This is a full archive of articles and books from the twenty sessions of Urban South Asia, a workshop and reading group on cities in India and Asia which I organised with anthropologist Prof Michael M.J. Fischer and historian Dr Nikhil Rao at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

From 2006 to 2008 we hosted social scientists and urban researchers who presented their work in-progress alongside selected texts and sources on urbanisation in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and America. Files linked in the posts below are provided solely for purposes of study, research, and education.

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MIT-STS URBAN SOUTH ASIA WORKSHOP

Program in Science Technology & Society (STS)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) E51-185, Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A.

2006

1 March: “Hyderabad from Charminar to Cantontment”
ERIC LEWIS BEVERLEY
Harvard University Department of Indo-Islamic Cultures

• Eric Lewis Beverley. “Cosmopolitanism from Charminar to Cantontment: Urban Hyderabad and Colonialism” (draft chapter of dissertation in the Departments of History and Indo-Islamic Studies, Harvard University).
• David Harvey. “Paris, 1850-1870” and “Monument and Myth: The Building of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart” in Consciousness and The Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanisation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, pp.63-249.
• David Harvey, “Part II: Materializations: Paris 1848-1870” and “Part III: Coda” in Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity, New York: Routledge, 2003.
• Marshall Berman. “Baudelaire: Modernism in the Streets” in All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Verso Books, 1983, pp.131-172.

15 March: “The Apartment Building in Bombay”
NIKHIL RAO
Wellesley College Department of History

• Nikhil Rao, “House, But No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay in the 1930s” and “Caste, Community and the Cooperative Society: The Emergence of Dadar-Matunga as Ethnic Neighbourhood in Bombay” (chapters from dissertation in the Department of History, University of Chicago, 2006).
• Meera Kosambi, Bombay in Transition: The Growth and Social Ecology of a Colonial City, 1880-1980 Chapters 1-4 and Chapters 5-8. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1986.
• Robert E. Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment” (1915) in Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick D. McKenzie, eds., The City, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, pp.1-46 (chapter 1).
• Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project” in Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick D. McKenzie, eds., The City, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, pp.47-62 (chapter 2).
• Roderick D. McKenzie, “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community” in Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick D. McKenzie, eds., The City, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, pp.63-79 (chapter 3).
• Paul G. Cressey, “The Taxi-Dance Hall as a Social World” (1932) in James F. Short, Jr., ed. The Social Fabric of the Metropolis: Contributions of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, Chicago: Univesity of Chicago Press, 1971, pp.193-209.
• William Foot Whyte, “Social Structure, The Gang and the Individual” (1943) in James F. Short, Jr., ed. The Social Fabric of the Metropolis: Contributions of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, Chicago: Univesity of Chicago Press, 1971, pp.214-235.
• Ulf Hannerz, “Chicago Ethnographers” in Exploring the City: Inquiries Towards an Urban Anthropology, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, pp.19-48 (chapter 2).

5 April: “The Street in South Asia”
NIKHIL RAO
Wellesley College Department of History

• Nikhil Rao, “The Bourgeois Street in Bombay” (from dissertation in the Department of History, University of Chicago).
• Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze” in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp.65-79.
• Sudipta Kaviraj, “Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta”, Public Culture vol.10, no.1 (1997) pp.83-113.
• Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (1960) and Appendices to The Image of the City (1960), Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
• Michel de Certeau, “Spatial Practices” and “Walking in the City” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, pp.91-130.

19 April: “Urban Social Spaces: Adeeb and Adda”
SARAH WAHEED
Tufts University Department of History

• Sarah Waheed, “Bombay and the Adeeb: Exploring Spaces of Sociability amongst Urdu Intellectuals, 1899-1965” (draft chapter of dissertation in the Department of History, Tufts University).
• Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle”
• Ismat Chugtai, “Bombay to Bhopal”
• Saadat Hasan Manto, “Ismat Chugtai”
• Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
• Sudipta Kaviraj, “In Search of Civil Society” in Indira Chandrashekhar and Peter C. Seel, eds., Body.city: Siting Contemporary Culture in India (Berlin / Delhi: Haus der Kulturen der Welt / Tulika Books, 2003).
• David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity, London: Polity Press, 2002, ch.1 (The Flaneur in Social Theory), ch. 3 (Georg Simmel’s Metropolis), ch. 4 (Vienna is not Berlin), ch. 5 (Otto Wagner & Vienna), ch. 6 (Social Theory, the Metropolis and Expressionism).
• Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, Thomas Levin, ed., trans., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

3 May: “Sex, Work & Migration in Mumbai”
SVATI SHAH
New York University (NYU) Dept of Gender & Sexuality Studies

• Svati Shah, “Sex Work and Secrecy” and “The Red Light Area: Producing the Spectacle of Sex Work” (from dissertation “Seeing Sexual Commerce: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai”, Columbia University Department of Anthropology, 2005).
• David Harvey, “Introduction” and “On Bodies and Political Persons in Global Space” (ch.6 “The Body as Accumulation Strategy” and ch.7 “Body Politics and the Struggle for a Living Wage”) from Spaces of Hope, Berkeley: Univesity of California Press, 2000, pp.97-132.
• Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Workers’ Politics and the Mill Districts in Bombay Between the Wars” from Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950, pp.100-142.
• Kamala Kempadoo, “Introduction: Globalizing Sex Workers’ Rights” in Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, eds., Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and Redefinition, New York: Routledge, 1998, pp.1-28.
• Jeremy Seabrook, Selections from In the Cities of the South: Scenes from a Developing World (ch.1 “Myths of the Megacities”, ch.2 “Urbanization: The Making of a Transnational Working Class”, ch.3 “Migrants to the City”, ch.4 “Bombay in the Nineties”, ch.6 “Labour in the Cities”, and ch.10 “Slums and Settlements”), London: Verso, 1996, pp.1-73, 86-130, 174-209)
• Kalpana Sharma, Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.
• Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London: Verso Books, 2005.

10 May: “Real Estate Capital & Film Finance in Bombay”
ASHISH RAJADHYAKSHA
Centre for the Study of Culture & Society (CSCS), Bangalore

• Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to Emergency. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

3 October: “Patrick Geddes & Town Planning in India”
RAMACHANDRA GUHA
MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History

31 October: “Suburbanisation in Colonial Bombay”
NIKHIL RAO
Wellesley College Department of History

• Nikhil Rao, “An Indian Suburbia” (chapter 1 from dissertation in the Department of History, University of Chicago, 2006).
• Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
• Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the
  United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
• John Archer, “Colonial Suburbs in South Asia, 1750-1850, and the Spaces of Modernity” in Roger Silverstone, ed. Visions of Suburbia, New York: Routledge, 1997, pp.26-54.
• Anthony D. King, “Excavating the Multicultural Suburb: Hidden Histories of the Bungalow” in Roger Silverstone, ed. Visions of Suburbia, New York: Routledge, 1997, pp.55-85.

14 November: “Delhi in Ruins”
ANAND VIVEK TANEJA
Columbia University Department of Anthropology

• Anand Vivek Taneja, “The Archaeology of Myth: The Myth of Archaeology: The Pasts and Present of the Purana Qila” and “History and Heritage Woven in the New Urban Fabric: The Changing Landscapes of Delhi’s ‘First City’, 1995-2005 (or, Who Can Tell the Histories of Lado Sarai?)” (draft chapters from dissertation in the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University).
• Bayly, C.A. “Delhi and Other Cities of North India during the ‘Twilight’.” In The Delhi Omnibus, edited by R.E. Frykenberg, 121-136. New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2002.
• Gupta, Narayani. “Delhi and Its Hinterland: The Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” In The Delhi Omnibus, edited by R.E. Frykenberg, 137-156. New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2002.
• Khan, Naveeda. “Of Children and Jinn: An Inquiry into an Unexpected Friendship during Uncertain Times.” Research-article, May 18, 2006.
• Kumar, Sunil. “A Medieval Reservoir and Modern Urban Planning: Local Society and the Hauz-i-Rani” and “Making Sacred History or Everyone his/her own Historian: The Pasts of the Village of Saidlajab.” In The Present in Delhi’s Pasts, 62-118. New Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2002.
• Messick, Brinkley. Selections from The Calligraphic State. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

5 December: “Colonial Planning & Princely Hyderabad”
ERIC LEWIS BEVERLEY
Harvard University Department of Indo-Islamic Cultures

• Eric Lewis Beverley, “Improvising Urbanism: Aesthetics and Sanitation in the Making of Modern Hyderabad”. (draft chapter of dissertation in the Department of Indo-Islamic Studies, Harvard University).
• Mark Harrison, “The Foundations of Public Health in India: Crisis and Constraint”, chapter 3 of Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
• Di Wang, “Street Control”, chapter 5 of Street Culture in Chengdu:
  Public Space, Urban Commoners and Local Politics, 1870-1930, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
• Paul Rabinow, “Techno-Cosmopolitanism: Governing Morocco”, chapter 9 of French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
• John E. Brush, “The Morphology of Indian Cities” in Roy Turner, ed.,
  India’s Urban Future: Selected Studies from an International Conference sponsored by Kingsley Davis, Richard L. Park, and Catherine Bauer Wurster, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.
• Zeynep Celik, “Regularization of the Urban Fabric” in Celik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

12 December: “Divine Enterprise in Bangalore”
TULASI SRINIVAS
Emerson College Department of Anthropology

• Tulasi Srinivas, “Divine Enterprise: Hindu Priests and Ritual Change in Neighbourhood Hindu Temples in Bangalore”, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol.XXIX, no.3, December 2006.
• Wayne Ashley, “The Stations of the Cross: Christ, Politics, and Processions on New York City’s Lower East Side” in Robert Orsi, ed. Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, pp.341-366.
• David Harvey, “Capitalism: The Factory of Fragmentation” (chapter 7) and “Cartographic Identities: Geographical Knowledges Under
  Globalization” (chapter 11) from Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, New York: Routledge, 2001, pp.121-127 and pp.208-236.
• Peter Hall, “The City of Enterprise: Planning Turned Upside Down: Baltimore, Hong Kong, London, 1975-1987” in Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, London: Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp.342-260.
• Janaki Nair, “Battles for Bangalore: Re-Territorialising the City”, paper published by SEPHIS (South-South Exchange Program for Research on the History of Development), International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 2002.
• James Heitzman, “Becoming Silicon Valley”, Seminar 503 on Globalization, New Delhi, July 2001

2007

15 March: “Remembering Raj Chandavarkar”
DOUGLAS HAYNES
Dartmouth College Department of History

• Douglas Haynes and Subho Basu, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, 1953-2006, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 41, Issue No. 21, 27 May 2006.
• Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “From Neighbourhood to Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Left in Bombay’s Girangaon in the 20th Century”, introductory essay from Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar, One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: The Mill Workers of Girangaon: An Oral History (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004).
• Chandavarkar, “Workers’ Politics and the Mill Districts in Bombay Between the Wars” from Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950, pp.100-142
• Chandavarkar, “Police and Public Order in Bombay, 1880-1947” from Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950, pp.180-233
• Chandavarkar, “Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896-1914” from Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950, pp.234-265

22 March: “Labour, Space & Politics”
Roundtable at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Conference, Boston, Mass, 2008
SUBHO BASU, Syracuse University, New York
FRANK F. CONLON, University of Washington, Seattle
DOUGLAS HAYNES, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
SHEKHAR KRISHNAN, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
NIKHIL RAO, Wellesley College, Massachusetts
LISA TRIVEDI, Hamilton College, New York

2 October: “Street Hawkers, Commodities and Urban Space”
JONATHAN SHAPIRO-ANJARIA
Bard College Department of Anthropology

• Arvind Rajagopal, “The Violence of Commodity Aesthetics: Hawkers, Demolition Raids and a New Regime of Consumption”,  Social Text 68, Vol. 19, No. 3, Fall 2001.
• Mitchell Duneier. Sidewalk. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.
• Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria. “Street Hawkers and Public Space in Mumbai”, Economic and Political Weekly, May 27, 2006.

2008

19 February: “The Making of an Indian Metropolis”
PRASHANT KIDAMBI,
The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1860-1920.

• Kidambi, Prashant. The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1860-1920. Ashgate, 2007.
• Kidambi, P. “‘An Infection of Locality’: Plague, Pythogenesis and the Poor in Bombay, 1896–1905.” Urban History 31, no. 02 (2005): 249-267.
• Kidambi, P. “Housing the Poor in a Colonial City: The Bombay Improvement Trust, 1898-1918.” Studies in History 17, no. 1 (February 1, 2001): 57-79.

12 March: “ Making Lahore Modern”
WILLIAM J. GLOVER,
Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City

• Glover, William J. Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
• Glover, William J. “Objects, Models, and Exemplary Works: Educating Sentiment in Colonial India.” The Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 03 (2007): 539-566.
• Glover, William J. “Construing Urban Space as “Public” in Colonial India: Some Notes from the Punjab.” The Journal of Punjab Studies 15, no. 1 (forthcoming 2008): 1-14.
• Plotz, John. “One-Way Traffic: George Lamming and the Portable Empire.” In After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation, edited by Antoinette Burton, 308-23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

2 April: “Urban Hegemony in Bombay”
SANDEEP HAZAREESINGH,
The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity : Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay City, 1900-1925

• Hazareesingh, Sandip. The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity : Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay City 1900-1925. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007.
• Chopra, Preeti. “Refiguring the Colonial City: Recovering the Role of Local Inhabitants in the Construction of Colonial Bombay, 1854-1918.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 14 (2007): 109-125.
• Hazareesingh, Sandip. “Colonial Modernism and the Flawed Paradigms of Urban Renewal: Uneven Development in Bombay, 1900–25.” Urban History 28, no. 02 (2001): 235-255.
• Hazareesingh, Sandip. “The Quest for Urban Citizenship: Civic Rights, Public Opinion, and Colonial Resistance in Early Twentieth-Century Bombay.” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 4 (October 2000): 797-829.

23 April: “Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities”
STEPHEN LEGG,
Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities

• Stephen Legg. Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities. Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.
• Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India 1639-1739, New Edition (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
• Stephen Legg, “Beyond the European Province: Foucault and Postcolonialism,” in Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, ed. Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden (Ashgate Publishing, 2007).
• Stephen Legg, “Ambivalent Improvements: Biography, Biopolitics, and Colonial Delhi,” Environment and Planning A 40, no. 1 (2008): 37-56.

14  May: “Representing Calcutta”
SWATI CHATTOPADHYAY,
Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny

• Chattopadhyay, Swati. Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny. Routledge, 2006.
• Sudipta Kaviraj, “Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta”, Public Culture vol.10, no.1 (1997) pp.83-113.
• Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze” in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp.65-79.
• Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Adda: A History of Sociality” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp.180-213.

28 May: “Bangalore’s Twentieth Century”
JANAKI NAIR,
The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century

• Janaki Nair, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2005).
• Nair, Beladide Noda Bengaluru Nagara!, Photo Exhibition on “Worlding the City : The Futures of Bangalore”, 2000

2 October: “Cinematographs, Celluloid & Cinema in Bombay”
ASHISH RAJADHYAKSHA,
Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to Emergency

6 November: “Beyond Colonial Urbanism: Cities in South Asia”
Panel at the Urban History Association (UHA) 4th Biennial Conference, Houston, Texas, 2008
WILLIAM J. GLOVER, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
ISHITA PANDE, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario
ERIC LEWIS BEVERLEY, Stony Brook University, New York
NIKHIL RAO, Wellesley College, Massachusetts

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