Review Essay: Forgotten Pasts, Uncertain Futures: Land and Water in Colonial and Post-Colonial Calcutta

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Notes

1. Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 5.

2. For South Asia, two recent important ethnographic works are Lisa Bjorkman, Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); and Nikhil Anand, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017).

3. Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw, ‘Cities, Natures and the Political Imaginary’, in Architectural Design, Vol. 82, no. 4 (2012), pp. 22–27 [26].

4. Veena Talwar Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–1877 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

5. Mariam Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City 1845–1875 (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1991).

6. Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); and Partho Datta, Planning the City: Urbanization and Reform in Calcutta, c. 1800–c. 1940 (New Delhi: Tulika, 2012).

7. Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 62.

8. Colin McFarlane, ‘Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Bombay’, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 32, no. 2 (June 2008), pp. 415–35 [416].

9. Awadhendra Sharan, In the City, Out of Place: Nuisance, Pollution, and Dwelling in Delhi, c.1850–2000 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 25.

10. Ibid., p. 23.

11. Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities; Michael Mann, ‘Delhi’s Belly: On the Management of Water, Sewage and Excreta in a Changing Urban Environment during the Nineteenth Century’, in Studies in History, Vol. 23, no. 1 (2007), pp. 1–31; and Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 8, ‘The Politics of Health in Calcutta, 1876–1899’, pp. 202–26.

12. Yannis Tzaninis et al., ‘Moving Urban Political Ecology beyond the “Urbanization of Nature”’, in Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 45, no. 2 (online 2020, print 2021), pp. 229–52, doi: 10.1177/0309132520903350.