The edges of Indian cities have become nebulous, their morphology uncertain. They appear to extend for miles in Mumbai and Kolkata as an ‘assorted chaos’ of middle-class residences, slums and bazaars, blurring into smaller provincial towns. The latter seem to distinguish themselves through the sameness of their ‘taste for strident politics, violent films, ostentatious architecture, lewd music, rumour-mongering newspapers and overcooked food’.Footnote ¹ The stretch between Delhi and Gurgaon is a series of real estate fictions of spurious capital and inadequate infrastructure. Spurred by the liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s and supported by state policies that have lifted many of the restrictions on rent and land use, the structural transformation of Indian metropolises manifests itself on the edges of the city as a struggle between vast slums and corporate developers’ vision of up-scale real estate, between landscapes of rice and wheat fields and expanding airports and golfing greens.

Real estate developers have seized on the idea of ‘suburbia’ as the key to urban expansion into the countryside, selling to an upwardly mobile middle-class, cut-and-paste versions of an obsolete American paradigm as the newest ‘global’ accomplishment.Footnote ² As both large and small towns expand and their centres and edges morph into newer visions of urbanity, they continue to inform us about the changing social relations that underlie this structural transformation, and the fragile distinctions between city, small town and countryside. Recent scholarship on urbanization in India has paid scant attention to the historical legacy of such developments. Consequently, the term ‘suburb’ gets used habitually, without sufficient attention to its historic constitution in the subcontinent. The four articles in this volume, by Tania Sengupta, Preeti Chopra, William J. Glover and Florian Urban, are an invitation to think through this formation – the relation between city, country, and suburbs – in South Asia in the long durée.Footnote ³

Suburbs have a long history in the subcontinent.Footnote ⁴ The suburbs of seventeenth-century Shahjahanabad extended for several miles around the walled city proper: residential neighbourhoods, wholesale markets, shrines, tombs and dargahs were ‘interspersed with extensive gardens and open spaces’, and supplied with a canal network.Footnote ⁵ About half of the population of the city resided in the suburbs. Such suburbs were, however, more vulnerable to enemy attack, and suffered extensive damage in the later centuries of Mughal rule as central power weakened and trade and communication were temporarily disrupted. The Mughal idea of suburbs, dotted with gardens and orchards as sources of revenue and leisure, however, survived into the eighteenth century and emerged as the preference for ‘garden houses’ in the outskirts of large cities among the British and Indian elite. In Bengal, such garden houses were weekend retreats made possible by the new property relations inaugurated by the Permanent Settlement of Bengal (1793), and were informed by both British and Indian notions of the rural landscape as a space of pleasure.Footnote ⁶ And yet suburbs during British colonial rule did not serve as tools of class-based residential segregation after the Anglo-American model,Footnote ⁷ suggesting that quite different socio-economic processes were at work. This distinction between the dominant Anglo-American model and the South Asian model has been largely masked and ignored in contemporary debates, as evidenced by planning documents recently formulated under the aegis of the Indian central government that speak of Indian cities in the future following the path set by the Anglo-American precedents, giving rise to ‘new, self-contained suburban centers’.Footnote ⁸

The growth of the outlying areas of the city in the presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras during the nineteenth century did not take identical contours either; they were much attenuated by the specificities of power relations and the relative economic strengths of the European and Indian communities in each region. Preeti Chopra notes in her article on colonial Bombay, ‘Free to move, forced to flee’, the small British population's propensity to move their residence, following the seasonal moves of the governor from ‘Bombay to Poona (now known as Pune) during the monsoons, to Mahabaleshwar before and after the rains, and back to Bombay for the cool winter season’, differed from the Indian middle classes’ reason for moving their residence. The latter moved away from the city centre during the plague to set up suburban communities along the railway lines, which created the template for Bombay's suburbanization in the twentieth century.

The British colonial officials’ move from cities in the plains to cooler climes in hill stations was part of a general pattern, as was the more frequent ‘commute’ between suburban gardens and cities. The infrastructure of colonial governance was predicated on the movement of colonial officials and their retinues – ‘in circuit’ – between seats of government in presidency towns, suburban settlements and provincial towns, facilitated by the increasingly viable network of roads, water transport and railways that connected them. They were a ‘composite space’ that destabilized the distinctions between urban, suburban and rural. Studying the nineteenth-century provincial or district headquarter towns in the Bengal presidency in ‘Between country and city: fluid spaces of provincial administrative towns in nineteenth-century Bengal’, Tania Sengupta argues that ‘the idea of peripheries or of sub-“urban” conditions cannot always be delimited to defined belts around cities’. A product of ‘more complex dependence–autonomy relationships and ensuing flow of cultural practices’, they require a different analytic than offered by the paradigm of Anglo-American suburbia, one that attends to the fluidity of socio-spatial relationships. For British colonial officials, such provincial towns signalled a move to the ‘countryside’ that came with an abundance of spatial privilege centred on the bungalow, privileges that were becoming increasingly constrained in the metropolises. Indian zamindars (landholders) used the small town as the staging post and an aperture to access the hinterland for revenue collection due to the colonial government. For the native peasantry who travelled to these towns to access land deeds and tax records and seek justice, such towns became places of complex exchanges of information, documents, commodities that required a different kind of spatial competence than afforded by the everyday life of the village; it represented a move towards the ‘city’. This also showed up in the spatial organization of these settlements that neither fit the model of the urban nor the image of the rural.

The form and life of these small towns is key to the understanding of urbanization in the subcontinent for several important reasons. The numerous small towns, some with modest populations, constituted the large proportion of urban India during much of its history. C.A. Bayly estimates that 70 per cent of the urban population in northern India in the nineteenth century resided in the small towns, and that this percentage would have been higher in Bengal and southern India.Footnote ⁹ In addition, a large number of new small towns were built following independence – 118 between 1947 and 1981 according to Robert Holme's count,Footnote ¹⁰ and more recently, as a package to stimulate ‘urbanization’ of the Indian economy, the central government announced its plan to establish 100 new towns of 0.5 million population each by 2021.Footnote ¹¹ Bayly has argued, following Richard Fox, that we need to focus on the urban style of these settlements, rather than population size or density, to understand the importance of these small towns to the functioning of the region, economically, culturally and politically. The ‘chaotic’ mixing of urban and rural communities in these provincial towns was apparent to nineteenth- as well as early twentieth-century commentators. Such recognitions grated against the idealized vision of the ‘village community’, as a distinct form of socio-political unit, entrenched in the colonial and Indian nationalist literature. William Glover takes up the usefulness of the ‘village community’ – as a socio-historical trope and formal possibility – in his article ‘The troubled passage from “village communities” to planned new town developments in mid-twentieth-century South Asia’, to investigate the contradictory impulses that prompted the theoretical reflections on planning new towns in the subcontinent. New towns designed to address rural in-migration to cities, he argues, put pressure on the distinction between village and city, and at the same time offered an utopian possibility for harbouring the social framework of the rural community while eradicating those marks (such as caste-segregation) that signalled their ‘backwardness’ and made them incommensurable to civic-nationalist consciousness. If the typical notion of the suburb conveys the image of the city-dweller in a (semi-)rural setting, new towns dealt with the figure of the ‘villager in the city’.

Florian Urban's article, ‘Mumbai's suburban mass housing’ extends the inquiry into planned interventions by examining a different form of development: the high-rise municipal housing in the suburbs of Mumbai in the second half of the twentieth century, and their subsequent transformation in the 1990s in the wake of economic liberalization and the state withdrawing its role as the provider of housing. He notes that although located in the ‘suburbs’, these accommodations defy the image of conventional suburbia either of the American or the European variety. Designed for the economically underprivileged, these housing complexes became home to the ‘middle classes’, and yet retained in their spatial constitution a heterogeneity ‘unimaginable in Europe or North America’.

Both in terms of spatial configuration and building types, Indian suburbia developed characteristics that are historically specific, and requires an understanding of the city–country relationship that emerged in the colonial context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The spatial deconstruction of the idea might shed light on the dominant Anglo-American model as well. And yet, not since Kenneth Ballhatchet and John Harrison's edited collection, Cities in South Asia (1980), has there been any effort to organize historical reflections on Indian cities in one volume.Footnote ¹² The articles included in this issue have been nurtured in the hope that the theoretical thrust and empirical depth of historical studies of cities in the Indian subcontinent produced in the last decade can be brought to bear on subjects more contemporary.