Birth of a Colonial City

Calcutta

Ranjit Sen

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429638985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Indische & südasiatische Geschichte

Long before Calcutta was 'discovered' by Job Charnock, it thrived by the Hugli since times immemorial. This book, and its companion Colonial Calcutta, is a biographical account of the when, the how and the what of a global city and its emergence under colonial rule in the 1800s.

Ranjit Sen traces the story of how three clustered villages became the hub of the British Empire and a centre of colonial imagination. He examines the historical and geopolitical factors that were significant in securing its prominence, and its subsequent urbanization which was a colonial experience without an antecedent. Further, it sheds light on Calcutta's early search for identity — how it superseded interior towns and flourished as the seat of power for its hinterland; developed its early institutions, while its municipal administration slowly burgeoned.

A sharp analysis of the colonial enterprise, this volume lays bare the underbelly of the British Raj. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern history, South Asian history, urban studies, British Studies and area studies.

Part I
Scanning the context

1
Mapping the pattern of urbanization in history

The Calcutta Chapter

An unsure identity

Urban history, it is said, is unsure of its identity.¹ Its forms, methodology, and discipline as well as its concepts and procedures have not yet been developed. It had borrowed freely from external sources, geography, topography, demography, economics, sociology, and many other such subjects. The result of this is that although we have chroniclers of towns we seldom have historians of urbanization. In the west urban history took its shape as a discipline only around or after the World War II when it became a formidable component for the growing American nationhood.² India is an agglomeration of villages and more than 70 per cent of its population lives in the countryside.³ Hence the writing of urban history has taken a backseat in comparison to agrarian history writings. From time immemorial India’s history has accommodated within its fold a queer paradox. It is abound with the story of foundations of towns, but towns here could never shake off relics of villages from their core. As a result, towns in India had always been only developed villages with some callings of life other than agriculture and rural crafts. The total disjuncture from rusticity could rarely become a stable phenomenon in India. Its effects had been serious. The concept of town as sovereign in itself with no organic attachment with villages except those of the basic subsistence relations had thus never grown in India. It was a singular misfortune for India that her earliest civilization, the Harappan civilization, having originated as a potential centre of urban growth, eventually relapsed into an infinite monotony of an agricultural one. The sort of urbanization which Europe experienced in the high middle ages when towns at the crest of a commercial revival after the tenth and eleventh centuries raised their heads as break-away units from feudal manorial system was unthinkable in the Indian context. Thus, when Europeans came to India they concerned themselves not with towns, which were absent in their broad experience, but with village communities, rural land tenures, revenue from agriculture, and agrarian relations. In this context urban history did not grow effectively in India. Long before the Europeans came to India the people of this country had their own ways of writing history.

That was mostly narrative history that revolved around rulers. Cities had no great role to play as subjects of history.⁴

Indifference to urban history was in fact a global phenomenon. Attention to towns grew in Europe only when consequences of the Industrial Revolution were felt very acutely in the continent. Marx’s The Communist Manifesto for the first time ushered in the epoch-making theory that, because of the rise of the bourgeoisie, towns and cities overwhelmed villages. But understanding of urban history stopped at that only. Interests in the history of towns remained lulled for some time and were revived many years later when F.W. Maitland published his work Township and Borough in 1898. Following his lead, Henry Pirenne in the 1920s published his work on medieval towns.⁵ Then there was a wait for many years before a landmark work on urban history could be produced. In 1963 was published Asha Briggs Victorian Cities. Even then institutional formalization of urban history writing did not gain momentum. Such formalization took rest of the twentieth century to crystallize itself.⁶

In India urban history had never been a popular theme of writing for historians. The British historians who wrote on India were mostly panegyrists of British exploits in the east. To them the history of India was coterminous with the history of the emergence and expansion of an empire which was replete with wars and the exploits of the Governors General or the history of civilizing missions from the west that involved stories of wars against oriental misrule through a steady process of reform and regeneration. For many British historians writing for India an imperial undertone seemed to be unavoidable. Their works prepared the minds of future British civil servants in India and, therefore, quite naturally and also a little surreptitiously they imparted the message of the empire. This was the compulsive logic under which many British historians found themselves commissioned to write. Under such circumstances political and administrative history got precedence over economic and social history where the city could serve as the most convenient unit of analysis. From the beginning the Imperial government in India was concerned mainly with two things, the problem of governance and the means of governance, i.e. revenue. When the nationalists emerged a new set of problems called for definition – famine, poverty, deindustrialization, drain of wealth, rural indebtedness, the railways versus canals, and irrigation and finally degeneration of Indian life. Industrialization and urbanization are concurrent events and the absence of the one automatically obliterates the importance of the other. When these problems filled the nationalist discourse it was logical that urban history would have no place in Indian historiography.

Uncongenial for colonial historiography

Thus urban history could not find a congenial soil in the colonial historiography of India. Could a pre-industrial urban history be possible in this situation? The answer would be broadly “no.” Such a discipline did not grow in the free societies of the west.⁷ How could it flourish in the inhibited colonial settings where incentives for change manifested little? W.H. Moreland many years ago laid his hands on the subject and wrote a masterful account of India towards the end of the sixteenth century.⁸ With the judgement of a true investigator Moreland scanned the economic forces that prevailed in India at the time of Akbar’s death. He discussed the condition of important cities of the time but none of his discourses did form the principal focus for urban history. His intention was to show what India was like at the end of the best of the Mughal rule so that it could be compared to the condition of the Indians under the rule of the British in modern times. The result was that in spite of being a primary study of the economic condition of the Indian society in pre-colonial era it failed to become the starting point of a productive from of urban history in India.

In this situation, writing on Calcutta is not only to be an effort to restore Calcutta to history, but perhaps, more importantly, also to restore history to Calcutta. A town history for Calcutta became an administrative necessity when the census operations started in India. Thus Mr. H. Beverley, c.s. wrote a history of the city as a part of his Census Report of 1876. In later years A.K. Ray followed suit writing a detailed history of Calcutta as a necessary part of the Census Report of 1901.⁹ “It is a pioneer venture in Calcutta study.” This is how the book has been rated by historians.¹⁰ But unfortunately the work was never followed by another of its kind. The growth of Calcutta was a phenomenon in urban history and its complexities were seldom analyzed.¹¹ From the coming of A.K. Ray’s book down till the end of the colonial era in India Calcutta remained in quest for a sound historian.¹² In course of the rest of the twentieth century a school of urban history did not grow in Bengal or India at large. Seven decades passed since A.K. Ray’s history in the Census Report of 1901 before new ventures could be made toward understanding Calcutta.¹³ Nearly another two decades more had to go by when a well-documented study of Calcutta’s morphology manifested itself.¹⁴

Notes

1“As a historical discipline, urban history has always been peculiarly unsure of its own identity. H.J. Dyos, the father of British urban history, described it as a ‘portmanteau subject,’ ‘a field of knowledge’ rather than a discipline as traditionally defined. Much of the history of towns and cities is written outside the confines of the academy, merging into the genres of ‘local history’ or topography. Although it would claim a greater degree of historical rigour than such writings, urban history has never established its own identifiable theories and methodologies, being instead a promiscuous borrower of concepts and procedures from other fields of history and from disciplines of the social sciences” – Martin Hewitt, “Urban History” in Kelly Boyd, ed., Historians and Historical Writings, Vol. 2 (M-Z), Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, London (Chicago), 1999, p. 1246.

2“The sense of urban history as a discipline emerged first in the United States in the years around World War II, prompted by the works of Arthur Meir Schlesinger and Richard C. Wade which integrated the city into Turner’s frontier thesis, and thus made cities central to the development of American nationhood” (Ibid.).

3India’s estimated population in July 2007 was 112,98,66,154 (112 crores, 98 lakhs, 66,154). Of this more than 70 per cent of the population alive in 5,50,000 (five lakhs and fifty thousand) villages. The remainder lives in 200 towns and cities. India covers 2.4 per cent of the world’s land area but supports more than 15 per cent of its population.

4“The peoples of south Asia who came under the British colonial rule from the middle of the 18th century had various traditions of history writing. Most accessible from the point of view of the conquerors were the narrative histories written in Persian that chronicled the reigns of Mughal emperors or other rulers. Eighteenth century British scholars eagerly translated such works and indeed commissioned a by no means uncritical history of the transition to British rule in eastern India by Ghulam Hussain Khan, published in translation in 1789 as View of Modern Times (modern reprints available). British people also began to write histories to chronicle their own doings in India, Robert Orme’s History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan (1763–78) being the first of such books.” – Peter Marshall, “India since 1750” in Boid, Historians and Historical Writings, Vol. I (A-L), p. 580.

5Henri Pirenne authored a book titled Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (1927). This book was based on some lectures he delivered in the United States in 1922. His main contention in the book was that in course of two centuries, from the tenth to the twelfth, Europe recovered control of the Mediterranean from the Muslims. This helped them to open up sea routes to the Orient. This in its turn resulted in the formation of a merchant cum middle class who steadily built up their characteristic abode, the city. From this Pirenne moved to his logical next step. He argued that out of this revolutionary development capitalism originated in Europe and cities became the birth place of capitalism in the continent. Out of capitalism grew democracy, the basis of Europe’s modern way of life. Pirenne’s theory of a commercial renaissance in towns in the eleventh century had since remained to be the hallmark of standard interpretation of Europe’s rejuvenation and eventual emergence into the modern world.

6“Even then, institutional formalization occurred only hesitatingly. In North America, an Urban History Newsletter was published form the 1950s, eventually superseded in 1974 by the Journal of Urban History. But it was not until the establishment of the Urban History Association in 1988 that urban historians could claim an associational base. In Europe it was not until the mid 1970s that the first urban history journals were established, and not until the early 1990s that the European Association of Urban Historians was formed; in Britain, it took 20 years to convert the Urban History Newsletter into a semi-annual journal, Urban History, and in the mid-1990s there was still no formal urban history association. Outside these two continents, although it has been possible to trace an increasing amount of urban history research, little or no progress towards the institutionalization of the discipline has taken place.”

7“However, as political and purely economic approaches were challenged in the 20th century by broader social perspectives, the pre-occupations (and limited sources-bases) of pre-industrial urban history came to be seen as increasingly restricted, despite Pirenne’s attempt to develop a more socio-economic framework for the study of medieval cities. From the 1950s through to the 1980s pre-industrial towns were marginal to urban historians. Only in the 1980s, often through the creation of a new generation of networks of urban historians, such as the Early Modern Towns Group in Britain, were there signs of a lessening of this imbalance.” – Boyd, Historians and Historical Writings, Vol. II. p. 1247.

8W.H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar: An Economic Study (London, 1920), Indian Reprint, Delhi, ...