Nationalism and the City in Colonial India

Abstract

Studies of Indian nationalism have frequently acknowledged its “urban roots” but seldom considered in a systematic and sustained fashion the ways in which nationalism shaped the city. Focusing on colonial Bombay, c. 1890-1940, this article explores the changing relationship between Indian nationalism and the city. The first section examines the period spanning the late Victorian and Edwardian eras and highlights forms of middle-class political activity in the urban public sphere that expressed a distinctive civic patriotism and local identity while simultaneously affirming loyalty to the British Empire. The second section shows how popular nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s spawned an extensive repertoire of collective performances and extraconstitutional forms of public action and protest that sought to reterritorialize the city as nationalist space. At the same time, the article also points to the constraints and contestations that marked the nationalist makeover of the “colonial city.”