The story of colonial urbanism has traditionally been understood through the prism of spectacular built forms and highly racialized and segregated spaces. Influenced by the spatial turn, which sought to unpack the social processes behind the production of colonial-built environments, a recent strand of historiography has questioned the coherence of colonial impulses and shifted focus away from viewing cities solely as vehicles for economic and political domination. While building on this rich scholarship, the book under review has presented a substantial methodological departure from existing accounts that focused primarily on those spaces that had a direct political and commercial bearing on the expansion of colonialism in Calcutta. By paying attention to the less monumental spaces, Nabaparna Ghosh has ferreted out fascinating historical materials on Calcutta's neighbourhoods, or paras, to enhance our understanding of the indigenous perspectives on the colonial-built environment. In addition, her work foregrounds the resilience of vernacular settlements, a point that is often ignored within a field saturated with accounts of colonial bureaucratic procedures that rationalized and disciplined space.

In thinking about the para as a historical, spatial and symbolic category constituted of kinship ties, Ghosh demonstrates how these neighbourhoods have been shaped and reshaped, built and rebuilt and experienced in response to highly racialized and exclusionary discourses on sanitation and public health, colonial legal and propertied regimes, emergent discourses on urban governance drawn from mythology and scriptures that recast the natives into rights bearing Hindu citizens, and an anti-colonial cultural nationalism fostered by the bhadralok or the urban professional elites. By doing so, Ghosh resists essentializing the para into an atavistic and unchanging category waiting to be reformulated by colonial modernity, and instead unearths the governmental, discursive, legal, cultural and political processes that constantly regulated and produced these neighbourhoods.

The first chapter follows a familiar line of argument on hygiene in talking about how the enforcement of civic improvements and the articulation of British ethno-medical discourses on sanitation, such as in official colonial reports and photographs, served to inferiorize native bodies and neighbourhoods as receptacles of filth. Unlike many of the existing studies that have stressed the steady acculturation and appropriation of the liberal language of improvement by the native propertied elites, Ghosh has unearthed archival sources on contestations about colonial building policies and urban improvements that were not necessarily linked to the secular terrain of the municipalities. Instead, she shows how the upper-caste propertied men, in their routine negotiations with the state, fashioned themselves as nagarpotis entrusted with the moral authority to uphold the Hindu spatial order.

In the second chapter, she provides yet another instance of reification of social identities, when upper-caste propertied men threatened with evictions by the Calcutta Improvement Trusts invoked religious vocabularies to transform the paras into exclusive Hindu spaces. A scrutiny of the legal correspondence, petitions, municipal and property records reveals the creative use of Hindu religious texts by the Marwari and Bengali elites to claim ownership rights over properties that were deemed debutter or inalienable. We can observe a further consolidation of Hindu religious identities in the 1920s, when the Swarajists (a group that had branched out of the Indian National Congress) together with the bhadraloks assumed control of the municipal administration to launch a brand of cultural nationalism that fused health campaigns, fitness training and festivals in the paras with anti-colonial agitations. Here, instead of solely focusing on the native negotiations with the colonial state in the municipalities, she shifts attention to the merchant-led village settlements of the thirteenth century, which had segued into the colonial urban configuration as autonomous spaces. Known for being distinctive Hindu built environments, these settlements, now spearheaded by a new class of urban professionals, had by the last decades of the nineteenth century emerged as an equally important site for articulating a language of resistance against colonial rule.

In contrast to the conventional received wisdom about English education and the rise of nationalism, Ghosh argues that the everyday bhadralok-led organization of cultural and civic activities in the paras was later appropriated by the dominant nationalist political currents to craft a Hindu language of public health and cultural nationalism. However, as shown in her final chapter, these urban upper-caste mediations on hygiene were primarily intended to graft the same set of racialized practices, which had hardened and codified native bodies and spaces as being inherently insanitary and threatening, on to the bustees or migrant workers’ tenements populated with non-Bengali non-Hindu and low-caste dwellers. By locating filth in low casteness, this mimetic project ensured the continued dominance of the caste elites as reformers and vanguards of the anti-untouchability, as well as the anti-colonial movements as well informed of much of the later day caste and class spatial polarization and marginalization of informal settlements in post-colonial Calcutta.

While the author has offered a highly textured and fine grained analysis of how the para elites led hygienic restructuring of space through mediations with the colonial state, more information on how these discourses circulated among different sections of the urban populace within the para would have revealed the multiple tensions that went into the making of these spaces. Except for highlighting a few instances of dissonance within the hegemonic conceptions of Hindu hygiene from the Dalits and Muslim city dwellers, the paras come across as texts that could be ‘read’ to understand either the colonial impulses or the upper-caste attempts to create new forms of Hindu modernities. Despite these minor gaps, this book, which is also beautifully illustrated with vernacular cartoons, photographs and maps, has set the stage for incorporating the histories of marginal spaces within the extant scholarship on colonial-built environments.