Spatial Imagination and Development in Colonial Calcutta,c. 1850–1900

Abstract

Abstract

Although sanitation and improvement were seen as key considerations among planners in modern cities around the world, they were used as an important mechanism of colonial propaganda in order to shape the colonial city in accordance to the state’s understanding of the urban space and the meanings that such a space held for them, politically and commercially. This article aims to investigate the terms of planning and to understand the so-called improvement projects carried out by the colonial state in relation to their imaginings of the city and how they understood the city space and what the city meant to them. By studying the various texts written by prominent Europeans in Calcutta in the nineteenth century and their memories of the city, one could gauge how and what part of the city did the administrators at large consider to be Calcutta, and how that had a bearing on the development or improvement projects in the city. This would help give a fresh perspective on the lopsided development and improvement of nineteenth-century Calcutta. The article would finally investigate the ways in which the city was viewed commercially to help tie the other end of the explanation of the kind of improvement Calcutta witnessesd.