Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City in North India

Michael S. Dodson is Associate Professor of South Asian History at Indiana University Bloomington, USA. His previous books include Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770-1880 (2007), Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories (Routledge, 2011) and Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia (Routledge, 2012).

• Part I: The Banaras technoscape (and its discontents) 1. A riot in Banaras 2. Resorting to the language of stereotypes 3. Filth, disgust, and governance 4. Illness and hardship 5. Creating the modern from the traditional 6. Do you think the river is dirty? 7. Administrative infrastructures 8. Taxation and the transactional state 9. To contemplate what was and what might have been Part II: The crafting of historical space 10. Lord Curzon tours Jaunpur, James Fergusson in hand 11. Ruination and un-ruination 12. Files and archives 13. Three mosques and a committee 14. Not all tombs are created equal 15. Act VII and the not-seeing of Banaras 16. A Sharqi mosque in Banaras 17. A further note on whitewash 18. The ruins of now

"Michael Dodson's book on colonial bureaucracy and north Indian urbanism looks at the way in which urban meaning was produced in colonial India through the ‘incipient citizenship’ of Indians involved in an unequal but transactional relationship with the state. Rather than focussing on this relationship as a hierarchy of command, obedience and resistance, he explores it through the lens of infrastructure in a highly original way. This innovative piece of research is unusual in matching a finely detailed account of colonial bureaucracy with a big argument about the global making of modernity."Faisal Devji, Professor of Indian History, University of Oxford