Bourgeois residential urban form

In 1896, an outbreak of bubonic plague devastated the colonial city of Bombay, nearly halving its population and sending the public health administration of the entire province into disarray. The hastily-constituted Bombay Plague Committee commissioned a series of photographs to document the public health response to the plague, an operation which relied on a staff of sweepers, scavengers, health workers and midwives from lowered caste communities. These workers were employed by voluntary organisations and charitable institutions who worked closely with the colonial government over four decades to build a range of modern sanitary urban amenities. Some of these voluntary organisations were run by upper-caste Hindu nationalists, the most prominent of whom was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Gandhi idealised an ‘urban/rural utopia'(a self-sufficient village untouched by colonial modernity) as a symbol of the ‘real India’, and in 1936, he built an urban/rural utopia named Sevagram Ashram in the eastern Bombay Presidency. Although intended to demonstrate nationalist self-reliance, Sevagram Ashram was built on an industrialist’s privately owned land and dependent on modern sanitary urban amenities built by the colonial public health authorities. One of Gandhi’s many followers was upper-caste engineer Raghunath Sripad Deshpande, who wrote a number of house construction manuals for his readers in the Bombay Presidency in the 1930s. Deshpande fused Gandhi’s upper-caste paternalist ethos with the public health department’s anti-epidemic measures to forge a new type of middle class neighbourhood, marked by the routine evictions of marginalised populations to make way for exclusive enclaves for upper-caste white-collar homeowners.