Beyond The Colonial City - Haynes and Rao

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Beyond the Colonial City: Re-Evaluating

the Urban History of India, ca.
1920–1970
a b
DOUGLAS E. HAYNES & NIKHIL RAO
a
Dartmouth College , Hanover , New Hampshire
b
Wellesley College , Wellesley , Massachusetts
Published online: 02 Sep 2013.
To cite this article: DOUGLAS E. HAYNES & NIKHIL RAO (2013) Beyond the Colonial City: Re-
Evaluating the Urban History of India, ca. 1920–1970, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies,
36:3, 317-335, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2013.814617
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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2013
Vol. 36, No. 3, 317–335, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2013.814617
Beyond the Colonial City: Re-Evaluating the Urban History

of India, ca. 1920–1970
DOUGLAS E. HAYNES, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
NIKHIL RAO, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
Historiographical Concerns1
Downloaded by [116.203.180.188] at 23:27 22 August 2014
It was long customary to begin essays on the historiography of cities in South Asia by
mentioning the low level of scholarly interest once given to the study of urban pasts;2 but a
major corpus of work on this subject certainly now exists. In our view, the most important
shortcomings of the existing body of scholarship now lie less in their neglect of historical
urbanism than in the relative inattention given to a particular phase of urban history: the
middle decades of the twentieth century. The historiography of South Asian cities has
concentrated highly on what might be called ‘the long nineteenth century’,3 a phase lasting
from the establishment of British rule (which varied according to the region being discussed)
to some point during the early twentieth century. Many of the richest works in the field confine
themselves completely to nineteenth-century developments4 or begin sometime during the late
The authors wish to thank the other contributors to this special issue—Eric Beverley, Abigail McGowan and
Diya Mehra—for their comments on this essay. We also wish to thank Subho Basu, Frank Conlon, Prashant
Kidambi and Howard Spodek for supplying a rich set of comments and references. Peter Sutoris and Bonnie
Macfarlane provided valuable research assistance. All shortcomings of the essay, of course, are the
responsibility of the authors.
1
The following discussion is by no means intended to be an exhaustive examination of the now very substantial
literature on Indian urban history and urban studies; we cite here titles that are representative of the general
tendencies in the field.
2
For overviews of the field of South Asian urban history, see Howard Spodek, ‘Studying the History of
Urbanization in India’, in Journal of Urban History, Vol.VI, no.3 (May 1980), pp.251–96; Gyan Prakash, ‘The
Urban Turn’, in Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Geert Lovink and
Shuddhabrata Sengupta (eds), Sarai Reader 02, The Cities of Everyday Life (Delhi: Centre for the Study of
Developing Societies, 2002), pp.2–7; Prashant Kidambi, ‘South Asia’, in Peter Clark (ed.), Oxford Handbook of
Cities in World History (Corby: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp.561–80; and Eric Lewis Beverley, ‘Colonial
Urbanism and South Asian Cities’, in Social History, Vol.XXXVI, no.4 (2011), pp.482–97.
3
This is a term that has been utilised independently in a very similar context by Kidambi in his essay ‘South
Asia’, p.561.
4
For instance, C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British
Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Christine Dobbin, Urban Leadership
in Western India: Politics and Communities in Bombay City, 1840–1885 (London: Oxford University Press,
1972); Mariam Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City (Bombay: Oxford
University Press, 1991); Jim Masselos, Towards Nationalism: Group Affiliations and the Politics of Public
Associations in Nineteenth Century Western India (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1974); S.N. Mukherjee,
Calcutta: Myths and History (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1977); Veena Talwar Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial
Lucknow, 1856–1877 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Pradip Sinha, Calcutta in Urban
History (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1978).
Ó 2013 South Asian Studies Association of Australia

318 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
nineteenth century, edge into the initial decades of the twentieth century, and then end at some
point in the 1920s or 1930s.5 The burgeoning scholarship on present-day cities, on the other
hand, often offers a rich and textured assessment of the unfolding urban moment, addressing
recent patterns of economic change, the re-development of slums, land use conflicts, ethnic
conflict and violence, and tensions between local, regional and national governance.6 This
growing body of valuable work by anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers, however,
generally has little to say about the connections between South Asian pasts and the present
and often provides at best a cursory survey of historical trends. Literature on ethnic identities
typically addresses developments beginning during the 1990s, while work on the economy
5
See, for example, C.A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880–1920 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975); Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and
the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Frank Conlon, A
Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans, 1700–1935 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1977); Narayani Gupta, Delhi Between Two Empires, 1803–1931: Society, Government and Urban
Growth (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981); Douglas E. Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The
Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Sanjay
Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2001); and Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public
Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007). There is a smaller body of literature that
focuses on the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s but does not extend into the period after 1947, leaving its implications
for an understanding of post-colonial urbanism unclear. See, for instance, A.D.D. Gordon, Businessmen and
Politics: Rising Nationalism and a Modernising Economy in Bombay, 1918–1933 (Canberra: Australian
National University, 1977); Rajat Kanta Ray, Urban Roots of Indian Nationalism: Pressure Groups and Conflict
of Interests in Calcutta City Politics, 1875–1939 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979); Nandini Gooptu,
The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001); Sandip Hazareesingh, The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity: Urban Hegemonies and Civic
Contestations in Bombay City (1900–1925) (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007); and Stephen Legg, Spaces of
Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Malden, MA.: Blackwell Publishing, 2007).
6
This literature is fast growing. For example, see discussions of de-industrialisation and the informal economy in
urban India in Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996); Barbara Harriss-White, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003); Darryl D’Monte, Ripping the Fabric: The Decline of Mumbai and Its Mills
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Geert De Neve, The Everyday Politics of Labour: Working
Lives in India’s Informal Economy (Delhi: Social Science Press, 2005). Some works by journalists and planners
that investigate life in informal settlements are Kalpana Sharma’s Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s
Largest Slum (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000); Gita Dewan Verma’s Slumming India: A Chronicle of Slums
and Their Saviours (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002); and Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (New
York: Random House, 2012). For attempts at re-development of slums and critiques thereof, see Jan Nijman,
‘Against the Odds: Slum Rehabilitation in Neoliberal Mumbai,’ in Cities, Vol.XXV, no.2 (April 2008), pp.73–
85; Vinit Mukhija, Squatters as Developers?: Slum Redevelopment in Mumbai (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003);
Liza Weinstein, ‘Democracy in the Globalizing Indian City: Engagements of Political Society and the State in
Globalizing Mumbai’, in Politics and Society, Vol.37, no.3 (September 2009), pp.397–427; and Amita Baviskar,
‘Urban Exclusions: Public Spaces and the Poor in Delhi’, in Bharati Chaturvedi (ed.), Finding Delhi: Loss and
Renewal in the Megacity (New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2010), pp.3–15. Amita Baviskar, ‘Breaking Homes,
Making Cities: Class and Gender in the Politics of Urban Displacement’, in Lyla Mehta (ed.), Displaced by
Development: Confronting Marginalisation and Gender Injustice (New Delhi: Sage, 2009), pp.59–81, Diya
Mehra and Lalit Batra, ‘Slum Demolition and the Production of Space in Neoliberal Delhi’, in Darshini
Mahadevia (ed.), Inside Transforming Urban Asia: Processes, Politics and Public Actions (Delhi: Concept,
2008), pp.391–414; Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); and Ornit Shani, Communalism, Caste, and Hindu Nationalism: The
Violence in Gujarat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) examine ethnic and religious conflict in
Indian cities. Solomon Benjamin’s ‘Touts, Pirates and Ghosts’, in Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta,
Jeebesh Bagchi and Geert Lovink (eds), Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts (Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies, 2005), pp.242–54, considers conflicts between municipal and regional authorities in the planning
process. This is just a small sampling of the literature.
Beyond the Colonial City 319
often starts somewhere in the 1980s. When historical issues are addressed in discussions of
Indian urbanism, reference is sometimes made to an undifferentiated colonial city, suggesting
that the broad outlines of urban development in 1890 resembled those in 1940, or that patterns
of change in the 1960s had departed dramatically from trends prevalent during the 1940s.7 In
short, a radical disjuncture often exists between historical work and scholarship on the
contemporary city.
As a result of its chronological perspective, historical writing on South Asian cities has
often been dominated by the theme of ‘colonialism’. Scholars have discussed the importance
of the import-export trade, the role of military priorities and the need to establish social
stability, the drive to project imperial notions of authority, and the emergence of new imperial
conceptions of health shaping the character of urbanisation.8 In discussions of urban space, a
central theme has been the differentiation between white towns on the one hand and black
towns on the other, with the former being characterised by high concentrations of Europeans,
the presence of military cantonments, and spatial layouts reflecting the aesthetic and sanitary
concerns held by the ruling group, and the latter being associated with dense clusters of shops
run by indigenous merchants, unplanned forms of housing and streets, and neighbourhoods
built around caste and religious affiliations. Scholars studying the character of urban power
have focused on the relationship between the colonial rulers and local elites such as urban
notables who based their power upon claims to ‘traditional’ influence in local communities,
and the members of the emerging middle class.9 The development of an Indian nationalism
that at first contested colonial policies, then called colonialism itself into question, was an
especially critical theme.
Of course, a substantial literature now exists on South Asian urbanism during the long
nineteenth century that has recognised sources of agency other than colonial impulses and that
has deployed models of change that go beyond older notions of imperial impact/nationalist
response. Work on historical urbanisation has discussed the role of Indian merchant and
artisanal groups in the shaping of urban economies,10 the significance of indigenous capital
and of class conflict in the process of Indian industrialisation,11 the importance of rural–urban
7
For examples of work that use quite general understandings of the colonial city in describing patterns before
1947, see Jan Nijman, ‘A Study of Space in Mumbai’s Slums’, in Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale
Geografie, Vol.101, no.1 (Feb. 2010), pp.4–17; and Sanjoy Chakravorty, ‘From Colonial City to Globalizing
City? The Far-from-Complete Spatial Transformation of Calcutta’, in Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen
(eds), Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), pp.56–77.
8
See for instance, Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities; Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow;
and especially Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976).
9
Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics; Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India; Oldenburg, The
Making of Colonial Lucknow; and Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Areas and the
Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
10
Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars; Gordon, Businessmen and Politics; Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in
Colonial India; and Douglas E. Haynes, Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants and the
Making of the Informal Economy, 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) discuss the
artisan economy from the late nineteenth century into the early post-colonial period.
11
Just to give a few examples that consider the larger urban context, see Chandavarkar, The Origins of Indian
Capitalism in India; Subho Basu, Does Class Matter?: Colonial Capital and Workers’ Resistance in Bengal,
1890–1937 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class
History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Sujata Patel, The Making of
Industrial Relations: The Ahmedabad Textile Industry, 1918–1939 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987); and
Chitra Joshi, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and Its Forgotten Histories (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003).
migration,12 and the formation of urban identities.13 Disputes among Indians over municipal
plans and the use of urban space have figured in some of the literature.14 Recent scholars have
discussed how ‘indigenous modernities’ espoused by the middle class have contributed to the
physical structure and the imagining of Indian urbanism, the ways in which the built
environment in cities sometimes reflected a ‘joint enterprise’ created by British and Indians
alike, and the contradictory and unexpected shape of urban spatial configurations; this work
has, for instance, seriously complicated the black town/white town distinction.15 As a whole,
this varied literature has done much to enhance our understanding of historical patterns of
urbanisation, and to highlight the role of South Asians in shaping the contours of Indian
urbanism. At the same time, as the titles of many of these works indicate, the colonial context
and colonial relations of power often remain central considerations in this new scholarship.
And because this literature often stops around the third decade of the twentieth century, its
value in furthering an understanding of the formation of the contours of the contemporary
South Asian city is often either limited or unclear.
Even major works that one might expect would address the middle decades of the
twentieth century often end up treating this period superficially. Robert Frykenberg’s edited
collection on Delhi offers us valuable essays stretching from the thirteenth century into the
early twentieth century, as well as contributions that touch on the post-Independence capital,
but none that significantly address the transformations taking place between 1920 and 1970.16
A recent special issue on the history of Indian suburbs in the journal Urban History examines
formations outside urban cores during the long nineteenth century and then again during the
1960s and 1970s, but includes no contribution on actual suburbs during the middle decades of
the twentieth century, the very period when the modern suburb as a type came into being.17
Janaki Nair’s impressive study of twentieth-century Bangalore offers superb insights into the
development of the South Indian city up to 1920 and a rich analysis of post-Independence
changes, but thins out during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, a period that was surely a crucial
formative time in Bangalore’s history.18 In a recent study of Mumbai, Mariam Dossal
examines land use patterns in the city from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth
12
See for example, Chandavarkar, The Origins of Indian Capitalism in India; Arjan de Haan, Unsettled Settlers:
Migrant Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Calcutta (Calcutta: Bagchi, 1994); and Susan Lewandowski,
Migration and Ethnicity in Urban India: Kerala Migrants in the City of Madras, 1870–1970 (New Delhi:
Manohar, 1980).
13
See for instance, Lewandowski, Migration and Ethnicity; Nikhil Rao, House, But No Garden: Apartment
Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Anne Hardgrove,
Community and Public Culture: The Marwaris in Calcutta, c. 1897–1997 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004); Karen Isaksen Leonard, Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978); and Frank Conlon, A Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur
Saraswat–Brahmans, 1700–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
14
See for instance, Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis.
15
Jyoti Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism (London: Routledge,
2005); Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny
(London: Routledge, 2005); William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial
City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); and Preeti Chopra, A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites
and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
16
R.E. Frykenberg, Delhi Through the Ages: Selected Essays in Urban History, Culture and Society (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1994).
17
See Swati Chattopadhyay (ed.), Urban History, Vol.XXXIX, no.1 (Feb. 2012), pp.51–148. Will Glover’s
article on ‘new towns’ in South Asia in this issue certainly covers this period, as we will mention below, but its
subject clearly falls outside the common understanding of what constitutes a suburb.
18
Janaki Nair, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
century, but in the sections of her study devoted to the period after World War I, her approach
shifts from a social history of land use to an intellectual history about local urban planners,
leaving the reader wondering how the ideas espoused by these figures affected realities on the
ground.19 Gyan Prakash covers a wide range of urban phenomena from the late nineteenth
century up to the twenty-first century in his valuable book on Mumbai, but his examination of
various short-term subject matters and the radical shifts in his focus from one chapter to
another—methods he deliberately deploys to illustrate how Mumbai was constituted by a
patchwork of developments—prevents us from understanding many important structural
changes over the course of the twentieth century.20 Work on the urban middle class in colonial
India typically stops around World War I or just afterwards, leaving us with little
understanding of how the pre-war middle class, which was typically employed in government
service and was seemingly rather restrained in its consumption practices, was transformed into
a category of actors who mainly worked in the private sector and whose identity increasingly
revolved around the accumulation and use of consumer goods.21 There has been considerable
literature on ethnic identities but this scholarship has tended to pay relatively little attention to
the intersection of ethnicity with emerging ideas of urban citizenship between 1920 and 1970.
There are exceptions to this pattern, especially among academics who have explored
political developments on the subcontinent; these writings illustrate the potential of work that
uses innovative chronologies cutting across disciplinary chronological constraints by seriously
engaging with developments during the mid twentieth century. The books of Sujata Patel and
Thomas Blom Hansen, scholars who work in sociology and anthropology departments
respectively but who have done significant historical research, are two excellent examples.22
Owen Lynch, another anthropologist, did rich work on ‘Untouchable’ politics in urban North
India during the middle decades of the twentieth century in an early book devoted to
understanding patterns of social mobility.23 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar’s masterful
introduction to Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar’s collection of oral histories on the
neighbourhood of Girangaon in Bombay traces a host of developments from the 1930s to the
1980s that radically altered the nature of labour politics in the city, reducing the power of local
communists and raising that of Maharashtrian nationalists.24 Howard Spodek’s recent study of
Ahmedabad, though focused primarily on the political roles of the city’s leading figures,
allows us to understand how a local power structure promoting co-operation among
nationalists, capitalists and labour sustained itself from the 1920s into the 1960s, but also how
new forms of popular politics based upon a Gujarati identity acquired their shape soon after
Independence.25 Susan Chaplin has written on the politics of sanitation in urban India from the
19
Mariam Dossal, Theatre of Conflict, City of Hope: Mumbai, 1660 to Present Times (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1910).
20
Gyan Prakash, Mumbai Fables (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
21
Sanjay Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
22
See especially Sujata Patel’s introductory essay, ‘Bombay and Mumbai: Identities, Politics and Populism’, in
S. Patel and J. Masselos (eds), Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2003), pp.3–30; and Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial
Bombay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
23
Owen Lynch, The Politics of Untouchability: Social Mobility and Social Change in a City of India (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1969).
24
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, ‘Introduction: From Neighbourhood to Nation’, in Meena Menon and Neera
Adarkar (eds), One Hundred Years One Hundred Voices: The Mill-Workers of Girangaon: An Oral History
(Calcutta: Seagull Press, 2004), pp.7–80.
25
Howard Spodek, Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth-Century India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2011).
colonial period into the post-colonial era, tracing over time the shifting constellation of
interests that have obstructed the provision of social services to the poor.26 Effectively, this
historiography, when taken as a whole, demonstrates how extensively urban politics was
already breaking outside the colonialist/nationalist divide well before 1947. The richness of
the work on politics, however, has not been matched in the consideration of other realms of
urban life.27 Moreover, the fact that urban political historians have yet to draw connections
among their various studies means that larger patterns of change over the subcontinent during
the 1920–1970 period remain obscure.
Whatever the limits of ‘colonialism’ as an organising principle in studies on cities during
the long nineteenth century, its relevance as the central narrative principle of urban history
almost entirely breaks down after that time. We argue in this special issue that, beginning
around 1920, cities on the subcontinent began to change in new ways that are not easily
captured by approaches that keep colonialism at the centre of their analysis. Around this time
new kinds of social, economic and political forces began to affect the growth and character of
South Asian cities, configurations of urban space and the forms of built environments,
conceptions of urban governance and governmental practices, the provision of urban services,
and the nature of urban identities. These forces continued to play a critical role over several
decades lasting well beyond Independence; 1947 should thus not be seen as a watershed in the
modern histories of urban India.28 While historians have found it difficult to establish a
genealogy that traces the contemporary city to pre-1920 urban forms in any straightforward
fashion, it is much easier to recognise and analyse processes set in motion during the interwar
period that persisted through the 1960s and proved critical to determining the shape of
contemporary urbanism. The five essays included in the special issue, each of which is
focused on a specific city or set of cities, examine significant issues that straddle the divide
between late colonial and early post-Independence India. This introductory essay examines
the implications of the articles for the larger historiography of urban India, and makes a
broader case both for the coherence and significance of this period.
Demography and Urban Economy

At the most obvious level, the urban population of South Asia began to expand much more
rapidly during the middle years of the twentieth century. While cities on the subcontinent
certainly grew in the century before 1920, they did little more than keep pace with the
expansion of India’s overall population. The urban population in the early nineteenth century
has been estimated at 17.6 million people or about 11 percent of India’s population as a whole.
By 1911, it had almost doubled to 32.8 million but that figure was still only 11 percent of
British India’s population.29 In the following decade the number of people living in cities
26
Susan Chaplin, The Politics of Sanitation in India: Cities, Services and the State (Delhi: Orient Blackswan,
2011).
27
As we discuss below, several books on urban ethnicity also use unconventional periodisations; Meera
Kosambi’s pioneering study of urban ecology also deserves mention as one study of urban space that breaks
from conventional chronologies, though it still deploys the model of a ‘colonial city’. See Meera Kosambi,
Bombay in Transition: The Growth and Social Ecology of a Colonial City, 1880–1980 (Stockholm: Almqvist
and Wiksell International, 1986).
28
A collection of essays that seeks to explore continuities and ruptures across the 1947 divide—without an
explicit urban focus—is Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar and Andrew Sartori (eds), From the Colonial
to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (New Delhi: Oxford India, 2007).
29
James Heitzman, ‘Middle Towns to Middle Cities in South Asia, 1800–2007’, in Journal of Urban History,
Vol.XXXV, no.1 (Nov. 2008), p.22.
expanded by only 8 percent. But after the 1920s, the urban population grew at a much faster
rate: it increased by 19 percent (or double the growth rate of the rural population) in the
decade between 1921 and 1931; by 32 percent between 1931 and 1941; by 41 percent between
1941 and 1951; and by 34 percent between 1951 and 1961.30 The percentage of people living
in urban places rose from 11.2 percent in 1921 to 12.0 percent in 1931, 13.9 percent in 1941,
17.3 percent in 1951, 18.0 percent in 1961 and 19.9 percent in 1971.31 In absolute terms the
urban population more than doubled in the thirty years from 1921 to 1951 (from 28 million to
62 million), then went up again by nearly 75 percent in the ensuing twenty years.32 The
generalisation made in some scholarship that cities in India stagnated under colonialism serves
as an apt characterisation for the period before 1921 but does not apply to the subsequent
decades. It would be more accurate to suggest that rates of urban growth established during
the 1920s and 1930s persisted into the early post-Independence decades. All of the authors
who have contributed to this special issue—Haynes on Western Indian textile centres, Mehra
on Delhi/New Delhi, Beverley on Hyderabad, McGowan on Ahmedabad, and Rao on
Mumbai—focus on cities that were growing rapidly during the middle decades of the
twentieth century.
Not only did cities in general expand in size after 1920, but the larger pattern of
urbanisation changed. In particular, smaller cities began to make significant contributions to
India’s overall urban expansion. Throughout much of the colonial period, smaller South Asian
cities as a whole experienced stagnation. Many regions were characterised by hyper-primacy,
with one big city, such as Calcutta in Bengal, Madras in the Madras Presidency and Bombay
in the Bombay Presidency, that was many times larger than any other centre in the same
province. This pattern can be attributed to a number of factors: the decline in India’s
traditional industries; the orientation of the colonial economy to the export of agricultural
commodities and the import of industrial goods; and the concentration of economic activity
related to commerce, administration, industry and transportation in cities of special
importance to the British Empire. There were exceptions; sometimes smaller cities serving as
critical nodes in railroad networks or as key collection points for produce in the agricultural
sector did exhibit significant growth.33 But substantial expansion in centres other than the
colonial ports and capitals was relatively uncommon, and many towns actually contracted in
size. Writing on Bengal, where the levels of urbanisation were particularly low and the extent
of primacy especially high, Atiya Habeeb Kidwai characterises the colonial period as one of
‘urban atrophy’; Heitzman argues that the colonial export-import economy imposed an ‘urban
straitjacket’ on the growth of middle-sized cities.34 As late as 1931, the percentage of the
population of the Bombay Presidency living in towns with more than five thousand inhabitants
was only 13.4 percent if the four largest cities were excluded (20.9 percent if those centres
were included), leaving the commissioners of the census in that year to conclude: ‘over the
Presidency as a whole urbanisation is making little headway’.35
30
Ashish Bose and Jatinder Bhatia, India’s Urbanization, 1901–2001 (New Delhi: Tata/McGraw Hill, 2nd rev.
ed., 1980), p.19. The high rates of growth during the 1940s reflect the twin impacts of World War II and of
Partition, both of which spurred migration to cities in especially strong ways.
31
Ibid., p.50
32
Ibid., p.341. Bose’s starting total figure for 1921 may be lower than Heitzman’s because for comparability
purposes Bose excludes cities that would later fall in Pakistan.
33
Heitzman, ‘Middle Towns to Middle Cities in South Asia’, pp.23, 28.
34
Atiya Habeeb Kidwai, ‘Urban Atrophy in Colonial India: Some Demographic Indicators’, in Indu Banga (ed.),
The City in Indian History: Urban Demography, Society, and Politics (Columbia, MO: South Asia Publications,
1991), pp.149–72; and Heitzman, ‘Middle Towns to Middle Cities in South Asia’, pp.15–38.
35
Census of India 1931, Bombay, Vol.8, pt. 1, p.9.
After the 1920s, South Asia’s mega-cities, the large agglomerations associated with
overlapping commercial, administrative and industrial functions, continued to expand at
rapid rates. The populations of metropolitan Bombay and Calcutta more than doubled
between 1921 and 1951, then doubled again by 1971; Delhi grew nearly four times over
in the 1921–51 period, then doubled between 1951 and 1971. But middle-sized cities also
began to contribute significantly to India’s overall expansion; urban places with
populations between 20,000 and 100,000 consistently grew at rates between 25 and 40
percent per decade between 1921 and 1961, with the rate accelerating gradually over
time.36 Haynes’s essay here examines one such type of urban place, the weaving centres
of Western India, which were transformed between the 1930s and the 1960s from
handloom towns into middle-sized cities. He finds that a number of small places, which
began to adopt electric power during this period, started to grow at much more rapid
rates than cities in India as whole. But a wide variety of middle-sized towns were also
growing, as James Heitzman’s data indicates.37
Increased levels of rural to urban migration, largely of young males, account for
much of this expansion, both in large mega-cities and in smaller urban places. The
essays in this volume do not explore migration extensively, and more research is
certainly needed. But the period after the 1920s seems to have witnessed the formation
of new migration patterns. Before this time large numbers of the poor who migrated to
urban areas seem to have come from a relatively small number of ‘labour catchment
areas’—such as the impoverished districts of the Konkan in Maharashtra, the eastern
United Provinces and western Bengal, and much of what is now Tamil Nadu.38 But after
the 1920s and the 1930s, most rural areas of India began to generate substantial numbers
of migrants, undoubtedly in great part because of widespread agrarian stagnation, and
perhaps also because low-caste labourers perceived opportunities to break outside their
longstanding dependency on landowners by moving to cities.39 During the period after
1920, the migration of young men with literate skills, such as the movement of ‘South
Indians’, Saraswat Brahmans and Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans to Bombay, also began
to accelerate, altering the composition and diversity of the middle classes.40 There was a
special spike of migrants in 1947 to big urban centres, such as Punjabi Sikhs and Hindus
to Delhi and Amritsar, Punjabi Muslims to Lahore, Hindu Sindhis to Bombay, Hindu
Bengalis to Calcutta, and Muslim muhajirs to cities in Pakistan like Karachi.41 As Diya
Mehra shows here, the influx of Partition refugees placed major strains on urban
resources such as housing and considerably influenced the character of Delhi’s spatial
expansion. While the flow of refugees slowed soon after 1947, other forms of large-scale
migration to the mega-cities persisted through the 1950s and 1960s. Migration to smaller
places also became very significant, as the essay by Haynes demonstrates.
Transformations in the character of the Indian economy contributed mightily to the
emergence of more rapid forms of urbanisation. Industry in British India expanded quite
considerably after 1913, with the colony experiencing some of the highest growth rates in the
36
Bose and Bhatia, India’s Urbanization, 1901–2001, p.83.
37
Heitzman, ‘Middle Towns to Middle Cities in South Asia’, pp.15–38.
38
Lalita Chakravarty, ‘Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force in a Dual Economy-British India, 1880–1920’,
in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol.XV, no.3 (July 1978), pp.249–327.
39
See Gooptu, The Politics of the Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India, p.41.
40
Conlon, A Caste in a Changing World; and Rao, House, But No Garden.
41
These issues have also been explored in Ian Talbot, Divided Cities: Partition and its Aftermath in Lahore and
Amritsar, 1947–1957 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition:
Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
world, a development that stands in sharp contrast to the record of manufacturing before this
point.42 The increased rate of industrialisation was caused by a variety of factors: the impact
of the two world wars (which insulated producers in India from imports coming from
countries participating in the conflicts); the emergence of a regime of tariff protection for
Indian industries after the 1920s (one that grew stronger after Independence); the evaporation
of investment opportunities in the Indian countryside; the declining importance of the import-
export economy; and the advent of hydroelectric power.43 Most of the centres where textiles
were manufactured in British India expanded significantly. McGowan’s paper focuses on
Ahmedabad, where the number of mills tripled between 1901 and 1961, attracting large
numbers of workers who struggled to find spaces to live. In Calcutta, Indian manufacturers
moved aggressively into the jute industry.
But this was also a period when small-scale, ‘informal’ enterprise began to thrive. Haynes’
essay suggests that much of the expansion of small handloom entrepreneurs in Western India
after 1930 can be attributed to the role of local small capitalists from artisanal communities.
His essay points to three sets of factors conducive to the expansion of growth in middle-sized
cities: 1) technological and commercial innovations introduced by the weaver capitalists; 2)
new policies adopted by the late colonial state during World War II and the Nehruvian state
after 1947 that spurred the development of informal enterprise; and 3) forms of local politics
that squelched the possibilities for trade union militancy in smaller centres. While larger cities
often remained characterised by strong unions, capitalists in smaller places were frequently
able to suppress this development, enhancing their ability to attract funds from outside. South
India also witnessed the emergence of significant weaving centres, although there the chief
entrepreneurs were often landowners from rural castes such as the Gounders and the Naidus.44
In other places investors in products as diverse as hosiery, machinery and sugar contributed to
the emergence of small-scale industries, which in turn produced growth in cities where they
were located.45 While we often tend to assume that the informal economy is a ‘traditional’
characteristic of South Asia, the development of smaller industries that would be weakly
regulated by post-Independence laws governing larger enterprises was to a significant extent a
product of the new economic environment that first developed in India during the 1920s and
1930s. The emergence of smaller enterprises of course laid the foundation for the radical
expansion of India’s informal economy after 1980.
A final important development worth mentioning during the 1920–1970 period is the
changing economic and social character of what has been called the ‘middle class’. Works on
the middle class in the pre-World War I period typically associate this category with English-
language education, work in government service and in a small number of urban professions, a
42
According to a League of Nations study published in 1945, India’s manufacturing capacity grew 230 percent
between 1913 and 1938, a rate that was about 25 percent faster than the world average, and nearly double the
rate of the United States, Germany, Britain, France and Belgium. In this survey of 27 countries, only the Soviet
Union, Japan, South Africa, Greece and Finland grew at faster rates. League of Nations. Secretariat. Economic,
Financial and Transit Department, Industrialization and Foreign Trade (New York: League of Nations, 1945),
pp.130–7.
43
Christopher John Baker, An Indian Rural Economy, 1880–1955: The Tamilnad Countryside (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1984).
44
Sharad Chari, Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); and Baker, An Indian Rural Economy.
45
Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India, p.41; Avanish R. Patil,
‘Urbanization in Kolhapur District during 1950–2000: A Historical Perspective’, unpublished PhD Dissertation,
Shivaji University, Kolhapur, 2007; and Meenu Tewari, ‘Intersectoral Linkages and the Role of the State in
Shaping the Conditions of Industrial Accumulation: A Study of Ludhiana’s Manufacturing Industry’, in World
Development, Vol.XXVI, no.8 (Aug. 1998), pp.1387–411.
commitment to ‘modernity’ (in the form of gender reform, nationalism, etc.), and relatively
limited appetites or capacity for consumption. Work on the more contemporary middle class,
on the other hand, often stresses professional employment in the private sector, low levels of
concern for the fate of subordinate groups, and extensive participation in the consumption of
material items.46 If such a characterisation is accurate, how did the earlier middle class
become transformed into the later one, or is it even a mistake to imagine these terms refer to
similar social categories?47 Here again, an examination of the middle decades of the twentieth
century may be crucial. Beginning around World War I, the nature of commercial
enterprises in some larger cities began to change, as modern business practices and a
professionalised white collar workforce began to replace the older pedhis (family-run firms).
The professionalisation of the work environment, coupled with the proliferation of
service-oriented firms such as banks and insurance companies, meant that the post-war period
saw the flourishing of the office in workplaces outside the structures of colonial government.
The rise of the office in turn led to the formation of a new kind of lower-middle-class
workforce. New migrants generally drawn from the literate upper castes arrived in larger
Indian cities in increasing numbers, and came to constitute the large army of clerks and other
white collar workers who would play significant roles in struggles over housing and other
services.48 All over India, the middle class increasingly defined its identity by purchasing and
using new kinds of modern consumer items made and advertised by corporations—soap,
tonics, vegetable oil, ready-made clothes, and even some electrical goods—and abandoned
some of the items urban Indians had exclusively obtained from local bazaars before this
time.49 In short, only by understanding the transformations of the middle class during the
1920–1970 period can we appreciate the origins of India’s contemporary service economy and
the historical development of modern consumerism.
Political Transformations and Implications for Planning

In political terms, the period between 1920 and 1970 witnessed a profound shift in the politics
of urban governance. The Government of India Act of 1919 signaled the colonial state’s
retreat in significant measure from urban intervention and management, with local self-
government listed as a ‘transferred’ subject. Not only was urban governance now under the
jurisdiction of an elected Indian minister in provincial government, but urban municipal and
planning bodies themselves were increasingly Indianised from the early 1920s onwards.
Further, the municipal franchise was widened, first in 1922 and then again in 1935, as portions
of the urban middle and lower-middle classes were incorporated into the electorate. Both
planning bodies as well as municipal bodies were thus given greater powers and brought under
the control of Indian actors. Yet colonial legislation often did not clearly define the elected
municipal representatives’ jurisdiction over, or oversight of, the planning process, and this had
46
See Christiane Brosius, India’s Middle Classes: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity
(New Delhi: Routledge, 2010); and Leela Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era
of Economic Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
47
Sanjay Joshi (ed.), The Middle Class in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), contains
some works that consider the newly-emerging middle class of the mid twentieth century.
48
An account of the change in the labour force that came with the expansion of the service sector and the
‘modern offices’ of the industrial sector is Gordon, Businessmen and Politics, especially pp.45–7.
49
Haynes has explored this development for the 1930s and 1940s but does not carry his work into the post-
colonial period. See Douglas E. Haynes, ‘Making (Fracturing?) the Ideal Home: Advertising of Electrical
Appliances and the Education of the Middle Class Consumer in Bombay, 1925–40’, unpublished paper
presented at the University of Goettingen, Germany, July 2012.
important implications. The end of this critical period—the late 1960s and the early 1970s—
saw the emergence of mass politics, leading to the plebeianisation of urban politics.50 The
decline of the Congress Party’s hegemony from the late 1960s onwards meant not only the
emergence of new regional parties such as the Shiv Sena, which campaigned initially on
strictly local issues such as jobs and housing for the Marathi citizens of Bombay, but also the
decline of the paternalistic political style and the emergence of a street-oriented mass political
practice.
The transfer of urban developmental responsibilities—and the right to challenge such
developments—had important implications for the dynamics of urban planning. Until the
early twentieth century, most responsibility for urban planning had been in the hands of the
colonial administration and of municipalities, local bodies that included some Indian
representation but that were often in effect still controlled by the colonial government. Before
World War I, planning institutions such as the City Improvement Trusts in Bombay and
Calcutta began to make new kinds of claims to urban space, but recent scholarship has
questioned the effectiveness of such entities on account of their colonial nature.51 From the
1920s onwards, however, not only did such enterprises increase in number, with new
Improvement Trusts in cities ranging from Calcutta, Madras, Hyderabad, and Delhi to Agra,
Amritsar, Allahabad, Lucknow, Kanpur and Nagpur, but they were increasingly controlled by
Indians and the range and scope of intervention increased. The coloniser–colonised opposition
receded in significance and clashes between class interests increasingly characterised the
planning process, with different sets of Indian elites competing for control of the power and
patronage accompanying urban development and expansion.52 In some cases, newly-
mobilised constituencies sought to use the widening sphere of urban politics to assert their
influence. Various urban groups were also able to challenge the ability of elites to impose their
vision on the cityscape and undermine that ability through informal means; simply squatting
on urban lands may have been the most dramatic of these processes.
Thus, in the period between 1920 and 1970 a seemingly contradictory pattern arose. On the
one hand, statutory bodies such as the Improvement Trusts proliferated in number and also in
the scope of their interventionist ambitions. These entities were created through provincial and
later state legislation and were thus independent of local municipal oversight.53 Often
claiming authoritarian powers and justifying these claims by arguing that their effectiveness
depended precisely on achieving autonomy from public pressures, these Improvement Trusts
would become the Housing Boards and Development Authorities—so-called parastatals—that
continue to play critical roles today.54 These institutions, increasingly administered by Indian
planners, reflected the circulation of ideas on a global scale about urban improvement and the
50
Hansen, Wages of Violence; and Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about
Space in Calcutta’, in Public Culture Vol.X, no.1 (Fall 1997), pp.83–111.
51
Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis.
52
Nandini Gooptu argues that in the cities of Northern India, the transfer to (elite) Indians of control over urban
development coincided with the increasing emphasis within planning bodies on regulating the living conditions
of the urban poor. See Gooptu, Politics of the Urban Poor, p.74.
53
The proliferation of such planning authorities and the friction between them and elected bodies is noted in
Howard Spodek, ‘City Planning in India under British Rule’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol.XLVIII, no.4
(26 Jan. 2013), p.57.
54
For instance, Partho Datta argues that the Calcutta Improvement Trust was legislated to be remarkably
autonomous from municipal oversight. See Partho Datta, Planning the City: Urbanisation and Reform in
Calcutta c 1800–c 1940 (Delhi: Tulika Books, 2012). Annapurna Shaw argues that with the growing perception
of crisis by the late 1960s, central and state governments increased control over urban intervention precisely
through such parastatal planning bodies. See Annapurna Shaw, ‘Urban Policy in Post-Independent India–An
Appraisal’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol.XXXI, no.4 (27 Jan. 1996), p.224.
purposes of urban government; such ideas centred on the need to mitigate dangers to the health
of city populations, to provide housing for the middle class and the poor, and to furnish green
spaces for aesthetic purposes and for leisure usages. By the 1960s, the Third Five Year Plan
explicitly acknowledged what had already been the first principle of the Bombay
Improvement Trust: that the central imperative of planning bodies seeking to achieve these
goals was to gain control of urban lands.55 On the other hand, the increased involvement of
various urban groups in urban governance meant that the interventions of planning authorities
did not go uncontested, as local voices expressed through municipalities sometimes gained in
strength.56 Although we have now some understanding of the way in which such planning
authorities assumed their powers while still under colonial control,57 the essays in this special
issue demonstrate the different ways in which planning authorities staked claims to urban
space in the period after 1920, when Indians increasingly controlled urban planning, as well as
the ways in which the actual character of urban expansion often escaped planning.
The new dynamics of power in Indian cities is illustrated in the articles by Mehra and
Beverley, who discuss at length the operation of the new planning bodies. One general point
that emerges is that planning authorities claimed greater powers and more autonomy from
municipal supervision after 1920. But the logics and justifications through which planning
authorities asserted control over urban spaces could vary quite widely depending on the
context. Mehra demonstrates, for instance, how entities such as the Delhi Improvement Trust
assumed greatly enhanced powers by emphasising Delhi’s special status as capital. Seizing
upon moments of crisis such as World War II, the transfer of power, and Partition, the state in
Delhi successively evoked an aura of emergency and created a complex and overlapping
network of agencies and legislations to gain extraordinary control over the urban landscape.
Mehra shows how the assumption of executive powers by the Delhi Improvement Trust (and
subsequently the Delhi Development Authority) was legitimated by the fact that Delhi was
first the imperial and then the national capital in the period under consideration.58 The
increasing assumption of control over the city space of Delhi by the Government of India
(under whose direct authority the DDA still lies) thus represented the central government’s
efforts to exert sovereignty over India as a whole. Yet, Mehra argues that precisely this top-
heavy structure of the planning apparatus could impede and limit the authorities’ efforts to
regulate growth and provide affordable housing.
The assumption of control over urban space by planning bodies could play out differently
in the princely states, as Eric Beverley shows in his article. In Hyderabad, the proliferation of
technocratic urban planning practices under the City Improvement Board was assimilated into
an older framework of ethical patrimonialism. The urbanist projects of the Improvement
Board owed as much to the paternalistic obligations felt by the regime to the subject
population as to the logics of improvement and security that legitimated the work of planning
bodies in properly colonial cities such as Bombay or Delhi. And, as Beverley goes on to argue,
55
Shaw, ‘Urban Policy’, p.226.
56
In this regard, Bombay played an anomalous role. Whereas the period after World War I saw the proliferation
of Improvement Trusts outside municipal control in cities across India, the Bombay Improvement Trust,
founded in 1898 as the first Improvement Trust, was absorbed into an increasingly assertive Bombay Municipal
Corporation between 1925 and 1933.
57
Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis; and Hazareesingh, The Colonial City and the Challenge of
Modernity.
58
Stephen Legg investigates some continuities and ruptures between the DIT and DDA in ‘Post-Colonial
Developmentalities: From the Delhi Improvement Trust to the Delhi Development Authority’, in Stuart
Corbridge, Satish Kumar and Saraswati Raju (eds), Colonial and Postcolonial Indian Geographies (London:
Sage, 2006), pp.182–204.
the tension between these different modes of authorising urban bureaucratic practices had
ramifications beyond city planning, influencing the emerging agenda of national planning in
the post-colonial state. Not only did urban planning provide a set of frameworks for
subsequent national planning, but the patterns and inconsistencies to be found in planning for
the city also could find their way into planning for the nation.
Through different sources of legitimation, thus, urban planning authorities widened their
ambit in the period after 1920. At the same time, the urban population’s increasing
involvement in city matters during this period meant that middle-class groups often
challenged the attempted interventions of planning bodies or, alternatively, sought to house
themselves through their own initiative. During the late colonial period, new kinds of
institutions—such as labour unions and educational, housing and productive co-operatives—
emerged in South Asian cities, and local leaderships able to mobilise popular constituencies
acquired new political clout. In many cases, the new organisations themselves played critical
roles in determining the use of urban space, independently from (and often in competition
with) planning authorities. While co-operative housing was one important ‘self-help’ initiative
launched in the years after World War I, its trajectory varied across different cities depending
on local housing markets and the particularities of local policies and institutional support for
co-operative societies.59
Such initiatives as co-operative societies and voluntary associations, while noteworthy for
their efforts to envision the city as an organic whole, nonetheless often worked to consolidate
the position of the rising middle classes and to reinforce divisions within urban society. Yet,
even as such divisions widened, the urban underclasses also gradually learned how to use the
expanding urban political sphere to advance their own claims, often in opposition to the agendas
of both planning authorities as well as those of urban elites by the 1960s. The increasing
mobilisation of the urban underclasses, meanwhile, transformed the politics of South Asian
cities further and led to an enduring tense relationship between members of these underclasses
and of the middle classes. Urban planning and the provision of urban services in particular
emerged in this period as a discursive arena where different groups sought to exercise their
claims to municipal citizenship and contest the claims of others.60 Thus, as Mehra suggests,
even as planning authorities enhanced their claims to Delhi’s urban space, the actual cityscape
diverged quite significantly from their plans, largely as a result of the efforts of non-elite actors
to occupy lands for their own housing needs and build irregular structures that diverged from
the plan both in style as well as in location. These efforts were often successful because non-
elites learned, with the deepening of the democratic process, to make use of the very political
shifts that had given rise to authoritarian planning bodies and to the middle class. In addition,
non-elites were also able to act outside the formal political sphere and, through small
incremental actions, undermine the efforts of planning authorities to impose their vision upon
the urban environment.
Both Mehra and Beverley elaborate connections between urban planning and planning for
newly independent India. But the post-colonial state also undertook direct initiatives in
59
Sukumar Ganapati, ‘A Century of Differential Evolution of Housing Co-operatives in Mumbai and Chennai’,
in Housing Studies, Vol.XXIII, no.3 (May 2008), pp.403–22. See also Sukumar Ganapati, ‘Institutional
Potential of Housing Cooperatives for Low-Income Households: The Case of India’, in Habitat International,
Vol.XXV, no.2 (2001), pp.147–74. In the latter piece, Ganapati underscores the extraordinary circumstance of
Delhi, where the DDA owns most of the land in the city and is the principal supplier of housing (unlike Mumbai
and Chennai, where the private sector plays an important role in the supply of housing), pp.167–8.
60
Solomon Benjamin explores this dynamic in Delhi in his ‘Touts, Pirates, and Ghosts’, while Nikhil Rao
explores it in Bombay in his ‘Towards Greater Bombay: Town Planning and the Politics of Urban Expansion,
1915–1964’, manuscript.
shaping urban spaces that projected the face of the new nation, much as the late colonial state
had done with New Delhi. The examples of Chandigarh, Bhubaneshwar and Gandhinagar are
well known but, as William Glover points out, the Indian state built as many as 118 towns
between 1947 and 1981.61 Bidhannagar (Salt Lake City) and New Bombay were built as
satellite towns intended to decongest large cities such as Calcutta and Bombay respectively.
Many towns were built in connection with the Nehruvian state’s agenda of capital goods-
based industrialisation. Some examples were the planned townships attached to new steel
plants such as Bhilai in Madhya Pradesh, Rourkela in Orissa and Durgapur in West Bengal. In
such settlements, the state could, in principle, not just shape the spaces but also set the terms
on which social, cultural and economic exchanges took place.62 Given such a mandate, and
given the modernist agenda of industrialisation for which these townships were created, the
state often made surprising decisions in planning these spaces, as Glover argues, designing
many new towns to ‘nurture “inherited tendencies and habits” in their [hitherto rural] residents
rather than fostering wholly urbane subjectivities’.63 While such new towns may have varied
widely in appearance and function, the practices used to build them and the mechanisms of
governance had much in common with the urban developmental strategies of the
Improvement Trusts: direct land acquisition and subsequent control of land and extensive
control—indeed, often direct governance—by regional or central governments.
Old Cities, New Forms

Such political and economic transformations had significant implications for the use of urban
space. Cities expanded dramatically in this period, but the expansion also took new forms. The
opposition between the white town and the black town, an enduring opposition that informs
much analysis of the city before 1920, became less relevant as the Indian middle classes gained
control of urban governance. Beverley, Mehra, and McGowan all explore ways in which the
older spatial divisions broke down under the pressure of growing populations and transforming
economies. Increasingly, urban middle classes lived in suburbs, where work was separated from
residence. The urban underclasses, meanwhile, increasingly lived in slums and informal
settlements, often closely interspersed both functionally and spatially with the suburbs.
Indeed, the suburb and the slum both emerged as dominant urban forms in the cities of
India in the period between 1920 and 1970. While there have been studies of suburb formation
in previous periods,64 the category has hitherto been used in a rather general sense to describe
either the overspill from established urban settlements, or restricted movements by Indian and
British elites away from city centres to the outskirts.65 Suburbs in a more contemporary sense
61
William J. Glover, ‘The Troubled Passage from “Village Communities” to Planned New Town Developments
in Mid-Twentieth-Century South Asia’, in Urban History, Vol.XXXIX, no.1 (Feb. 2012), p.109. For accounts of
the relationship between the nation and architectural modernism as expressed in the building of new capitals,
see the works of Ravi Kalia, Chandigarh: The Making of an Indian City (New Delhi: Oxford, [1987] 1999);
Bhubaneshwar: From a Temple Town to a Capital City (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995);
and Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India (New Delhi: Oxford, 2005).
62
Kidambi, ‘South Asia’, p.575.
63
Glover, ‘The Troubled Passage’, p.110.
64
See especially the special issue of Urban History on suburbs in South Asia edited by Swati Chattopadhyay,
footnote 17.
65
For accounts that use this understanding of suburbs, see John Archer on Madras, Calcutta, and Batavia:
‘Colonial Suburbs in South Asia, 1700–1850, and the Spaces of Modernity’, in Roger Silverstone (ed.), Visions
of Suburbia (London: Routledge, 1997), pp.26–54. For Bombay, see Preeti Chopra, ‘Free to Move, Forced to
Flee: The Formation and Dissolution of Suburbs in Colonial Bombay, 1750–1918’, in Urban History, Vol.
XXXIX, no.1 (Feb. 2012), pp.83–107.
only began to appear from about the late 1910s and really picked up steam in the 1920s and
1930s. These settlements were beginning to be understood as large, organised expansion
schemes intended for the lower-middle-class and middle-class populations. Usually these
entailed systematic regimes of land acquisition using powerful new instruments such as the
1894 Imperial Land Acquisition Act. Finally, these suburbs were undertaken with an
awareness that suburbanisation was a global response to the challenges of the industrial city.66
Not only did suburbs represent a different ordering of urban space; they also contained
novel forms of dwellings. Until the early decades of the twentieth century, the urban middle
classes lived either in houses or, if they belonged to the lower end of the middle-class
spectrum, in tenement housing shared with the working classes. Partly in response to the
concerns about sanitation discussed by McGowan, partly as a result of concerns over space
and economy, and partly as an outcome of developments in building and plumbing
technology, the period after 1920 witnessed the rise of the apartment building, a typology
associated with a particular form of sociality. Appearing first in Bombay, the apartment spread
after Independence to cities from Karachi to Calcutta, and over the decades it has become
closely associated with the urban middle classes across the country.67 Not just apartments but
other kinds of middle-class dwellings being constructed in cities across South Asia in this
period reflected, in principle, changing notions of gender and respectability. Like the Bombay
apartments, the houses built in Model Town, a planned settlement outside Lahore built in the
1930s and 1940s, had functionally specific spaces such as bedrooms, living rooms, and dining
rooms.68 Different from the design of older houses, these layouts did not contain separate
zones in the house for men or women (mardanas and zenanas) and instead appeared to reflect
ideas of the family based on notions of bourgeois domesticity and the nuclear family.69
Furthermore, they were constructed using new building technologies such as reinforced
cement concrete (RCC) and featured novel innovations such as indoor plumbing and
electricity.70 Middle-class houses and apartments of this period thus not only spoke of
changing social arrangements but were also physically quite distinct from their predecessors.
If suburbs were physical expressions of the planning and regulatory regimes discussed
above, then the proliferating informal settlements underscored the limitations of, and
contradictions within, these very regimes. There is reason to believe that the very meaning of
the term ‘slum’, like that of ‘suburb’, began to change in this period. In the writings of late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century housing activists, ‘slum’ was a term used in cities like
Bombay to refer to congested areas consisting, usually, of multi-storey tenement buildings.71
Such tenements housed not just the very poor but also the lower-middle classes. In cities such
as Delhi and Lahore, slum was a term used to describe areas of congested, unregulated
66
Rao, House, But No Garden, Chapter 1.
67
For the rise of apartment living in Bombay, see Rao, House, But No Garden, esp. Chapters 3 and 4. For the
spread of apartment living in Karachi and Calcutta in the 1950s and 1960s, see, respectively, Laura Ring,
Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); and
Seemin Qayum and Raka Ray, Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009).
68
Glover, Making Lahore Modern, pp.151–8.
69
However as both Glover and Rao argue, the manner in which these dwellings were inhabited were quite
diverse and entailed complex negotiations between different understandings of domestic space, not some simple
progression from ‘Indian’ to ‘Western’ forms of dwelling.
70
Rao, House, But No Garden, esp. Chapter 4; and Haynes, ‘Making (Fracturing?) the Ideal Home’.
71
The prolific writings of the housing activist James Peter Orr, chairman of the Bombay Improvement Trust in
the 1910s, underscore this point. He understood the slums in Bombay to consist of multi-storey tenement
buildings in the older parts of the city, usually created by ‘sweating’ an older house by adding floors and
extensions.
buildings with poor or non-existent infrastructure, which were viewed as sources of disease
epidemics.72 Partly as a result of the frenetic activities of the various Improvement Trusts,
which often dishoused more people than they rehoused, and which placed their construction
workers in ‘temporary’ settlements that often became permanent,73 and partly as a result of
increasing migration into the cities, the understanding of the slum changed to signify much
more improvised structures occupying lands to which they may not have had legal title.
Paradoxically, such a pattern of informalisation of non-elite dwellings was taking place at the
same time that the urban underclasses were becoming permanent dwellers of some cities
rather than seasonal migrants.74 Thus, while the earlier meaning of ‘slum’ referred principally
to the supposedly unsanitary condition of the settlement, the newer meaning, which
emphasised the temporary-seeming nature of kachcha constructions, conveyed the notion that
such settlements were encroachments that occupied lands in violation of the law. In important
ways, this growing association of the slum with ‘illegality’ grounded the interventions of
planning authorities in a new kind of legitimation, different from the claims based on public
health made by earlier authorities.

Just as the ‘suburb’ came to mean a fairly specific urban typology linked to specific
planning practices and the rising middle classes, so too did the ‘slum’ come to represent the
contradiction between increasingly-ambitious planning authorities and a widening urban
underclass. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the increasing tendency of urban middle
classes to live in houses and apartments, on the one hand, and the relegation of the
underclasses to increasingly makeshift, kachcha structures, on the other hand, speak of a
sharpening of class divisions during this period. This pattern of housing reflecting increasing
differentiation between classes is underscored by McGowan, who shows how co-operative
housing societies, the very institutions that were used to promote visions of an organic city in
the 1920s, subsequently were the context for growing physical separation between classes in
Ahmedabad by the 1950s. As Haynes’ essay shows, slums during this period became as much
a feature of rapidly-growing middle-sized cities as they did of the major metropolitan centres.
Citizenship and Identity

Recent scholarship on the meanings of citizenship in India has suggested that democracy
functions in highly unequal ways, with some elite groups able to legitimate their claims for
government services on the basis of their citizenship, while the majority of non-elites need to
resort to bargaining on the basis of electoral politics.75 In important ways, the period between
the 1920s and the 1960s was a time when the middle classes made use of newly-available
political rights to consolidate their claims to the social services they increasingly saw as their
entitlement. In the cities of India, this middle-class juxtaposition of political rights with social
72
Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities; and Glover, Making Lahore Modern.
73
The Bombay Improvement Trust, for instance, often housed the construction workers who laboured away on
the Trust’s various schemes in so-called ‘semi-permanent’ sheds. For instances of the Improvement Trusts
dishousing more than they rehoused in Bombay and Delhi respectively, see Kidambi, The Making of an Indian
Metropolis, pp.89–90; and Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities, pp.170–1.
74
Nandini Gooptu argues that by the late 1920s and 1930s, conditions in the agrarian countryside had worsened
to such an extent that many of the seasonal migrants into North Indian cities tended to become permanent
members of the urban underclasses. See Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor, p.45.
75
Influential statements in this regard include Partha Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed: Reflections on
Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), esp. Chapters 2 and 3; and
John Harriss, ‘Antinomies of Empowerment: Observations on Civil Society, Politics, and Urban Governance’,
in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol.XLII, no.26 (30 June–6 July 2007), pp.2716–24.
rights to constitute the meaning of citizenship was especially marked.76 Increasingly in the
years after 1920, as Nandini Gooptu has argued, the urban middle classes ‘saw civic
institutions, town governance and urban development as the motors of modernization,
progress and national efficiency’, suggesting that the idea of Indian citizenship was forged in
the context of urban materialities.77
We now have a good understanding of the ways in which cities served as the staging
grounds for the efforts of anti-colonial nationalism. Yet, changing urban contexts between
1920 and 1970 also generated other affinities ranging from new forms of communal identity to
notions of urban civic mindedness that did not always overlap with national identity. Driven
as they were by various groups of Indians, debates over housing and public services from the
1920s onward served as the context for re-fashionings of communal identities, as urban groups
reconfigured their understanding of community to avail themselves of new institutional
mechanisms such as co-operative societies.78 Such debates over housing and public services,
undertaken in a gradually-widening political sphere, also underscored the consolidation of a
distinctive and increasingly more broad-based form of identification that was emerging in
Indian cities: urban citizenship, or the notion that living in a city entailed belonging to an
urban community with associated rights and responsibilities, even while in thrall to colonial
rule. While there have been efforts to re-ground present-day debates over citizenship in the
urban context,79 the historical links between urban materialities and citizenship in India have
not been fully elaborated.80 McGowan and Rao both explore the tensions within the idea of
urban citizenship as urban middle classes increasingly deployed this category in making
demands for housing and other urban services after 1920. While urban citizenship was
being constituted in this period, McGowan and Rao both argue, there was no
teleological progression from communal mindedness toward civic mindedness. Rather,
notions of community and civic sense were both being formulated and recalibrated at the same
time.
The connection between urban and national citizenship was especially strong in cities
like Ahmedabad, as McGowan shows, where nationalist leaders like Vallabhbhai Patel
also served as president of the Municipal Corporation in the 1920s, when he led a strong
and innovative movement to develop adequate sanitary housing for the various classes
and communities of the city. Because Ahmedabad had long had strong Indian leadership,
it is particularly inappropriate to see its development as shaped by colonial imperatives.
During the period after 1920, as McGowan argues, debates over housing served as the
context for viewing the entire city and its peoples in a new way as an organic whole.
Vallabhbhai Patel and other Congress leaders asked the residents of Ahmedabad to
imagine a new, larger, urban community, one in which the city’s various caste and
76
Sandip Hazareesingh has explored at length the juxtaposition of civil, political and social rights to constitute
urban citizenship between 1900 and 1925. See Hazareesingh, The Colonial City and the Challenge of
Modernity, esp. Chapter 4. We argue that the period after 1920 saw a greatly increased number of claims to
social rights on the basis of enhanced political rights.
77
Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor, p.22.
78
For one illustration of how such efforts to avail themselves of co-operative societies led to the emergence of
meta-caste urban identities such as the ‘South Indian’, see Rao, House, But No Garden, Chapter 5; and Rao,
‘“South Indians are Like That Only”: Communal Identity in Late Colonial Bombay’, in Chakrabarty, Majumdar
and Sartori (eds), From the Colonial to the Postcolonial, pp.182–200.
79
James Holston and Arjun Appadurai, ‘Cities and Citizenship’, in Public Culture, Vol.8, no.2 (Winter 1996),
pp.187–204.
80
This point has been forcefully made by Sandip Hazareesingh in his ‘The Quest for Urban Citizenship: Civic
Rights, Public Opinion, and Colonial Resistance in Early Twentieth-Century Bombay’, in Modern Asian
Studies, Vol.XXXIV, no.4 (Oct. 2000), p.797.
religious communities could house themselves yet also productively interact with one
another. Co-operative housing societies for different urban groups provided one way in
which the housing question functioned as locus for visions of the city as a whole, and
thus raised questions about the meaning of urban citizenship by imagining a polity where
membership in caste or religious communities superseded membership in the larger
urban community. First begun in Bombay in the 1910s and then taken up with gusto in
Ahmedabad and elsewhere from the 1920s onward, as McGowan shows, co-operative
housing societies offered, seemingly, an alternative path towards urban modernity, one
that permitted members to secure credit and acquire homes while seeking to retain
community and be free of the vicissitudes of the urban marketplace.
Communal identities were being reformulated in the context of new institutions such
as co-operative housing societies. At the same time, as Rao shows, with greater
possibilities for self-determination in the urban sphere following successive broadenings
of the franchise with the Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935, urban citizenship
came to be more closely associated with political rights and specifically with electoral
politics as elections were contested for higher stakes and also embraced a broader base.
The increased significance of electoral politics in turn brought the meaning of urban
citizenship into sharp focus, and newly-enfranchised urban residents were confronted
with different ideals. On the one hand, as has been discussed above, proliferating co-
operative societies and other institutions envisioned an urban polity comprising various
communities. Within such an urban polity, citizens were (without contradiction)
members of religious or caste communities first and members of a larger urban
community second. On the other hand, the growing significance of electoral politics and
the associated rhetoric of liberal democracy advanced the ideal of the liberal individual,
free of ascriptive attributes, and first and foremost a voluntary member of the urban
community. By examining debates over the electoral franchise (an increasingly important
dimension of urban citizenship), Rao shows how struggles over housing and public
services proved constitutive of urban citizenship. Rather than resulting from the
replacement of the community by the liberal individual, Rao argues, urban citizenship is
constituted in the field stemming from the negotiation between the community and the
individual, with both models claiming to provide the optimal mechanism for the efficient
and equitable delivery of urban rights and services. In this sense, Rao’s paper suggests
ways in which an enduring problematic of Indian citizenship was partially shaped by
changes unfolding in Indian cities from the 1920s onwards.
Conclusion
In the 1920s, co-operative housing had offered a vision of an organic city incorporating
all groups, a vision where membership in caste, religious or linguistic community was
the first step in the path towards membership in the larger urban community. By the
1950s, as both McGowan and Rao suggest, co-operative housing societies had come to
embody the clash between particularistic claims made on the basis of class and
community on the one hand, and a liberal view that sought to provide housing and
services on the basis of individual citizenship in the city and nation on the other. This
particular divergence was indicative of a larger divergence that became apparent from
the 1960s onwards, as the Congress Party consensus came under pressure and cities
increasingly became sites for various claims that contested the Congress vision. In
Ahmedabad during the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, the Mahagujarat Janata Parishad’s
challenge to Congress dominance arose from the weakening of the Congress Party, the
Textile Labour Association, and the Mill Owners’ Association, three organisations that
had availed themselves of the changes of the 1920s to come to power in that city.81 In
Bombay, meanwhile, the Shiv Sena was able to mobilise demands for services such as
jobs and housing to sideline the communists, who had gained prominence in the city in
the 1920s precisely on the basis of such demands.82 Similar developments were taking
place in cities in South India and the Punjab.83
The plebeianisation of politics from the 1960s onward was occasioned, in part, by an
intensification of the patterns sketched in this essay. Urban population growth accelerated, not
just in primary but also in secondary and tertiary cities. The growing demand for space and
employment in cities resulted in a heightening of spatial differences, with elites seeking
physical separation in suburbs from the growing urban underclasses, who moved into
proliferating informal settlements. The growing perception of urban crisis, in turn, led state
and central governments to attempt to exercise greater control in cities by increasing the
number and strength of planning agencies, a policy that prompted protests from local elected
bodies with increasing popular mobilisation. Cities and the materialities of urban life had
become the constitutive terrain for both elite and popular politics in ways that had begun in
the 1920s. The distinctively Indian forms of urbanism and urban politics that have emerged
since 1970 thus represent not a simple and sudden transformation of colonial cities into
post-colonial ones, but instead were a product of urban changes that began or accelerated
during the middle decades of the twentieth century.
81
Spodek, Ahmedabad, p.164.
82
Prakash, Mumbai Fables, esp. pp.204–50.
83
As far as the authors are aware, however, these developments have not been treated in studies exclusively
focusing on the urban context.

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South Asia: Journal of South Asian

Beyond the Colonial City: Re-Evaluating

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2013.814617

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Beyond the Colonial City: Re-Evaluating the Urban History

DOUGLAS E. HAYNES, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

NIKHIL RAO, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Ó 2013 South Asian Studies Association of Australia

Demography and Urban Economy

Political Transformations and Implications for Planning

Old Cities, New Forms

health made by earlier authorities.

Citizenship and Identity

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