The Interrupted Becoming of a City : Patna in the Census of India, 1901-31

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British officials in colonial India have always been harsh on Patna. ‘The inside of the city is disagreeable and disgusting,’ Francis Buchanan (later Hamilton) wrote in 1812, ‘and the view of it from a distance is mean’ (Buchanan 1922 [1812], 348). Buchanan, a botanist and the former superintendent of the Royal Botanic Garden of Calcutta