Social Science Baha

invites you to its
Lecture Series CXXI

Gaurav C. Garg
on
Development Insights for Kathmandu (and Others) from the ‘World’s Worst City’

5 pm | 27 May 2026 (Wednesday) | Yala Maya Kendra, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur

Reputations matter. In the 1950s and 1960s, Calcutta—the erstwhile capital of British India and the cradle of Indian modernity—acquired a dubious reputation as the ‘World’s Worst City’. Calcutta’s hyperreal reputation was invoked by a broad political spectrum—from the American left and right to even Fidel Castro of Cuba—to rationalise a variety of positions on urban development.

This lecture explores how this great city acquired such an awful reputation and what the consequences were for Calcutta and other cities globally, including Kathmandu. It will also focus on how and why American media framed Calcutta as the exemplar of urban crisis, why Indian politicians and media went along with this framing, and how this attention brought foreign aid to Calcutta but also contributed to repulsing private sector capital investments.

The lecture will also show how Calcutta’s growing disrepute forced a shift in the anti-urban bias of international development agencies such as the World Bank and the Ford Foundation in the 1950s towards active interventions in urban affairs in the 1960s. This, in turn, bolstered the case for state-led policy and development interventions in cities globally. In fact, Kathmandu’s own urban planning efforts emerged in this very global context. However, from the mid-1970s, Calcutta’s ‘refusal to die’ became an example used by the American right to argue in favour of planned shrinkage and benign neglect of cities, which, along with the collapse of New York’s city government, contributed to the emergence of neoliberal urbanism.

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Gaurav C. Garg is an Assistant Professor of History at Ashoka University, India. He was trained at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University and obtained his PhD from New York University. He is a historian of cities, business, mountaineering, and development in modern South Asia. His book, Agents of Inertia: Business, Urban Crisis, and Economic Decline in Twentieth-Century Calcutta, will be published by the Cambridge University Press in July 2026. His works have also appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of Global History, Journal of Historical Geography and South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies. He is currently working on two book projects: on the history of the Ford Foundation in India, and a global history of Indian mountaineering. Professor Garg is also trying to make tentative forays into modern Nepali history.

The lecture will also be livestreamed at http://facebook.com/soscbaha.

Admission is free and open to all on a first-come-first-seated basis.