This article traces the long-term development of the neighborhood unit concept in Indian planning practice and literature. By concentrating on the role and actions of post-independence planners, this article also explains the steps through which they reconciled neighborhood unit’s perceived foreign-ness with its imagined potential for national development. It concludes that while planners assimilated the concept in planning practice rather successfully, their efforts eventually mattered little because a host of urban actors gradually transformed the built neighborhoods to the extent that they represent a distinct form of urbanism today.