It was long customary to begin essays on the historiography of cities in South Asia by mentioning the low level of scholarly interest once given to the study of urban pasts; but a major corpus of work on this subject certainly now exists. In our view, the most important shortcomings of the existing body of scholarship now lie less in their neglect of historical urbanism than in the relative inattention given to a particular phase of urban history: the middle decades of the twentieth century. The historiography of South Asian cities has concentrated highly on what might be called ‘the long nineteenth century’, a phase lasting from the establishment of British rule (which varied according to the region being discussed) to some point during the early twentieth century. Many of the richest works in the field confine themselves completely to nineteenth-century developments or begin sometime during the late.