ABSTRACT
Delhi in the early twentieth century was a city of many cities and a contested terrain: the object of European romantic imagery and denigration, the site of imperial destruction and, from the European perspective, improvement. The agendas of colonialism and the ideals of modernism encountered inherited structures and spatial practices in Delhi to create a fractured urbanism that de-familiarized the familiar, appropriated the new, and created the multiple conflicting landscapes of “modern” Delhi. The plural expressions of Delhi’s modernity also expressed the contradictions inherent in the planning interventions.
