Walk through any old Indian city today and you’ll likely cross an invisible border. On one side: narrow lanes, temples tucked into corners, mosques with call-to-prayer echoing off close-set walls. On the other: broad avenues, bungalows, government offices, church spires. This split isn’t accidental. It’s a direct legacy of how the British reorganised Indian cities, and how religion adapted, resisted, and reinvented itself within that new order.
Table of Contents
Two cities within one city
Before colonial rule, many Indian cities were already religious centres. Temples, mosques, and shrines sat at the heart of urban life, not separate from it. The British changed this relationship entirely. They carved out new zones such as civil lines and cantonments, spacious, orderly enclaves built specifically to house administrative staff, military officers, and European residents.
These civil lines and cantonment areas received the bulk of colonial infrastructure investment, including piped water, sewerage, and electrification, while the older parts of the city were left to fend for themselves. The contrast was deliberate. Colonial administrators projected the new enclaves as symbols of governance, hygiene, and rational order. The old walled city, by comparison, was routinely described as chaotic, unsanitary, and ruled by custom rather than reason.
This wasn’t unique to one city. In Bombay and Calcutta, the divide was formalised through separate ‘white towns’ for Europeans and ‘black towns’ for the native population, each with its own architectural language, civic amenities, and rules of belonging. Historian Carl Nightingale traces this colour-coded template back to exactly these settlements, and notes that the colonial city was cosmopolitan by design, even as it was segregated by policy. That’s the paradox worth sitting with: cities built to look modern and secular were, from their foundations, structured around exclusion.
Was the new city actually secular?
The administrative enclaves projected themselves as cosmopolitan, rational spaces, free from the “superstition” associated with the old city. Social scientists studying these cities found this framing incomplete. Religion didn’t disappear from the new urban centres. It changed shape.
Folk deities and the old city
In the walled, older parts of colonial cities, religion remained visibly woven into daily life. Neighbourhood shrines, folk deities, and local festivals continued largely as they always had, tied to specific streets, guilds, and communities. This was the India that colonial reports liked to describe as backward, precisely because its religious life was public, embodied, and resistant to being tucked away.
New sects for a new city
The so-called modern parts of the city told a different story. Colonial rule generally followed a policy of non-interference in indigenous religion, which, combined with the commercial energy of port cities, created unexpected room for religious reorganisation. Research on Bombay shows that caste and religious sects were reoriented as a response to ideological and political change, taking on new institutional forms such as guilds and associations as the city industrialised. Far from fading, religious identity gained fresh visibility and organisational strength precisely because the colonial economy demanded new forms of community and trust among migrants, traders, and workers.
Port cities amplify this pattern. Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and Cochin all grew as centres where trade and the movement of people created a genuinely mixed, multi-religious culture. The East India Company had, in fact, actively courted this diversity from the start, offering trading privileges and freedom of religion to attract merchant communities from across faiths into its new ports. Religion in the “modern” city, then, wasn’t absent. It was repackaged, organised, and put to new commercial and social use.
Religion as a tool for anti-colonial resistance
If religion could be reorganised for commerce, it could also be reorganised for politics. Colonial law restricted political assemblies and public protest, but it generally left religious gatherings alone. Nationalist leaders noticed the gap and used it.
Tilak and the Ganesh Chaturthi
Ganesh Chaturthi was originally a modest, largely domestic observance. In 1893, Bal Gangadhar Tilak began encouraging its transformation into a large public festival in Bombay and Poona, complete with community pandals, processions, and patriotic songs. The timing mattered. The festival’s public form emerged partly to fill the space left by declining Mohurram processions, and Tilak, already a prominent nationalist voice, recognised its potential as a legal way to gather crowds under the British administration’s nose. A religious gathering could not easily be banned the way a political rally could.
What began as a devotional event became a platform for speeches, community mobilisation, and open expressions of anti-colonial sentiment, cutting across caste lines in a way few other public occasions managed at the time. The festival’s growth mirrors the broader pattern this unit is built on: religion in the colonial city was never purely private. It was public, visible, and strategically deployed.
The Kumbh Mela as a meeting ground
The Kumbh Mela offers an even larger-scale example. Held periodically at Allahabad and other sacred river confluences, it drew enormous crowds well before colonial rule, but its scale gave it new political weight once the freedom movement gathered pace. Colonial intelligence records confirm this directly. A British-era communication from 1920, held in the National Archives, notes that a 1918 meeting during the Kumbh Mela drew 300 delegates and 2,000 visitors and adopted a formal political memorial on land rights and civic reform, later feeding into the establishment of the UP Peasants Association. Nationalist leaders including Tilak and Gopal Krishna Gokhale used subsequent Kumbh gatherings to promote the Swadeshi movement, and by the 1930s the Congress party was actively organising around the Mela’s crowds.
What made this possible was the same colonial blind spot that helped Ganesh Chaturthi grow: religious gatherings sat outside the usual net of political surveillance and restriction. A pilgrimage was, on paper, just a pilgrimage. In practice, it became one of the largest recurring platforms for anti-colonial organising in the country.
The modern sacred: what this legacy left behind
The colonial city drew a hard line between the “modern” and the “religious,” but that line never held. The administrative enclaves that claimed secular rationality quietly became sites of new religious organisation. The old cities that colonial writers dismissed as backward remained centres of both everyday faith and, when needed, political resistance. Religion in the Indian city was never simply a private matter tucked away from public life; it was constantly being reshaped by, and pushed back against, the structures colonial rule tried to impose.
This pattern didn’t end with independence. Many Indian cities still carry the spatial and social imprint of civil lines versus old city, planned enclave versus dense mohalla. Understanding how religion moved through and around these divisions helps explain why sacred space in Indian cities still carries political weight today, from festival processions that double as assertions of public presence to disputes over who gets to use which street on which day.
What do you think? Do public religious festivals still function as spaces for collective political expression in Indian cities today, or has their role changed since independence? And do you see traces of the old civil lines versus walled city divide in the city you live in or have visited?
References
- https://sociology.institute/urban-sociology/urbanisation-urban-growth-india-historical-perspective/
- https://southasiatimes.org/colonial-legacies-of-bombay-and-calcutta/
- https://urbanstudies.institute/urbanisation-in-india/evolution-of-madras-bombay-calcutta/
- https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2019/10/22/the-making-of-hindu-cosmopolitanism/
- https://www.iias.asia/events/displacement-religion-and-urban-space-making-indias-southwest-littoral
- https://www.thecollector.com/ganesha-chaturthi-hindu-festival/
- https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/kumbh-mela-meeting-ground-for-freedom-fighters-during-british-raj-119030500440_1.html
Leave a Reply