Memoirs of Roads describes streets as registers of historical processes that shape the social and mental world of city dwellers in Calcutta. The book draws upon Marshall Berman's influential work All that Is Solid Melts into Air (1982) to describe arterial streets where city dwellers gather, wander and gaze, and through these activities inscribe meanings. The book stands apart from existing scholarship on cities in its detailed analysis of urbanization as an ongoing process, constantly made and unmade to match the needs of diverse groups who inhabit a city. At the heart of the book are three principal thoroughfares – Baghbazar Street, Theatre Road and Rashbehari Avenue – that capture the major nodes of transition in the city's history. Banerjee employs the metaphor of a family – Baghbazar Street as a grandmother, Theatre Road as a midwife and Rashbehari Avenue as a middle-class housewife – to explain how urban spaces embody belief systems and reflect the minds of city dwellers.

Unlike with western cities, urbanization in South Asian cities is not tied to industrial modernity. The first and second chapters locate the origins of the colonial city in myriad historical experiences and contestations at both formal and everyday levels. Chapter 1 describes how business interests prompted the British to transform villages they had bought from an Indian zamindar (landholder) into a city. In this chapter, Banerjee challenges Anthony D. King's argument in Urbanism, Colonialism, and World Economy (1990) that colonizers dictated the shape of colonial cities. Instead, he describes Indian business groups collaborating with the British to build cities. Preeti Chopra had a similar argument in her study of colonial Bombay in A Joint Enterprise (2011). Banerjee's work, however, goes beyond the narrative of collaboration to reveal how ordinary city dwellers also added to colonial urban designs. A fascinating example of this is the goli or branch street that city dwellers in Calcutta opened when they started living in plots of land behind the main streets. They named golies after their local heroes.

Even in a heavily segregated city divided by class and race, Banerjee shows that the working classes were able to erect makeshift settlements or slums near elite residences in both white and black towns. The second chapter describes slums as visual embodiments of colonial indifference to the poor. The British realized that slums solved the housing crisis but described them as dens of disease and called for their demolition. Slum-dwellers lived in a perpetual state of flux, moving from one street to another. Slums remain a common theme through the book as Banerjee discusses the need for workers to live near the wealthy to make their urban life possible. While workers lived in slums, the city's educated Bengali men experienced a change in their mental world and desired a space that reflected this change. Educated in English, they realized they could no longer identify with previous generations who lived in the northern part of the city. They chose to move south and imbued that space with their new sensibilities. Thus took shape South Calcutta, more of an idea than a space. Banerjee reconstructs this idea from memoirs and literary sources.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 centre on three arterial roads that moulded Calcutta's urban life. Chapter 3 describes Baghbazar Street as the grandmother from where all new streets were born. In the seventeenth century, Baghbazar Street served the purposes of trade. Later, with colonialism, new social groups informed the configuration of the street. Among these were: landholders ousted from their villages by the British and compensated to live in the city; nouveau riche commercial groups working for the British and members of traditional extended families that had separated, bought land in lanes behind the main streets and opened smaller lanes or golies to connect to a main street. Baghbazar was a spiritual hub where temples lined the streets. The Hindu saint Ramakrishna led a movement to revive Hinduism among urban groups. He found patronage among educated followers, including Vivekananda, who repackaged the spiritual into a political language and turned the streets into sites of anti-colonial protest.

Chapter 4 highlights Theatre Road which, unlike Baghbazar Street, housed a mixed population. Scholarship on colonial cities has questioned the neat racial segregation of black and white towns. Scholars have shown that the boundaries of black and white towns became less distinct due to the movement of workers and the need for shared entertainment. Banerjee's work makes a significant contribution to this literature by portraying how different races lived together and owned property in white urban areas. He retrieves from Thacker's Calcutta Street Directory the mixed demography where Europeans shared space first with Indian princes who demonstrated loyalty and later with urban professionals who bought apartments. He describes Theatre Road as a midwife bringing to life a hybrid colonial culture. Chapter 5 continues this narrative by bringing to light the ethnic diversity among residents of Rashbehari Avenue. Most communities living on this avenue came from the southern states of India and worked as accountants in Calcutta. The non-Bengali population comprised a substantial section among city dwellers in Calcutta, but there is little historical research on these groups. Banerjee's work is a timely intervention.

The theme of continuity between the past and the present makes the history of the three streets even more fascinating. Theatre Road preserves a hybrid culture, although colonial buildings that still exist have been repurposed to serve other functions. Entertainment venues from shopping malls selling global brands to cheap roadside eateries add to the hybridity. The mixed settlements on Rashbehari Avenue adjoin shopping malls and restaurants that are centres of western, predominantly American, cultural elements. Yet a sense of a black town pervades Rashbehari Avenue. Population pressure, poverty and diverse cultural practices have resisted the transformative impulses of a neoliberal economy. In sharp contrast, Banerjee points to megalopolitan urban planning of New Town, a township of gated communities and boulevards in Calcutta that embody a globalized neoliberal economy. Banerjee argues that in colonial cities, the poor at times benefited from trickle-down effects; but megalopolitan planning of New Town and its focus on privatization suspend all such possibilities.

Memoirs of Roads is a must-read for those interested in understanding thoroughfares as more than physical space, as connected to the social life of a city. The narrative could have benefited from more reference to sources. The metaphor of family at times tends to normalize gendered social roles. Other than these minor drawbacks, the book is an important contribution to the urban history of colonial cities. Banerjee leaves us with the question of what a balanced alternative might be wherein the urbanization of space would engender the urbanization of democracy.