In this remarkable book Partho Datta achieves many things: he compresses 140 years’ worth of city history into 332 pages, and in so doing he corrects a substantial shortfall in India's colonial urban history. Around other, much smaller, cities there is a growing historiography.Footnote 32 The absence of the “Second City of Empire” from this list has long been a frustration to scholars of colonial India, and an affront to this (once) proud Bengali city. As the author points out in his introduction, Kolkata's present urban landscape leads many to assume that the city has next to no urban planning; this book proves without doubt that the city was not only “severely” (p. xiii) planned, but that it was often the first to experiment with forms of planning that later spread to other Indian cities.
Datta draws on three particular archives to make this clear: the workings of the Lottery Committee from 1817, the Fever Hospital Commission files from the 1830s, and the reports of the Calcutta Improvement Trust (CIT) from 1911. The richness of the files, and the unpretentious but informed and insightful tone of Datta's writings, provides a rich and accessible history of town planning in Calcutta, with three recurring themes. First, the connections between colonial planning and public health; secondly, the shift from laissez-faire to interventionist government strategy; and, finally, the role of planning in stabilizing the economy of the city. The tension raised by the ambition of this scope for a history that is explicitly focused on “planning the city” is not entirely resolved, but this is a minor failing in an expansive and informative work.
The book has five empirical and chronologically organized chapters, after an introduction and first chapter that set the broader historiographical scene. Datta quickly associates himself with the established postcolonial critique, of various empires in various sites, of the failure of governments to provide accommodation and infrastructures for the migrant populations that their colonial economies created. Instead we see anxiety, then crisis, often followed by violent displacements and demolitions. This tactic was informed by a town planning ideology that sought to win consensus via the regulation of spaces. Datta's reach predates that of many other studies, his first chapter taking in the period of 1803–30. It examines the influence of miasma theory and Lord Wellesley's 1803 Minute on Calcutta, which provided the impetus for the first round of improvements. Since the 1773 completion of Fort William, the southern “white city” had been self-improving through the materialization of an imaginary “City of Palaces” around which, and especially in the northern “black city” bastis and disease spread. Datta uses studies of health, publics, and their relation to “baroque” town planning in examining the attempt to create salubrity via road building (p. 20). This led to complaints by wealthy classes, who were compensated, and by the urban poor, who were not. Early census data is examined to convey both the similarity and the difference of the early nineteenth-century city to great effect.
The next chapter examines the “fear of fevers” in the 1830s and ‘40s, in which sight and smell informed attempts to challenge the tropical climate and degeneracy of Calcutta. Medical topographical studies are here used to give us insights into the elite diagnosis of the city's problems, interpreted through colonial utilitarianism. The Fever Hospital Committee worked to promote new medical standards in the city, but its focus on the uncleanliness of the Indian working poor would not find urban manifestation until the more concerted focus on the bastis between 1830 and 1890. Datta effectively uses various reports to chart the vast migration that upturned Calcutta's previous dominance by high-caste migrants and created the second largest city of empire (9.49 million in 1900) on the backs of low-paid, ill-housed casual laborers. Early, pre-“germ theory” attempts to cleanse the city complemented economically liberal policies of free trade by opposing quarantine and reform to attempts to deodorize and ventilate; that is, to focus on “inanimate contagion” (p. 147). Drainage schemes followed, though these attempts were outpaced by in-migration until the more comprehensive powers of the CIT were inaugurated in 1911. Marked by a distrust of Indian municipal efforts, the CIT was European-led and had the powers to attempt large-scale social engineering through modern planning.Footnote 33 Its rectilinear authoritarianism was challenged in the Legislative Assembly and by the polymath Patrick Geddes (on whom we get rather a lot, as we do on E. P. Richards, despite neither having traceable effects on the CIT). The Trust's efforts are described in detail, and are given a generally positive appraisal, partly because perhaps, as Datta acknowledges, there is little record of the massive numbers of poor Calcuttans (estimated at 50,000) displaced by the 1911–40 remaking of the city (p. 268).
This last point hints at some of the broader tensions in the book. Datta draws on three underused archival sources to brilliant effect, but why is it that other work on government policy and the city has not been undertaken? What are the prospects of the twentieth-century archival treasures within the Writer's Building revealing themselves? The deeper tension, however, is between method and matter. The method here is informed by a wonderful range of other disciplines to tell his stories; from philosophy (Michel Foucault, repeatedly) to historical materialism (Walter Benjamin) and cultural history (Peter Stallybrass and Allon White). But the matter at hand returns doggedly to that of planning, excluding from review some features to which these literatures would surely demand attention. Thus, nationalism gets represented by protestors in the Legislative Assembly, but the presence of anti-partition (1905), swadeshi, revolutionary, or communal nationalists gets very little attention. Most astonishingly, and more directly related to both Datta's method and matter, is the absence of considered study of the 1911 shift of the capital of British India from Calcutta to Delhi. The impact on the urban morphology and social imaginary of the city, which must surely have affected the CIT's strategy, is hinted at, but the massively controversial affront to the city is barely considered at all.Footnote 34 It is tribute to Datta's phenomenal range and insight that this vital, penetrating, and beautifully illustrated work raises these questions, and the field of urban history is much richer for its publication.
