ABSTRACT
Making Calcutta sanitary, as Norman Chevers would suggest, was intricately linked with the projects of curing and civilizing the native of Bengal, by nurturing the natural instinct of “self-preservation” into a highly cultured rationale for selfdiscipline. The history of sanitation in the city helps retrace the ways in which imperial ideologies were captured in (and by) urban space and programs for sanitation, how the concerns for health and wealth clashed and were reconciled by imperial liberalism, and how the connections between poverty and barbarism, between cleanliness and civilization, came to be naturalized through a discourse on sanitation. A ‘sanitary city’ was imagined between the 1830s and 1850s, to replace the dual city of the days of the Company’s nabobs. In the dual city, the problem of sanitation had been resolved through the separation of “vulnerable” European bodies from Indian filth, realized in the segregation of the black and white towns. Such dualism could no longer contain the enthusiasm of the liberals in their eastern empire in the years of reform.
