By looking at the spatial cultures of provincial governance in district-headquarter (zilla sadar) towns of colonial Bengal from the late-eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth century, my thesis argues that colonial spatial landscapes in provincial areas were far more complex than the simple binary frameworks centred on categories such as black-town/ white town, dominant/ dependant spaces, native/ sahib areas that much of post-colonial studies have postulated. The thesis demonstrates that the very mechanics of evolution of colonial provincial governance through what was, by necessity, a trial and error process, in effect created a pluralistic and heterogeneous spatial culture - both at the level of individual buildings as well as the overall urban form of the towns in question. While the thesis shows that governmental architectural conceptions in provincial Bengal clearly became increasingly deterministic and normative from the early to the late-nineteenth century, it also shows how, in practice, these ideas continued to be tempered by forces that resisted homogeneity and singular authoritarian encoding of space. Analysing provincial administrative buildings as the core of the study, but extending this to the reading of related domestic and public spaces and the overall urban form of the zilla sadar, the study also demonstrates the complex nature of overlap between spatial and functional categories like work, home and leisure in the provincial context. It argues therefore that it is these various aspects that made the spatial culture of zilla sadar towns a fluid one, which was distinct from, but also calibrated between metropolitan centres like Calcutta on the one hand and a vast rural hinterland on the other. In order to capture the complexity of the subject, I have used a variety of methodological approaches, culling together tools from a number of disciplines such as architectural/spatial studies, historical studies, cultural studies and cultural anthropology, combining extensive field- work with detailed archival research.