This book is a re-evaluation of modern urbanism and architecture and a history of urbanism, architecture, and local identity in colonial north India at the turn of the twentieth century.
"Michael Dodson's book on colonial bureaucracy and north Indian urbanism looks at the way in which urban meaning was produced in colonial India through the ‘incipient citizenship’ of Indians involved in an unequal but transactional relationship with the state. Rather than focussing on this relationship as a hierarchy of command, obedience and resistance, he explores it through the lens of infrastructure in a highly original way. This innovative piece of research is unusual in matching a finely detailed account of colonial bureaucracy with a big argument about the global making of modernity."
Faisal Devji, Professor of Indian History, University of Oxford
Michael S. Dodson is Associate Professor of South Asian History at Indiana University Bloomington, USA. His previous books include Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770-1880 (2007), Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories (Routledge, 2011) and Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia (Routledge, 2012).