The Lost Grammar of Indian Urbanisation – The Civic Collapse

There was once a rhythm to Indian urban life -

a grammar of space and sanctity that evolved organically around water, worship, and community.

Cities grew from sacred centres - temples, tanks, rivers - outward into streets, homes, and courtyards. The geometry of our towns had purpose: they were meant to be walked, lived, and breathed.

Then came the Mughals. Their imprint was never without violence. Having come themselves from barren steppes, they inherited a landscape rich with sanctity and rhythm and made it serve empire, appropriating and layering it.

They drew upon Indic pragmatism. Charbagh gardens and waterbodies echoed Vedic mandala symmetry, while bazaars and caravanserais often coexisted within the same civic fabric, reflecting an understanding of climate, commerce, and community.

Yet Mughal urbanism was imperial, not civic. The city revolved around the court, not the citizen; beauty thrived, but public responsibility withered. And when the Empire waned, its cities stripped of patronage and purpose began their slow decline into disrepair.

By the time the British arrived, what they saw was not India’s living sacred urbanism but the ruins of Mughal imperial urbanism. They, in turn, brought a very different idea of a city.

To the colonial mind, it was not a living organism but a military and administrative machine. Order had to replace organic growth; control had to replace community. 

European cities had evolved around churches and cathedrals, their spiritual heart shaping civic life around it. But in a colony, the policy was not to build around faith but to control and erase it.

Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Delhi became centres of commerce and command, while Varanasi, Haridwar, Ayodhya, and Ujjain were left to their fate. The sacred cities of India, teeming with pilgrims, cows, and rituals, were everything the Empire wanted to “civilise” out of existence.

They created “Civil Lines” for the sahibs and “native towns” for the rest. One side had gardens, drains, and promenades; the other had open sewers, filth, and faith. It was segregation disguised as sanitation.

So when Independence arrived, we inherited not just their cities but their contempt. The colonial disdain for the “native” became the postcolonial planner’s embarrassment with the sacred.

Nehruvian modernity, true to a new convert, shunned its past and, instead of an inclusive embrace, continued the segregation. 

Civil Lines and a Lutyens for the Brown Sahibs; beyond it - native chaos. India’s sacred urbanism was quietly written out of its own history. Our holy cities decayed. Narrow lanes choked with garbage, overflowing drains, crumbling temples, encroached ghats. All politely ignored in the name of secular restraint. After all, restoring a temple precinct might appear communal, and that was a label no bureaucrat wished to earn.

Compare this to Mecca, Jerusalem, or the Vatican, all meticulously preserved as global heritage sites. 

Whereas India, civilisation’s oldest urban experiment, let its cities rot with an almost philosophical detachment.

But the story doesn’t end with the State’s neglect. 

It deepens with society’s. We Indians have perfected the art of worshipping our gods while defiling their surroundings.

We offer milk to the deity and throw plastic packets into the river. We light lamps at the ghat and toss the burnt wick into the water. Our flower garlands choke drains. Ritual purity, public filth — the two coexist happily in our moral landscape.

For all our religiosity, we are civically illiterate. We treat the street as someone else’s problem, the drain as the government’s job, and cleanliness as optional. 

The colonial subject in us never quite evolved into the civic citizen. We remain a people who look upwards for deliverance and sideways for blame.

So when one man launched Swachh Bharat, we clapped, took selfies with brooms and went back to littering.

The campaign revealed something uncomfortable: the dirt on our streets is less about infrastructure and more about attitude. 

The problem is not the lack of dustbins; it’s the lack of ownership. The real filth is psychological — a mix of fatalism, laziness, and entitlement.

In the absence of civic discipline, cities have collapsed under their own chaos. Urban India today is a study in contradictions. Gleaming flyovers above overflowing gutters, luxury towers beside mounds of garbage, and temples surrounded by filth. 

We have mastered the aesthetics of devotion but not the ethics of citizenship.

Our municipalities, meanwhile, have become monuments to mediocrity with bloated bureaucracies that sweep only where the VIP is expected to walk. 

There is no civic imagination, only tokenism. The ward office is where files go to die; tenders are floated not for public good but private gain. The few honest officers who try to enforce rules are either transferred or tamed.

Local governance meant to be the first and most responsive tier of democracy is now the most dysfunctional. 

The result is visible in every overflowing drain, every broken pavement, every encroached footpath. We live amid a civic collapse that is both administrative and moral.

Our urban spaces mirror this decay. Parks become parking lots, lakes turn into landfills, and pavements into open bazaars. Masterplans are drafted with imported jargon but little local wisdom. The pedestrian, once central to our streets, is now an inconvenience.

Urban India no longer breathes. It merely exists, gasping between concrete and corruption.

Yes, there are projects.

Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, Mahakal Lok, Kedarnath’s rebuilding that suggest a course correction. But architecture alone cannot fix what mindset destroyed. 

You can restore a temple; you cannot yet restore civic sense.

The British may have divided our cities; Independence didn’t unite them. Faith endured, but civic virtue perished. And somewhere between the sacred and the squalid even the Gods looked away and gave up on us.

However, all is not lost. 

The grammar can be relearned - one act of responsibility at a time. A citizen who refuses to litter, does not deface public space with paan and gutka, revives a park, or holds a municipality accountable, restores more than just cleanliness; they restore faith. After all, civic sense, like culture, begins with the individual. 

The Power of One can ripple through a thousand streets because the city is ultimately a mirror of us, its citizens. When we reclaim that ownership, our cities might finally look back at us, not with despair, but with the dignity we deserve.