The long hold of the idea that ‘India is the land of villages’ on the imaginations of politicians, policy makers and scholars alike was a result not just of the numerical preponderance of the village, but because it represented the space of an organic, unsullied authenticity. Needless to say, in many accounts, well into the late twentieth century, the authenticity was only made possible by relinquishing a claim to the turbulence of history, and indeed on ‘modernity’ itself. The Indian city in the period of colonial rule, on the contrary, became a heaving, undisciplined monster, the site of a corrupting modernity, illegitimate and even unauthentic in its form. Apart from the monumental cities of Delhi or Lucknow, and some attention to ‘temple’ towns, most monographs on modern Indian cities written in the last 60 years remained without a legible past and were the work largely of geographers or sociologists. Those early pioneers who explored the history of the modern Indian city on its own terms, such as Narayani Gupta,Footnote ¹ Mariam DossalFootnote ² or Veena Oldenburg,Footnote ³ were lonely outcrops in a vast field of historical works that were largely rooted in the countryside. The peasant and the village, rather than the worker and the city, occupied centre-stage in the most important phases of post-independence Indian historiography. Since the history of Indian nationalism gripped the scholars of the immediate post-independence years, and economic history powered by Marxism informed the next phase of writing (both of which were enormously productive lines of enquiry), the Indian city was embedded in works that traced either the fate of anti-colonial nationalism or the broader trajectories of labour and capital. The innovative approaches of the Subaltern Studies collective from the early 1980s drew historiographic attention once more to the rebellious peasant and rural communities or mentalities.

The relative lack of scholarly interest in the modern city was not the result of any idiosyncratic historiographical obsession. Urbanization suffered under British rule: a long period of deindustrialization and deurbanization throughout the nineteenth century was compensated only partially by the rise of the Presidency cities of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, and by new railway towns. Christopher Bayly's 1983 work, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, which attempted to demonstrate that the economic life of north Indian towns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was far more robust than the ‘deindustrialization’ thesis had assumed, was unusual in its scope, though by suggesting too strong a continuity between the pre-colonial and the colonial, it reduced the disastrous impact of colonialism on the Indian economy.Footnote ⁴ In contrast to the metropolitan centre, and despite over a century and a half of British rule, only 11 per cent of Indians were living in cities in the early twentieth century. However, as Prashant Kidambi points out, cities gained visibility at the beginning of the twentieth century, if only as a site of potential disruption: ‘Prior to the 1890s, the colonial state had largely focused on the pacification of the Indian countryside. But as the nineteenth century drew to a close, it was in the towns of the Raj that the maintenance of “public order” became an increasingly pressing issue’(Kidambi: p. 154).

Urban history's status as the somewhat neglected cousin in Indian scholarship has disappeared in the last two decades, as historians have joined planners and policy makers in recognizing the importance of the massive (and growing) presence of the urban in contemporary Indian life. The genealogies of the modern Indian city are now investigated with some exuberance by those seeking answers that go beyond the strictly economic. What were the conditions for the possibility of the emergence of an elite public sphere during the period of colonialism in a city like Surat?Footnote ⁵ What were the new controls, new forms of resistance and unprecedented interventions by the colonial regime that were engendered by plague, riots and economic growth that fostered large informal sectors, particularly as it affected the working poor of Bombay city?Footnote ⁶ What does the comparison of four smaller North Indian cities yield about the lives of poor and marginal people in a period of uncertain political and economic fortunes?Footnote ⁷ These are some samples of the lingering influence of older historiographical penchants for economic and political analyses, now applied to the city. Most of the works under review, however, mark a sharp shift away from these concerns. That the economic, and even the political, have receded as principal frames of reference becomes clear in the new scholarship. More correctly, rather than disappearing altogether, the meaning and depth of both the economic and the political have been expanded and diffused under the twin rubrics of ‘modernity’ and ‘governmentality’. If Jim Masselos’ book, The City in Action is an exception to this trend, it is for a number of obvious reasons: it is a reprint of previously published essays on Bombay, written between 1971 and 1999; it is strongly focused on the city as the theatre for the exercise of political power, in its riots, assemblies, associations and planned nationalist protests or celebrations; finally, it conforms to more conventional styles of history writing, largely based on archival materials and sources. As such, Masselos himself suggests, there is no single theoretical framework that unifies the essays (Masselos: p. 11), and he has taken rather eclectically from Max Weber, George Rudé or Michel Foucault in approaching the city as the space of action for modern political associations, crowds during festivities or governmental agencies during epidemics, though with sometimes unforeseen consequences.

The other four books reveal how seriously the twin concerns of modernity and governmentality furrow the brows of many contemporary historians. The focus on questions of modernity, rather than capitalism, or on governance, as opposed to protest or rebellion, is of some significance. Rather than portraying Indian modernity as an imitative, unoriginal or unfulfilled version of the European original, the burden of these works is to reveal the contestations of the colonial-modern narrative, the simultaneous emergence of indigenous modernities and the uniqueness of the resultant mix. Each of the authors is compelled to coin terms to qualify the experience of modernity in the colonial metropolis. Prashant Kidambi favours the term ‘hybridity’ to describe Bombay's new associational culture between 1890 and 1920, that ‘combined voluntary and ascriptive criteria of membership’ (Kidambi: p. 13). Jyoti Hosagrahar's description of the ‘irregular, uneven and unexpected’ encounter between the dominant Western universal-modern and an Indian engagement which calls ‘all inherited categories into question’ leads her to the term ‘indigenous modernities’ (Hosagrahar: pp. 6–7). To correct the ready equation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Calcutta with disorder and planning gone awry, Swati Chattopadhyay proposes a series of ‘translations’ of the Western ideals of individuality, progress and public and private life into the Indian setting, resulting in an ‘unreasoning modernity’: a ‘city rendered uncanny in both colonialist and nationalist imagination [sic]’, where ‘unreason’ refers not to the lack of reason, but to the ‘realm of memory, myth, and those aspects of experience that are not easily amenable to discourse or representation’ (Chattopadhyay: p. 3). Stephen Legg's discussion of the early twentieth-century occupation of New Delhi, a city strikingly different from the old imperial capital in form and purpose, yields a qualified use of Michel Foucault's influential discussion of ‘governmentality’ (broadly understood as individuation, normativization and the disciplinary practice of bio-power that replaced absolutist ‘sovereign power’ in the European instance). ‘Colonial governmentality’ (first theoretically distinguished from its European instance by David Scott)Footnote ⁸ was ‘a unique hybridization of the imperial and the modern’ generated by the very conditions of colonial rule (namely dominance without hegemony), where sovereign power is wrought into, rather than replaced by, the disciplinary practice of power (Legg: pp. 20–9). Not surprisingly, each of the authors demonstrates the resistance to and adaptation of the techniques and artefacts of the modern (one might list the clock tower, the city hall, the plague measures or town planning as some instances), leading to the kinds of compromises that colonial governmentality was compelled to make.

The current preoccupation with the meaning and shape of modernity in the colonial context must be explained, if not accepted. To begin with, it must be pointed out that none of the four authors proposes a reperiodization of the modern, i.e. suggesting that the modern had indigenous roots that were thwarted or transfigured by a triumphal colonial-modern, though not without a struggle, as some Indian historians have tried to do. Instead, there is an acceptance that ‘modernity’ begins with the arrival of the Europeans. Swati Chattopadhyay alone contests the imperial histories of Calcutta that begin with its heroic ‘founding’ in 1690 by Job Charnock to show that there were well-developed trading and manufacturing nodes and settlements whose histories have rarely been acknowledged in colonial accounts (Chattopadhyay: pp. 8–9). But even her rendering of the past is to emplace the modern, whether indigenous or colonial, not to recast the time of the ‘modern’ itself.

The concern of all the authors is to disturb the narrative of colonial designs that were frustrated by incorrigible ‘cultural’ traits. They deny any kind of neat cleavage between an original settlement/city and the ‘white city’ that took form under colonialism in order to blur the radical separation between two modes of conceiving and making meaning of space, namely the ‘traditional’ (Indian) and the ‘modern’ (European). That clarifies the task of the historian who focuses on demonstrating the ways in which colonialism as a mode of power could never fulfil the promise of transferring the techniques of modern governance, whether these were systems of sanitation, sewage, public health or town planning, in their entirety, because, despite their declared objectives of ‘improvement’, the primary goal was extraction, as opposed to economic transformation of any fundamental kind. The exercise of power, predicated on the ‘rule of racial difference’, was one that relied on and strengthened, instead of replacing, the power of indigenous elites. The indigenous population, in turn, made sense of, rejected or manipulated the space of the modern city within these constraints, and rarely as passive recipients of colonial schemes.

The attractions of the ‘modern’ as the unifying framework become even more intelligible when we consider the kinds of historical materials that are analysed in each of these works. Architectural, artistic and literary texts are among the cultural legacies of the city that are pressed by Hosagrahar and Chattopadhyay into telling a story of myriad, conflicting, public cultures, and indeed modernities. Kidambi and Legg veer closer to the more conventional archive, and the latter forcefully justifies the use of the governmental archive to reveal the ‘flux and indeterminism’ of colonial rule (Kidambi: p. 17; Legg: 211). Both the writers discuss the urban form and new spatial practices, including analyses of new nodes of tension and disturbance, new techniques for ordering of the city (in peace time through planning, and in times of potential riots through mapping/controlling the city) to thicken our knowledge of colonial-modern governance.

All the books are focused on either the large Presidency cities of Bombay and Calcutta or the imperial capital, Delhi. Indeed, a high proportion of urban residents in twentieth-century India belonged to the three great Presidency cities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. These were multi-functional cities, housing major ports, warehouses, homes and offices, army camps, as well as educational institutions, museums and libraries. Of these, Bombay was the urbs prima of India, with 644, 405 people in 1872, going up to nearly 1.5 million in 1941. Following the long period when it was turned into the most important port for Indian products ranging from cotton to opium, it burgeoned in the late nineteenth century as the textile industry took root and proliferated.

Both Masselos and Kidambi take Bombay as the site of study, and offer two accounts that intersect and diverge in their concerns and conclusions. Masselos’ essays are divided into three sections, which deal respectively with the time of empire, nationalism and independence. The book principally explores the exercise of power in the public arena over 150 years from the mid-nineteenth century.

Masselos’ concern is primarily with collective action in the linked spheres of the formal and the informal, ranging from the sanctioned nationalist actions to the more spontaneous neighbourhood responses. In his account, the colonial regime at first exerted a form of political power that sat lightly on several layers of already existing power networks, even as it showed no unwillingness to bare its teeth when all other forms of persuasion had failed (Masselos: p. 22). The first section analyses forms of power that were exercised from below, in neighbourhoods and mohallas, in the public world of crowd actions and in the space of the household. If the colonial administration leaned heavily on the local leadership at the outset, Masselos suggests that there was a steady increase in the exertion of state power to manipulate and bend the mohalla (Muslim neighbourhood) to its ends (Masselos: pp. 31, 40). Jyoti Hosagrahar suggests a similar path traced by the power of the amirs/rais or local notables, which was increasingly absorbed by the municipal corporation, turning a largely ‘privatized’ city into a more public one (Hosagrahar: pp. 66–8). The prospect of mobilizing the Bombay mohalla for newer political goals, such as Jinnah's Muslim League in 1915, for instance, could fail where colonial administrations had succeeded. Indeed, as another chapter in Masselos’ book points out, nationalist associations in Bombay were far less vigorous than in Poona, particularly in the 1870s since the energies of the Bombay elites were exhausted in the field of municipal politics itself.

Masselos is at his best when he sketches the Bombay mohalla, to reveal the way in which its circuits of power intersect with or diverge from larger circuits. His is an interesting counterpoint to the more purposeful discussion of the neighbourhood in the work of Raj Chandarvarkar, who also charts the ways in which working-class solidarities were cemented or taken apart at different historical conjunctures (thereby drawing attention away from the experience of the shop-floor to the life in the neighbourhood in explaining working-class action). In his highly textured discussions of crowd action (Masselos: pp. 80–124) or in analyses of the celebration of festivals and conflict as signs of cohesion, a way of belonging to the city, when riots occur over ‘accustomed space’ (Masselos: pp. 284–318), Masselos offers novel insights that have been echoed in contemporary analyses of violence in Bombay/Mumbai (as in the recent work of Thomas Blom Hansen).Footnote ⁹ The conduct of relatively more harmonious festivals (e.g. Diwali) as well as those that were more competitive or riot prone (for example, Muharram or the Ganapati festival) form two different ways, he says, of laying claim to the space of the city. Yet is the city neighbourhood merely a village on an expanded scale to which Masselos can transpose the work of Indian anthropologists of the village and its conflicts, a method that he justifies at some length?

The specificity of the city itself disappears in Masselos’ discussion of Bombay as the stage for the enactment of some great moments of nationalist mobilization, whether in 1919, 1930 or 1942, or in its celebration of the Independence day, in 1947. As he himself admits, his method in these chapters is more additive than revisionist or pioneering (Masselos: p. 196). While there are themes here that are taken up and elaborated by some of the other scholars (the question of control of the procession for instance is taken up by both Prashant Kidambi and Stephen Legg for Delhi), the compulsions of traversing the entire period of the early twentieth century have resulted in a far more formulaic treatment of city level politics.

Prashant Kidambi focuses on a much shorter period of Bombay's history, and provides the reasons for doing so: between the 1890s and 1920s, he says, there were at least three sets of changes that marked a break with earlier periods the city's history: it was the time when Bombay was transformed from port city to a major industrial metropolis, with the emergence of a significantly ‘plebeian secondary economy’; the experience of the 1898 plague in particular set in motion the apparatuses of town planning, with ambiguous effects; finally, a new and vigorous ‘associational culture’ took root in this time (Kidambi: p. 9). Although he does not rehearse the well-known aspects of Bombay's industrial history, he does discuss the ways in which municipal taxation policies and civic amenities systematically favoured the rich over the poor with enduring consequences for the future of the city and citizenship itself. This is a point that is emphasized in both Masselos, and in Legg's discussion of Delhi's municipal politics.

The plague of 1898, the devastating toll it took on the city of Bombay, and indeed many other Indian cities, and the extraordinary interventionary measures that it occasioned have been discussed by a wide range of historians, Masselos included. Residents of the city took flight, we well know, from the contagion as much as they fled the harsh and invasive plague measures of the colonial authorities, who perhaps for the first time realized that a policy of racial segregation in the city, the infamous ‘black’ versus the ‘white’ town, was no guarantee against contagion, and the drastic depletion of populations that resulted. Bombay city alone lost 183,984 citizens between 1896, when the bubonic plague first broke out, and 1914. Kidambi's contribution to the scholarship on plague is to turn attention away from the colonial state's focus on the bodies of the afflicted, founded on new scientific evidence of ‘contagion’, to the ‘predisposing’ cause of plague, namely environmental factors. He charts the effects of the lingering effects of ‘pythogenic’ theories which identified the festering slums of Bombay as the chief cause of contagion, rather than germ theories centred on the body. To the extent that the ‘locality’ rather than the diseased body was the focus of governmental attention, responses could range from the demolition of plague-ridden buildings through the use of fire, and eviction of large populations to the camps outside the city, to the more positive, long-term institution of town planning. It is another matter that such measures exacerbated, instead of eradicating, poverty. The experience of other cities, such as Bangalore in the same period, for instance, reveals that some of the lowest castes, who occupied the most insanitary areas of the city, such as the sweepers, were impervious to the disease. They triggered a crisis, instead, by deserting the city, and refusing to clear corpses and homes. As many historians of labour camps and plantation housing have also revealed, since it was contagion, rather than poverty itself, that was central to the colonial administration's concerns, planning itself was directed at preserving the health and well being of the elites, and marginally the health of those on whose services the elites depended. To the extent, however, that plague could be analytically anchored in the local environment of the slum or chawl, segregation of the poor (a part of the social body) was the cheaper means of restricting the spread of contagion.

It is indeed true, as Legg's discussion of the old Delhi's environment has shown, that the regime of bio-power identified by Foucault with its focus on the disciplined and healthy reproductive body, was an impossibility in colonial cities that privileged economic over the bio-political considerations (Legg: p. 163). Grand diagnoses of problems were routinely undermined by pragmatic considerations of cost, and the structural preference for middle-class housing rather than the needs of the urban poor (Legg: p. 168).

Neither Kidambi nor Legg (though for slightly different periods) give importance to the stubbornly resistant ‘cultural’ factors that flourished under colonial authorities in all their explanations of why measures taken to reduce contagion in Bombay and Delhi often failed. Rather, their scrutiny of the official archive itself reveals the inconsistencies of the preferred modes of resolving problems of urban governance and the impunity with which colonial authorities invented invasive regimes that became long-term legacies.

In this sense, they strike a different note from the account provided by Masselos who acknowledges cultural difference as the source of resistance to invasive plague measures, and the folly of the British in persisting with these methods, even after the threat of plague had receded, inviting violent reactions and response. Masselos concludes that the failures of the administrations were an indication of

The dilemma posed by the ‘invasion of private’ is here taken as the ground of irreducible cultural difference, while Kidambi and Legg would place the failure of the plague measures as a sign of the limits posed by colonial governmentality.

With governmentality as the focus, Prashant Kidambi and Stephen Legg cover almost identical sites: while Kidambi discusses the policing of public order (‘The ultimate masters of the city’) Legg's ‘Disciplining Delhi’ too analyses policing, disciplinary mechanisms and the restoration of order in the time of riots. The discussion of ‘Bio-politics and the urban environment’ in Legg's book is matched by Kidambi's discussion of the ‘crisis of sanitary order’. Both works include critiques of the ideology of improvement, which was institutionalized in the Improvement Trusts of the two cities. Trust schemes were doomed from the start since they privileged profit over improvement. The search for low costs systematically drove Trust schemes, in Bombay as well as in Delhi, to unfold in ways that undermined general rules of sanitation (Kidambi: pp. 89–113; Legg: pp. 159–209). While Kidambi does discuss some of the elements of the resistance to the plague measures as rooted in community concerns (as in his discussion of the reluctance of the Kolis to move away from their accustomed spaces; Kidambi: pp. 80–1), the ‘acts of resistance’ are interpreted as part of the Kolis’ wider concern about surviving in a new location.

Kidambi's long account of the development and growth of an associational life in Bombay, which substantiates his argument about the importance of the period he studies, shows us how ‘a limited urban civil society’ of the early nineteenth century expanded to include a rich mix of nationalist groups, caste and religious associations, trade unions and cricket clubs (Kidambi: pp. 157–201). This undifferentiated mass of organizations is taken as proof of the expansion of ‘civil society’ of Bombay, ‘hybrids’ insofar as they used both ascriptive and voluntary modes of recruitment. Whether the cricket club and the caste association can be placed on the same plane, and treated as equal signs of the rise of civil society, is debatable. Kidambi's archival detail is allowed to overwhelm the overall argument, through too lightly framing the theoretical contradictions of building voluntary organizations in colonial India.

Stephan Legg, in contrast, shows no unwillingness in bringing a theoretical framework to bear on his archival material. His declared objective is to reframe Michel Foucault's influential analyses of governmentality in the colonial Indian context. His discussion of ‘three landscapes’ of the old and new cities of Delhi between 1911 and 1947 – residential arrangements in the old and new cities, the policing of communities and potentially riot-prone festivals and the new sanitary arrangements – not only makes creative use of official materials such as maps and government orders, but devises new and insightful schema for understanding colonial governmental mechanisms (Legg: p. 21). Through a strict transposition of the terms of Foucault's analysis, Legg demonstrates the founding contradictions of colonial rule, which relied as much on the exercise of ‘excessive’ control as it did on studied ‘neglect’ of important issues. Overcrowding and underbuilding were thus the marks of not only the old but even the new capital, and persistent shortfalls undid the best-laid plans. Through the use of the sharply framed petitions of the clerks against racial segregation, and the inequities that it produced, Legg supports the broader argument that the explanations so readily offered by colonial authorities were rooted more in the overall interests (or the lack of them) in preserving order and maintaining their rule, rather than improving or recasting society through the techniques of government (Legg: p. 69). While the resistance to the governmental initiatives is not overlooked, Legg's emphasis is on the range of measures, new and old, which were used throughout the early twentieth century, when the threats to British rule were at their height. The Communal Riot Scheme of 1934 was therefore the production of an imagination that reduced all political issues to the common currency of security and policing (Legg: pp. 128–35). The landscape thus produced ‘was shorn of major topographical features and displayed as a site for the distribution of force’ (Legg: p. 135).

Legg's battery of the governmental archive with the heavy artillery of Foucault's theoretical insights is sometimes unwarranted and abstruse, and often peters out into the banal: New Delhi was intended as a showpiece imperial capital, but achieved no such status since ‘such discursive simplicity was complicated in the material world of practice and existence’ (Legg: p. 66). There are the trappings of a not-quite-governmentality, and the exercise of not-quite-sovereignty. ‘Rather than operating silently and creating docile subjects of political obedience, the systems of urban discipline in Delhi had to resort to sovereign mechanisms of violence in times of emergency. These actions possessed their own logic that remained stubbornly external to the government, while remaining fundamentally constituted by and constitutive of, the colonial administration’ (Legg: p. 148). There are variations on the theme of the gap between intention and effect throughout (Legg: 215). Fortunately, the impressive empirical material that Legg uses with creative insight saves the work from its excessive reliance on and reworking of Foucault's governmentality thesis.

Jyoti Hosagrahar's book Indigenous Modernities takes the discussion of Delhi to an altogether different plane in the period between 1857 (the year of the Great Revolt) and 1947 (the year of Indian independence). Like Swati Chattopadhyay, she makes the buildings, maps, photographs and poetry speak of another city than the ones that the colonial writers made familiar. Both these authors share with Prashant Kidambi and Stephen Legg, though in varying degrees, the urgency of blurring the borders between traditional and modern, to suggest irregularity and discontinuity, as well as reconstruction and revitalization of partially dismantled cultural forms. Hosagrahar's scrutiny of the built form takes her to the heart of private and public spaces of what in the twentieth century began to be referred to as the ‘old city’. How did the inhabitants of an older imperial order experience, creatively respond to or cultivate new habits of living following the period of colonial dismantling and reconstruction? Here too, as in Kidambi and Legg, Hosagrahar uncovers the emergence of a new civic culture centred on the public square, and new design for living, as in the construction of Clarkegunj (Hosagarhar: pp. 123–32), the important ways in which the question of sanitation on a city scale produced new inequalities and reinforced older ones. But Delhi, unlike either Calcutta or Bombay, had a richly urbane culture and architectural profile prior to colonialism, making the transformations that were brought about far more disquieting and visually striking. The marginalization of the haveli or mansion, from its position of centrality in an earlier order, was both spatial and social: if the haveli was once the residence of the amir/rai (landed gentry) it now became the house of a merchant, yielding up its richly opulent, though no doubt oppressive, interior to the compulsory fragmentation following the 1857 revolt. Many of its pleasures were surrendered to the seductions of the new secular time that was announced by the clock tower, the town hall and the railway. That this was no singular, uninterrupted, or unidirectional process of change has now become part of the historical common sense, although none of these authors would take such an understanding for granted. The space of the haveli, she shows us, went from representing feudal power to signifying ‘rationalism, efficiency and technological progress’ in its reinvented form (Hosagrahar: p. 44). The newly defined public sphere, focused on spaces such as the civic square, generated new and unintended uses, while the power of the local rais shrank before the new muscularity of the municipal council.

The mandatory discussion of the new sanitary order, and the necessary digression on new curbs and regulations on potentially disruptive processions (themes which recur in all the books under review) apart, Hosagrahar is the only author who chooses to discuss a new rule of property within the city, which was entirely initiated by the British. In the realm of property relations, she discovers a series of contradictions, some of which are also noted by Legg. There was an inverse relationship between an accuracy of surveying and actual amelioration of poor living conditions (Hosagrahar: p. 140). The cohesive urban community was assumed while (individual) rights to property were defined and upheld (Hosagrahar: p. 141). The ideology of ‘improvement’ was subordinated to the logic of capital so that exchange value was privileged over use value: ‘Improvement was not about remedying environmental conditions but about enhancing the commercial value of land’ (Hosagrahar: p. 137).

The dilemmas of dealing with cultural predispositions within an explanatory framework that foregrounds the agency of the subjects of colonial rule, without undermining the dominance of the colonial systems of governance, dog all the works under review. Although Hosagrahar, for instance, frames her work in ways that do not absolve the colonial regime of the inequalities and problems that they fostered, the clash of two health regimens becomes an attractive resource for tracking the resistance of the indigenous population: ‘for many other citizens, the sanitary improvements were unnecessary, disruptive and in conflict with their interests and customary ways’ (Hosagrahar: pp. 103, 110–13). In other instances, as we have seen above, the cultural difference argument was rejected in order to expose racial prejudice. It would be appropriate to ask: in which location might such a battle (against ‘customary ways’ that did not recognize the importance of a regimen of public health) not have been fought? The work of Richard Sennett or David Harvey, for instance, has shown us how recently such battles were waged and won even in capitals of the west. Writing from a space that is wracked by bitter conflicts, routine violence, aggressive interventions in public life by those whose ‘sentiments’ are purportedly hurt, one wonders whether the traits that the colonials saw as stubbornly unreformable habits, or irrational loyalties, of the subjects, can always/everywhere be read as signs of ‘resistance’.

The reading of cultural artifacts such as buildings and plans, paintings and novels, to stress creative borrowings between traditions, new and old, makes the work of both Hosagrahar and Swati Chattopadhyay innovative. Calcutta's architectural hybridity did not stem from the same sources that have been identified for Delhi. Chattopadhyay's book, Representing Calcutta, lays out the scope of her ambition quite clearly: the city of Calcutta between the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth century was ‘no less or more provincial, as a process no more or less contradictory than that of the urbanism of nineteenth-century Paris or Vienna, which are routinely suggested as birthplaces of nineteenth-century modernity’ (Chattopadhyay: pp. 3–4). As the capital of British India until 1911, and for long acknowledged as the fount of Indian nationalism, Calcutta was among the earliest spaces to wrestle with colonial modernity following the establishment of British rule, as much as it presented the British with their first baffling experiences of governing India. Chattopadhyay examines a range of cultural sources – drawings, landscapes, maps, building plans, literary works and legal documents – to challenge colonial representations of the city and its history.

The intentions of this architectural historian are similar to those of the others discussed above, namely to restore agency to the indigenous population, to disturb both the self-sufficiency of the discourse of the colonial ‘founding’ of the city and its teleology. Yet the argument primarily rests on the copious writings, productions, constructions and representations of the colonial period itself, to launch either a critique of European portrayals of the city (in travel writings, landscapes, figural representations, maps) or an alternative representation that uses and adapts the techniques of the colonizer to altogether unintended uses (the caustic wit of the bat-tala prints, which satirized ‘modern’ Bengali life is a case in point). Unlike Hosagrahar's book, which is able to draw on the rich pre-colonial heritage of Delhi, in both physical and social senses, to enhance the argument for a ‘clash’ or reconciliation of two ways of conceptualizing city space or sculpting social life, the ‘alternative’, or, more correctly, contested, space of the city that Chattopadhyay builds is at once colonial/post-colonial in its moorings. It is no wonder then that nationalism forms the principal frame through which Calcutta is seen/understood/represented.

If there are historians whose arguments about modernity are based on a strongly unified, official archive, Chattopadhyay juxtaposes wide-ranging, even disparate texts to make her argument. ‘Locating mythic selves’ (Chattopadhyay: pp. 136–78), for instance, analyses three cultural texts – a didactic text of 1823 (Kalikata Kamalaya), the house-plan of a nineteenth-century Calcutta merchant family and a 1930 painting of Bengal's pioneering nationalist artist, Abanindranath Tagore. Each of these is made to yield a spatial history, standing for practices which developed in response to and against colonial styles and practices. The detailed discussion of the relationship of the house to the street, which was inverted/turned inside out in the colonial period, converges on a reading of the nat-mandir, ‘a combination of a temple form and a large enclosed public hall’ (Chattopadhyay: pp. 157–61) which enthusiastically adopted ‘a neo-classical vocabulary’. Radhakanta Deb choose this hybrid style for the nat-mandir, at once a space which was used for public gatherings of a religious and a secular kind. Yet this was no mimicry, but a translation of power from one realm to another, as became evident in the smaller scale of the construction.

A transformed meaning of neo-classicism was achieved in the structure since ‘the multiple architectural references in Radhakanta's nat-mandir meant that these references could be selectively called upon, made active through different forms of spatial practice during religious worship, political meetings, and secular engagements’ (Chattopadhyay: p. 163).

Such interpretative strategies may be called into methodological question by the more conventional urban historian. Does the task of establishing another genealogy of Indian modernity in the colonial period and the very choice of cultural texts (which are in this chapter made commensurate, despite their widely differing genres and moments of production) call for such strategies? The history of the city that is narrated on these cultural registers is one of agency, interruption of the dominant narrative and translation, rather than mere post-colonial mimicry. It is therefore once more a history of cultural nationalism that reconfigures the unprecedented ways of seeing inaugurated by colonialism. It is also a history that challenges the positivist evidentiary protocols of the historical method.

One discussion in Chattopadhyay's work critiques the new orthodoxies of nationalist historiography. While all the authors discussed in this review pay attention to the effects of and responses to the gendered spaces of colonial modernity, Chattopadhyay begins the outline of a critique of Bengali nationalism as always and already an urban male discourse. In his influential schematization of the reasons why the women's question receded from public view in late nineteenth-century Bengal, Partha Chatterjee identified the success of cultural nationalism in defining the home/inner world (and therefore the world of women) as spiritual, uncolonized and private, over which nationalists alone would hold sway. Chattopadhyay questions this formulation and inverts the home and public divide, recognizes its blatantly patriarchal character and redefines the relationship between public sphere and public space (which are often discrepant) to ask: ‘If we proceed with the assumption that the domestic realm was the principal site of women's struggle, we risk the normalization of women's exclusion from public space. Could it be possible to write a history of nationalism and the Bengali public sphere by beginning with women in public space?’ (Chattopadhyay: p. 18). Chattopadhyay takes us through a dizzying array of texts in making her point about the maleness of nationalist thought and representations, about the ways in which women in the public space (such as prostitutes or actresses) were invisibilized in the public sphere. Literary texts and popular prints, well-publicized (and historicized) scandals and the operation of the Contagious Diseases Act, manuals of domesticity and clothing reform are all used in her discussion of women in the city space. A legal case of 1898, and the complex negotiations made by the chief protagonist, Nistarini Debi, are used to discuss competing definitions of public and private space. A widow who was driven to file a suit against her brothers-in-law to enjoy her rights to the property of her husband, Debi was compelled simultaneously to transgress and uphold the gendered spaces of the household, to her advantage. By testifying behind purdah (seclusion), despite having in practice long breached the protocols that separated the inner spaces of the home (andarmahal) from the outer, and invoking the image of chastity, she convinced a colonial judiciary which understood static and inflexible notions of female propriety: ‘the force of Nistarini's statement and the judgment delivered in her favor clearly assumed that both the architecture of the house as well as the social practices that guarded or facilitated relationships between male and female family members were to be understood in absolute terms’ (Chattopadhyay: p. 271).

Chattopadhyay's concerns take her readers well away from conventional histories of the city, and represent both the problems and possibilities of using diverse representations to argue for agency, resistance and a blurring of boundaries between the colonizer and colonized. In a review article written more than 10 years ago, Anthony King had remarked that the ‘post colonies’ have since the 1980s acted as ‘academic and writing laboratories’.Footnote ¹⁰ He may find confirmation of his controversial observations about post-colonial critics who ‘take their own post colonial subjectivity . . . halfway round the world to experience them’. Or he may be persuaded to learn the uncomfortable lesson that despite close to 20 years of ‘post-colonial’ critiques, the imperatives of dismantling the power and the effects of colonial ‘modernity’ still remain.

Are we then left with a substantially altered perspective on the history of modernity under colonialism, which is surely the theoretical burden of most authors discussed here? It must be confessed that while a variety of cultural texts and their analyses make for engaging reading, it is the rich empirical detail of plague measures and sanitary schemes, property markets and new settlement schemes, mohalla and haveli patterns of power that provide the more persuasive case for the limits to urbanization under colonial rule, and to the clash of colonial priorities with local needs, in which the former always triumphed. In order to challenge the dominance of colonial policies in and about cities, one need not go so far as to suggest a mutually constituted order of power, or scopic regime. This would be to deny the radical rupture represented by colonial rule, and the ambiguous legacies that it has bequeathed to Indian cities up to the present day. It is the achievement of all these new histories of the colonial city that they steer us towards an understanding of the sordid mess in which we find most South Asian cities today, not as a failure of planning mechanisms, or unreformable cultural traits of Indians, but as a structural feature of undemocratic, unequal forms of power of which colonialism was the supreme instance.