This is a highly original account of the design and development of Pakistan's capital city; one of the most iconic and ambitious urban reconstruction projects of the twentieth century. Balancing archival research with fresh, theoretical insights, Markus Daechsel surveys the successes and failures of Greek urbanist Constantinos A. Doxiadis's most ambitious endeavour, Islamabad, analysing how the project not only changed the international order, but the way in which the Pakistani state operated in the 1950s and 1960s. In dissecting Doxiadis's fraught encounter with Pakistani policy makers, bureaucrats and ordinary citizens, the book offers an unprecedented account of Islamabad's place in post-war international development. Daechsel provides new insights into this period and explores the history of development as a charged, transnational venture between foreign consultants and donors on the one side and the postcolonial nation state on the other.

The 1930s to 1950s witnessed the rise and dominance of a political culture across much of North India which combined unprecedented levels of mobilization and organization with an effective de-politicization of politics. On the one hand obsessed with world events, people also came to understand politics as a question of personal morality and achievement. In other words, politics was about expressing the self in new ways and about finding and securing an imaginary home in a fast-moving and often terrifying universe. The scope and arguments of this book make an innovative contribution to the historiography of modern South Asia, by focusing on the middle-class milieu which was the epicentre of this new political culture.

Middleclass political culture in interwar North India was haunted by fascistic resonance. Activists from various political camps believed in forms of Social-Darwinism, worshipped violence and war and focused their political action on public spectacles and paramilitary organization. This book argues that these features were part of a larger political culture - the politics of self-expression - that had lost sight of society as the normal space in which politics was to be conducted. Instead, there was an emphasis on the inner worlds of individuals who increasingly came to understand politics as an avenue to personal salvation. It proposes that this re-orientation of politics was the result of social transformations brought about by the coming of a consumer society. The politics of self-expression was fixated with matters related to political choices, the branding of clothes and bodies and the use of a political language that closely resembled advertising discourse. This study traces the socio-genesis of this new form of politics through a detailed analysis of material culture in the Urdu middleclass milieu. It examines how middleclass people arrived at their political opinions in consequence of how they structured their immediate spatial surroundings, and how they strove to define the experiences of their own bodies in a particularly middleclass way. The scope and arguments of this book make an innovative contribution to the historiography of modern South Asia.

This is a highly original account of the design and development of Pakistan's capital city; one of the most iconic and ambitious urban reconstruction projects of the twentieth century. Balancing archival research with fresh, theoretical insights, Markus Daechsel surveys the successes and failures of Greek urbanist Constantinos A. Doxiadis's most ambitious endeavour, Islamabad, analysing how the project not only changed the international order, but the way in which the Pakistani state operated in the 1950s and 1960s. In dissecting Doxiadis's fraught encounter with Pakistani policy makers, bureaucrats and ordinary citizens, the book offers an unprecedented account of Islamabad's place in post-war international development. Daechsel provides new insights into this period and explores the history of development as a charged, transnational venture between foreign consultants and donors on the one side and the postcolonial nation state on the other.