The making of a model town: planning in a Princely city and the All-India Sanitary Conferences

Abstract

The arrival of the third plague pandemic in the Indian Subcontinent in the late nineteenth century is well known to have prompted the state to rethink colonial governance. In this article, I examine how a locality in Bangalore, Fraser Town, was turned into a ‘model town’ at the All-India Sanitary Conferences hosted between 1911-1914, in the aftermath of the plague. I juxtapose archival manuals that recount the planning of Fraser Town with the discussions on town planning in the AISC proceedings to show how a universal ‘plague urbanism’ emerged as the most effective prophylactic against disease across Imperial India. The colonial government’s intent to project Fraser Town as an exemplar of sanitary planning at the AISC, I argue, had a twofold agenda. In Bangalore, they could claim credit for creating a model town although it was the Princely Mysore State’s capital. Across Imperial India, Fraser Town supported the Conferences’ agenda of deconstructing the difference between British, Princely, and variously ruled territories, reconstituting them in a performatively united ‘All-India’ against disease. Putting the making of Fraser Town alongside the imperial AISC, in dialogue with a global pandemic and conferencing; I show how planning processes were integral to territorial aspirations of empire.