This book explores the social history of colonial Bombay in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, a pivotal time in its emergence as a modern metropolis. Drawing together strands that hitherto have been treated in a piecemeal fashion and based on a variety of archival sources, the book offers a systematic analytical account of historical change in a premier colonial city. In particular, it considers the ways in which the turbulent changes unleashed by European modernity were negotiated, appropriated or resisted by the colonised in one of the major cities of the Indian Ocean region. A series of crises in the 1890s triggered far-reaching changes in the relationship between state and society in Bombay. The city’s colonial rulers responded to the upheavals of this decade by adopting a more interventionist approach to urban governance. The book shows how these new strategies and mechanisms of rule ensnared colonial authorities in contradictions that they were unable to resolve easily and rendered their relationship with local society increasingly fractious. The study also explores important developments within an emergent Indian civil society. It charts the density and diversity of the city’s expanding associational culture and shows how educated Indians embraced a new ethic of ’social service’ that sought to ’improve’ and ’uplift’ the urban poor. In conclusion, the book reflects on the historical legacy of these developments for urban society and politics in postcolonial Bombay. This wide-ranging work will be essential reading for specialists in British imperial history, postcolonial studies and urban social history. It will also be of interest to all those concerned with the comparative history of governance and public culture in the modern city.

"More than an outgrowth of public policy implemented by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the exodus of American Indians from reservations to cities was linked to broader patterns of social and political change after World War II. Indian Metropolis places the Indian people within the context of many of the twentieth century's major themes, including rural to urban migration, the expansion of the wage labor economy, increased participation in and acceptance of political radicalism, and growing interest in ethnic nationalism."--Jacket.

The City: A World History tells the story of the rise and development of urban centers from ancient times to the twenty-first century. It begins with the establishment of the first cities in the Near East in the fourth millennium BCE, and goes on to examine urban growth in the Indus River Valley in India, as well as Egypt and areas that bordered the Mediterranean Sea. Athens, Alexandria, and Rome stand out both politically and culturally. With the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, European cities entered into a long period of waning and deterioration. But elsewhere, great cities-among them, Constantinople, Baghdad, Chang'an, and Tenochtitlán-thrived. In the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, urban growth resumed in Europe, giving rise to cities like Florence, Paris, and London. This urban growth also accelerated in parts of the world that came under European control, such as Philadelphia in the nascent United States. As the Industrial Revolution swept through in the nineteenth century, cities grew rapidly. Their expansion resulted in a slew of social problems and political disruptions, but it was accompanied by impressive measures designed to improve urban life. Meanwhile, colonial cities bore the imprint of European imperialism. Finally, the book turns to the years since 1914, guided by a few themes: the impact of war and revolution; urban reconstruction after 1945; migration out of many cities in the United States into growing suburbs; and the explosive growth of "megacities" in the developing world.

This book offers fresh theoretical, methodological and empirical analyses of the relation between religion and the city in the South Asian context. Uniting the historical with the contemporary by looking at the medieval and early modern links between religious faith and urban settlement, the book brings together a series of focused studies of the mixed and multiple practices and spatial negotiations of religion in the South Asian city. It looks at the various ways in which contemporary religious practice affects urban everyday life, commerce, craft, infrastructure, cultural forms, art, music and architecture. Chapters draw upon original empirical study and research to analyze the foundational, structural, material and cultural connections between religious practice and urban formations or flows. The book argues that Indian cities are not ‘postsecular’ in the sense that the term is currently used in the modern West, but that there has been, rather, a deep, even foundational link between religion and urbanism, producing different versions of urban modernity. Questions of caste, gender, community, intersectional entanglements, physical proximity, private or public ritual, processions and prayer, economic and political factors, material objects, and changes in the built environment, are all taken into consideration, and the book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of different historical periods, different cities, and different types of religious practice. Filling a gap in the literature by discussing a diversity of settings and faiths, the book will be of interest to scholars to South Asian history, sociology, literary analysis, urban studies and cultural studies.

A fascinating history of a great cosmopolitan port and industrial city

Using Delhi’s contemporary history as a site for reflection, Pirate Modernity moves from a detailed discussion of the technocratic design of the city by US planners in the 1950s, to the massive expansions after 1977, culminating in the urban crisis of the 1990s. As a practice, pirate modernity is an illicit form of urban globalization. Poorer urban populations increasingly inhabit non-legal spheres: unauthorized neighborhoods, squatter camps and bypass legal technological infrastructures (media, electricity). This pirate culture produces a significant enabling resource for subaltern populations unable to enter the legal city. Equally, this is an unstable world, bringing subaltern populations into the harsh glare of permanent technological visibility, and attacks by urban elites, courts and visceral media industries. The book examines contemporary Delhi from some of these sites: the unmaking of the citys modernist planning design, new technological urban networks that bypass states and corporations, and the tragic experience of the road accident terrifyingly enhanced by technological culture. Pirate Modernity moves between past and present, along with debates in Asia, Africa and Latin America on urbanism, media culture, and everyday life. This pioneering book suggests cities have to be revisited afresh after proliferating media culture. Pirate Modernity boldly draws from urban and cultural theory to open a new agenda for a world after media urbanism.

By the turn of the century we are told by the experts, there will be several cities in developing countries whose population will exceed ten million. The largest cities in the world in future are likely to be Mexico City, Bombay and Calcutta, not London, Paris, New York or Tokyo. Several cities in developing countries have a population exceeding two million already and are expected to reach five million in a few years time. In India, the breakdown of city services like transporatation and water supply has become a cause of widespread concern. Rights of pavement dwellers have been taken up to the Supreme Court of India. Their eviction has been halted, after a fast by the actress Shabana Azmi in mid-1986. Why is there a breakdown of city services? Can the pressure on cities be reduced by diverting development to other parts of the country? Such questions can best be answered by someone with direct experience of city management.

"Middle-class Hindus have worked to modernize Kālīghāṭ - the most famous Hindu temple in Kolkata - over the past long century. Rather than being rejected with the onslaught of European modernity, the temple became a facet through which Hindus could produce and publicize their modernity, as well as their cities' and their nation's"--

This is a detailed study of the various ways in which London and India were imaginatively constructed by British observers during the nineteenth century. This process took place within a unified field of knowledge that brought together travel and evangelical accounts to exert a formative influence on the creation of London and India for the domestic reading public. Their distinct narratives, rhetoric and chronologies forged homologies between representations of the metropolitan poor and colonial subjects - those constituencies that were seen as the most threatening to imperial progress. Thus the poor and particular sections of the Indian population were inscribed within discourses of western civilization as regressive and inferior peoples. Over time these discourses increasingly promoted notions of overt and rigid racial hierarchies, of which a legacy still remains.Drawing upon cultural and intellectual history this comparative study seeks to rethink the location of the poor and India within the nineteenth-century imagination.