The ‘subaltern’ awakening in postcolonial urban studies and narratives beyond small towns: reflections from Siliguri, West Bengal

This paper is an intervention in the research realms of Southern and Subaltern urbanisation that has simultaneously addressed metro‐centrism and North‐centrism in critical urban scholarship. This is done by raising a few questions around medium‐sized cities and their under‐representation in scholarly endeavours. A reconsideration of how medium‐sized cities are treated while making theoretical and empirical sense of Southern urbanisation is long overdue. To that end, the present intervention empirically grounds itself in a medium‐sized city, Siliguri, which is the largest urban cluster in the northern part of West Bengal, India. Drawing on critical literature, in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with urban and regional affairs scholars in India as well as key informants from Siliguri, the paper develops a research agenda that seeks to capture the urban conditions of those cities which conform neither to the demographic threshold of metropolitan cities nor small towns; and theorise them under the critical field of subaltern urbanisation.