# Imagining Urbanity in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia

Anne Castaing, Anne Murphy

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Anne Castaing, Anne Murphy. Imagining Urbanity in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia. Nidan: International Journal of Indian Studies, 2025, 10 (1), pp.3-7. 10.58125/nidan.2025.1.28091. hal-05155050

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# Introduction

## Imagining Urbanity in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia

Anne Castaing

Centre d'Études sud-asiatiques et himalayennes (CESAH), France

Email: anne.castaing@ehess.fr

Anne Murphy

University of British Columbia, Canada

Email: anne.murphy@ubc.ca

## The City

South Asia's population is now roughly 35% urban (Key Indicators n.d.). The World Bank has shown that the urban population grew by 130 million between 2001 and 2011; it is expected to grow by more than double that by 2030 (World Bank 2016, Ellis et al. 2016). In this, South Asia is in line with broader trends: one half of the world's population lives in cities today, and this is expected to double by 2050. This will mean that, by 2050, 70% of the human population in the world will be city-based (World Bank n.d.). For comparison: in 1970, when the world's population was approximately 3 billion, approximately 37% of the world's population was urban (World Bank Group et al. 2018) We thus see both a dramatic increase in the sheer number of the urban population, and its size relative to rural populations.

It is thus not surprising that this period of exponential growth in the world's urban population has been accompanied by the substantial growth of Urban Studies as a field in academia, and a broader 'urban turn' in the field of social science and humanities, which has involved geographical, but also anthropological, sociological, economic and environmental engagements with urban life worlds and expressions. Conversely, Rural Studies, which were very popular from the 1960s to the 1990s, have been declining for the last two to three decades. In keeping with such developments, the 'city' as a space, whether real or imagined, has thus become a major subject of South Asian studies in diverse disciplines (see for example: Balakrishnan 2019, Chaudhuri 2022, Chaudhuri 2025, Gertner 2015, Coelho and Sood 2021). This special issue, "Imagining Urbanity in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia"— which is paired with a second forthcoming issue of the journal—wishes to consider the idea and practice of urbanity in South Asia in the colonial and postcolonial periods, to examine how it has been perceived, described, and inhabited, in relation to diverse social and cultural formations. Our focus is primarily literary and historical, to consider how a notion of 'urbanity' is articulated in diverse languages and contexts across the subcontinent, with a focus on its northern domains and Indo-Aryan languages in the colonial and, in this issue, postcolonial periods.

## Urbanity

What does it mean to imagine the city?<fnref n="1" /> 'Thinking the city' involves considering the multiple factors that make urban space both dynamic and stable at the same time, a space of both

<footnote n="1">¹ This essay and these special issues take inspiration from the “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations.” Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe project at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Social and Cultural Studies, University of Erfurt (Germany), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – FOR 2779. Murphy was a Visiting Fellow with the KFG in 2022.</footnote>
transformation and the production of tradition. It is a space that is defined by the built
landscape, but is also constituted by the social lives enabled by that landscape: practices built
around the use of space by and with people, defined by different kinds of socialities and
encounters among individuals, communities, and genders. The city is thus also lived,
embodied, and inhabited; it can be understood as a ‘combination of territories’, the bringing
together different cultural communities in a common space (Le Gallès 2002). It is also an
imagined landscape—thought into being by the minds that inhabit it—and then articulated in
images, objects, places, and texts which express our lived experiences in the density of our
inhabitation. We tell ourselves stories about these places, and how we live in them, in the past
and in the present. This is perhaps why the urban has been a preoccupation of the literary,
across languages and genres. In the South Asian context, the city has thus been examined by
multiple authors: Intizar Husain on Lahore (Basti 1979), Amit Chaudhury on Kolkata (A Strange
and Sublime Address 1991), Ahmed Ali (Twilight in Delhi 1940) and Anita Desai (Clear Light
of Day 1980) on Delhi, Arun Kolatkar (Kala Ghoda Poems 2004) and Rohinton Mistry (A Fine
Balance 1995) on Mumbai, and R.K. Narayan (Mysore 1939) on Mysore.

But what of urbanity? Even if the urban can defined by the density of human inhabitation and
of the built landscape, the related and yet distinct notion of ‘urbanity’ is still somewhat more
complex: does it signify a material condition of the built landscape, a way of being, or an ethical
commitment? Susanne Rau’s (2020) recent exploration of “[u]rbanity (urbanitas, Urbanität,
urbanité, urbanità, urbanidad…)” has noted that “urbanity” has been understood in
dramatically different ways over time, in scholarly as well as more general terms. It can be “an
ideal of virtue and a style,” for example, or more concretely, it can be an effect and expression
of the built environment. Perhaps most usefully, it can “be understood as a form of relation,
not as a state or condition” (Ibid.): a set of relations between built landscapes and people, and
among the people within them. In this latter sense, in its relational sense, it perhaps most
centrally signifies the way the city is lived in ethical terms—how a set of values and ideas is
embodied in place and by people, in relation to each other—and the sociality that the urban
landscape both allows and is sustained by. Urbanity, then, might be conceived as the
imagination of the city’s social life, its ethical and social commitments and possibilities.

Embracing such a formulation of urbanity as a set of social and ethical commitments, literary
representations of the city have often been marked by idealization, and by celebration of the
ethical potentials of the urban form. The romantic construction of the city is visible, for example,
in the representations of Calcutta in Begum Rokeya's utopic *Sultana's Dream* (1905; see Hans
Harder in this issue). We see similar idealization in the portrayal of the town Malgudi in R. K.
Narayan's novels: this latter case shows that it is not only the bustling metropolis that can
realize our hopes and dreams and represent our nostalgia within the interactions of the human
landscape. Intizar Husain's *Basti* (1972) and Salman Rushdie's *The Moor's Last Sigh* (1995),
which both combine an idealized—even nostalgic—portrayal of the city with complex
representation of urbanity in the present, similarly evoke a space of accommodation and
fertilization, of social awakening and cultural dynamism. This literary practice of urbanity can
appear in language itself, in literary references and representations of hybridization, as
strikingly shown in Rushdie's hybrid language and writing, as discussed in *Imaginary
Homelands* (1991). These are the resonances of the vision of *begampūrā*, the city with no
sorrow, that Hans Harder opens his essay with in this volume: the city as a place of joy and
freedom, beyond discrimination and harm.

But this is only one way of conceptualizing the city. If urbanity is a set of ethical and social commitments—a kind of practiced living together—the betrayals of the city, too, have something to say.
Dystopia

The contradictions of the city—its limits, and failures—define urbanity in its negation, a meaning made apparent in stark contrast. This is the ambivalence of the city: as Rau (2020) has noted, the urban “can be heaven or hell or both at the same time” (see also Rau 2024). This ambiguous perception of the city is evident in many literary works, which, while not explicitly dystopian, offer an exaggerated vision of urban life as sprawling, invasive, and dehumanising. We see this, for instance, in the city of Bombay in Rohinton Mistry’s *A Fine Balance*, which contrasts with the poor and yet peaceful villages of Maharashtra, leading the novel’s characters into decadence. In *Basti*, Lahore is, in the final pages of the work, an almost apocalyptic space of war and confinement, as manifested by the nearby border, which contrasts with nostalgic representations of a childhood village. Decadence is also evident in Anita Desai’s portrayal of Delhi in *Clear Light of Day*, as embodied by disoriented and disillusioned characters. In such representations, the city, as a dynamic space, seems always a “fine balance” between idealization and deception, social accommodation and violence, and vibrancy and decadence.

Anne Murphy's contribution demonstrates how literary texts bear witness to a new kind of cosmopolis—in this instance, the one brought about by the formation of a new Punjabi identity in Delhi after 1947—that echo or continue the urban Punjabi identity of Lahore. Murphy's article demonstrates the persistence of both inclusion and exclusion in the urban context. Her analysis of the work of Punjabi-language writer Ajeet Cour (b. 1934) demonstrates how the city is portrayed, on the one hand, as a place of possibility for women, providing for new kinds of meetings, and new kinds of freedom. But, as Murphy notes, while “[t]he city may offer possibilities for autonomy for women… Cour suggests at the outset that these stories are not simple tales of triumph.” The city—Delhi, in this case—can also be a place of exclusion, showing the dystopic features of the city space—a pervasive anti-urbanity, perhaps, that accompanies the sociality and potentiality that constitutes urbanity. In her example, this is made starkly apparent within Cour’s portrayal of the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984. These dystopic features of the urban are also echoed in Rotem Geva’s contribution, which also addresses post-Partition Delhi through the writing of an author who hailed from west Punjab as well and relocated to Delhi. Geva explores the writings of Fikr Taunsvi (the pen name of Ram Lal Bhatia, 1918-1987) that in their engagement with the portrayal of the everyday reveal a kind of “ambivalence between emancipatory politics and an implicit sense of defeat,” the contradictions between the progressive possibilities of the city and “a sense of moral erosion and routinized malfeasance” in its everyday life. Corruption here appears as a symptom—a plague, one might say—of everyday life. Both Murphy’s and Geva’s essays thus foreground both possibility and its denial in postcolonial Delhi, in the shadow of Partition’s violence.

Hans Harder and Justyna Kurowska's essays too dispel any notion of a utopian interpretation of the changes occurring in and through the city. Their articles paint a picture of cities as invasive, dangerous and unhealthy spaces, in a state of decay that in some cases is portrayed as reflecting the widespread degeneration of the world. Decolonization here is fraught with failure and contradiction. Through his exploration of Science Fiction, Harder aptly demonstrates the extent to which change, and transformation are integral to the urban ecosystem and stimulate speculative imaginings. The dystopic turn he examines is “connected with globalizing crisis scenarios.” Climate change, a major theme of the 21st century, is particularly relevant here. Harder’s exploration of a range of works from the late 20th and early 21st centuries highlights how these works “play randomly through the set of available options—heat, drought, drowning, state control, segregation, etc.” in their description of crisis and disaster, focusing on social and political themes that “acquire prominence in sync with global public discourse.” In Justyna Kurowska's article, the city is similarly presented as a
harmful, pathogenic space. In it, we see in many ways the disillusionment and disenchantment expressed by Fikr Taunsvi, as examined by Geva, taken forward in time and generalized in place. However, the basis for this perception is drawn from contemporary views of the city as perceived in the 1970s and 2000s. In this period, “[o]nce a symbol of infinite possibilities, the city began to reveal its harsh and cruel realities.” Illness is the focus of a range of works that Kurowska examines, where illness acts on both an individual, personal level, and also as an effect of the city itself, becoming a metaphor for the degeneration embodied in modern urban spaces. The city itself appears as a sick body, rotting and contaminated. This is far from the domain of *begampūrā*, indeed.

## Closing

The essays in this issue demonstrate the moral saturation of our understanding and experience of the city: urbanity—and its denial, its failure—haunt the essays. With them we move through the challenges and failures of the postcolonial period, decades of both corruption and violence, of environmental degradation and loss. Urban failure in this sense stands in for a larger, social and political failure. This is explored in the wake of Partition and decolonization in Delhi in Geva and Murphy's work, with special attention to gender in the latter's. It is taken to imaginative extremes in the representations examined by Harder and Kurowska. Urbanity, in this sense, can also be defined by its own loss. Still, the articulation of this loss is itself the crafting of its alternative: the promise of a city that survives the violence, and the moments of shared humanity that can rise from within it, as Ajeet Cour's writing shows us. There is an urbanity, too, perhaps, that calls out, even in the despair.

## References

* Ali A., (1940). *Twilight in Delhi*. London: Hogarth Press.

* Balakrishnan S., (2019). *Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India*. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

* Chaudhuri A., (2002[1991]). *A Strange and Sublime Address*. New Delhi: Penguin India.

* Chaudhuri S., (ed.) (2022). *Religion and the City in India*. New York: Routledge,

* Chaudhuri S., Das N., Jackson I., Magedera I.H., (eds.) (2025). *Envisioning the Indian City: Spaces of Encounter in Goa, Calcutta, Pondicherry and Chandigarh*. Jadavpur: Jadavpur University Press.

* Coelho K., Sood A., (2019). "Urban Studies in India across the millennial turn: Histories and future." *Urban Studies* 59 (13): 2613-2637.

* Desai A., (1980). *Clear Light of Day*. London: Heinemann.

* Ghertner D.A., (2015). *Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi*. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

* Husain I., (1995[1980/1979]). *Bastī* (trans. From Urdu, Pritchett F.W.). New Delhi: HarperCollins.

* Kolatkar A., (2004). *Kala Ghoda Poems*. Mumbai: Pras Prakashan.

* Le Gallès P., (2002). *European Cities: Social Conflicts and Governance*. London: Oxford University Press.
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