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.

Focusing on Banaras and Jaunpur, two of northern India’s most traditional cities, the book examines the workings of colonial bureaucracy in the cities and argues that interactions with the colonial state were an integral aspect of the ways that Indians created a sense of their own personal investment in the city in which they lived. The book explores the every-day and the mundane to better...