Published on Reviews in History (https://reviews.history.ac.uk ) Claiming the City: Protest, Crime, and Scandals in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1860-1920 Review Number: 2368 Publish date: Thursday, 30 January, 2020 Author: Anindita Ghosh ISBN: 9780199464791 Date of Publication: 2016 Price: £28.99 Pages: 340pp. Publisher: Oxford University Press Publisher url: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/claiming-the-city-9780199464791?cc=gb&lang=en& Place of Publication: Oxford Reviewer: Kaustubh Mani Sengupta In the last couple of decades, there has been a resurgence in studying the history of South Asian urbanism with a wide range of monographs and articles being published. The new scholarship has questioned some of the basic assumptions of colonial urbanism, highlighted the role of the colonized people in fashioning the cities they lived in, and has revealed the limits of the colonial state in policing and ordering the people of the cities. Issues of infrastructure and ‘improvement’ have been studied to look into the contestations and negotiations through which the urban morphology was shaped. (1) Merging concerns of postcolonial studies with spatial theories, these histories have unearthed a complex picture of the colonial cities. Anindita Ghosh in her book carries this scholarship forward, with a focus on the role of the lower rung of the population of colonial Calcutta. She shows how the common people imagined and shaped the city. It was not only British fiat or elite Indians’ effort that produced the urban space; rather, as Ghosh contends, the mass of urban poor too had a right to the city and claimed it in their own terms. To elaborate on this theme, Ghosh brings in some common themes of social and cultural history of colonial Bengal—gender, labour, communal relationship—to foreground the ways through which urban experience shaped these histories, and in the process, how the city was being constituted by their complex practices and negotiations. In her words, ‘The work studies how the ‘colonial urban’ was not just born out of the ordered institutional and structural spaces inscribed by public parks, libraries and courtrooms, sewers and water supplies, roads and tramways, but also the more plebeian imprint of their circumvention by the city’s inhabitants.’ (32) One can read Ghosh’s work keeping in mind Michel de Certeau’s distinction between ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’, where state’s intention gets subverted by everyday practices of ordinary folks. (2) The book has six chapters with an introduction and a conclusion. In the first chapter, Ghosh discusses the ‘relationship between space and material culture in colonial Calcutta.’ (37) She highlights the contrasting urban visions of the colonizers and the colonized and shows how western notions of urban planning sat at odds with indigenous ideas of space and habitations. While the state wanted wide roads, rectilinear street- schemes, and open spaces, the local population was more accustomed to alternative imaginings of urban lay- out with highly localized spatial settings and communitarian living areas. The efforts of the colonial state to create a modern city with the help of technology emanated fears and anxiety among the bhadraloks (genteel folks). There was both an acknowledgement as well as critique of the reordering of the urban space by new