Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City in North India

1870-1930

Michael S. Dodson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367818906
• eBook ISBN: 9781000051360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is a re-evaluation of modern urbanism and architecture and a history of urbanism, architecture, and local identity in colonial north India at the turn of the twentieth century.

Focusing on Banaras and Jaunpur, two of northern India's most traditional cities, the book examines the workings of colonial bureaucracy in the cities and argues that interactions with the colonial state were an integral aspect of the ways that Indians created a sense of their own personal investment in the city in which they lived. The book explores the every-day and the mundane to better understand the limits of British colonial power, and the role of Indians themselves, in the making of the modern city. Based on highly localized archival source material, the author analyses two key aspects of city-making in this era: the building of new infrastructure, such as water supply and sewerage, and new policies governing historical architectural conservation. The book also incorporates an ethnography of contemporary urban space in these cities to advocate for a more nuanced and responsible approach to writing the history of such cities and to address the myriad problems of present-day north Indian urbanism.

Containing examples of bureaucratic procedure and its contradictions and enlivened by a set of personal reflections and narratives of the author's own experiences, this book is a valuable addition to the field of South Asian Studies, Asian History and Asian Culture and Society, Colonial History and Urban History.

Part I

The Banaras technoscape (and its discontents)

Banaras is an ancient city book-ended by two prominent forms of the colonial modern. To the city’s north lies the Dufferin Bridge (now known as the Malaviya Bridge), an impressively tall, double-storied steel truss over a kilometer wide. Lying on the path of the Grand Trunk Road, the bridge carries rail, road, and pedestrian traffic across the river Ganga. To the south of Banaras is the Bhadaini water intake pumping station, which by way of a series of large engines and pipes provides water from the river to the city’s entire population. Both were constructed at the end of the 19th century, both are technical accomplishments rendered on a huge scale, and both feature prominently in contemporary British accounts of Banaras as symbols of the civilizational superiority of the West. They are signs, in essence, of the constructive and transformative potential of British colonial rule and its technological appliances.

In “The Bridge-Builders,” Rudyard Kipling writes:

There stood his bridge before him in the sunlight, lacking only a few weeks’ work on the girders of the three middle piers — his bridge, raw and ugly as original sin, but pukka — permanent — to endure when all memory of the builder, yea, even of the splendid Findlayson truss, has perished. Practically, the thing was done.¹

Kipling’s 1898 story of engineers working on the Dufferin Bridge hinges on just such a symbol of Western civilizational superiority, rendering the bridge a product of European personal accomplishment and professional fulfilment amid the context of the challenging landscapes of the Indian countryside and its laboring classes. But if the bridge and the pumping station are bookends to this city, then one might also reasonably ask about the books on the shelf in between. How were these understood through that same colonial lens? The answer, predictably, is as the opposite of modern and technologically advanced. The bookends were, as we will see, not only symbols-in-themselves, but also often made to serve a cajoling of the “non-modern” into a never-quite realized form of modern subjectivity.²

Arjun Appadurai pioneered the use of the term “technoscape” to indicate a kind of exchange, “flow,” and interconnection in globalized capitalism: that of informational and mechanical technology.³ Here I focus less on how forms of technology moved – on the actual exchanges of technology through the mechanisms of British colonialism – and more on what instances of technology might mean once they get to where they are going. In this case, I examine the creation of a sanitation and water distribution infrastructure for Banaras. In this section I investigate the ideological importance of sanitary technology for notions of civilizational superiority so intrinsically linked to British colonial rule. But I am also interested to look past attempts at making such symbolic meaning to examine the sociopolitics of amending an urban landscape with forms of technological innovation. I do not wish to accept a particular colonial presentation of technology as transformative in a certain way, but instead to look to micro-processes within city building to reveal the wider array of meanings that people might have attached to the processes of city “modernization.” Like Appadurai, I argue that the technoscape, in the colonial context, is not one-dimensional, but rather is prone to contestation and nuances of meaning. A technoscape may well represent large-scale processes of movement and transfer that traverse continents, but it is also a form that elicits renewed notions of localness. What it means to be Banarsi – a resident and partisan of Banaras – evolves in interaction with the transformation of the colonial technoscape.

As I have noted in the introduction to this book, I understand the meanings created through new forms of infrastructure for a city to be constituted at least partly through transactions – micro-processes of interaction between people in and out of government that entail an expression of cultural understanding and identity. In this section I discuss some of the key legal, governmental, and administrative structures that I believe framed the “transactional” nature of city re-fashioning in Banaras at the end of the 19th century. I do this with particular reference to the functioning of Banaras’s municipal government as it considered, and then undertook, substantial forms of infrastructural improvement in the city. Municipal governance in India was often understood as a form of decentralized decision-making. This is true, although such decentralization was also subjected to forms of hierarchical bureaucracy and oversight. The virtue, I think, of conceptualizing local identity as having this transactional quality is that the presence of such colonial oversight need not mean that the Commissioner’s office, or that of the Lieutenant Governor, had a monopoly on how to understand and characterize urban change. The municipal commissioners of the city were a key part of this process, together with their constituents. Transactions are productive, in other words, even when conducted within an authoritarian hierarchy, and even when there are clear attempts on the part of the colonial state to elicit certain sorts of outcomes.

My historiographical modus operandi is in this section fairly straightforward, I think, and is more or less repeated through much of the rest of the book. I begin with an invocation of the obvious: the distinctions made in colonial sources between (European) “modernity” and (Indian) “tradition,” for example, and the ways that the British colonial state attempted to establish a discourse of self-regard through the creation of a “modern” cityscape in a place such as Banaras. Then I try to use the strength of archival evidence – records that document the processes of transaction – to begin to undo that distinction and to ask a new set of questions of the available evidence. While a dichotomy of modern/non-modern may well have been held sacred by some British writers, and often used to considerable rhetorical effect, I seek to show that it consistently failed to capture the dynamic and equivocal nature of colonial rule at the level of the city. If the urban landscape can be understood to communicate values and ideas about the past and the future of a place, I argue that the colonial state also consistently overestimated the extent to which they could control narratives about built space. This is not to say that the colonial archive presents us with incontrovertible evidence of Indian cultural thinking and urban values – it does not – but it does provide us with suggestions of complexity and some alternatives to the obvious.

This section begins, then, with an account of an event that is often deemed typical of the traditional character of Banarsis’ engagement with forms of Western technological innovation: namely, a riot. This event, which took place in 1891, has been recounted many times – in official colonial accounts of Banaras as well as in more contemporary academic analyses of colonial rule in the city. What I will do here is invoke this event as a starting point only and then look beyond that day’s violence and point to the laws, regulations, governance practices, economic changes, petitioning, other forms of personal advocacy and engagement, and community mobilization that constituted the wider set of engagements with one particular form of infrastructional improvement. In so doing, I hope to illustrate that the construction of the brick and concrete towers, the installation of the steel pipes, and the widening of roads associated with the Banaras waterworks project held a variety of meanings for the city and its inhabitants as they confronted the colonial modern and co-created it; meanings that inevitably transcended those ascribed to them by the official state and its acolytes. I want to tell you a different story, then, one not dominated by invocations of civilizational difference, as has so often been the case.

Notes

1 R. Kipling, “The Bridge-Builders,” in The Day’s Work, (New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1898). Kipling sets his story in Kashi, but the descriptions of the bridge seem to have been heavily influenced by his reporting on the Sutlej Bridge in the Punjab. See http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_sketches_40.htm

2 For my ideas on cajoling, I’ve drawn on Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry. See H. K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man” reprinted in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

3 A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

1 A riot in Banaras

In the early afternoon of 15 April 1891, a crowd of people assembled near the Ram Chandraji temple at Bhadaini, a small muhalla (neighborhood) located in the southern reaches of Banaras. The crowd numbered some 5,000 at its height and was composed of a variety of the city’s residents – both Hindu and Muslim – including the “town badmashes,” according to police reports. The men who had gathered were apparently concerned by rumors of the imminent destruction of the temple by British engineers constructing a nearby water-pumping station on the ghat (a kind of stepped platform on the riverfront made of large stone). This was part of an ambitious plan undertaken by the city’s Municipal Board, with the assistance of the government of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, to bring an infrastructure of water distribution and sanitary conservancy (estimated to cost some Rs 40 lakh [40,00,000]) to Banaras.¹ Crowds had been present at the temple for several days as construction on the waterworks proceeded, but on this day things soon spiraled out of control.

As the crowd swelled in Bhadaini, the 15 or so members of the police were soon hopelessly outnumbered. They sent for reinforcements from their headquarters at Kotwali, and later from as far afield as the northern muhalla of Adampura. But these men arrived too late. A cry of “destroy the machinery!” arose from the crowd, and it quickly descended on the water pumps, boiler, and supply pipes, ripping them from their foundations and throwing them into the river. The police opened fire, injuring one, and the crowd dispersed to wreak havoc on other, far-flung parts of the city. Men attacked and looted the telegraph office in Bisheshwarganj, cutting the wires and destroying the machinery there, as well as emptying the safe. The Telegraph Master, Mr Ludgwick, was caught and beaten while trying to escape over his back wall. The private houses of several notable men were ransacked and looted. The railway station at Rajghat was vandalized: telegraph wires were cut, and a bar of silver taken from the vault. Street lanterns were smashed throughout the city.² Calm returned to Banaras by the evening hours, only to be followed on the next day by widespread arrests and the deployment of the military to protect key points of civil infrastructure.³

The temple at the heart of the events of that day was a small but ostensibly quite ancient one, dedicated to the god Rama with additional murtis (images of the deity) of Sita, Lakshman, and Hanuman consecrated within it. It was favored principally by the wealthy Gujarati banias of the city as well as the Rani of Barhar, a woman by the name of Bendeshri Prasad Kunwar, who also acted as a key sponsor of its establishment.⁴ As early as six months before the disturbances of 15 April, it was clear to many of Banaras’s residents that the planned water infrastructure project would have significant effects upon the established physical landscape of the city and the everyday life of its inhabitants. It was noted in one account that sites all around Bhadaini and Assi muhallas were being surveyed for new building, with the taking of measurements and drawings being made by Public Works Department officials.⁵ This would undoubtedly have caused some nervousness amongst local residents. A newspaper article from November 1890, for example, had also warned of the danger posed to this particular temple by British engineers, the disrespect with which they treated this sacred structure, and the acute anxiety that local Hindus felt about its fate. The correspondent from Bharat Jiwan even claimed that the chief engineer routinely entered the temple with his shoes on and openly threatened to demolish it if any of the worshippers interfered with him.⁶ The Rani sent a petition to the government, as did the newly formed Bhadaini Temple Protection Society, right up until the unrest occurred, pleading for construction work to stop and the temple to be saved. Importantly, these appeals routinely identified the local agents employed or sanctioned by government as the main culprits in endangering the temple and, by extension, the public peace. It was their recklessness with the religious sensibilities of the local population, in other words, that was the issue. The petitioners also emphasized that the provincial and imperial governments had a long history of ensuring non-interference in religious matters, as they understood the importance that people placed in the maintenance of their religious structures. To tear down their temple was to tear at “their very heart-strings,” the Rani no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• A note on infrastructure and bureaucracy
• PART I: The Banaras technoscape (and its discontents)
• PART II: The crafting of historical space
• Afterword: Infrastructure and the dismantling of the colonial self
• Bibliography
• Index