Book Review: Planning the City: Urbanization and Reform in Calcutta c.1800-c.1940

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Planning the City: Urbanization and Reform in Calcutta c.1800-c.1940 . By Partho Datta . New Delhi : Tulika Books , 2012. xv, 332 pp. Rs 650 (cloth).

Book Reviews--South Asia

In this remarkable book Partho Datta achieves many things: he compresses 140 years' worth of city history into 332 pages, and in so doing he corrects a substantial shortfall in India's colonial urban history. Around other, much smaller, cities there is a growing historiography.³²The absence of the "Second City of Empire" from this list has long been a frustration to scholars of colonial India, and an affront to this (once) proud Bengali city. As the author points out in his introduction, Kolkata's present urban landscape leads many to assume that the city has next to no urban planning; this book proves without doubt that the city was not only "severely" (p. xiii) planned, but that it was often the first to experiment with forms of planning that later spread to other Indian cities.

Datta draws on three particular archives to make this clear: the workings of the Lottery Committee from 1817, the Fever Hospital Commission files from the 1830s, and the reports of the Calcutta Improvement Trust (CIT) from 1911. The richness of the files, and the unpretentious but informed and insightful tone of Datta's writings, provides a rich and accessible history of town planning in Calcutta, with three recurring themes. First, the connections between colonial planning and public health; secondly, the shift from laissez-faire to interventionist government strategy; and, finally, the role of planning in stabilizing the economy of the city. The tension raised by the ambition of this scope for a history that is explicitly focused on "planning the city" is not entirely resolved, but this is a minor failing in an expansive and informative work.

The book has five empirical and chronologically...