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Robert Darnton writes that one can read cities as one does texts. Few historians would disagree. After all, the doyen of British urban history, H.J. Dyos, had been 'reading' streetscapes since the 1950s. Moreover, his peers had long felt comfortable with the idea that cities were templates which could in a sense be read in order to extract the historical developments that were 'reflected' in them. A younger generation of urban historians had been enthralled by the release in 1973 of the remarkable two-volumeThe Victorian City, and by the unfolding patterns through which its contributors sought to read the nineteenth-century cityscape. But now, well into the second decade afterThe Victorian City'sfirst publication, it is timely to ask how have historians sought to read? My conclusion is unflattering. It seems to me that historians are awkwardly equipped to interpret the urban past because of their primitive approach to texting the past. Some of the most successful readings of the urban past have drawn less from history than from archaeology, architecture, geography, literary criticism, and cultural anthropology. Such analysis is more directly geared to address the essence of the text: its immediacy to a particular audience. The texts which historians think of familiarly as their own are in fact anchored in the local horizons of people other than ourselves. Their context is not our own. Moreover, their quality is profoundly dynamic. They were tools by which people addressed and sustained common-sense meanings and rhythms amidst the indeterminacies of daily living in ever-changing urban settings.

This is a conference paper. ; The high rate of population growth in developing countries in recent times has created intricate sanitation problems which governments can no longer ignore. The problem is further accentuated by the constant drift of rural dwellers to the few urban centres in search of jobs and other opportuni­ties offered by urbanization. Urbanization and its concomitant housing problems have created the situation where urban slums have become a regular feature of most urban centres. High population density, temporary structures used as living quarters and lack of proper sanitation are conspi­cuous features of these slums. The predominant method of excreta collection known to these slum dwellers is the night soil system. This paper examines some popular methods of excreta collection and puts forward another possible method of excreta management in high density urban slums.

Four slum colonies in the satellite township of Panchkula, on the periphery of Chandigarh, are profiled. In some of the colonies, hardly one fourth of the children were attending school. Health Services were poor and water was scarce. Lack of sewerage facilities, due to which slum dwellers had to defecate in the open, added to the squalor. In contrast to this dismal picture, in Azad Colony, most of the children were encouraged to go to school; and in one of the slum settlements-Indira Colony, due to the efforts of the pradhan, groups of children were being educated in the juggis itself. Residents of Azad colony had also collected money and harnessed skilled and unskilled labour available locally to provide better drainage and sanitation. The general tendency in the other colonies was to depend on succor provided by the State machinery, which only results in a complete denial of basic infrastructure.