Creation and Presentation of Indian Cities: Historical Evolution and Urban Development

Every Indian city carries layers of history you can still read on its streets. A grid of lanes here, a mosque-centred neighbourhood there, a colonial cantonment on the edge of town, a steel township built around a factory gate. India’s cities were not built once. They were built again and again, by different rulers, migrants, and planners, each leaving a mark that the next generation built over rather than erased. Understanding how Indian cities took shape tells us as much about power, faith, and displacement as it does about roads and buildings.

The three phases of India’s urbanisation story 🔗

India’s journey from a rural to an urban society has unfolded slowly and unevenly. Demographers usually break this journey into three broad phases: a period of slow urbanisation between 1901 and 1931, a phase of medium urbanisation from 1931 to 1961, and a rapid phase that began around 1961 and continues today. Urban population as a share of the total rose from roughly 11 percent at the start of the twentieth century to just over 31 percent by 2011, when about 377 million Indians lived in towns and cities. According to detailed analysis of the 2011 Census, official urban figures blend a statistical definition of density and contiguity with a legal definition based on municipal boundaries, which is part of why India’s urban share looks comparatively low next to countries that define urban areas differently.

Two forces drive this growth: natural increase within cities, and migration from villages. Migration has usually mattered more. As cities became centres of political power, trade, industry, and education, they pulled in people looking for work and opportunity that villages could not offer. This pull has only intensified since the 1990s, as liberalisation opened up private-sector jobs concentrated overwhelmingly in urban India.

Ancient and medieval foundations of Indian cities 🔗

The Indus Valley Civilization: India’s first urban planners 🔗

The idea of a planned Indian city is thousands of years old. Cities like Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, built by the Indus Valley Civilization around 2500 BCE, were laid out on a strict grid, with wide main streets running north-south and east-west, and residential blocks organised around them. According to research on Indus town planning, both cities were divided into a raised citadel area and a larger lower town, with covered drains running beneath the streets to carry away wastewater. This level of civic infrastructure, planned centuries before comparable systems appeared elsewhere, shows that urban design and public sanitation were priorities from the very beginning of city life on the subcontinent.

Mughal cities: power, faith, and neighbourhood order 🔗

The Mughal period was a second major turning point for Indian urbanisation. Emperors built and rebuilt capital cities to project authority and control trade. Agra grew into a major commercial hub under successive Mughal rulers, while Shah Jahan founded Shahjahanabad, today’s Old Delhi, in 1638 as a purpose-built imperial capital centred on the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid. According to IGNOU study material on Mughal urbanisation, capital towns like Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, and Shahjahanabad combined political, administrative, and commercial functions, with lively bazaars operating independently of imperial patronage rather than surviving only on royal spending.

These cities were also organised around Islamic institutions. Mosques were arranged in a clear hierarchy, from the emperor’s grand Jama Masjid down to hundreds of smaller neighbourhood mosques funded by nobles and traders. Housing followed a similar logic. According to a study of Shahjahanabad’s social geography, residential areas were divided by caste and occupation, with elite groups clustered near the centre of the city and lower-ranking artisans and labourers pushed toward the periphery, a pattern that echoed the spatial logic of the traditional Hindu village even within a Mughal Islamic city.

Colonial rule and its lasting mark on Indian cities 🔗

Hill stations and cantonments: engineering distance 🔗

British colonial rule reshaped Indian cities in ways still visible today. Calcutta, Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, and Kanpur all carry direct or indirect traces of British planning and architecture. To escape the heat of the plains, the British built entirely new hill towns such as Shimla, McLeod Ganj, and Mount Abu. Shimla is the clearest example: what began as a small hill village became, by 1864, the official summer capital of British India, complete with a railway line, a Viceregal Lodge, and Tudor-style cottages that made it feel, to colonial officials, like a slice of England. According to the Himachal Pradesh government’s official history of Shimla, the town’s development as a hill station and later as a princely-state merger site shaped its administrative importance well after independence.

Alongside hill stations, the British established cantonment areas, known locally as chaavni, to house army officers and troops separately from the existing Indian population. These military townships, along with civilian “civil lines” built for British administrators, created a segregated urban layout that placed colonial infrastructure such as piped water and street lighting in European quarters while largely bypassing native neighbourhoods.

Civil lines and the colonial cityscape after independence 🔗

Decades after independence, this colonial imprint has not disappeared. Civil lines neighbourhoods still exist in cities including Delhi, Allahabad, and Jaipur, often retaining their status as administratively important or affluent localities. Clock towers, locally called Ghantaghar, still stand in the centre of many north Indian towns, a small but persistent reminder of how deliberately the British reshaped urban space for their own convenience and control.

Partition, refugees, and new towns after 1947 🔗

Partition’s sudden urban surge 🔗

The 1947 Partition of British India triggered one of the most abrupt urban transformations in the country’s history. Lakhs of people crossed the new border from Pakistan and initially settled in migrant camps, many of which were later converted into permanent urban colonies. Delhi absorbed a huge share of this migration. According to an account of Delhi’s refugee history published in the Economic and Political Weekly, the capital’s population jumped by roughly 90 percent between the 1941 and 1951 censuses, compared to about 13 percent growth in the rest of the country over the same period. This single event explains why the 1941 to 1951 decade shows the sharpest jump in India’s urbanisation figures of the entire twentieth century.

New towns for political and humanitarian reasons 🔗

Not all post-independence urban growth came from Partition. Several new towns emerged for political reasons, particularly the formation of new state capitals as India’s internal boundaries were redrawn along linguistic and administrative lines. Refugee resettlement also created entirely new urban communities beyond 1947. When the Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959, Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh became the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile and grew into a settlement built around this refugee community, illustrating how displacement, not just trade or governance, can create a city from scratch.

Cities shaped by faith and industry 🔗

Pilgrimage cities: economies built around devotion 🔗

Many Indian cities owe their existence and continued growth to religious significance rather than trade routes or political decisions. Ajmer, Varanasi, Ujjain, Haridwar, Mathura, Puri, and Rameswaram all evolved organically around temples, shrines, and river ghats, with local economies built almost entirely around the needs of pilgrims. Anthropologists have studied these cities closely to understand how Indian civilisation itself is structured. Robert Redfield and Milton Singer developed the influential concept of the “sacred complex,” while McKim Marriott and L.P. Vidyarthi extended this framework through fieldwork in specific pilgrimage towns, showing how ritual, commerce, and caste organisation are woven together in these urban spaces in ways that differ sharply from cities built for administration or industry.

Planned industrial towns: cities built around a factory 🔗

A very different model of urban growth came from industrialisation. Cities like Jamshedpur, Bhilai, Bokaro, and Jamnagar grew up almost entirely around a single large industry, usually steel or mining. Jamshedpur, built by the Tata Group in the early twentieth century, became the template for later state-built steel towns. According to Steel Authority of India’s own history of its steel cities, Bhilai’s development began with an Industrial Policy statement tabled in Parliament in April 1948, and the town was built on land acquired from several existing villages to house the new plant and its workforce. These “company towns” prioritised worker housing, sanitation, and civic amenities from the outset, giving them a very different character from the organically grown bazaars and neighbourhoods of older Indian cities.

What ethnographers have found inside Indian cities 🔗

Beyond broad historical patterns, anthropologists have used detailed fieldwork to understand what life inside Indian cities actually looks like. K.L. Mythili’s study of a Tamil migrant enclave, titled “Little Madras in Bombay City,” and O.M. Lynch’s work on rural-urban continuities both explored how migrants recreate familiar social worlds inside unfamiliar cities. Jonathan Parry’s ethnography of Varanasi, “Death in Banaras,” examined how death rituals sustain an entire urban economy, while his later work on the Bhilai steel plant, “Classes of Labour,” traced how a planned industrial township produced new and often unequal forms of working-class identity. Amita Baviskar’s “Uncivil City,” reviewed in detail by the LSE Review of Books, examined two decades of environmental politics in Delhi and argued that elite-driven “green” campaigns have often displaced the urban poor rather than protecting shared resources. Eric Denis and Marie-Hélène Zérah’s edited volume on subaltern urbanisation extended this focus to India’s smaller, less-studied towns, highlighting how informal economies and everyday negotiation, rather than formal planning, actually hold much of urban India together.

Taken together, these studies push back against the idea that Indian cities can be understood through maps and census figures alone. They show cities as lived, contested spaces, shaped as much by caste, migration, ritual, and informal labour as by roads and buildings.

What do you think? Which layer of history do you think shapes your own city the most today, its ancient roots, its colonial past, or the industries and migrations that built it after independence? And as Indian cities keep growing, do you think planned townships or organically grown neighbourhoods do a better job of serving the people who actually live in them?

References

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10327898/
2. https://tpmap.org/submission/index.php/tpm/article/download/2976/2225/6462
3. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/109045/1/Theme-III.pdf
4. http://www.sahapedia.org/shahjahanabad-physical-vis-vis-socio-cultural-space
5. https://hpshimla.nic.in/history/
6. https://www.epw.in/engage/article/embracing-%E2%80%98refugee-istan%E2%80%99-look-delhis-refugee
7. https://www.sail.co.in/sites/default/files/publication/2020-06/sail_steel_cities.pdf
8. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2021/07/14/book-review-uncivil-city-ecology-equity-and-the-commons-in-delhi-by-amita-baviskar/