The Making of an Indian Metropolis

Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890-1920

Prashant Kidambi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351886246
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book explores the social history of colonial Bombay in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, a pivotal time in its emergence as a modern metropolis. Drawing together strands that hitherto have been treated in a piecemeal fashion and based on a variety of archival sources, the book offers a systematic analytical account of historical change in a premier colonial city. In particular, it considers the ways in which the turbulent changes unleashed by European modernity were negotiated, appropriated or resisted by the colonised in one of the major cities of the Indian Ocean region. A series of crises in the 1890s triggered far-reaching changes in the relationship between state and society in Bombay. The city's colonial rulers responded to the upheavals of this decade by adopting a more interventionist approach to urban governance. The book shows how these new strategies and mechanisms of rule ensnared colonial authorities in contradictions that they were unable to resolve easily and rendered their relationship with local society increasingly fractious. The study also explores important developments within an emergent Indian civil society. It charts the density and diversity of the city's expanding associational culture and shows how educated Indians embraced a new ethic of 'social service' that sought to 'improve' and 'uplift' the urban poor. In conclusion, the book reflects on the historical legacy of these developments for urban society and politics in postcolonial Bombay. This wide-ranging work will be essential reading for specialists in British imperial history, postcolonial studies and urban social history. It will also be of interest to all those concerned with the comparative history of governance and public culture in the modern city.

Chapter One
Introduction

You can only express things properly by details …Yet a detail ceases to mean anything when it becomes nothing but a colour and a shape, when we feel it’s a detail and nothing more.¹

In recent years, scholarly accounts of urban modernity in Europe have focused increasingly on historical processes that transcended the boundaries of the local. The emergence of modern forms of state power and urban governance, the growth of civil society and the rise of the public sphere have emerged as key themes in the historiography. In turn, this has led to a growing recognition of the comparative possibilities afforded by the analytical study of these transnational developments. Historians have been especially keen to explore the similarities and differences that characterized the modernization of urban society in diverse European contexts.

Curiously, however, there has been relatively muted recognition of the extent to which imperial expansion and overseas colonization lent a global dimension to many of these historical processes. Yet even a cursory survey would show that many of the contemporary megacities in the former colonial societies of Asia and Africa acquired their recognizably modern characteristics during the ‘imperial globalization’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The fabric of urban life in many colonial cities was transformed by the rise of a global economic system based on industrial capitalism and its attendant technologies of power. At the same time, the dense concentration of modern factories, commercial firms, western-educated local intelligentsias and culturally diverse migrant communities rendered colonial cities decisive sites of the encounter between European and non-European societies.² A vigorous public culture emerged in these cities, buoyed by a thriving print industry and a variety of associational activities. The experience of urban modernity in the colonial context thus offers fertile terrain for the comparative analysis of processes and ideas that may have originated in Europe but became truly global in reach and scope during the age of empire.

These themes and their scholarly appraisal constitute the point of departure for this book, which explores the dynamics of urban change in a premier colonial city at a pivotal juncture in its emergence as a modern metropolis. Dawing together strands that have hitherto been treated in an isolated and piecemeal manner, this micro-study investigates the social history of Bombay in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. In examining the colonial experience of historical processes that have attracted considerable attention in recent European scholarship, the inquiry seeks to highlight the global dimension to a comparative discussion of these themes. At the same time, the book does not construe modernization in the colonial context as the inexorable unfolding of industrial capitalism, ‘westernization’ or ‘governmentality’. Rather, it is interpreted here as a contested and contingent set of outcomes that flowed from the contradictory currents generated by the market, state and politics against a background of rapid technological change, demographic growth, urbanization and mass migration.³ In particular, the book highlights the manner in which the turbulent changes unleashed by European modernity were negotiated, appropriated or resisted by the colonized.

This book also seeks to contribute to the current revitalization of urban studies in India. For long, as scholars have noted, the perception that the defining feature of Indian society was its predominantly agrarian character had tended to obscure the significance of its cities.⁴ It was the village rather than the modern city that dominated the Indian intellectual landscape. As with many other representations of the subcontinent, the notion that India had been since time immemorial a land of self-contained village communities was a construct of nineteenth-century colonial discourse.⁵ Nonetheless, it was embraced by educated Indians of differing ideological persuasions and exerted a profound influence on their cultural and political imagination in the twentieth century.⁶ The village was regarded as the authentic repository of the timeless values and virtues of Indian civilization, whereas the modern city was viewed with profound ambivalence as a spurious Western implant.⁷ These attitudes also suffused the scholarship within the social sciences: anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists largely focused on the countryside since the ‘real’ India was believed to reside, literally as well as figuratively, in her villages.⁸

There were, of course, intermittent flashes of interest in the modern Indian city. One of the earliest attempts at studying processes of contemporary urbanism in the subcontinent was undertaken not very long after the embryonic field of ‘urban planning’ had begun to crystallize in Britain at the dawn of the twentieth century. This was initiated by Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), the renowned Scottish polymath, ‘social evolutionist’ and civic visionary who spent prolonged periods of time in India between 1914 and 1924. Having initially arrived in the country on the eve of the First World War with his peripatetic City and Town Planning Exhibition, Geddes stayed on to investigate the effects of economic and social change on its cities. In the years that followed, he prepared over fifty ‘town-planning’ reports on Indian urban centres. In 1919, Geddes also took up a professorship in the newly-created department of Sociology and Civics at the University of Bombay. In his writings and lectures, Geddes questioned many of the prevailing shibboleths of urban ‘improvement’ that he encountered in colonial India, regarding them as historically ill-informed and destructive. Instead, he advocated ecologically sensitive forms of town planning that were attuned to the rich architectural, civic and cultural traditions of the Indian urban environment.⁹ Geddes’s work triggered a short-lived burst of enthusiasm for studying Indian urbanism. In particular, it produced an interest in indigenous traditions of urbanism and spawned attempts to search for solutions to contemporary civic problems in the prescriptions of the past. But on the whole, his influence was restricted to a few individuals and did not have a lasting impact.¹⁰ Indeed, one of the intriguing features of the late colonial period is that even though the leading lights of the Indian intelligentsia were products of the city, they ‘devoted most of their energies to the task of producing an idea not of the future Indian city but of a rural India fit for the modern age’.¹¹ This seeming paradox has yet to be satisfactorily accounted for, but any plausible explanation would surely have to consider the impact of Gandhi on Indian intellectual life in these years.

The contemporary Indian city resurfaced as an object of intellectual scrutiny in the 1950s. The nationalist endeavour to construct fitting capital cities for newly-created regional states,¹² the need to accommodate within towns and cities the massive influx of Partition-affected refugees and the burgeoning international interest in processes of ‘modernization’ in postcolonial societies, all combined to create new political situations in which urban issues attracted scholarly attention. Several developments attest to this newfound interest in the city. A number of theoretically-driven anthropological and sociological accounts of Indian cities were published in this decade.¹³ The topic of ‘urbanization’ also came to form a separate segment within the Indian Sociological Association and the Indian Economic Association,¹⁴ while ‘Town-Planning’ became a recognized subject in the undergraduate curriculum.¹⁵ Equally significant was the decision of the Indian Planning Commission’s Research Programmes Committee to initiate and sponsor socio-economic surveys of a number of major cities.¹⁶

The urban surveys of the 1950s inaugurated an enduring tradition of descriptive studies detailing the economic, demographic and morphological features of contemporary Indian cities.¹⁷ But their wealth of detail was rarely matched by a depth of historical perspective. Historians, for their part, did not begin to engage with the modern Indian city until the 1960s. Two developments in that decade served to awaken their interest. First, scholars embarking on the serious study of the Indian nationalist movement were drawn to the urban centres in which ‘modern’ politics emerged. Thus, a number of studies sought to locate the rise of Indian nationalism within specific urban contexts.¹⁸ Second, a growing interest in the ‘industrialization’ of developing societies led some scholars to undertake the historical investigation of these themes in relation to particular cities.¹⁹ Common to all these works was a tendency to view the city merely as the backdrop for the larger economic and political processes that were the principal focus of analysis.

In the following two decades, however, scholars began to pursue fresh lines of enquiry that construed the social history of the modern Indian city as an important object of study in its own right. Three noteworthy strands can be discerned within this historiography. First, historians began to explore the ways in which the built environment and public architecture of Indian cities under colonial rule was shaped by the ideology and cultural values of the European ruling elite.²⁰ Some works within this genre emphasized the centrality of the events of 1857 in reshaping colonial attitudes to urban governance in the cities of North India.²¹ Second, scholars began to explore the social history of a variety of urban groups. Some focused on particular intermediate classes or ethnic communities;²² others examined the social formation and political culture of the urban working classes.²³ Finally, there emerged a new interest in the public culture of Indian cities during the colonial period. There was an attempt to reconsider the political culture of Indian elites in the light of the analytical perspectives drawn from cultural anthropology and ‘ethnohistory’.²⁴ At the same time, the growing incidence of ‘communal’ violence in contemporary Indian cities, as well as wider intellectual trends, prompted a new interest in urban ‘popular culture’ and collective mentalities.²⁵

Notwithstanding the interest exhibited in the modern Indian city by individual scholars and the formation of the Urban History Association of India,²⁶ the countryside continued to dominate the scholarly agenda in the 1970s and 1980s. Village studies revolving around caste, kinship and ritual held sway over the disciplines of anthropology and sociology.²⁷ Historians investigating the rural order under colonial rule focused especially on the mechanisms and effects of colonial tenurial systems, the social formation of various agrarian strata and the different modes of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• General Editors' Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Glossary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Rise of Bombay
• 3 'A Disease of Locality': Plague and the Crisis of 'Sanitary Order'
• 4 Reordering the City: The Bombay Improvement Trust
• 5 'The Ultimate Masters of the City': Policing Public Order
• 6 Forging Civil Society
• 7 'Social Service', Civic Activism and the Urban Poor
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index