Urban ‘Failures’: Municipal Governance, Planning and Power in Colonial Delhi, 1863–1910

This article highlights the relationship between the ‘failures’ of municipal governance and the reproduction of its power in the colonial city. It examines the everyday operations of the Delhi Municipality between 1863 and 1910 and shows how the ‘failure’ to promote urban renewal actually provided ‘opportunities’ for the municipality’s own longevity. After the Rebellion of 1857, the Delhi Municipality was invested with a wide variety of powers to check sanitary offences and regulate building construction in Delhi. This article discusses how this very growth and centralisation of powers created severe challenges for the functions of the municipality. The growing complexity of its operations, recommendations of experts, costs of ambitious projects and resistance from city dwellers, it is suggested, constantly subverted municipal intentions. Yet, in bringing to light the ‘failure’ of municipal policies, this article will argue that failure was profoundly productive. Municipal ‘failure’ was always accompanied by the growth in its bureaucratic capabilities and regulatory powers.