01808nam a22001577a 4500 514221 514221 201016b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d Chakravarty, Ishita 18708 Owners, creditors and traders: women in late colonial Calcutta Indian Economic and Social History Review 56(4), Oct-Dec, 2019: p.427-456 This article tries to reconstruct the world of the property-owning, mortgage-holding and money-lending women in late colonial Bengal and especially in Calcutta, the commercial capital of British India until the First World War. It argues that as all poor women occupying the urban space were not either sex workers or domestic servants, similarly all middle-class women in colonial Calcutta were not dependent housewives, teachers and doctors. At least a section of them engaged in other gainful economic activities. However, existing scholarship sheds very little light on those women who chose other means of survival than the bhadramahila: those who bought and sold houses, lent money for interest, acquired mortgages, speculated in jute trade and even managed indigenous banking business. Evidence of court records suggests that they, along with the lady teacher, the lady doctor, the midwife and the social worker or later members of political organisations, could be found in considerable numbers in late colonial Calcutta. Due to the enactment of stringent laws to control moneylending, on the one hand, and the commercial decline of Calcutta, on the other hand, these women were possibly driven out of the shrinking market of the 1940s and 1950s. – Reproduced Widow, Labour, Money lending, Jute trade 18670 Indian Economic and Social History Review WOMEN – INDIA - KOLKATA AR 0 0 ddc 0 0 388232 IIPA IIPA 2020-10-16 56(4), Oct-Dec, 2019: p.427-456 AR123260 2020-10-16 AR