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Departing from approaches that see the city as the unproblematic product of British initiative and disciplining, Claiming the City presents the urban processes shaping Calcutta as contested and partially indigenous. In a crucial intervention the work studies how the colonial urban was not just born out of the ordered institutional spaces inscribed by public parks and squares, sewers and water supplies, roads and tramways, but also the more plebeian imprint of their circumvention by the citys inhabitants - through their use of this civic infrastructure, violence, protest and street demonstrations. In the process the book also traces the ways in which the once proverbial City of Palaces turned by the early twentieth century into a city of endemic unrest and political strife.

Contents: Introduction. 1. Urban space, technology and community. 2. Songs the city and the everyday. 3. Sexuality, scandals and the urban order. 4. Battle for the streets: contesting municipal regimes. 5. Criminality, class and moral anxieties. 6. Collective protest and riots. Conclusion. Bibliography. Index.