A Hygienic City-Nation
Space, Community, and Everyday Life in Colonial Calcutta

This book offers an on-the-ground view of colonial Calcutta's neighbourhoods, where kinship-like ties shaped urban space and resisted city-making efforts of the state.

Nabaparna Ghosh (Author)

9781108489898, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 October 2020

236 pages
23.7 x 15.7 x 2 cm, 0.44 kg

'A groundbreaking study of colonial Calcutta from the perspective of its Indian neighborhoods and everyday life. Ghosh delivers skillful analysis of the gritty spaces of urban modernity and resistance, and explores the colonial spatialization of hygiene and race with fresh insight. Well written and engaging, the book is a must read for scholars of South Asian cities and global urban history in general.' Rosemary Wakeman, Fordham University

Calcutta, the centre of British imperial power in India, figures in scholarship as the locus of colonialism and the hotbed of anti-colonial nationalist movements. Yet, historians have largely ignored how the city shaped these movements. A Hygienic City-Nation is the first academic work that examines everyday urban formations in the colonial city that informed the broad global forces of imperialism, nationalism, and urbanism, and were, in turn, shaped by them. Drawing on previously unexplored archives of the Calcutta Improvement Trust and neighbourhood clubs, the author uncovers hidden stories of the city at the everyday level of neighbourhoods or paras, where kinship-like ties, caste, religion, and ethnicity constituted new urban modernity. Ghosh focuses on an emergent discourse on Hindu spatial hygiene that powered nationalist pedagogic efforts to train city dwellers in conduct fit for the city-nation. In such pedagogic efforts, upper-caste Bengalis were pitted against the lower-caste working poor and featured as ideal inhabitants of the city: the citizen.

List of Figures, Tables, and Boxes
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Black Town, Spaces of Pathology, and a Hindu Discourse of Citizenship
2. The Calcutta Improvement Trust: Racialized Hygiene, Expropriation, and Resistance by Religion
3. A City-Nation: Paras, Hygiene, and Swaraj
4. A New Black Town: Recolonizing Calcutta's Bustees
Epilogue
Glossary
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Local history [WQH], Sociology [JHB], Social & cultural history [HBTB], History [HB]