Critical urban scholarship today is full of studies of “other” cities—not just of the usual suspects in the global pantheon seeking to outdo one another in lists of achievement, splendor, power, and influence, but examinations of many others of varying sizes, histories, and contexts as well. An increasing number of books and articles seek to explore the urban beyond those sites that have tended to dominate the urban imaginary—studies that extend our perspectives beyond the tales of gentrification and revanchism in New York and Los Angeles, of finance capital in London and Hong Kong, of neoliberal urbanism in Paris and Tokyo, of spectacular transformations in Dubai and Singapore. This turn to “the elsewhere” has been a reaction in part to the fetishization of so-called “world cities”—their assumed rankings and the attempts to quantify power and prestige in the urban. Too often such a focus has led not to critique or interventions, but rather a reification and celebration of the “winners” in an environment of “Municipal Darwinism.”Footnote ¹

This is not to suggest that a focus on the cities we know so well has nothing to teach us; on the contrary, we can learn much from these spaces about a host of processes both global and local and the ways in which they are adopted, transformed, and replicated in various other forms and places. But as the “ordinary cities” turn in urban studies has shown us, an unstinting focus on mega-cities can lead to an obscuring of other places and the many variations of city form and function. The work of Ananya Roy, Jennifer Robinson, Aihwa Ong, and an increasing number of other scholars has argued forcefully that we must look at a wider array of cities and the ways in which they reference not only New York, Tokyo, London, and Paris, but also themselves, others, and none at all through familiar, unexpected, and alternative idioms.

It was thus with considerable pleasure that I took up these three books—selected not by myself, but by the South Asia book review editor of this journal. I have him to thank for this experience. I doubt I would have picked all of these titles on my own—three cities with vastly different histories, contexts, and mythologies: one very familiar to me, one I knew only by reputation, the other a complete mystery. Yet they are the perfect illustration of why we must look at other places when we seek to understand the urban—not because they are different or because they are unknown or simply because they are not London, New York, and Paris, but because it is important to see how significant processes and practices play through diverse locations and are made manifest in them. In Kolkata, Shikarpoor, and Banaras we see the ways in which history, power, and privilege have shaped urban space in South Asia and beyond. Perhaps even more importantly, books like these allow us to interrogate our collective memories and mythologies of such places and the parts they play in the national, regional, and local fabrics of life.

Kolkata is a city I know very well, having been born and spent a significant portion of my life in it, as well as studying its transformations over the past twenty years through several projects. Banaras I know mainly through the tales that my family and popular discourses have long told me. I had never heard of Shikarpoor. These are three cities of varying sizes and locations, of distinct historical legacies and contexts, and of different contemporary dynamics and trajectories. Each of these books takes up its story at different times and in different ways. All three tell us about the mythologies that construct the present narrative surrounding each. For Kolkata, the story is of a newly globalizing city overcoming its imperial past and postcolonial decay. For Banaras, the tale is of a venerable and seemingly unchanging site defined by its Hindu religious identity. And for Shikarpoor, the story is of a formerly prominent node in regional networks of commerce and trade crumbling into ruins and being literally stripped of its past significance and grandeur. All three authors deconstruct such narratives both historically and in the present through a careful and at times exhaustive analysis of planning, architecture, and urban form in each of these cases.

Reading these three books as a set also allowed me to explore alternative directions in South Asian urban research. As Anglo-American and European cities have come to often dominate our perspective on the urban, at a regional scale the same is true of certain other sites globally and certainly in South Asia. The shift away from London, Paris, and New York has highlighted other sites, it is true, but too often some other “usual suspects” have emerged at a more regional scale. Within South Asia a substantial amount of scholarship has focused on Mumbai and Delhi in particular. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with such a focus, yet as the authors of these books argue, there is much to learn from other places as well.

Of these three sites, Kolkata is arguably the best known among urban scholars. Certainly a number of well-known monographs have taken up the stories of the city from various perspectives. John Hutnyk's The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation (London: Zed Books, 1996), for example, interrogates the ways that Kolkata has been rendered on the global stage—as emblematic of a certain set of tropes of “Third World urbanism” (or perhaps more accurately, of urban disaster). Ananya Roy's City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) describes a city in transition, as a leftist state government best known for its rural development program begins to embrace neoliberal urbanism. Swati Chattopadhyay's Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (London: Routledge, 2005) deconstructs the notion of the city as an essentially colonial and modernist creation. Ishita Dey, Ranabir Samaddar, and Suhit Sen's Beyond Kolkata: Rajarhat and the Dystopia of Urban Imagination (London: Routledge, 2013) and my own Urban Development in Kolkata: Global Indians in the Remaking of Kolkata (London: Routledge, 2015) take up the contemporary changes that have transformed the city and the concrete effects of dreams of globalization.

Siddhartha Sen's Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata: From a Colonial to a Post-Marxist City is an important contribution to this trend of critical engagements with the poverty of Kolkata's representations. Sen provides a comprehensive perspective of Kolkata's urban history; what is especially welcome in the book is the much more complex story of the city's early and colonial history than we sometimes see. Rather than leaving this period as a somewhat linear tale of colonial modes and local ambitions, Sen provides a nuanced reading of the ways in which foreign idioms were contested—in often unconventional and subtle ways—from the city's very inception. A wealth of well-chosen maps, planning documents, and reproductions of paintings help to provide an effective and enlivening antidote to the sometimes barren portrayals of colonial Kolkata. Sen's focus on the architectural details of the city's built environment are especially illuminating; the distinctions between and the blurring of vernacular and imported forms help to support his argument that, even from its founding, the city could not be easily understood through the White Town/Black Town dichotomy so central to the representations of colonial urban development.

Sen's book is not restricted to the colonial period alone. Chapters 2 and 3 explore its proto- and early histories as well as the initial period of imperial influence leading to Kolkata's ascendancy as the premier city of the British Raj. Chapter 4 focuses on the post-partition decline of Kolkata and especially on the importance of American planning paradigms at the municipal level—primarily as a bulwark against communist influences in the post-World War II period up until at least the 1970s. In his final chapter, Sen takes on the most recent trends in Kolkata's development, with accelerated growth associated with globalization evident across the city and taken up by politicians of all stripes. Here again, one of the main strengths of Sen's book is in not characterizing the current transformations as being simply about the reproduction of other places—which would be an easy conclusion to reach when we see a replica Big Ben appearing and talk of a replica London Eye in today's Kolkata—but rather the ways in which such examples are part of larger trends that take diverse pathways and lead to often distinct outcomes. In Sen's words, his purpose is “[to compare and contrast] Kolkata's urbanism with the rest of India to illustrate why Kolkata was unique and illustrates several distinctive features of the city … [as well as to argue that] Kolkata's post-colonial urbanism was even more unique than its colonial saga” (Sen, p. 22). This seems to be the main goal of Sen's book, to show the differences of Kolkata's development—especially compared with the other Presidency cities and Delhi, as well as with postcolonial cities like Chandigarh and more prominent contemporary Indian cities such as Hyderabad and Bangalore. At the same time, his goal is not to present Kolkata as exceptional; common processes and themes bind all of these sites, even if their manifestations of these may be different.

In Anila Naeem's Urban Traditions and Historic Environments in Sindh: A Fading Legacy of Shikarpoor, Historic City, we are provided a similarly interesting and comprehensive review of a city's development, rise, and subsequent decline. There is nowhere near the volume of literature to do with this once-important city in Sindh (in present-day Pakistan) as we find with Kolkata—outside of newspaper articles (mostly domestic) and a few blogs, it is much harder to find much mention of this city. The urban history that Naeem provides is extremely illuminating, with a painstaking inventory of the architecture and especially the older historic districts in the city. She details the rise in Shikarpoor's importance as a trading center and as a cosmopolitan intersection between Afghan, Sindhi, and Hindu interests.

Naeem begins by describing Shikarpoor's origins and rise to commercial and political prominence—especially during the Mughal and colonial periods—and traces the especial decline of the city to the postcolonial moment. Partition is the point at which the city (already in decline) rapidly accelerated its downward spiral, with the exodus of the once prominent Hindu trading and business class from the city as part of the population exchange that accompanies the creation of the new India and Pakistan(s). Naeem describes the impact of the influx of migrants and refugees into Shikarpoor—essentially a loss of an entrepreneurial population and their replacement by those from a more agricultural background. In her view there are multiple effects, from the loss of economic power and political significance to a concrete degradation of the housing stock, as areas left empty by more urban communities are occupied by rural populations, often accompanied by their livestock. Naeem gives evocative descriptions of this process in what she calls the echoes of the older city visible in the neighborhoods of the departed Hindu communities and around old Hindu temples and religious districts.

Naeem catalogs Shikarpoor's physical environment and layout in considerable detail, with temporal changes to the town's layout examined in subsequent chapters. In chapter 3 we are presented with a list of dominant building types, while chapter 4 discusses characteristic architectural features and chapter 5 provides a typology for these classifications and features. Perhaps most interesting to urban scholars may be chapter 6, in which the current status of the buildings previously discussed is explored to a greater extent. Naeem describes the increasing loss of historic buildings due to a lack of maintenance and investment in their repair and eventually in their demolition in order to build new housing. There is an especially compelling story of a local old man who sees Naeem's research team's efforts to catalogue the city and invites them to come with him to see some of the last remnants of the older city as it is being taken apart; he and Naeem bemoan the loss of infrastructure and interest in protecting the heritage of Shikarpoor. It is not that Shikarpoor's history is completely without value, however; Naeem describes the ways in which some of the facades of the historic districts are literally removed and sold in markets in Karachi as artifacts of an older age to be commodified and bartered for others seeking to add such grandeur to their own homes, no matter how decontextualized such additions might be.

For Naeem, the need to recognize and respect Shikarpoor's history is not just about the past, nor is it limited to this city alone. She suggests that

In chapter 7, Naeem provides a roadmap towards intervening in these dynamics of urban decay, using existing protections to aid in identifying and recognizing Shikarpoor's significance. She suggests multiple ways to revitalize interest and more importantly protections in the city. These include emphasizing historic approaches to sustainable development (taking into account climate change and environmental conditions), reinvesting in Shikarpoor's potential as a trading center, focusing on the possibilities of handicrafts and training in traditional arts as forms of urban development, and using the existing infrastructure as a resource rather than regarding it as being in the way of urban revival.

Unlike Sen's and Naeem's books, Madhuri Desai's Banaras Reconstructed: Architecture and Sacred Space in a Hindu Holy City is not focused on the present, but rather on the city in precolonial and colonial times. The central argument of the book is that the city is much more than the Hindu artifact it is often presented as. Instead, Desai shows clearly that the city, especially its waterfront, has been a canvas for the inscription of power—of Mughal courtiers, Bengali merchants, British imperial functionaries, Hindu rajas, Maratha nobles, and an array of others trying to create their own narratives of heritage and lineage, whether for political or personal gain. As with the other titles, this book presents another exhaustive and comprehensive review of a city, replete with a number of architectural drawings and sketches, historical landscape paintings, photographs, and maps. Desai argues that “Banaras is a creation of the imagination, and its representations are as critical to shaping the city's image and identity as its material reality” (Desai, p. 212). Accordingly, she looks at a plethora of ways in which the city has been narrated; she devotes chapters to pilgrimage routes and how they evolved over time, to the provenance of temples and mosques, and the ways that rituals and spectacles were reified, contested, and reconstructed over time.

Taking center stage in Desai's book is the waterfront and the landscape of ghats that loom so large in religious mythologies of the city. She carefully analyzes the building and rebuilding of these spaces to deconstruct their seemingly static nature. Desai focuses on the complex intersections of religion, political power, commerce, empire building, gender, caste, and ethnicity that have been central to the development of the city's waterfront. It is this landscape in particular that she argues plays a pivotal role in the portrayal of Banaras as the Hindu city, in a way that others are not. Desai writes that

What Desai does in her book is to deconstruct this mythology. The contrast she presents between the notion of an “eternal” Hindu city and one that expresses multiple urban forms—for example, the Mughal encounter with Hindu religious sites, not simply the aggressor and destroyer, but as one that incorporated and transformed urban space—is particularly useful.

This is not to say that Desai's book—or each of the others—is without flaws. While the analysis is careful, the level of architectural detail might seem a bit overwhelming for those less familiar with the distinctions between Mughal columns and British facades. This is also true with Naeem's book, which similarly revels in the minutiae of such architectural detail, while Sen spends considerable time on planning documents that might again hold less interest for some. For those more interested in the politics of urban development, this leads to substantial portions of each book devoted to less than compelling material. Sen also spends a significant part of his book addressing a particular part of the greater Kolkata metropolitan area, the city of Haora. He explains this in light of his own background in the area, but in the context of the book these sections appear to be a bit of an add on. It might be better to have them more integrated or balanced with the rest of the book. It would also be good to have more of a discussion of the contemporary politics implicated in the contemporary representations of each city. How, for example, do Hindutva's politics construct Banaras into its territorial ambitions and rewriting of history? How do various subregional political claims complicate any attempt to rebuild Shikarpoor or recognize particular histories? How do state and national politics structure Kolkata's future?

But such shortcomings are relatively small in the overall scheme of things, and these books are highly recommended for a range of readers. The level of architectural and planning detail might be overwhelming for undergraduates, but they would still find much to commend each of these titles. For graduate students and scholars of South Asian urban history, politics, and culture, each of these three titles will be of considerable interest.