Bazaar Lives: Calcutta, New Urban Form and Spatial Experience: 1890–1940

South Asian cities share a contested late colonial history.Calcutta (Kolkata) occupies a distinctive place in their emergence as modernising urban centres.Instead of viewing changes in Calcutta's markets merely as the products of colonial and racial hierarchies-or as the product of modernisation-mental maps of people moving through these spaces inform a deeper understanding.Attempts by the Calcutta municipality to 'modernise' markets using European assumptions about how urban markets work, failed to recognise the autonomous nature of indigenous 'mental maps' .The paper analyses these tensions through a street-level observational typology.An experiential legibility of urban spaces thus exposes an otherwise obscured haptic and psychological tension, as cities modernised, between a Westernised urban sensibility and an expanding autonomous space.1.