Contesting "the Public" in Colonial South Asia

This is an essay I wrote in September, 2026. At the time, I had a wonderful professor who deepened my interest in Indian cities, and I wrote the following about the friction between European visions of urbanism and public space and South Asian conceptions of collective space.

Since British colonial authorities started to reshape South Asian cities in the eighteenth century, South Asian understandings of the collective and collective space have been in tension with European conceptions of “the public” and “public space.” For instance, whereas the British viewed the outdoor space as a public arena defined by laws and boundaries which divided the rich and poor, South Asians understood the outdoors as a profoundly porous and intimate collective space that was informed by custom and hierarchy. British manipulations of the South Asian city sidelined Indian populations while benefitting the colonial elite. At the same time, colonial definitions of “the public” as a place to serve strictly codified “public interest” collided with South Asian viewpoints on how to use outdoor spaces. Throughout colonial rule, the British enforced laws that stopped South Asians from practicing their own understandings of the collective space. South Asians resisted these impositions of “the public” and “the private” in disputes with municipalities. But ultimately, colonial authorities retained the power to overrule such claims and enforced their own definitions of the public. 

South Asian conceptions of urban space contrasted sharply with British and European understandings, which rested on a more rigid distinction between the public and the private. Scholar Sudipta Kaviraj explains that in South Asian contexts, understandings of the “inside” do not equate to “the private,” and similarly, “the outside” does not equate to the “public.” For instance, the Indian household, which many European city models would designate as a private space, also hosts many communal activities, enforcing hierarchies and specific rules of communal responsibility. Thus, the communal usage of the household space in India does not perfectly align with European or bourgeois conceptions of “private space” which strictly reserves such grounds for just an individual and their family. Conversely, the outdoors in the South Asian city, which includes the street or the bazaar, carries personal qualities that Western models typically reserve for the private sphere. South Asian merchants often lived in, or, usually adjacent to, their own bazaars and small shops, for instance. Service industries that manufacture all kinds of goods are located in predominantly residential areas and are deeply ingrained in local neighborhood networks (Brush, 60). Whereas Western urban spaces operated on proper authorization, impersonality, legality, state sanction, and a clear ascription of individual responsibility, Indian common spaces were founded on common responsibility, obligation and action (Kaviraj, 89).

Moreover, the way in which Europeans enforced the law in collective spaces significantly differed from South Asian law enforcement strategies, which prioritized negotiation with the urban poor rather than immediate punishment for law violation. As scholar Partha Chatterjee explains, the distinction between civic and political society in South Asian society significantly informed law enforcement. The city’s poorest inhabitants, whom Chatterjee situates within the "political society", often lived as squatters on public land and therefore fell into a rather ambiguous position under Indian law. Since their living conditions violated Indian law, these inhabitants could not always claim the rights of legally recognized citizens. Yet at the same time, their precarious position did not lead to a simple exclusion from urban governance. Instead, urban authorities actively negotiated with poorer populations; the city government’s role was deeply intertwined with the needs of the urban population. Sanjay Gandhi’s initiative to clear out slums in the 1970s, for instance, received lots of pushback and calls for political negotiation. In other cases, Indian authorities sanitized slum areas with the request that the squatters do not litter in return. This unique relationship underscores a continuous process of negotiation between authorities and poorer sects of Indian society, where good behavior on the part of the squatters warranted basic services and tolerance from government officials (Chatterjee, 175-176). This contrasts sharply with Western understandings and regulations of collective space, which imposes a more indiscriminate application of policy with little to no negotiation with violators. South Asian societies could not afford to ignore or jail all squatters because they formed such a massive part of society. Therefore, common spaces in India involved extensive political and legal negotiation with its inhabitants, which contributed to a more porous and class diverse framework for collective space. 

In their remodeling of Indian cities, the British only allowed a small and resource-limited space for the indigenous Indian population. A significant part of British colonial urban planning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the development of a “Master Plan” which sought to sanitize and minimize the space allotted to Indian people, while a larger plot of land was reserved for the British. The Master Plan left out the disorder, the poor, and squatter settlements which “did not exist” according to colonial elites. Moreover, the urban layout of South Asian cities also allocated specific large areas for the British, and therefore instilled deep ethnic and racial divisions in colonial society. Historian Anthony King notes New Delhi was “the ultimate imperial city” because it was specifically planned for administration and colonial opulence, and did not allocate the resources for industrial growth that would specifically benefit the South Asian communities (Anthony King, 33-35). Colonial dominance over the layout of Indian cities ultimately deprived Indian urban populations from the advancing technology and space that would have allowed them to thrive. Notions of “the public” and “public space” evolved within these constrained urban grounds in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as South Asians brought their pre-colonial understandings of the common space to their cities. European colonial ideas, which insisted that “the outside” was the “public”, and the “inside” was the “private” clashed with South Asian ideas of collective space. 

To instill their visions of “the public” and “the private”, colonial authorities established the “municipality” which created and enforced laws based on British urban standards. From the 1860s onward, these municipalities gradually replaced the older Mughal- or Sikh-era urban practices in Indian cities. Before colonialism, Indian societies held many collective spaces including bazaars, which were open to the use of many, but were not strictly classified as “public spaces.” While the British colonial authorities did not eliminate custom, those who asserted custom and tradition-based ideas of collective spaces had to resist the more legalized, municipal systems the British sought to impose (Glover, 8).

Meanwhile, South Asians’ defense of their own constructions of the common became a central part of South Asian dialogues about the usage of urban space. For instance, in a case that arose in Hoshiarpur, in 1885, a resident named Hamir Chand installed a wall around a well in public property. Chand claimed that although he knowingly installed his wall on public property, his wall was open to all people, and thus he did not consider it an encroachment on public property. Notably, Chand was assured by lawyers that he would not face any legal charges because the Municipal Committee had ruled in his favour. Later, Sir Charles Umpherston Aitchison, who was a British Lieutenant Governor of Punjab and the province’s highest official, declared that Chand’s wall violated public interests. He claimed that since “the well is a public well, and the street a public street” the actions of the Municipal Committee in favor of Chand were “illegal.” The Governor further pressured the committee by threatening to completely dissolve the Municipal body if they failed to compel Chand to remove his wall (Glover, 8). Disputes over mosques, wells, and streets show how Indians and colonial officials negotiated and contested meanings of “public.” The colonial authorities had the final say when it came to enforcement of public space regulations, even making threats to local legal committees in order to take down certain constructions, as in Hamir Chand’s case. The colonial authorities had the power to override (and even dissolve) an entire Municipal Committee if it judged the Committee’s decisions as inconsistent with colonial definitions of public space. Comparable tensions emerged over Indian-built mosques, shrines and wells where Indians claimed that their religious or customary obligations legitimized these constructions, while British colonial officials insisted on their own notions of codified “public interest” in the outdoor segments of the city. 

At heart, British colonial urbanism tried to impose a legalistic, property-bound notion of “the public,” while South Asians worked within more custom-based and hierarchical ideas of the collective space. The two systems collided over what counted as encroachment or legitimate communal use of space. Kaviraj argues that South Asian societies have not fully assimilated to British colonial authorities’ imposed binary models of public and private spaces. Instead, Western conceptions of inside/outside functions overlapped with South Asian ones, and created a unique,“historically specific configuration” of how South Asians understand and navigate space (Kaviraj, 89). By the twentieth century, the bazaars, shrines and other communal sites did not disappear from South Asian societies. However, as is demonstrated in the case of Hamir Chand, European ideas of “the public” and “encroachment” of that public property became deeply ingrained South Asian conversations about their cities. 

      Bibliography 

Kaviraj, Sudipta. “Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta.” Public Culture 1997. By Duke University Press. 83–113.

Chatterjee, Partha. “Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois at Last?” In Body City: Siting Contemporary Culture in India, edited by Indira Chandrasekhar and Peter C. Seel, 133–147. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2003.

Glover, William J. “Construing Urban Space as ‘Public’ in Colonial India: Some Notes from the Punjab.” The Journal of Punjab Studies 15, no. 1 (2008): 81–107.

Brush, John E. “The Morphology of Indian Cities.” In India’s Urban Future, edited by Roy Turner, 57–96. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.

Goldman, Michael. “Development and the City.” In Cities of the Global South Reader, edited by Faranak Miraftab and Neema Kudva, 97–105. New York: Routledge, 2014.

King, Anthony D. “Colonialism and Urban Development.” In Cities of the Global South Reader, edited by Faranak Miraftab and Neema Kudva, 45–53. New York: Routledge, 2015.