About Book
Envisioning the Indian City offers a set of new, ground-breaking
studies of Indian cities as sites of physical, cultural and historical
encounter. It places three colonial cities – Goa, Calcutta/Kolkata
and Pondicherry/Puducherry – side by side with the postcolonial
city of Chandigarh, created by the independent Indian state, to
examine the specificities of cross-cultural exchanges, physical
settings, urban flows, social imaginaries and built spaces, as
developed over time and experienced by a variety of urban
actors. If the city is, as Henri Lefebvre described it, a space of
‘encounter, assembly, simultaneity,’ colonial cities demonstrated
the encounter of European imperialism and capitalism with the
non-European populations and cultures they sought to
subjugate. Equally, they were ‘global pivots’ of change,
resistance and renewal, constituting important new additions to
the global order – just as Chandigarh was for independent India
a space for new departures in architecture, politics and urban
structure. Each of the case studies here bears witness to the
capacity of the Indian city to mediate both global imperatives
and regional identities. Envisioning the Indian City represents the
best of both established and emerging international scholarship
on the complex fabric of the city in India.
About Author
Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor Emerita in
the Department of English, Jadavpur
University. Nandini Das is Professor of
Early Modern English Literature and
Culture at the University of Oxford. Iain
Jackson is Professor of Architecture and
Research Director at the School of
Architecture, University of Liverpool.
Ian H. Magedera is Senior Lecturer in
Languages, Cultures and Film in the
School of Humanities and Social
Sciences, University of Liverpool.