Swati Chattopadhyay’s book, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny, and William Glover’s book, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City, share an interest in the development of a modern, urban city under British colonialism and shaped by local populations. Separated by more than a thousand miles, the subjects of these two books, Calcutta and Lahore, vary in terms of each city’s history, language, cultural features, and position in the British colonial empire. As both authors demonstrate, these cities were transformed by British colonial policies; however, shared colonial rhetoric and similar policies prompted different local responses and yielded varied experiences and results.

Chattopadhyay and Glover share an abiding concern with modernity as introduced to overseas colonies, but it is a modernity variously contested, mediated, and adapted by the inhabitants of each city. In addition to challenging the notion that modern cities in British India were the creation of colonial powers, these books also successfully dispute British assertions that these cities remained unfulfilled, unrealized, or failed versions of their European models. The authors instead emphasize the intentional, reflective, and strategic utilization and rejection of certain practices and associated forms of British colonialism. They offer careful analyses of the arrangement of space and the effects of social practices to show how local populations challenged British interventions and altered their intended goals, even when a building or a neighborhood seemingly adopted foreign conventions. Restoring agency to colonial subjects in the development of a modern city is one way in which Chattopadhyay and Glover dismantle the boundaries that allegedly separated colonized from colonizer, old city from new city, and tradition from modernity. In the process these authors artfully extricate the anxieties that animated notions of interracial mixing, hybridity, and the corruption of identity through exposure to foreign practices.

While bound by shared concerns, these sympathetic projects draw upon divergent methodologies and frameworks. This is in part by necessity: as Glover writes, the particularities of a city’s history, culture, climate, and resources, as well as its significance in the larger empire, ensured that “urban change in colonial India was not a monolithic process” (xiv). That Calcutta was a British Presidency and then capital of the British Raj while Lahore had been reduced to a provincial capital during British rule meant that the physical canvas of each city developed differently. Moreover, as both authors explain, modernity as introduced through the colonial encounter was not drawn along simple lines of colonizer and colonized; rather, local responses were shaped by a wide range of factors, among them class, political aspirations, and gender.

Each author utilizes a different frame to explore modernity in the colonial context. For Chattopadhyay, modernity in Calcutta was contingent upon “translations” that were “inherent to the process of colonial encounter and formed in accommodation and conflict with Western ideals of individuality, progress, and public and private life” (3). She explains how such Bengali translations of modernity became tools of “cultural and political intervention,” which held the potential to challenge models of Western modernity (145). In contrast, Glover emphasizes the “different life-worlds within modernity” (xvii; emphasis in original), where “the ‘local’ and contingent became constitutive of—rather than remaining external to” the techniques and assumptions surrounding physical reform (200). Rather than subscribe to notions that promote alternative, indigenous, or other modernities, Glover focuses on the “colonial practices [that] brought a modern form of urbanism to Indian cities” (201), and the ways in which colonizer and colonized alike transformed this into something distinctive, varying by location, such as British dependency on natives, and political aspirations of local groups. Maintaining a singular model of modernity, Glover argues, enables better recognition of resistance, paradox, creativity, and difference. In the same fashion that their subjects are complex and multifaceted, these two scholarly works are intricately crafted and richly nuanced. The following discussion of each book will help to clarify further their differences and draw attention to some of their salient features.

Covering the period from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, Chattopadhyay’s insightful book, Representing Calcutta, examines the various modes of representation used by the British and Bengalis to lay claim to the city, raising questions about what it means to represent Calcutta. Reflecting how neither a singular image nor an individual identity is sufficient to stand in for a city—a cacophony of dissenting and concurring layers—she elucidates the ways that representations of Calcutta were politically bound, continuously contested, and reinvested with meaning. What is the relationship, she asks, between representation, experience, and the transformation of landscape? To answer this question, Chattopadhyay draws on an impressively wide range of material; sources include British paintings and prints, British travelogues, health and cartographic maps, house plans, Kalighat paintings, literary texts, judicial cases, and legislation. Relying on archival, literary, architectural, and artistic sources, she highlights the interwoven, mutually constituted, and contested framework of verbal, visual, and built landscapes. In her able hands, these sources—impressive and sometimes unconventional in their scope—are shown to sometimes support, sometimes undermine each other. These diverse sources enable Chattopadhyay to resist reducing Calcutta to simply a counter image of that constructed by the British. Moreover, by expanding her data to reach beyond the built environment, she successfully makes the important point that representations of our environment are fed by a multitude of non-architectural sources and debates. In essence, she moves beyond the image to contest the way in which representation is conventionally defined.

Chapter 1 challenges the British narrative that extolled their heroic efforts to build the city of Calcutta in an uninviting and challenging environment, revealing such claims to be propagandistic in nature. Instead, Chattopadhyay explains how the proposed British mastery over the region was related to a system of representations that emphasized “an absence, a lack—of beauty, morality, colonial control” (32). The theme of absence ran through British perceptions of the city and outlying region. She cites travelogues that describe the “dark impenetrable jungles,” and “notorious swamps” of Bengal, picturesque paintings and prints by Thomas and William Daniell of overgrown, unkempt terrain, and local maps that were intended to chart sanitary and health concerns—all meant to underscore the lack of order, sanitation, and health. Eventually, it was such qualitative and quantitative data that legitimized British efforts to take control and regulate disease, improve sanitation, and establish order, thereby making Calcutta a city “worth living in” (75).

In chapter 2, Chattopadhyay examines and deconstructs British attempts to create difference between themselves and the inhabitants of Calcutta. The “inherent contradictions of colonial life” (92) involved a dependency upon Bengali merchants and domestic help. Such dependency was reflected in the British colonial house, which adapted the principles of the Indian house to accommodate colonial needs. In contrast to English homes, the service spaces in the colonial homes of Calcutta were inextricably linked to served spaces, and the tremendous British reliance on native servants meant there was no convenient or possible way to achieve segregation. As Chattopadhyay comments, “the pleasures of imperialism did not simply necessitate native presence but were depended on and besieged by native practices in the very center of domestic life” (135). Even though colonial residential architecture declared its ties to Britain, Chattopadhyay makes clear here and elsewhere that the use of British architectural elements by no means guaranteed the British could cement signs of difference; instead, it was the activities that occurred inside these spaces that ultimately dictated relationships and practice.

Chapter 3 marks a shift toward an analysis of public space and Bengali assertions of the individual, collective, and political self in public, a theme also pursued in later chapters. Here she focuses on the double-speak of the Bengal elite—often critical of British policies yet wishing to remain in favor—whose interventions in the public sphere were predicated upon being able to own land. One telling example involves the Nat Mandir, a Hindu temple built in 1840, which also functioned as a public hall and a ballroom. Merging Neoclassical and Hindu temple architectural elements, this building reflected the Bengali elite’s interest in appropriating local and colonial vocabularies of prestige and power to display the patron’s standing in society and his political and cultural sway.

In chapter 4, Chattopadhyay turns to interventions by Calcutta’s middle class, whose constrained resources forced them to rely on other means to intervene in the public sphere. Of particular significance was literature, arguably the most significant medium wielded by the Bengali middle class, which became a forum for locals to lay claim to their city, express grievances and anxieties, and demonstrate resistance. Chattopadhyay effectively shows how these writings presented counter images to the visions disseminated by the British. An especially intriguing example describes the use of European-style furniture and decoration in elite Bengali homes, which turned into an important literary device in the late nineteenth century. Rameshchandra Dutta’s novel Samsaar (1886) takes the reader to some Calcutta residences alongside a man who has recently moved to the city and seeks employment. Here, the furnishings and interiors of baithak khana (spaces where men would receive company) are used to reflect the characters of the men who inhabit them. In the first home, inexpensive European prints juxtaposed with images of Hindu deities indicate the owner’s poor judgment, lack of taste, and blind acceptance of European customs while the second home—a luxurious salon with silk-trimmed sofas and chairs, marble statues, and expensive oil paintings—signals a Bengali life given over to pleasure and immorality, and “everything that has gone awry in Bengali society under colonial rule” (218). The third house, belonging to an esteemed High Court lawyer, is kept well organized and clean, with “some tasteful pictures on the wall” and only the amount of furnishing necessary for study and work (219). The third home’s table, chairs, and bookshelves—European in design—are considered appropriate since they reflected an educated mind committed to improving public welfare. In short, the orderly, tidy, and rather plain room, as Chattopadhyay carefully explains, mirrors “the refined character and noble values of a young progressive Bengali gentleman” (220).

Calcutta’s literary community—consisting predominately of middle-class men—assigned/confined women’s place and their role in society to the inner sanctum of the home. In the next chapter, Chattopadhyay seizes on what she identifies as the central problem of Bengali discourse on modernity: the limited representation of women in the Bengali imagination. One measure of this involved how “the most anxious social commentaries in the city” concerned women’s exposure in the public realm (227). Chattopadhyay is not content, however, with looking to domestic activities only. “If we proceed with the assumption that the domestic realm was the principal site of women’s struggle,” she argues, “we risk the normalization of women’s exclusion from public space” (18). Proposing that women’s absence was due to strategic erasure—“a product of modern Bengali taxonomy” (185), she encourages readers to consider Bengali women’s experiences from other perspectives. For instance, women could participate in the “public sphere of letters” even from their homes (18). She also pays special attention to judicial cases, such as that brought by the widow Nistarini Dasee against her deceased husband’s brothers for depriving her of the family property that her spouse left her upon his death, to showcase “the voices of women challenging patriarchal norms” in the public sphere (273). Her work carefully distinguishes between public spaces and the public sphere and, similarly, between private spaces and the private sphere. By doing so she collapses larger distinctions between public and private—and their problematic corollaries of political (public) and cultural (private)—to better account for slippages and movement between the two. Chattopadhyay cleverly shows how the analysis of representation can be creative and wide-reaching in order to recapture the experiences of the marginalized.

Chattopadhyay’s impressive, multipronged approach to a wealth of data means that her work on Calcutta constantly changes perspectives. By offering multiple views of the city using different data, her work contends that cities cannot be reduced to a single image. While each chapter focuses on a new set of data and her book as a whole features a multitude of voices, she remains faithful to her goal of challenging the British stereotype of Calcutta while remaining mindful not to substitute a monolithic construction in its place. As such, each chapter contributes something new to our understanding of Calcutta and illustrates how various practices—artistic endeavors, health reform, literary practice, and litigation, for example—intersect and interact with the built environment and its inhabitants.

Glover’s well-crafted and thoughtful study of Lahore, the provincial capital of Punjab from the second half of the nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth century, shares with Chattopadhyay’s work an interest in how different groups laid claim to a city. Yet, provincial capitals and older, medium-sized cities followed different paths than the major port “Presidencies” of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras did, as we learn in Making Lahore Modern. A key premise of his book is that “any city is constituted as much imaginatively as it is physically of bricks and mortar,” and that the imaginative and empirical elements cannot be separated from one another (xv). This theme assumes the lead in his analysis of a widespread nineteenth-century practice of urban reform across the Anglo-European world and its overseas colonies: “the idea that urban society could be recursively shaped by and through material objects and arrangements of space” (xxi). This practice was based on two related suppositions: first, the belief that the material environment shaped human behavior; second, the notion that the material environment could be transformed to alter the mode of living and human conduct. The results of such urban interventions, the British felt, would have tangible results in both physical appearance and human behavior in Lahore. For modern urbanism to succeed in India, however, it was vital that participants hailed from British and Indian communities. The latter would be recruited through educational institutions, ensuring that locals would be able to understand the significance of these reforms and to consciously emulate them.

Intently focused on the built environment, Making Lahore Modern also considers how similar issues of health reform and literary practice intersect. The message here—how the built environment was utilized in the formation of a new modern subject—is explored step by step, chapter by chapter. Each chapter in this thoughtfully structured book follows a clear trajectory toward the construction of a modern city and subject, each essay, however, remaining an intriguing study of its own.

What made Lahore distinct from other cities is the subject of chapter 1, in which Glover treats the city’s distinctive genealogy, particularly its Mughal and Sikh past, as an “urban palimpsest” (1). When the British arrived, for practical and ideological reasons, they initially converted existing buildings—largely Mughal structures—to house new administrative and social functions, thereby continuing a long-established practice for asserting authority in the region. British proclivity toward Mughal buildings, particularly Mughal tombs, which “resonated closely with Anglo-European notions of civic architectural grandeur,” meant that these edifices were retrofitted to become the offices, residences, and churches of the British. With the transfer of the Punjab Province to Crown rule following the uprisings of native sepoys against the East India Company in 1857–58, the British would pursue more dramatic changes to the city’s landscape.

Colonial intervention in the city, as shown in chapter 2, depended on the ways in which the physical environment of the older districts of Lahore (also known as the inner city) and the countryside were interpreted through a mixture of imagination and documentation. Concerns over filth, lack of hygiene, disease, and disorder dominated contemporary accounts of the inner city, including those of writers such as Rudyard Kipling, and reports by Lahore’s sanitary commissioners. Despite (or, at least rhetorically, as the result of) British critiques, the inner city was largely left untouched by the colonial state’s modernizing project. Rather, it was the suburban areas outside the inner city that would be transformed by British policies.

Chapter 3 analyzes several major colonial institutions in the new British district built outside the inner city, called the Civil Station. Emphasizing the collaborations between the colonizer and colonized that were involved in building these projects, Glover draws attention to modes of governance that do not rely on force and discipline. Instead, the success of these buildings and the larger urban project required the local populace to be able to read and understand them. Here, an important component of the colonial project involved education—instruction that would persuade Indians to view the physical landscape as being shaped by and reflecting new cultural values. At the same time, these values needed to be made relevant to the city’s inhabitants and their local context. The curricula of British-sponsored colleges and technical institutes were designed to disseminate the British worldview and, because the ability to secure a respectable position was largely dependent on securing a degree from one of these institutions, Lahore’s educated classes were introduced to such approaches. The curricula underscored the functional and expressive potential of architecture, and the conviction that architecture could both shape and reflect the aspirations of its inhabitants and audience. Glover shows convincingly that British and Indian views regarding the use and corresponding meanings of buildings “refracted differentially” across the landscape (xxvii). Indeed, the architectural strategies used to build such structures for Indian elite patrons and members of the middle class eventually became useful for projects that were created in opposition to colonialism. One salient example involves the Dayanand Anglo Vedic (DAV) College, an institution dedicated to the principles of Vedic Hinduism as practiced by the Hindu reform group the Arya Samaj. The DAV College was founded “to counter what its founders saw as the increasing Anglicization of students trained in the British colonial system,” and was interestingly designed by Indian architects who came out of the British educational system (95). Here, Glover makes the point that the fact that the architectural design of the DAV College was perceived “as an expressive medium for publicly identifying themselves as a Hindu, civic-minded body” is in itself a result of British educational program which emphasized the functional and expressive potential of architecture, and the conviction that architecture could both shape and reflect the aspirations of its inhabitants and audience (97).

The next two chapters explore the Indian and British residential districts of Lahore. Chapter 4 focuses on how architectural alterations made to the average Indian house were informed by this movement to reform, which involve shifting attitudes toward technology, health, and order. One result was the creation in Lahore of a “neat Western-type ‘New Town’ environment” (157) (called Model Town)—inspired by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow and implemented by an Indian barrister, Diwan Khem Chand. Although Lahoris moved into Model Town, it did not result in the rejection of an “Indian way of life.” Glover shows how the residents of this new settlement took what they wanted from the British garden city model, but continued to nurture pre-existing models of family and social life. Recalling themes in Chattopadhyay’s work, chapter 5 examines the British residential districts, focusing on the colonial bungalow whose physical features and social practices could not be made to conform to British models of “home” and domestic ease. Forced to accommodate the peripatetic nature of British service in India and the particularities of their immediate environment—including climatic, material, social, and racial factors—home life in the bungalow was filled “with anxiety and ambivalence over who, master or servant, was in the end more at home” (183). Practical concerns like renting from Indian landlords and being attended to by native servants are mixed with details of homes filled with “mobile” or disposable decorations and furnishings—including copies of European designs produced locally and considered inferior in quality. Such residences never measured up to the comfort and refinement of residences “back home” and filled the colonial British not only with anxiety but with longing and nostalgia.

Illustrating how urban restructuring does more than change the look of a city’s urban fabric, Glover’s final chapter also reveals how it changes the way people imagine and understand it. In a clever shift, Glover considers the strategies that Indian writers, such as Dina Nath and Shah Muhammad Latif, used to interpret and represent their city and its monuments. He argues that these writers utilized new strategies for making sense of their urban environment so that abstract principles were associated with and mapped onto the old (native) and new (British) cities, with Lahore’s modern buildings and colonial institutions holding the most significance and promise. On one hand these examples confirm the assimilation of an approach that binds abstract principles to the material environment; on the other hand, one can still find continued links—or traces—to other local histories and ways of organizing social life.

Both of these distinctive and thoroughly researched books offer important contributions to our understanding of modernity, architectural history, and colonial cities. They are part of a growing body of scholarship that marks a shift from Eurocentric views on modernity and a focus on the dominant structures of colonialism to paradigms that consider the experiences of the colonizer alongside the colonized. Although some of their methods are similar—it is particularly impressive how both books incorporate the study of literature to help readers understand the ways in which space was perceived and negotiated—their findings are not entirely the same. Glover’s work, for instance, proposes that Europe’s engagements with “its overseas colonies gradually unsettled the assumption that materialist reform entailed principles—and produced effects—that were universal in nature” (199; emphasis in original). Chattopadhyay, however, suggests that the British took steps to ensure that these colonies could never attain such a universal standard. Even if the British meant to invoke the European metropolis to which the colonial city should aspire, both the British and the local citizens of the colonial metropolis worked in different ways to ensure the two would never become identical (274). Chattopadhyay’s wide range of visual and literary material will surely entice readers from various disciplines including art history, architecture, comparative literature, history, and urban planning. Although the range of source material in Glover’s book is more focused, his methodology and findings will appeal equally to scholars interested in the same fields. These two books—featuring extensive black-and-white illustrations that are well coordinated with the text—are essential for anyone interested in modernity and colonialism in South Asia as well as for scholars interested in postcolonial studies and the larger field of architectural history and urban development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.