In the last chapter, I discussed how the British tried to reduce all Indian neighbourhoods into an insanitary black town. In this chapter, I argue that the black town facilitated massive land acquisitions that powered a lucrative market in land. The British began to plan Calcutta in the wake of the plague epidemic in 1898. The plague outbreak showed that earlier town improvement committees had failed to improve the city's health. Improvement committees, such as the Lottery Committee and the Justices of Peace, had planned new streets and filled up water bodies, but these were localized projects. The ravages of the plague mandated a complete reordering of the entire city that assisted colonial land acquisitions. In 1911, the state commissioned a town planning committee—the Calcutta Improvement Trust—to draw a fresh plan for the city. The Trust's plans embraced Victorian notions of hygiene and advocated a new spatial order for Calcutta that required levelling and rebuilding Indian neighbourhoods.

In Victorian London, the state instructed citizens in hygiene. Health officers schooled city dwellers in scientific ways to dispose garbage, clean their houses, and maintain healthy bodies. But hygiene in nineteenth-century London meant more than clean spaces and bodies. It was tied to notions of respectability. The obsession of wealthy Londoners with hygiene contrasted with the sweatand dirt-covered bodies of the workers, casting the former as respectable and the latter as embodiments of shame. This divide also informed city spaces, forcing the poor to live in separate neighbourhoods away from the rich. The state was aware of the wretched living conditions in the poorer neighbourhoods but refused to extend civic amenities like modern streets or sewers. Instead, health officers labelled the poor ‘inherently unhygienic’, carriers of disease. This, in turn, strengthened class divides in the city.

The language of hygiene that nourished a class hierarchy in Britain, when imported to India, fuelled a hierarchy of race. Colonial health officers viewed the Indians in the same way as they viewed the urban poor in London. To that end, they employed hygiene—defined entirely according to English standards of sanitation—to condemn Indians as unhygienic by nature.