ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 focusses on Delhi's fourth nineteenth-century construct, Tamed Delhi. This construct emerges post-British victory, with the Raj initiating an agenda to penalize and discipline the insurgent city by transforming it into a tamed ‘Colonial Modern’ Delhi. The construct operates in the post-uprising space that decisively ended Delhi's dual power centres and established the Raj's supremacy. With the insurgent city not being demolished as a punishment, colonial sanitarians cast a mantle of modernity over it to make it safe; secure; healthy and genteel. Three spatial interventions, that encapsulate the construct, facilitated this transformation, a military landscape spatialized as the Garrison-Barrack-Battery-Esplanade combine; a civic landscape spatialized as the Town Hall-Club-Public Park-Library-Menagerie combine and an industrial landscape spatialized as the Railway Station-Factory-Mill-Warehouse combine. Meanwhile, Dilliwallahs also engaged with modernity in many ways as some became Anglicized, while others nostalgically recalled Mughal Adab as the city's defining character, with the rest lying in between. With the British enclave occupying nearly half of the city, not only did Dilliwallahs’ city space shrink considerably, it also became highly insalubrious due to rapid growth, thus compromising the Raj's vision of a healthy ‘Colonial Modern’ Delhi. The British pursued their endeavours to modernize Delhi and also reinstated its position as a historic seat of power as the city officially proclaimed Queen Victoria as the Empress of India, two decades after the uprising, in 1877.
