Abstract

            This paper discusses how changing the narratives can impact the economy and visual culture in an urban space with the example of a particular street in Calicut— SM Street. Sweet Meat Street, or Mittai Theruvu, claims a history of five to six hundred years and has been a melting pot of literature, ideas and commerce for a very long period of time. The street is also the protagonist in the acclaimed Malayalam novel Oru Theruvinte Kadha (The Story of a Street), written by S.K. Pottekkatt in 1960. In 2017, the state government undertook renovation of this street and was classified under the heritage zone along with the adjacent Mananchira precinct which includes a pond, open ground and a few buildings. Today, the reliefs of Pottekkatt’s characters from the novel adorn the walls of the street. The street is pedestrianised, paved with cobblestones and has pendant lamps; the visual culture of the street has changed. Based on an ethnological fieldwork of SM Street, I analyse how a change in narrative can change the economy and visual culture of the urban space. I use Lefebvre’s chief argument from The Production of Space (1991) that a space is produced through the dialectics between perceived, conceived and lived spaces, to understand how a new space has been produced at SM Street, as it continues to change.