realizes that its true subject is not crime, but governance. It is about how states imagine threats, how cities absorb violence, and how marginal lives are written into history—often against their will.
The book reminds us that underworlds do not exist in isolation; they are shadows cast by systems of power.
For scholars of urban history, criminology, or South Asian studies, this book remains indispensable. For readers invested in Kolkata’s past and present, it offers a sobering mirror.
The city’s struggles with inequality, political muscle, and informal power structures did not emerge overnight. They have deep roots, carefully traced here.
In the end, ‘The Goondas’ does not offer closure. It leaves us with questions—about justice, memory, and responsibility. And perhaps that is its greatest strength. History, the book suggests, is not a court of final judgment. It is a space of reckoning.
There are books that explain a city, and there are books that ‘listen’ to it. ‘The Goondas: Towards a Reconstruction of the Calcutta Underworld’ belongs uneasily to both categories, and it is precisely this unease that gives the monograph its enduring power.
On rereading it, one is struck less by the sensational promise of its title—goondas, underworld, crime—and more by the quiet, methodical patience with which Suranjan Das and Jayanta Kumar Ray allow the archive to speak, falter, repeat itself, contradict itself, and sometimes betray its own anxieties.
This is not a book that romanticizes criminality, nor one that moralizes it. Instead, it performs a careful historical excavation of how deviance was produced, named, administered, and periodically forgotten in colonial and early postcolonial Calcutta.
Give it a go, indeed—especially if you are a Calcutta buff. But more than that, give it time.
This is a book that reveals itself slowly, like the city it studies, layer by contested layer.
Most recommended.
March 31, 2022
Basically a short bio of about 100 goondas.
Who they were, what they did and what sentence they received.
Afte you've read 25 your interest is gone.
Not a social studies book, more of a dry account of charges and sentences.
Only 100 pages so a quick but dull read
Who they were, what they did and what sentence they received.
Afte you've read 25 your interest is gone.
Not a social studies book, more of a dry account of charges and sentences.
Only 100 pages so a quick but dull read
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews