In this dissertation, I examine the socio-cultural history of the provincial city of Allahabad from 1885 until 1939. Place, identities, and most importantly, texts, are the three pillars on which the theoretical and empirical claims of my dissertation rest. Relying on these three categories, the dissertation examines the cultural politics of place-making in Allahabad by taking texts and textually mediated publics as the locus of debates on literary, linguistic, religious, gender, and caste-based identities in the city. I argue that all of these identities became arenas of contestations between liberal and conservative trends. Paying attention to these contestations complicates the hitherto existing claim that the dominant marker of this city’s identity is its Indo-Islamic syncretic culture, known in popular parlance as gaṅgā jamunī tahẓīb. The dissertation asks a cluster of questions with three broad aims. The first objective is to propose a theoretical relationship between the urbanity of this prominent provincial city and the textuality engendered here by the efflorescence of print culture under conditions of colonial modernity. My second objective is to highlight how each text-based public produced particular urban imaginations and institutions, a process I call place-making. My third aim is to analyze the acts of writing and publishing in cities as essential to the process by which indigenous agents and interest groups emerged as modern publics. In so doing, I establish that writing and publishing were the grounds on which new imaginations of local civic communities developed, and that they were often distinct from visions of a national community. These urban imaginations of self and community were informed by contradictory instincts. In the early decades of the twentieth century, each marker of identity examined in this dissertation, be it literary selfhood, language politics, caste, religion, or gender, was simultaneously the locus of progress and inclusive expansion as well as the site of conservative boundary-making exercises. My thesis demonstrates that examining socio-cultural change and shifts in identity at the site of a medium-sized but significant provincial city reveals a more complex portrait of modernity. Instead of focusing on the nature of modernity generated in this provincial city, I argue for a shift of attention to the modern acts of writing and publishing for a public. In so doing, my case study of Allahabad uncovers the existence of multiple local and regional modernities that were contingent and contested. Local publics wrote and expressed themselves in a number of genres and addressed a variety of audiences. Therefore, place-making cannot be viewed simply as generating an exclusively liberal ethos and progressive norms. Rather, the processes of public reasoning, reflection, and negotiation through the medium of textuality and print enabled the emergence of urban modernity in a number of contradictory ways. By tracking the complex entanglement between text and place, I argue that the sub-fields of textual studies, urban history, and micro-history hold the potential of making an intervention in the larger domain of cultural history.