MHI-10

Urbanization in India
Indira Gandhi
National Open University
School of Social Sciences

Block

8
COLONIAL CITIES - 2
UNIT 37
Modernity and the City in Colonial India 5
UNIT 38
City Planning in India under British Rule 19
UNIT 39
Predicaments of Post Colonial Cities 34
UNIT 40
Case Study : Bombay 48
Expert Committee
Prof. B.D. Chattopadhyaya Prof. Sunil Kumar Dr. P.K. Basant
Formerly Professor of History Department of History Department of History
Centre for Historical Studies Delhi University, Delhi Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi
JNU, New Delhi
Prof. Swaraj Basu Prof. Amar Farooqui
Prof. Janaki Nair Faculty of History Department of History
Centre for Historical Studies IGNOU, New Delhi Delhi University, Delhi
JNU, New Delhi
Prof. Harbans Mukhia Dr. Vishwamohan Jha
Prof. Rajat Datta Formerly Professor of History Atma Ram Sanatan Dharm
Centre for Historical Studies Centre for Historical Studies College
JNU, New Delhi JNU, New Delhi Delhi University, Delhi
Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian Prof. Yogendra Sharma Prof. Abha Singh (Convenor)
Centre for Studies in Social Centre for Historical Studies Faculty of History
Sciences, Calcutta JNU, New Delhi IGNOU, New Delhi
Kolkata
Prof. Pius Malekandathil
Dr. Daud Ali Centre for Historical Studies
South Asia Centre JNU, New Delhi
University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia

Block Editor : Prof. Janaki Nair

Course Coordinator : Prof. Abha Singh
Programme Coordinator : Prof. Swaraj Basu
Block Preparation Team
Unit No. Resource Person
37 Dr. Prashant Kidambi
School of Historical Studies
University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.
38 Prof. Howard Spodek
Temple University
Philadelphia, U.S.A.
39 Dr. Awadhendra Saran
Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies, University of Delhi, Delhi.
40 Prof. Amar Farooqui Illustrations
Department of History Mr. Vimal Gaurav Sharma
University of Delhi, Delhi.

Material Production Secretarial Assistance Cover Design

Mr. Manjit Singh Ms. Parinita Mr. Anil Kumar Saxena
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SOSS, IGNOU

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BLOCK 8 COLONIAL CITIES - 2
The Units in Block 8 continue to examine the specific features of the Indian city as it
developed in the modern period, both during and after colonial rule. As we have already
seen, the city could be made the space in which power and authority were enacted,
either through temporary pageants and Darbars, or through certain architectural forms
and devices. It was the space of different kinds of claims to space (by nationalist or
religious movements) and contests over those claims. But the city in the 19th and 20th
centuries could be the very crucial and well defined space of ‘modernity’ itself, with the
rise of new social classes, such as the working class, new forms of association and
associational practices, and several new modes of sociality and conviviality which arose
around emerging mass transport systems such as railways, or mass entertainment such
as the cinema. Unit 37 introduces the student to some aspects of the ways in which
modernity was inextricably linked to the city.
An important aspect of this modernity, as Unit 38 reveals, was the introduction of
urban planning and new forms of urban governance. Though it was everywhere dogged
by inadequate funds and the relative indifference of colonial administrators, especially
to the indigenous parts of the city where the preferred mode of governance was to
continue to allow local powers autonomy, planning in India was slow and piecemeal
even in the period when more Indians were drawn into the administration of cities.
Cities were drastically rebuilt and refashioned by the colonial authorities in response to
such political crises as the 1857 revolt, in response to the threats of plague (1896-8)
and other contagions, or quite simply in response to the imperial need for new spaces
for the display of power as in New Delhi after 1912. The involvement of greater numbers
of Indians, as colonial rule wore on, in urban governance produced new tensions and
contests, and some important changes, and a recognition of the objective limits to possible
transformations under conditions of colonialism.
In what ways then did the transition to Independence refashion the Indian city? As
Unit 39 of this block reveals, the immediate decades that followed 1947 were marked
by great optimism among the leaders of the new Indian nation, and a number of new
industrial and administrative capitals reveal this great new vision. At the same, the
exigencies of partition and the urgency of rehousing large masses of displaced people
particularly in north India, defined some of the initiatives in the immediate post
independence years. Urban planning was far more professionalised and yet, though
every attempt was made to bring most Indian cities under its sway, remained woefully
inadequate. Moreover, the limits and tensions produced by planning itself became more
and more evident, as urban populations burgeoned and legalities stretched to their
limits. New concerns, as this unit shows us, began to surface both among urban planners
and those who constituted “civil society” regarding the multiple uses of city space,
general environmental concerns, and the role of law in curbing, or controlling certain
uses of space in the interest of a purported general good.
The Unit 40 of this block is a case study of what is easily identified as India’s premier
metropolis, Bombay. From its early origins as a port city, connected to an international
trade network, to its emergence as the administrative capital of western India, its later
development as an industrial city with all its complexities and contradictions, and finally,
to its existence as the financial and entertainment capital of India, Bombay’s existence
cannot be understood without reference to its economy and the ways in which it shaped
city space. This unit therefore takes the reader through these economic phases in order
to highlight the specific features which arose, or declined as the case may be, in response
to these broader developments. The city therefore enjoys a multi faceted profile, at one
and the same time, as a working class city and as developing a specific form of
cosmopolitanism.
The two Blocks on the modern Indian city focus on the very specific ways in which
colonialism structured and restructured urban space, with enduring effect in the post
colonial phase. Yet, as we see throughout these units, they also reveal that indigenous
groups and forces, whether from elite or non elite sections of urban India, made their
sense of, participated in, and shaped the features of the Indian city. Such participation
in, and sometimes collaboration with, the colonial (and post colonial) regimes however
rather than implying that these efforts were equally placed and on the same plane, in
fact bear testimony to the very uneven and contested space that was the modern Indian
city. Above all, the Units allow the student to understand and judge for themselves the
principal features of the modern Indian city and the historical forces which have shaped
them. The Units also introduce the student to the sheer variety of approaches and
materials that have been used in the study of the modern city.
UNIT 37 MODERNITY AND THE CITY IN
COLONIAL INDIA*
Structure
37.1 Introduction
37.2 The City as the Space of the Modern
37.3 Technologies of the Modern
37.4 Indian Engagements with Modernity
37.5 New Associational Practices
37.6 Summary
37.7 Exercises
37.8 References

37.1 INTRODUCTION
Since the mid-nineteenth century, cities have been naturally associated with modernity.
Indeed, the main prisms through which the making of the ‘modern’ has been viewed –
whether it is industrial capitalism, bureaucratic rationality or ‘governmentality’ – have
frequently focused on the city as a primary site.
It is a matter of considerable debate among historians as to whether colonialism was
instrumental in introducing ‘modernity’ to the Indian subcontinent, as colonial authorities
themselves often claimed. Was Indian society imprisoned in ‘tradition’ until the beginning
of colonial rule? The term ‘modernity’ may be said to refer not only to some material
changes, i.e. industrial or print capitalism, or systems of sewage and sanitation, but also
to new institutional spaces, such as museums, public libraries, and voluntary associations,
as well as to new sensibilities, of individualism and bureaucratic rationality. The cities
were among the earliest spaces within which these changes and transformations were
made most visible and this Unit considers the colonial city from the perspective of
whether or why it merits the term ‘modern’. To begin with, let us consider the ways in
which cities and modernity are usually linked.

37.2 THE CITY AS THE SPACE OF THE MODERN

For some 19th century observers like Friedrich Engels and Alexis de Tocqueville, the
‘shock cities’of Britain’s first industrial revolution symbolised the emergence of a modern
economic order geared to the capitalist market and its attendant social consequences:
the separation of the home and the workplace, the segregation of classes and the abysmal
living conditions of the poor.
By the turn of the twentieth century, there emerged other kinds of association between
modernity and the city. The spectacular capital cities of Western Europe such as London,
Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Stockholm and New York in the USA – stood forth as symbols
of urban modernity. Many of these cities were reconstructed (e.g. ‘Paris’, with urban
space recreated ‘as a visual spectacle, opening up the monumental vista while
simultaneously rendering the city a site of consumption, of window-shopping,
promenading and surveillance.’ (Gunn, 2006: 123)

*
Dr. Prashant Kidambi, School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK. 5
Colonial Cities - 2 Urban modernity was, however, not merely reflected in the built form of the city or its
governance. The city also became a site for novel forms of urban interaction and sociability
made possible by the emergence and consolidation of a new domain mediating between
state and society: what is broadly referred to as the ‘public sphere’. Equally, the
unprecedented density of people, technologies, commodities, institutions and information
within cities generated new encounters and experiments, both individual and collective,
that were distinctively ‘modern’. And, as the nineteenth-century French romantic poet
Charles Baudelaire was quick to grasp, many of the fundamental aspirations and anxieties
associated with modernity were most intensely experienced in the city.
These forms and ideals of urban modernity came to be adopted in many parts of the
globe during the age of ‘imperial globalization’ presided over by Europeans. Cities
across the colonial world took their spatial, technological and social cues from the
imperial West. However, as a growing body of scholarship has begun to show, they
also developed in ways that were not prefigured by the experience of the metropolitan
contexts.
This chapter focuses principally on four premier cities of colonial India – Bombay,
Calcutta, Delhi and Madras – as sites of ‘urban modernity’ in the period from the end
of the Great Uprising/Rebellion to the end of the First World War (1918) and considers
two key issues. First, it shows how the technologies and institutional forms associated
with modernity transformed the fabric of material life in these cities. Second, this Unit
assesses the ways in which Indians shaped the processes of modernity as they unfolded
within the urban context.

37.3 TECHNOLOGIES OF THE MODERN

In the decades following the cataclysmic events of 1857, urban-dwellers in the major
cities of colonial India could perceive all around them the visible signs and symbols of
‘modernity’. The most obvious and spectacular manifestation of this was in the built
form of their cities. In the aftermath of 1857, colonial urban planning and policies showed
‘a more focused concern with defence, sanitation, order and above all the display of
the new imperial power’. (Khilnani, 1997: 116) Like many metropolises across the
globe, the built environment of Indian cities was rapidly altered in keeping with these
imperatives. The fate of Mughal Delhi after the suppression of the 1857 uprising was
particularly poignant. Here, as Narayani Gupta writes:
At one sweep the face of the city, so lovingly built by Shahjahan, was transformed. What
the Government decided was necessary for its security led to some of the loveliest buildings
of the city being destroyed – Kucha Bulaqi Begum, the Haveli Nawab Wazir, the Akbarabadi
Masjid, the palaces of the Nawabs of Jhajjar, Ballabhgarh, Farrucknagar and
Bahadurgarh….In the excess of patriotic fervour that prevailed in the early 1860s, the
Lahore and Delhi Gates of the Red Fort were renamed Victoria and Alexandra Gate. (Gupta,
1998: 27-8)
Further changes to the urban built form of colonial cities occurred at the end of the
century following the outbreak of a major plague epidemic, which gradually engulfed
the subcontinent. The panic aroused by the dreaded disease prompted the colonial
state to create ‘Improvement Trusts’ in order to carry out an ambitious programme of
civic renewal and urban development. (Kidambi, 2007: 71-113) These bodies tore
down ‘slums’ in the Indian quarters, widened existing streets, built new arterial roads
and developed the commercial infrastructure of cities. They also played an important
part in the creation of new urban spaces devoted to shopping and entertainment. For
instance, on Bombay’s Hornby Road, one of the city’s principal thoroughfares, the
Improvement Trust built unified commercial arcades where visitors could sample the
6 latest goods and fashions imported from Europe. (Hazareesingh, 2007: 39)
 Modernity and the City
in Colonial India

1. North of Dalhousie Square, European Quarter, Calcutta (Kolkata), 1922

Source: Library of Congress; Call No. LC-B2- 68-11 [P&P] LOT 7225
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/ggbain/00300/00354r.jpg

Alongside these changes came new technologies that transformed the material quality
of urban life. Some developments – most notably, the coming of the railways and
steamships – were essential to the growth of many cities even as they enlarged
geographical horizons by opening up new possibilities for mobility. The railways, for
example, linked port cities like Bombay, Calcutta and Madras to vast new hinterlands
and made them key nodes in an evolving global network of maritime trade and transport.
The first train journey in the subcontinent was flagged off from Bombay on 16 April
1853 by Lord Elphinstone, the Governor of Bombay, and terminated 21 miles away in
Thana. Within decades the Great Indian Peninsular Railway and the Bombay, Baroda
and Central India (BB & CI Railway) had connected the city to the cotton-growing
tracts of central India and Gujarat. By the end of the century, the railways were bringing
commodities and migrants from all over the subcontinent to Bombay, thereby contributing
both to the commercial life of the city and its increasingly cosmopolitan culture.
The railway companies also became important players in the urban property market,
acquiring vast swathes of land for their complex operations. Moreover, they also built
monumental stations ‘that would match the railway, civic, and administrative grandeur
associated with them’. (Richards and MacKenzie, 1986: 70) These railway stations –
like Bombay’s Victoria Terminus – became symbols of colonial modernity, with their
ornate architecture, bustling stalls and the rapid movement of people and goods.

7
Colonial Cities - 2

2. Bombay Victoria Station: Horse Drawn Tram, Circa 1900

Source: Library of Congress; Call Number: LOT 11948, no. 373 [P&P]
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/wtc/4a00000/4a02000/4a02600/4a02613r.jpg

3. Electric Tramways of British India, Calcutta (Kolkata)

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trams_of_British_India_In2.jpg

Equally significant was the role of the new steamships which expanded and speeded up
the links between the major port cities of the subcontinent and the lands across the
seas. The arrival of steamships in Indian waters not only dramatically reduced travelling
times but also transformed the rhythms of sea voyages, as it now became possible for
shipping vessels to operate independently of weather conditions. Moreover, it also
8
consolidated migrant flows and networks that connected Indian port cities to West Modernity and the City
in Colonial India
Asia and East and South Africa, on the one hand, and to Southeast Asia, on the other.
Like the railways, steamships too affected the built environment of these port cities, as
new docks, wharves, warehouses and depots were built to handle the growing volume
of cargo and passenger traffic that now passed through them.

The tramway represented another important mode of transport within cities. Horse-
drawn trams first made their appearance in Bombay and Calcutta in the early 1870s.
These gave way by the end of the century to electric tramways, with Madras becoming
the first city in India to introduce the innovation (1895). As Stephen Hughes has pointed
out, ‘By connecting up its constituent parts with a common and habitual movement of
people, the tram helped to articulate the city as one publicly shared place like never
before.’ (Hughes, 2006: 41) At the same time, these years also saw the appearance of
privatised and elite modes of modern transport such as the motor car. In Bombay, car
ownership increased five-fold between 1914 and 1924, with well over ten thousand
vehicles in the city by the latter date, with important consequences for the way in which
urban residents could now negotiate the street. (Hazareesingh, 2007: 64-70)

It was not only the technologies of mobility that symbolised urban modernity. In the late
nineteenth century, cities like Bombay and Calcutta also became important industrial
centres. Bombay’s Parsi businessmen established the city’s first cotton mills in the mid-
nineteenth century, while Scottish entrepreneurs laid the foundations of Calcutta’s
emergence as the bastion of the Indian jute industry.

Writing in 1863, Govind Narayan Madgaonkar, author of the first Marathi history of
Bombay, described the sense of wonder that a visitor experienced on stepping into a
cotton mill:

The astonishment that one felt on seeing the mill cannot be put into words. Where does
one start? The structure was about four hundred hands long and about as broad. It is full
of machines and wheels which are whirring incessantly. Men are not required to power
these wheels, they rotate automatically. At one place, the cotton is carded and cleaned
and all the dirt is removed. In another place, this cotton is converted into fine fibrils which
are then spun into thick or thin threads in yet another place….If one thinks about it, these
machines in Mumbai can produce in one day what a man needs fifty years to do. It is
suggested that our readers ponder about the power of these machines. (Ranganathan,
2008: 209, 211)

Over the course of the following decades, these mills came to dominate the skyline of
cities like Bombay and Calcutta. At the heart of the new industrial capitalist order that
they inaugurated was a new regime of ‘clock time’, with its emphasis on regularity,
uniformity and punctuality. As Sumit Sarkar has noted, ‘Through uniform office-routine,
so different from the seasonal rhythms of the village, clock-time established its domination
over life in the colonial metropolis: the flow of people into and away from the office-
district…so crowded in the daytime but deserted at night.’ (Sumit Sarkar 1990: 105)
Symbolic of this shift in the conceptions of time was the ubiquitous presence in cities
across colonial India of the ‘clock tower’.
9
Colonial Cities - 2

4. Clock Tower, Delhi; Circa 1910. Photograph by Jadu Kissen

Source: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00routesdata/1600_1699/shahjahanabad/
clocktower/clocktower.html

It was in the colonial city, too, that modern technologies of communication, which enlarged
social horizons and made possible new imaginings of the self, both individual and
collective, were to have the greatest impact. Here, a key development was the rise of
the printing press, which transformed urban public culture over the course of the
nineteenth century. Though the printed book first made its appearance in India as early
as the sixteenth century, it was only from the late eighteenth century onwards that printing
presses began to proliferate in the subcontinent. An unlikely pioneer in this regard was
James Augustus Hicky (1739-1802), who set up a printing press in Calcutta in 1780.
Hicky, ‘a man with a colourful if ill-starred life’, embarked on the venture to pay off his
numerous debts. The weekly newspaper that he brought out – The Bengal Gazette or
10
Calcutta General Advertiser – did not survive very long, but his example was quickly Modernity and the City
followed by others and very soon printing presses across urban India were churning in Colonial India
out a steady stream of publications. (Sarkar, 1990: 128-9) Indeed, barely a decade
after Hicky had set up his printing press, one European editor of a Calcutta-based
journal was moved to remark:
In splendour London now eclipses Rome…and in similar respects, Calcutta rivals the
head of empire. But in no respect can she appear so eminently so, as in her publications….If
in Europe, the number of publications gives the ground to ratiocinate the learning and
refinement of particular cities, we may place Calcutta in rank about Vienna, Copenhagen,
Petersburg, Madrid, Venice, Turin, Naples or even Rome. (Sarkar, 1990: 128)

5. Rajabai Clock Tower, Bombay

Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rajabai-Tower.jpg

11
Colonial Cities - 2

By the end of the nineteenth century, the major colonial cities had a vibrant print culture,
catering to a linguistically diverse and ever-growing Indian readership. The newspaper,
in particular, became a familiar part of the urban landscape and served to construct the
city as an object of public discourse. Moreover, it also democratised (in theory, if not in
practice) access to ‘news’ in a way that was wholly unprecedented. Equally significant
were the numerous periodicals and pamphlets that competed with each other in generating
ideas, debates and opinions on issues ranging from the momentous to the mundane. But
simultaneously, as Anindita Ghosh has pointed out, ‘The printing press unleashed a
huge production of petty pamphlet literature – consisting of mythologies, fables, popular
religious texts, farces, almanacs, sensational novels and the like – whose content was
quite contrary to the dominant acceptable forms.’ (Ghosh, 2006: 107) Cumulatively,
this torrent of publications was crucial to the making of a heterogenous public culture
that was integral to the experience of urban modernity.
The emergence of new educational institutions within the urban context amplified the
power of print in enlarging social horizons. In particular, once the debate about the
future of India’s educational system was settled in favour of the ‘Anglicists’ as a
consequence of the ‘Macaulay Minute’ of 1835, there developed a plethora of
educational institutions in which the new Western knowledge was imparted. Major
metropolises like Bombay, Calcutta and Madras stood at the apex of a reorganised
educational system and possessed the most prestigious colleges for the study of the
arts, medicine and law.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, urban public culture also began to
register the effects of new forms of mass entertainment, most notably in the form of the
cinema. Film production and exhibition had commenced in Bombay with the Lumiere
screenings in 1896, just a year after they had been shown for the first time in Paris.
Even though it did not displace theatre as the most popular mode of urban entertainment,
the cinema came to symbolise ‘modernity’ because of its reliance on electric and
mechanical technologies of movement as well as new structures of commodification.
Cinema halls, in particular, were places where city-dwellers came to experience the
thrills and pleasures of the modern. The most famous cinema halls were constructed on
a grand scale, often in the ‘baroque’ style, and located in the heart of the urban central
business district: the Fort area in Bombay, for instance, or Mount Road in Madras. But
the significance of the cinema hall also lay in the fact that, like the new modes of public
transportation, it too ‘opened up and institutionalised new kinds of public space, which
allowed for greater mixing at close proximity among those of different castes, classes,
and religious communities that would otherwise not normally interact.’ (Hughes, 2006:
40)

37.4 INDIAN ENGAGEMENTS WITH MODERNITY

The previous section highlighted some of the key features of urban modernity in colonial
India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But what was distinctive about
India’s experience of urban modernity under colonial conditions and to what extent did
Indians shape its trajectories? Furthermore, how did Indians respond to the profound,
if unsettling, transformations unleashed by colonial modernity?
Historians have differed in their answer to these questions. In one view, the history of
colonial India was framed as a transition from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ (which was
itself construed as a force that was diffused outwards from its origins in Western Europe).
12
From this perspective, scholars regarded modernity positively but saw the colonial Modernity and the City
state itself as incapable of carrying it through to its logical conclusion. Further, their in Colonial India
accounts primarily focused on the response of educated Indians to the ‘modernizing’
forces emanating from the West. (See, for instance, the essays in Leach and Mukherjee,
1970)
A later generation of historians, largely influenced by the writings of Edward Said and
Michel Foucault, took a more negative view of ‘modernity’ and saw it as an all-powerful
discourse that imprisoned Indian intellectuals within its ‘totalising’ framework.
Significantly, colonial dominance was seen to be most clearly reflected in the city and it
was argued that their ‘perceived lack of agency’ within its confines meant that educated,
middle-class Indians were unable to feel ‘at home’ within the city. It was for this reason
too, some writers suggested, that the modern city was marginal to nationalist thought in
India. (Chatterjee, 2004; see also, Prakash, 2002)
In recent years, however, scholars have begun to query these perspectives. To begin
with, they have become skeptical of the view that modernity in the colonial context
simply replicated developments that had occurred elsewhere. For instance, historians
have shown how the social formation of the urban working classes in colonial India
followed a distinctive logic that was not anticipated by the historical experience of the
West. Notably, the Indian working classes continued to retain close links with the villages
from which they had migrated to the city. This did not mean, however, that they were
insufficiently ‘urban’ or that they lacked a ‘commitment’ to the industrial setting. On the
contrary, it was precisely because they needed their urban jobs to sustain their village
small holdings that these rural migrants were deeply attached to the city. At the same
time, their village base served as an insurance against the vagaries of the urban labour
market. Further, their rural connections were often crucial in helping migrants find work,
credit and housing in the city. Thus, industrial capitalism in colonial India consolidated
rural-urban ties, rather than dissolving them. (Chandavarkar, 1994)
Likewise, some historians have argued that the urban public sphere in the colonial
context should not be seen ‘simply as a variation of the Western model’. Contrary to
the Habermasian formulation, Neeladri Bhattacharya has recently noted, the public
sphere in colonial India was neither ‘homogeneous’ nor a ‘unitary space’; instead, it
was ‘deeply segmented’. Nor did debate and discussion within the Indian public sphere
‘necessarily end in consensus’. (Bhattacharya, 2005: 153-55) On the contrary, it
frequently reaffirmed differences and produced intractable conflicts. Furthermore, within
the urban public sphere in colonial India the languages of reason (and modernity) and
custom (and tradition) became mutually imbricated. As Bhattacharya argues: ‘While
reason was articulated through the language of tradition and discovered within tradition,
tradition was perceived and appropriated through the framework of modern reason.’
(Ibid: 154)
Historians have also begun to point to the different ways in which ‘colonial modernity’
in the urban context was not simply a creation of the colonizers; it was actively shaped
by different sections of Indian society. For instance, scholarly explorations of colonial
architecture and urban development have highlighted the Indian contribution to the public
spaces of these cities. Wealthy Indian merchants, keen to express their support for
colonial ideals of ‘improvement’ and ‘progress’, contributed generously to the public
architecture of the great Presidency capitals. In colonial Bombay, the munificence of
leading Parsi businessmen in Bombay made possible many of the city’s major public
buildings and monuments. Similarly, Delhi’s loyalist Hindu and Muslim businessmen
made substantial financial contributions to the public buildings that were erected in that
city in the two decades after 1857. (Gupta, 1998: 83-86) 13
Colonial Cities - 2 But it was not simply rich Indians who helped to fashion the public spaces of colonial
cities. A recent study has shown how the Parsi architect and engineer Khan Bahadur
Muncherji Cowasji Murzban (1839-1917) was a crucial figure in the evolution of
Bombay’s built environment. His contribution was two-fold. On the one hand, as an
engineer in the Public Works Department Murzban was involved in the construction of
some of Bombay’s most spectacular public buildings. On the other hand, inspired by
traditions of British private philanthropy, Murzban also designed and built hospitals and
housing settlements for the members of his own community. (Chopra, 2011: 73-116)
The public life of the colonial city was also shaped by a diverse range of individuals,
classes and communities. We have already noted the role of wealthy Indian philanthropists
in creating the public spaces of colonial cities. But by the end of the nineteenth century,
it was the emergent Indian middle classes of the great Presidency capitals who began to
exert a decisive influence on urban public life.
Print culture and Western education in particular not only fostered new kinds of social
interaction and sociability among members of the internally diverse middle classes but
also made possible their growing dominance within the urban public sphere. This took
several forms. For instance, in every major colonial city there emerged newspapers
that represented the views of the emergent Indian middle class on a range of civic
matters. These newspapers paid close attention to the doings of their municipal authorities.
They were especially quick to seize upon, and criticize, the privileges claimed by members
of the British ruling elite with regard to the distribution of resources within the city.
Nationalist newspapers, in particular, tended to highlight such inequities in arguing
vociferously for a greater say in the conduct of civic affairs. For instance, the Bombay
Chronicle, founded in 1913 by Sir Pherozeshah Mehta (1845-1915), became a vocal
critic of the colonial administration during the First World War and focused on a range
of pressing material issues that confronted the city’s residents. As Sandip Hazareesingh
has shown, the paper ‘assumed the role of an active citizen seeking knowledge about,
and answers to, the grave problems of urban life.’ (Hazareesingh, 2007: 177)

37.5 NEW ASSOCIATIONAL PRACTICES

Members of the educated Indian middle class also took the lead in forming a variety of
voluntary associations that concerned themselves with the material issues of the urban
civic arena. They established and ran schools, universities, libraries, hospices,
co-operative credit societies and conducted relief work during calamities such as floods
and famines. Furthermore, they drew upon both Western ideas of service and
associational philanthropy as well as longstanding Indian traditions of seva (service)
and dana (charity) in propagating ideals and practices of active citizenship, patriotic
endeavour and ‘constructive nationalism’. (Watt, 2005) At the same time, these
associations were also ‘a rhetorical platform for launching challenges to existing policies
and making claims to resources and rewards controlled by the government.’ (Haynes,
1992: 155)
One of the most prominent voluntary associations in early-twentieth century India was
the Social Service League. Established in March 1911 by prominent members of
Bombay’s liberal Indian intelligentsia, the League sought to collect ‘social facts’ and
discuss ‘social theories and social problems with a view to forming public opinion on
questions of social service.’ By the end of the First World War, the League had become
an important player in the civic arena, especially in matters pertaining to the lives of
Bombay’s working classes. In particular, it campaigned for mass education, sanitary
awareness and ‘social purity’; tried to raise public awareness about the importance and
14 value of social service; and conducted relief work among the urban poor during
emergencies such as the influenza pandemic of 1918. Furthermore, the League became Modernity and the City
a vocal advocate of reforms in the sphere of local self-government and called for greater in Colonial India
state investment in welfare activities that would bring about civic equity. (Kidambi,
2007: 203-34)
But the urban middle classes also engaged in forms of sociability that were less formal
and structured than the kinds of associational activity discussed above. In late-nineteenth
century Calcutta, for example, the new print culture – often centred on a periodical –
opened up a social space for the more relaxed and informal middle-class ‘adda’, which
soon became an integral part of the city’s bhadralok culture. (Sarkar, 1997: 174-5;
Chakrabarty, 2007: 180-213)
Equally, as Sumit Sarkar has noted, the social and civic activism of the Indian middle
class also frequently ‘alternated with moods of self-critical satire, introspection and
passivity.’In particular, ‘A sense of moving forward in tune with the times was intermixed
with evocations of Kali-yuga gloom.’ (Sarkar, 1990: 104) Sarkar argues that it was this
tendency that accounts for the growing fascination of the late-nineteenth century Calcutta
bhadralok for the teachings of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, the Dakshineshwar mystic.
In recent years, historians have also highlighted the role of the working classes in the
making of urban public culture. Notably, they have documented how the world of print
far from being the preserve of Anglophone Indian elites was shaped by the activities
and aspirations of plebeian writers and readers. For instance, the ‘cheap and often
shoddy books’ produced in the Bat-tala area in north Calcutta were testament ‘to a
flourishing world of urban folk culture’ in that city. (Sarkar, 1990: 133-4; Ghosh, 2006:
107-51) Similarly, as A.R. Venkatachalapathy has shown, Madras had its Gujili Bazaar
where booksellers sold ‘chapbooks, ballads, and a whole range of popular reading
material….characterised by their poor quality of production (and) catering to the common
folk.’ Gujili Bazaar thus ‘became the metaphor for a distinct kind of “low” culture, the
“other” of respectable and honourable living as well as, by extension, publishing.’
(Venkatachalapathy, 2012: 138-9)
The plebeian classes also left their mark on urban public culture in other ways. A
ubiquitous feature of working-class life in the city was the presence of numerous akharas
(wrestling clubs), whose activities ranged from cultivating the physical prowess of their
working-class adherents to providing the necessary muscle power for rival parties during
the periodic episodes of violence that swept up colonial cities. From the late nineteenth
century onwards sections of the urban working classes also began to engage in ‘modern’
forms of associational activity, ranging from educational ventures to self-help societies.
This trend intensified in the tumultuous years immediately after the end of the First
World War, a period that saw a profusion of trade unions, charitable societies, reformist
associations and volunteer corps among the urban poor. (Gooptu, 2001: 185-320)
Recent accounts have also begun to offer a more nuanced appraisal of the Indian
responses to the changes associated with urban modernity. In particular, they have
shown how these responses are not easily captured by analytical frameworks that
counterpose ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’.
At one level, the technological innovations and institutional practices of modernity played
a key role in the reimagining of ‘community’ and ‘tradition’ in colonial India. For instance,
from the late nineteenth century onwards numerous castes and communities formed
associations to make claims on the colonial state for recognition and resources. They
also ‘published caste newspapers and histories, expanding the community audiences
that would be receptive to critical reflections on community affairs.’ (Bhattacharya,
2005: 141)
15
Colonial Cities - 2 As Sudipta Kaviraj has noted, the caste and community associations that developed in
cities like Calcutta, Madras or Bombay ‘aspired to a certain kind of universal
membership.’ Thus, ‘the Kayastha Sabha, a highly successful caste association, would
not have relaxed its efforts at recruitment until the last Kayastha had joined its ranks;
but by its very principles of membership, it could not be open to anyone else.’ In other
words, such associations used ‘a strange complex of the opposite principles of universality
of access and a particularity of membership.’ (Kaviraj, 2001: 311) Hence, in colonial
India ‘the modern public was not one, singular and unitary, constituted of individuals
who came together as anonymous beings whose social moorings were irrelevant, as
equivalent citizens – an equivalence that reproduced in the public sphere the idea of
universal man.’ (Bhattacharya, 2005: 141)
At another level, historians have also challenged the influential Weberian proposition
that modernity is inevitably accompanied by ‘disenchantment’. As Michael Saler points,
out, ‘This view, in its broadest terms, maintains that wonders and marvels have been
demystified by science, spirituality has been supplanted by secularism, spontaneity has
been replaced by bureaucratization and the imagination has been subordinated by
instrumental reason.’ (Saler, 2006: 692) By contrast, recent historical perspectives have
emphasised the ways in which the material culture of modernity itself came to be invested
with ‘enchanted’ meanings. ‘Enchantment’ – admittedly an ‘ambiguous term’ – refers
in this context to the persistent sense of wonder and rapture in the face of the marvellous
and the mysterious. (Ibid: 702)
In an interesting study of one such ‘economy of enchantment’ that developed among
the Muslims of colonial Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Nile Green suggests that ‘the conditions of industrial modernity did not necessarily lead
to few “Reformist”, “uniform” or “globalized” religious forms any more than they favoured
processes of rationalisation and disenchantment.’ (Green, 2011: 23) On the contrary,
among the city’s diverse Muslim communities there flourished a ‘Customary Islam’,
based on a variety of shrines, cults and miracle workers. As a result, ‘the growth of
Bombay was not only coeval with train stations and factories but also with sites of the
anti-scientific power associated with relics, rituals and holy men.’ (Ibid: 53) ‘For many
of its Muslims, especially among the labouring classes,’ Green argues, ‘Bombay’s
industrialisation was inseparable from the enchantment of its mills, stations and dockyards
by the providers of religious services that ranged from supernatural medicines to social
support networks and licit entertainments.’ (Ibid: 236)

37.6 SUMMARY
This Unit has tried to show how the fabric of urban life in colonial cities was transformed
from the mid-nineteenth century by the rise of a global economic system based on
industrial capitalism and its attendant technologies of power. Consequently, there
developed in these cities a dense concentration of factories, commercial firms, western-
educated local intelligentsias, ethnically diverse migrant communities and a vibrant public
culture buoyed by a thriving print and associational culture as well as new forms of
mass consumption and entertainment. But the experience of urban modernity that these
cities generated, and the ways in which their Indian inhabitants responded to them, was
neither a pale imitation of a Western original nor a radical manifestation of irreducible
difference. Instead, urban modernity in the colonial context was simultaneously inscribed
with the marks of similarity and difference both in relation to the antinomies of Western
‘modernity’ and Indian ‘tradition’.

16
 Modernity and the City
37.7 EXERCISES in Colonial India
1) Discuss the markers of ‘modernity’ that are usually associated with the city.
2) In what ways did the colonial Indian cities embody the visible signs and symbols of
modernity?
3) How did the concept of urban planning change during the colonial period?
4) What was distinctive about India’s experience of urban modernity under colonial
rule? To what extent did Indians shape its trajectories?
5) Was ‘tradition’ usually swept away by the forces leashed by colonial modernity?
Illustrate with at least two examples.

37.8 REFERENCES
Bhattacharya, Neeladri, (2005) ‘Notes Towards a Conception of the Colonial Public’,
in Rajeev Bhargava and Helmut Reifeld (eds.), Civil Society, Public Sphere and
Citizenship: Dialogues and Perceptions (New Delhi: Sage Publications), pp. 130-
156.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, (2007) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 180-213.
Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, (1994) The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India:
Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Chatterjee, Partha, (2004) The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular
Politics in Most of the World (New Delhi: Permanent Black).
Chopra, Preeti, (2011) A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British
Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Ghosh, Anindita, (2006) Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of
Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778-1905 (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press).
Gooptu, Nandini, (2001) The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth Century
India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Green, Nile, (2011) Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian
Ocean, 1848-1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Gunn, Simon, (2006) History and Cultural Theory (London: Orient Longman).
Gupta, Narayani, (1998) Delhi Between Two Empires, 1803-1931: Society,
Government and Urban Growth (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).
Haynes, Douglas E., (1992) Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of
a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852-1928 (Delhi: Oxford University Press).
Hazareesingh, Sandip, (2007) The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity:
Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay, 1900-1925 (Hyderabad:
Orient Longman).

17
Colonial Cities - 2 Hughes, Stephen P., (2006) ‘Urban Mobility and the History of Cinema-Going in
Chennai’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Chennai Not Madras: Perspectives on
the City (Mumbai: Marg Publications, June), Vol. 57, No. 4, pp. 39-48.
Kaviraj, Sudipta, (2001) ‘In Search of Civil Society’, in Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil
Khilnani (eds.), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Khilnani, Sunil, (1997) The Idea of India (London: Hamish Hamilton).
Leach, Edmund and S.N. Mukherjee (eds.), (1970) Elites in South Asia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Prakash, Gyan, (2002) ‘The Urban Turn’, in Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday
Life (Delhi: SARAI), pp. 2-7.
Ranganathan, Murali (ed. and tr.), (2008) Govind Narayan’s Mumbai: An Urban
Biography from 1863 (London: Anthem Press).
Richards, Jeffrey and John M. MacKenzie, (1986) The Railway Station: A Social
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Saler, Michael, (2006) ‘Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review’, The
American Historical Review, Vol. 111, No. 3 (June), pp. 692-716.
Sarkar, Nikhil, (1990) ‘Printing and the Spirit of Calcutta’, in Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.),
Calcutta. The Living City, Volume I: The Past (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).
Sarkar, Sumit, (1997) Writing Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).
Sarkar, Sumit, (1990) ‘Calcutta and the “Bengal Renaissance”’, in Sukanta Chaudhuri
(ed.), Calcutta. The Living City, Volume I: The Past (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press).
Venkatachalapathy, A.R., (2012) The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and
Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu (New Delhi: Permanent Black).
Watt, Carey A., (2005) Serving The Nation: Cultures of Service, Association, and
Citizenship in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).

18
UNIT 38 CITY PLANNING IN INDIA UNDER
BRITISH RULE*
Structure
38.1 Introduction
38.2 The EarlyYears: Social Relationships and Urban Form in the British-Built Capitals
38.3 Urban Governance and Nationalist Responses
38.4 The Mixed Results of Improvement Trusts
38.5 Twentieth Century Nationalism; Patrick Geddes and the Rethinking of Town
Planning
38.6 Summary
38.7 Exercises
38.8 References

38.1 INTRODUCTION
British planning for Indian cities laboured under serious internal contradictions. As a
colonial power, Britain ruled India primarily for its own benefit, yet it had to address all
the issues of urban administration that any government confronts: design and control of
space; provision of water, sewerage, roads, street lighting; and police. What were the
different kinds of resolutions that were found to deal with the governance of cities under
colonial rule? How did they develop or change over time? The British introduced
concepts of urban planning – based largely on emerging European ideals of health and
sanitation: improved roads, spaciousness, order and beautification. They implemented
these concepts most fully in the parts of the city in which they resided, and which they
dominated, so-called ‘White Town.’ In the areas which were inhabited by Indians, and
usually poor Indians, or ‘Black Town’, they implemented less and more cheaply, with
minimum taxation and minimum expenditure. They attempted to persuade their Indian
subjects to accept these imported ideals as their own, though never without opposition.
British engagement with local leaders – sometimes cooperative and sometimes
oppositional – was determined by the imperatives of colonial rule, and in the later
phases, influenced by nationalist leaders who found a space and voice in municipal
politics. The physical legacies, and hierarchies of British rule were writ large on the
landscape. The administrative legacies of colonial rule were less tangible, but equally
significant. They included: entrusting more power to appointed bureaucrats than to
elected officials; subordination of city governments to state and national authorities; use
of eminent domain especially for slum removal; a policy of low taxes regardless of civic
needs; a pattern of patronage in contracting out urban services; and more emphasis on
impressive design and architecture for government and the elites than on the basic
needs of the ever-increasing immigrant urban masses.

38.2 THE EARLY YEARS: SOCIAL

RELATIONSHIPS AND URBAN FORM IN THE
BRITISH-BUILT CAPITALS
The immense size and diversity of India produced different policies in different regions
and at different times; even where policies may have been similar, their implementation
and reception were frequently different. Even among the Presidency cities of Calcutta,
*
Professor Howard Spodek, Temple University, Philadelphia, U.S.A. 19
Colonial Cities - 2 Madras, and Bombay, which the British largely created anew on rather minimal indigenous
bases – long before they began to take control of already existing cities –differences
soon appeared.
At the heart of each of these cities was an area dominated, designed, and occupied by
the British: Forts named for St. George in Bombay and Madras, and for King William
III in Calcutta. The British lived mostly inside the fort area, including the actual fort and
the strongly defended area around it, sometimes called the civil lines. Here they built
their homes, shops, and churches as well as their commercial and administrative
headquarters, with some variations, since Fort William had few residential settlements
while Fort St George was a veritable city in itself. The army was accommodated in a
nearby area called the cantonment or camp. The much larger Indian area of the city
was usually referred to as the native, or black town. As British control extended
across India, such patterns of racial separation were repeated, although they never
amounted to a system of apartheid.

1. An Eighteenth Century Sketch of Fort St. George, Madras by Jan Van Ryne
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fort_St._George,_Chennai.jpg

2. Fort William, Calcutta

20 Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fortwilliam_1760.jpg
In some cities, where the British presence was great, very large areas of cantonment City Planning in India
and civil lines were established alongside pre-existing Indian cities. Delhi, Bangalore, under British Rule
and Secunderabad, (adjoining Hyderabad) are examples. In other cities where the
British presence was minimal, (e.g., Ahmedabad) the cantonment was proportionately
smaller and it housed civilian as well as military personnel.

3. Lady Curzon Hospital, Bangalore Cantonment

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bangalore_LadyCurzonHospital.jpg

The British areas of town and the Indian appeared to be quite separate from one another.
For example, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, citing earlier texts, writes, ‘The major
geographical division in eighteenth-century Bombay was … between “its two distinct
limits, the English and the Black”.’ (Chandavarkar, 1994: 40) Anthony King notes this
racial segregation for urban India more generally, but he also reveals that divisions
between white and black neighborhoods were often blurred. (King, 1976) Even within
the fort, only some areas were white, others Indian. When Bombay tried to evict Indian
businessmen from the fort area, around 1800, many refused to leave and the government
admitted that it lacked the legal tools, the detailed land use and property records, to
force them to go. (Dossal, 2010: 57-8)
A survey in 1812-13, showed that, in fact, Indians overwhelmingly outnumbered the
British in the Fort area. Out of a total population of 10,801 listed as dwelling in the
Fort, 250 were English, 5464 Parsis, 4061 Hindus, 775 ‘Moors’, 146 Portuguese,
and 105 Armenians. (Dossal, 2010: 80) These groups, however, tended to be separated
even within the Fort, with Churchgate Street functioning as an intangible line of
demarcation that separated the British settlement to the south, characterised by
‘whitewashed English homes with covered piazzas’, from the ‘brightly painted and
carved ethnic Indian houses to the north’. (Hazareesingh, 2007: 15)
Later, suburbs began to develop outside the fort walls. As Siddhartha Sen, Mariam
Dossal and John Archer point out, the suburbs were even less racially exclusive than
the fort areas. (Sen, 2010; Dossal, 2010; Archer, 1997) European officials and merchants
as well as wealthy Indians, found themselves forming new elite neighborhoods together
as ‘many Indian magnates began to move out of their wadis and mohallas to European
dominated areas such as Malabar and Cumballa Hills, Breach Candy and Mahalaxmi.’
(Chandavarkar, 1994: 41) Conversely, some middle-class and poorer Europeans lived 21
Colonial Cities - 2 in the predominantly Indian sections of town, such as the Tarwadi and Byculla
neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, dangerous or offensive trades of tanners, catgut makers,
fat-boilers, and indigo dyers were relocated to areas farther north, beyond the indigenous
settlements.
Madras’ experience was similar, although suburban homes were often larger and
surrounded by large gardens:
Production and trade remained concentrated in the Black Town and adjacent areas, and
administration and finance took over Fort St. George, while traders, financiers, officials,
and other professionals and entrepreneurs, Indian and European alike, continued to lay
out enclaves of private residential compounds around the south-western, western, and
north-western perimeter of the city. (Archer, 1994: 45)

In Calcutta, although the fort was European, some of the land in the white town was
owned by Indians and rented to Englishmen. (Chatterjee, 2012: 6) Later, in the nearby
suburbs, such as Chowringhee, both Indians and Europeans established their own
individual, sizeable family homes, set in their own compounds, in a ‘distinct, discrete,
predominantly residential quarter.’ (King, 1976: 49; Cf. Sinha, 1978) Meanwhile,
‘Ballygunge was another popular place of residence for the Europeans…. Well-placed
and ambitious Indians with close connections to the government also settled here.’
(Datta, 2012: 177)
In the port-capitals, the areas within the fort walls and immediately around them, were
the sites of maximum inter-racial interaction. At least five recent scholarly works
emphasise the patterns. Swati Chattopadhyay focuses on the British-built house in
Calcutta. While it may have looked like a house in Britain from the outside, inside the
two functioned quite differently. In England, houses were constructed to separate servants
from masters. In their homes in India, however, British rulers and employers were
constantly crossing the paths of their (numerous) servants. Chattopadhyay claims that
the British were uneasy about the lack of privacy, but proud of their ability to command
such a large retinue of servants, and to be reminded of this command at every turn.
(Chattopadhyay, 2005)
Partho Datta provides descriptions of yet another style of urban integration: the street
scene jumble of wealthy European homes interspersed with huts of their Indian servants:
The appearance of the best houses is spoiled by the little straw huts, and such sort of
encumbrances, which are built up by the servants for themselves to sleep in; so that all the
English part of the town, which is the largest, is a confusion of very superb and very
shabby houses, dead walls, straw huts, warehouses, and I know not what. (Datta, 2012:
138)

The quote is from Calcutta, 1768, but Datta argues that this style of integration was
ubiquitous and enduring.
Some scholars such as Raj Chandavarkar and Preeti Chopra have shown the contribution
of wealthy Indian businessmen to the public life of some parts of Bombay, to which they
made their claims on power and on space.
Bombay’s mercantile elites acquired a grip on important and lucrative areas of the city’s
economy, including and indeed especially the cotton textile industry. By marked contrast
with Calcutta and Madras, the city’s elites swiftly acquired a significant share of local
power. From the 1830s onwards, they were firmly entrenched in local government. …As
they battled for power within the Municipal Corporation where they gained, by the 1880s,
greater representation on a relatively wide franchise, they took particular pride in public
standards in the city. (Chandavarkar, 2004: 73)
22
Preeti Chopra speaks similarly of a ‘joint public realm’, ‘distinct from concrete and City Planning in India
imagined ethnic, religious, racial, and class enclaves’, which was ‘a spatial arena that under British Rule
was, in theory, owned by and open to all of Bombay’s citizens and helped in the
construction of an imagined common public.’ (Chopra, 2011: xxi) By the end of the
nineteenth century, ‘wealthy natives, rather than the ruling race, seemed to control the
economy and space on the island of Bombay,’ (Chopra, 2011: 188) though this was
confined to some elite areas of the city.
Finally, writing of Lahore in the late nineteenth century, and its integrated civil station,
William Glover argues that the British wanted Indians to share in the suburban experience.
The ‘goal was nothing less than to create a new kind of person, and the material
environment was thought crucial to the task.’ (Glover, 2008: 199) In large measure
they succeeded, for Prakash Tandon describes Lahore in the 1930s and 1940s as two
cities, ‘the Lahore of the Lahorias, people who lived inside the old walled city; and the
Lahore of the ring of suburbs that grew after the city began to respond to the new
peace and order. …The two Lahores were quite different in appearance and character.’
(Tandon, 1968: 183)
On the other hand, the British response to the revolt of 1857, especially in Delhi and
Lucknow, two of the most rebellious of the cities, demonstrated that when the British
saw their supremacy and rule under attack, they could retaliate with devastating,
uncompromising power. The entire Indian population of Delhi was evacuated and
allowed to return only group by group, Hindus in January 1858, Muslims not till the end
of that year. Muslims who wanted their own property back had to pay for it. The poet
Ghalib cried out in 1858: ‘Where is Delhi, By God, it is not a city now. It is a camp. It
is a cantonment. There is neither Palace, nor bazaar, nor the canal.’ ( as cited in Gupta,
1971: 63)
In Lucknow, many key buildings that had housed rebels were razed to the ground and
others were seized for British control. Still others were destroyed to make way for
wide boulevards intended, as in the Paris of Baron Haussmann of about the same time,
to break up the close knit residential neighbourhoods where rebels could hide and
escape British forces, and to create roads along which troops could be deployed quickly.
New sanitation measures included not only water supply and sewerage, they also
extended to regulation and health examinations of the Indian women who serviced the
British troops sexually. The British also introduced new taxes and collected them more
efficiently to make the city pay for the new construction, services, and police.
(Oldenburg, 1984)
The descriptions of interactions of British personnel, policies and plans with Indian
people and traditions, suggest that while clear divisions and hierarchies persisted even
in the later stages of colonial rule, interesting ‘hybrids’ were created. Jyoti Hosagrahar
has argued that Delhi’s classical havelis, public spaces, roads, housing clusters, and
conceptions of public health were all transformed, not into British forms, but into new
hybrids as a result of being adapted to new uses. (Hosagrahar, 2005)
When the British moved their capital from Calcutta in 1911, they built New Delhi, a
new city outside and separated from (Old) Delhi. In the capitals of India’s large princely
states, and in the center of regions with numerous smaller states, they built Residency
areas to headquarter their local administration and troop garrisons adjacent to the existing
native cities. Degrees of segregation and integration continued, although they differed
by time and place.

23
Colonial Cities - 2
38.3 URBAN GOVERNANCE AND NATIONALIST
RESPONSES
Some cities found ways of coping with British rule. Ahmedabad provides an example
of a pre-existing large and important city in which only a few British officers came to
work and live.1 When the British came to power in Ahmedabad, after the third Maratha
War in 1817, they sought to ‘repair and restore some of the old, dilapidated structures.’
(Chauhan and Bose, 2007: 77) In 1830, they shifted their regional headquarters from
Baroda to Ahmedabad, and established a cantonment in 1832, which contained
residential facilities and administrative offices.
In 1830, the leading citizens of Ahmedabad received British permission to establish a
Town Wall Committee to repair the town walls and to raise the funds through a small
increase in town duties. Water was piped from the Sabarmati river to the center of
town, at Manek Chowk, in 1849, with some pipes extended even to private homes;
separate water pumps and latrines were installed for low castes. Later a dharamsala
and a grain market were added. Deeming the surrounding area to be safe, some wealthier
merchants began to build new bungalows for themselves in Shahibaug, the area between
the city wall and the new cantonment, as early as 1840.
Ahmedabad’s early local initiatives were, however, somewhat unusual. Nationally, more
sweeping legislation for urban governance was required. The East India Company passed
the Improvement in Towns Act (Act 26 of 1850), which called for contributions to
support Municipal Commissions that would introduce urban improvements. Ahmedabad
adopted the act in 1856, as did some towns in the Bengal presidency, also in the
1850s, and some in the Punjab in the 1860s.2 By the 1860s, a new regime of municipal
record keeping and control over building activity in towns and cities was inaugurated
through the new Municipal Committees, (Glover, 2007: 13-14) which focused largely
on providing urban facilities and services and enforcing building bye laws. (Ansari,
1977: 10) Initially, persons nominated by the British rulers governed these municipalities.
Later, especially after 1882, the municipalities were opened to more members elected
from the city’s Indian population as well.
Through his Resolution of 1882, Viceroy Lord Ripon extended the principles of local
self-government to all municipalities under British rule. The Chairman, however, was
the municipal commissioner, usually a British official. Civic improvement was only one
part of the agenda; shifting the burden of tax collection from the British to Indians was
another. Most citizens did not want to pay the taxes, especially when they perceived no
benefit for themselves. Many authors such as Mariam Dossal (on Bombay), Narayani
Gupta (on Delhi) and Susan Lewandowski (on Madras) have noted the shortage of
municipal funds and the almost total lack of concern for parts of the city into which poor
immigrants moved.
Urban government after the Ripon reforms required a series of compromises between
‘financial austerity and political necessity … No Indian town or city could approach the
economic resources of a Leeds or Birmingham in the nineteenth century.’ (Leonard,
1973: 251) There was enough in the budget, however, ‘to make it worthwhile for local
contractors to become politicians and win election to the Municipal Council … Urban
services … expanded most in road construction and lighting … highly visible

1
Information on Ahmedabad is cited from Gillion, Kenneth L. Ahmedabad: A Study in Indian
Urban History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), unless otherwise specified.
2
24 Personal communication, Narayani Gupta, April 10, 2012.
improvements that had great appeal for urban voters, cost relatively little and provided City Planning in India
an important administrative role and patronage for politicians.’ (Leonard, 1973: 246) under British Rule

Vested interests multiplied and even the highest municipal officials often felt frustrated.
Arthur Crawford, Municipal Commissioner of Bombay, 1865 to 1871, complained:
Kessowjee Naik brought his dyers back to their old quarters. I prosecuted them, but was
defeated. [He] spent money like water, eminent physicians swore solemnly that dye-pits
were beneficial to health! Even the Press was “nobbled” by sums so large that their
Editors could not resist the bait. This infamous success emboldened a powerful German
firm to open a large steam Dyeing Factory close to Parbadevi Temple, whose refuse waters
polluted the fair sands of Mahim Bay. … An English firm … dumped down on DeLisle
Road a bone crushing and bone manure mill nearly opposite Cowasji Jehangir’s College in
Parel Road. (as cited in Dossal, 1991: 203)

Crawford lamented that he had neither the time nor the resources to fight back and
members of the Bombay Association of rate payers forced his transfer in 1871. (Dossal,
1991: 213)
More attention was paid to the commercial infrastructure of colonial cities, which had
their own administrative authorities, separate from the municipal government. In Bombay,
for instance, three wet docks for large ships, the Prince’s Dock, the Victoria Dock and
the Alexandra Dock, were built between 1875 and 1914. India’s first oil terminal was
opened at Sewri, and new wharves, depots, warehouses and railway sidings were
added to handle the millions of tons of cargo annually shipped through Bombay.
(Hazareesingh, 2007: 18)
In general, then, until the end of the nineteenth century, the British were concerned
mostly with their own areas of the city – the administrative headquarters, the cantonment,
the civil lines, and the industrial and port areas. They planted some new buildings and
institutions in the native cities, drove some new roads through old neighborhoods,
supplied some new water and sewerage, but did not, indeed could not, fully engage
with the city as a whole.

38.4 THE MIXED RESULTS OF IMPROVEMENT

TRUSTS
In 1898, following the plague that broke out in Bombay in 1896, the first Improvement
Trust was initiated in Bombay (Ansari, 1977: 10). The trust was created for three
reasons. First, the disastrously poor sanitation in Bombay threatened the city’s
international trade. Already in 1867, at an international conference on cholera convened
in Constantinople, French and Egyptian representatives called Bombay a ‘cholera nest’.
(Dossal, 1991: 203) They threatened to close their ports to ships passing through Bombay.
The threat became a reality in 1896 as ‘plague initially closed the ports of Europe to
ships from Bombay, disrupting the city’s export trade and virtually paralyzing its
commercial life.’ (Hazareesingh, 2007: 27) The Trust was to bring Bombay into
compliance with international health standards.
Second, the Trust was to save lives through improving housing standards. ‘The
establishment of the Bombay Improvement Trust in 1898 was the outcome of a firmly
entrenched belief that plague was, in the first instance, the direct result of overcrowding
in poorly ventilated and filth-ridden dwellings.’ (Kidambi, 2007: 68) Mortality rates,
1896-1900, reached 65.4 per thousand, and remained at 64.1 per thousand,
1901-05. This was more than double its rate in the previous decades. (Klein, 1986:
729) Workers fled. The population of the city which had been 821,764 in 1891 (Klein,
25
Colonial Cities - 2 1986: 729) plummeted to 400,000 in 1897-98 (Dossal, 2010: 159), although, the city
recouped its losses by 1911.
Ira Klein points out that there was no building code in most of Bombay, and cites the
official census reports of 1901 for evidence of the grim housing conditions of the period.
Worse, close to 100,000 labourers had no homes at all. (Kidambi, 2007: 38) Klein
analyses the problem as follows:
Since the Western rulers believed that laissez faire methods were most efficient for
development, they were not particularly concerned about tremendous disparities in wealth,
crowding or urban blight; …. Bombay’s leaders did not conceive of the urban environment
as a separate entity to be protected for health, comfort or beauty; rather it was viewed as
a resource for development, disposable as a market commodity. (Klein, 1986: 727)

The Bombay Improvement Trust was therefore charged with invoking the power of
eminent domain to destroy slums and improve the living conditions of the poor. The
Trust focused on physical planning: creating new streets, decongesting crowded localities,
reclaiming land for urban expansion, and constructing housing for low income residents.
These improvements were also intended to enhance the city’s image as a center of
imperial and commercial power. (Ansari, 1977: 9)
Why an Improvement Trust? Why not carry out these activities through the existing
Municipal government? A third goal of the Trust was to keep key urban development
powers in the hands of appointed officials, who could proceed ‘unencumbered by
accountability to representatives of local self-governing institutions.’ (Kidambi,
2007: 72) As Improvement Trusts were subsequently extended to other large cities
across India – Agra, Kanpur, Nagpur, Delhi, Calcutta – they extended the frictions
between the elected municipal governments and the appointed trusts concerning division
of functions and responsibilities. ‘This initiated the process of multiplicity of authorities
that became a major issue of governance after independence.’ (Ansari, 2009: 52)
In pursuing its goals of improving or destroying slums and making available better living
conditions for the poor, the Bombay Improvement Trust was a failure. At least in the
short run, the Trust was actually reducing the supply of low cost accommodation, and
doing it without concern for those evicted. Thousands of houses were destroyed without
alternatives being provided. In order to let light and air into homes, the Municipal
Corporation had rooms inside houses destroyed to create interior chowks. To create
this space, some residents were displaced; in some cases the homeowners added storeys
to their houses. The result was more overcrowding. The remaining houses rose in price,
so the poor could not afford them. They left or they cramped even more tightly into the
remaining space. Meanwhile, the Trust was unable to provide adequate new housing
on the city’s outskirts. Poor residents also could not pay the systematic collection of
rent demanded by the Trust; they often preferred private owners with whom they could
negotiate or delay payments.
Living conditions in the overcrowded tenements in the central districts of the city continued
steadily to deteriorate. By 1911, fearing financial losses, the Trust began to raise rents.
In effect, by knocking down buildings in the slums and raising building standards, the
Trust had evicted the poor and created middle class housing in its place. (Kidambi,
2007: 71-110)
The dilemmas of the Trust revealed just one more example of the conflicts over land
that characterised Bombay (and other cities). ‘Conflict over land had a long history and
been so acute that the planning efforts were marginalized and vested interests determined
incremental growth in the island city. In this situation, the state had never been dominant
26 nor determined enough to ensure that planning initiatives were actually implemented.
The essence of Bombay’s history lay in the conflict between serving the immediate City Planning in India
needs of vested interests and the long term benefits for society as a whole.’ (Dossal, under British Rule
2010: 164)
Although health conditions were less severe, the physical conditions of Calcutta housing
were even worse than in Bombay. Calcutta had the highest percentage of slums of any
city in India, ‘divided into great “blocks” of buildings, ranging over 20 to 270 acres (but
most commonly about 100 acres) consisting of streetless dense building. The total area
covered in this way in the city in 1912, [the year after the Calcutta Improvement Trust
was established] was 2,200 acres covering an area of three square miles.’ (Meller,
1979: 338)
The first chairman of the Calcutta Improvement Trust, E.P. Richards, wrote a devastating
259 page report ‘On the Condition, Improvement and Town Planning of the City of
Calcutta and Contiguous Areas.’ Revealing his frustration in dealing with the lack of
planning, he said:
A casual glance at the Calcutta plans shows instantly that the city, as a whole, actually
possesses no streets. There are but two small areas in Calcutta having the normal street
system which is found throughout the whole area of almost every city in the world. …
2,500 acres are provided only with highly irregular lanes and passages. It would require
the creation of 110 miles of ordinary 30-40 Ft streets to bring Calcutta into line with even
the old built-up sections of European cities. (Moorhouse, 1971: 263; for a fuller discussion
of Richards’ report see Datta, 2012: 233-53)
The Calcutta Improvement Trust was to concentrate on the populated centres of the
city, thus restricting its source of income, as there was little vacant land to sell off for
development. The CIT saw its mission mostly as destroying slums, or at least opening
them up to circulation of traffic and ventilation of air.
The concepts advocated by the National Housing Reform Council in Great Britain, and
apparent in Britain’s first piece of town planning legislation, the Housing Town Planning
Act of 1909, began to influence Indian planning, but the gap between British ideals and
Indian realities was too great. The new British legislation called for purchasing land on
the outskirts of cities and developing it for the respectable poor with a steady wage;
they would then abandon their inner-city homes for the next generation of the poor. ‘It
was an idea based on the possibility of rising real incomes for the poor, orderly and
controlled administration, and the efficacy of private initiative. …Conditions in Indian
cities could not have been more different.’ (Meller, 1979: 336)
Industrialisation in India was minimal through most of the 19th century. Town planning
in the late 1880s and 1890s was more ‘a matter of asserting the Imperial presence by
the construction of impressive buildings for colonial rulers and their officers.’ (Meller,
1979: 331) In municipalities, very little professional expertise existed for drafting and
implementing town planning. (Meller, 1979: 341) The key personnel in India were
sanitary and civil engineers, who cleared slums or built straight roads through them;
filled up tanks to get rid of mosquitoes; and made sure civil lines were well taken care
of with water and sewerage services paid for by taxes on the entire city population.
Social planning was virtually non-existent.

38.5 TWENTIETH CENTURY NATIONALISM;

PATRICK GEDDES AND THE RETHINKING
OF TOWN PLANNING
The Bombay Town Planning Act of 1915, the first town planning legislation in India,
27
gave the Bombay Municipal Corporation powers to prepare Town Planning Schemes
Colonial Cities - 2 for urban development or redevelopment and present them to the Governor in Council
of the City of Bombay. It called for zoning, building regulations, acquisition of land for
public purposes, and the collection of funds for local improvements. The need was felt
especially strongly because of the chaotic growth of Bombay’s textile mills and the
workers’ housing that surrounded them.3 The initiative vested in the local authorities,
although the State Government could in special cases direct the local authorities to
undertake Town Planning Schemes. (Ansari, 1977: 10; also Ballaney, 2008)
Other provinces followed, UP in 1919, Madras in 1920. All the plans were physical in
orientation. Some entrusted the responsibility to local governments, some to Improvement
Trusts. Some were limited to municipal limits, some to peripheral areas, some included
both. Some enabled local governments or authorities to draw up planning acts. Most of
the town planning legislation called for the use of eminent domain; compensation for the
land acquired would be negotiated, but government had the final say.
The Bombay legislation was different, calling for land pooling where possible. Each
landowner to be affected by the acquisition for public facilities would surrender a part
of his land to the government, and keep a part. The land remaining after the government’s
acquisition would be re-parcelled out in proportion to the value of each person’s land
to the whole. It was presumed that landowners would approve of this process because
the value of their land, even though reduced in size, would nevertheless increase by
virtue of the new road or other facility introduced into the area. No one was completely
dispossessed; the value of the land increased; the government did not purchase land or
become a landlord. In the short run, this method was time consuming, requiring a great
deal of consultation with the landowners, but, in the long run, it created less resentment
and fewer protests. Nevertheless, after some time, the process of land pooling gave
way to the use of eminent domain, even in Bombay Province. Eminent domain appeared
so much easier to use. (In the last decade, however, Gujarat has returned to using land
pooling.) (Ballaney, 2008)
The five development plans prepared in 1915 for Ahmedabad by the ‘Consulting
Surveyor’ to the Bombay Government, Arthur Mirams, demonstrate the intersecting
interests of British town planners, the colonial government, and the Indian nationalist
movement, which was creating its own urban agenda. In 1915, Ahmedabad was the
home of Mohandas Gandhi, just beginning his rise to leadership of the nationalist
movement, and also of Vallabhbhai Patel, Gandhi’s principal lieutenant in Gujarat. Patel
served for many years as an elected member of the Municipality, and for several as its
President. If Mirams’ plans were to be implemented, the Municipality would have to be
persuaded.
The town planning schemes for restructuring and bringing electricity and increased water
supply and sewage lines to Jamalpur and Kankaria, areas just adjacent to and outside
the walls of the old city, were generally popular and passed easily. On the west bank of
the Sabarmati River, however, farmers objected to new development plans that took
away their land. Vallabhbhai Patel, who felt that the city had to expand, persuaded
them to comply. On the other hand, Patel felt that the plans for pulling down the city
walls and replacing them with a ring road and an electric tram line were too expensive.
In addition, he appreciated the symbolic importance to the Muslim community of retaining
the walls, which had been built in the time of the Gujarat Sultanate, and of preserving

3
The overall proportion of urbanization in India was not rising very fast, however, from 10.8% in
1901 to 13.9% in 1941, the last census of India under British rule, to 17.3% in 1951. The aggregated
numbers are more impressive, from about 26 million in 1901 to about 44 million in 1941 to about 62
28 million in 1951. The largest cities were growing fastest.
the Muslim cemeteries at their base. This project languished for two decades before it City Planning in India
was implemented, without the tram line. Later, Patel also opposed plans for a road under British Rule
through the walled city, on grounds that Indians hadn’t been consulted; road construction
was therefore put off until 1933. Social and political considerations were also part of
the agenda of the Indian National Congress and in 1924 the INC presided over the
election to the Ahmedabad Municipality of Kacharabhai Bhagat and two other dalits,
its first ‘untouchable’ mill worker representatives. (Spodek, 2011: 76-77; 100-01)
In 1915, Patrick Geddes arrived in India, at first as a guest of Lord Pentland, Governor
of Madras, who asked him to bring to India his innovative Cities and Town Planning
Exhibition. Geddes stayed on in India until 1924, the last six years as a professor of
Civics and Sociology at the Bombay University. A remarkable man who has influenced
town planners for a century, Geddes believed that ‘the town planner was the
propagandist, the inspirational genius who would raise the consciousness of the whole
community…’ (Meller, 1979: 343-44) He managed to get the Madras Government in
1915 to appoint the first official town planner in India, H.V. Lanchester, architect and
editor of The Builder. (Meller, 1979: 343)
Geddes’ ideas were influential but not immediately implemented. His concepts were
too romantic, too organic, too rooted in planning with and for the community rather
than in physical planning of buildings and roads by professional engineers. Geddes saw
British planning as the problem, not the solution. ‘Geddes was totally scathing about the
expensive and unrealistic activities of the British engineers and sanitarians with their
belief in wide, open thoroughfares, wholesale destruction of slum areas, flushed sewers,
etc; whilst Improvement Trusts rarely had the powers to make a comprehensive impact
on the total environment of the city.’ (Meller, 1979: 345) Geddes proposed cheap and
ameliorative solutions.
A few of the princes invited Geddes to make new plans for their capital cities, and some
did establish Improvement Trusts. Geddes’ ideas endured, but they had to wait for a
time and place in which community, rather than zoning, would be the focus of planning.
A few European trained urban planners came to India after Geddes. Linton Bogle, a
graduate of the first British university department of civic design at Liverpool, came and
wrote a treatise on Town Planning in India in 1929, following his experience as Chief
Engineer of the Lucknow Improvement Trust. Bogle wrote of the need to address the
appalling conditions in the slums. He used public health indices – a death rate of 501/
1000 infants under one year of age in Bombay; 464 in Cawnpore; 330 in Calcutta – to
emphasise the need for immediate action. He cited the dense overcrowding in the large
cities, the lack of space for recreation and play, the need for larger residences. Bogle
was an engineer, and most of the remedies he proposed took the form of physical
planning, including zoning and increased room for wider roads. (Bogle, 1929) In his
introduction to Bogle’s manual, Radhakamal Mukerjee, of the University of Lucknow,
proclaimed the need for social planning as well as engineering, in part because all of the
industrial cities had enormous surpluses of male population who might be seduced by
‘the thought of running away to liquor shops and brothels where there is more room
space, more light, and more company.’ (Bogle, 1929: 5)
Depression in the 1930s and then World War II brought about a pause in Indian planning,
as elsewhere. The construction of New Delhi as a new national capital, which continued
even through the depression, was a major exception. Otherwise,
the only important event from the point of town planning around this time was the
publication of a report in 1946 by the Health Survey and Development Committee under
the Chairmanship of Sir Joseph Bhore. It recommended the creation of a Ministry of
29
Colonial Cities - 2 Housing and Town Planning in every Province, well equipped Provincial Directorates of
Town Planning, appointment of an expert in the Central Ministry of Health to advise on
and scrutinize Town Planning Schemes in different provinces seeking financial support
from the center, and creation of Improvement Trusts in all large cities. (Ansari, 1977: 11)

Independence in 1947 revealed the limitations of town planning up to that point: shortage
of professionals, non-existence of comprehensive town planning legislation in almost all
the States, and lack of organisation of town planning departments. In 1951, the Institute
of Town Planners, India, was created with 19 members (290 in 1971; 600+ in 1979).
The central and state governments began establishing planning legislation and town
planning departments at the state level. The preparation of Master Plans for major
Indian cities began in the 1950s as a coordinated set of proposals for the physical
development of the whole city rather than for parts of it – as the Town Planning Schemes
had been – and going beyond problems of crisis management into consideration of
future as well as present needs. (Ansari, 1977: 11) A new era, with new problems, was
seeking new solutions, but, for better or worse, it began with the ambiguous legacy of
the previous century.

38.6 SUMMARY
Town planning emerged in England as a response to the problems posed by the industrial
city in the 19th century. In India, the construction and reconstruction of cities for reasons
of governance, and to reduce threats posed by epidemics, was more piece meal and
partial, hampered by indifference to the problems of indigenous zones of the city,
inadequate finances, and ineffective legal measures. By the 20th century, the influence of
professional town planners, the growing nationalist interest in municipal politics, and the
interventions of indigenous elites altered the scenario. Many Indian cities, however,
continued to bear the marks of a legacy of cities divided on racial and class lines, and
planned (or not planned) accordingly.

38.7 EXERCISES
1) How did British India confront urban issues with regard to design and control of
spaces, health and sanitation?
2) Critically examine the altered social relationships and urban forms in the British
built capitals.
3) How did nationalists respond to the opportunities for new urban governance in the
colonial period?
4) What role did the ‘Improvement Trusts’ play in the improvement of health and
sanitation in the cities during the colonial period? Were the Improvement Trusts at
all needed?
5) Mention the chief features of Town Planning Acts. What was their significance?
6) Write brief notes on Geddes’ and Bogle’s ideas of town planning.

38.8 REFERENCES
Ansari, Jamal H., (1977) ‘Evolution of Town Planning Practice and System of Urban
Government in India’, Urban and Rural Planning Thought, Vol. XX, No. 1 (January),
pp.9-23.

30 Ansari, Jamal, (2009) Revisting Urban Planning in South Asia: Regional Study
Prepared for Revisiting Urban Planning: Global Report on Human Settlements City Planning in India
2009, http://www.unhabitat.org/grhs/2009 (accessed 16 November 2012). under British Rule

Archer, John, (1997) ‘Colonial Suburbs in South Asia, 1700-1850, and the Spaces of
Modernity’, in Roger Silverstone (ed.), Visions of Suburbia (London: Routledge), pp.
26-54.
Ballaney, Shirley, (2008) The Town Planning Mechanism in Gujarat, India
(Washington: World Bank Institute).
Bogle, J.M. Linton, (1929) Town Planning in India (London: Oxford University Press).
Bombay, Government of India, (1925) Bombay Town Planning Act, No. 1 of 1915.
Town Planning Scheme: Ahmedabad No. 1 (Jamalpur) (Final) (Poona: Yeravda
Prison Press).
Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, (2004) ‘Introduction: From Neighborhood to Nation’, in
Neera Adarkar and Meena Menon, One Hundred Years One Hundred Voices: The
Millworkers of Girangaon: An Oral History (Calcutta: Seagull Press), pp. 7-80.
Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, (1994) The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India:
Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Chauhan, Muktirajsinhji and Kamalika Bose, (2007) A History of Interior Design in
India. Volume 1: Ahmedabad (Ahmedabad: SID Research Cell, School of Interior
Design, CEPT University).
Chatterjee, Partha, (2012) The Black Hole of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University
Press).
Chattopadhyay, Swati, (2000) ‘Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of “White Town” in
Colonial Calcutta’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. LIX,
No. 2 (June), 154-79.
Chopra, Preeti, (2011) A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British
Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Chopra, Preeti, (2007) ‘Refiguring the Colonial City: Recovering the Role of Local
Inhabitants in the Construction of Colonial Bombay, 1854-1918’, Buildings and
Landscapes, Vol. XV (Fall), pp. 109-25.
Datta, Partho, (2012) Planning the City: Urbanisation and Reform in Calcutta c.
1800-c. 1940 (New Delhi: Tulika Books).
Dossal, Mariam, (1991) Imperial Designs and Indian Realities. The Planning of
Bombay City, 1845-1875 (Bombay: Oxford University Press).
Dossal, Mariam, (2010) Theatre of Conflict, City of Hope: Mumbai 1660 to Present
Time (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).
Gillion, Kenneth L., (1968) Ahmedabad: A Study in Indian Urban History (Berkeley:
University of California Press).
Glover, William J., (2007) ‘Construing Urban Space as “Public” in Colonial India:
Some Notes from the Punjab’, Journal of Punjab Studies, Vol. XIV, No. 2 (Fall),
211-24.

31
Colonial Cities - 2 Glover, William J., (2008) Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a
Colonial City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Glover, William J., (2005) ‘Objects, Models, and Exemplary Works: Educating
Sentiment in Colonial India’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. LXIV, No. 3 (August),
pp. 539-66.
Gupta, Narayani, (1981) Delhi Between Two Empires, 1830-1931: Society,
Government, and Urban Growth (Delhi: Oxford University Press).
Gupta, Narayani, (1971) ‘Military Security and Urban Development: A Case Study of
Delhi 1857-1912’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. V, No. 1, pp. 61-77.
Hazareesingh, Sandip, (2007) The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity:
Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay City 1900-1925
(Hyderabad: Orient Longman).
Hosagrahar, Jyoti, (2005) Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and
Urbanism (New York: Routledge).
Kidambi, Prashant, (2007) The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial
Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890-1920 (Aldershot, England:
Ashgate).
King, Anthony D., (1976) Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power
and Environment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).
Klein, Ira, (1986) ‘Urban Development and Death, Bombay City, 1870-1914’, Modern
Asian Studies, Vol. XX, No. 4 (October), pp. 725-54.
Legg, Stephen, (2007) Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities
(Malden, MA: Blackwell).
Leonard, John, (1973) ‘Urban Government under the Raj: A Case Study of Municipal
Administration in Nineteenth-century South India’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. VII,
No. 2, pp. 227-251.
Lewandowski, Susan J., (1975) ‘Urban Growth and Municipal Development in the
Colonial City of Madras, 1860-1900’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2
(February), pp. 341-60.
Meller, H.E., (1979) ‘Urbanisation and the Introduction of Modern Town Planning
Ideas in India, 1900-1925’, in K.N. Chaudhuri and Clive J. Dewey, (eds.) Economy
and Society: Essays in Indian Economic and Social History (Delhi: Oxford University
Press), pp. 330-50.
Moorhouse, Geoffrey, (1971) Calcutta (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
Nair, Janaki, (2005) The Promise of the Metropolis. Bangalore’s Twentieth Century
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press).
Oldenburg, Veena Talwar, (1984) The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856-1877
(Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Sachdev, Vibhuti, (2011) ‘Paradigms for Design: The Vastu Vidya Codes of India’, in
Stephen Marshall, ed. Urban Coding and Planning (London: Routledge), pp. 83-
100.

32
Sen, Siddhartha, (2010) ‘Between Dominance, Dependence, Negotiation, and City Planning in India
Compromise: European Architecture and Urban Planning Practices in Colonial India’, under British Rule
Journal of Planning History, Vol. IX, No.4, pp. 203-231.
Silverstone, Roger, (ed.) (1997) Visions of Suburbia (London: Routledge).
Sinha, Pradip, (1978) Calcutta in Urban History (Calcutta: Firma K. L.
Mukhopadhyay).
Spodek, Howard, (2011) Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth Century India
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Spodek, Howard, (1973) ‘Urban Politics in the Local Kingdoms of India: A View from
the Princely Capitals of Saurashtra under British Rule’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol.
VII, No. 2, pp. 253-75.
Tandon, Prakash, (1968) Punjabi Century 1857-1947 (Berkeley: University of
California Press).

33
 UNIT 39 PREDICAMENTS OF POST
COLONIAL CITIES*
Structure
39.1 Introduction
39.2 Independence/Partition and Resettlement
39.3 Producing the New Urban Citizen
39.4 A New Impetus to Urban Planning
39.5 Critiques of Planning
39.6 Social Movements and the City
39.7 New Risks and Contemporary Urbanism
39.8 Summary
39.9 Exercises
39.10 References

39.1 INTRODUCTION
The departure of the British from India signalled a new start in many areas of national
life. Cities, as centres of large populations and as potential sites of economic growth
and employment opportunities, also attracted the attention of national leaders, though
to a lesser extent than rural areas. On the one hand, basic urban amenities had to be
provided for the existing urban centres, with the larger cities posing particular difficulties.
On the other, new urban settlements had to be created, and older towns revived, in
order to accommodate refugees and migrants and to set up new industries and commercial
ventures. Thus, for instance, were created the industrial townships of Rourkela, Durgapur
and later Bokaro; so too were the cities of Faridabad, Ghaziabad and Gurgaon improved
to accommodate the fresh influx of people. This Unit focuses on the nature of this
transformation in Indian cities, beginning from early post-independence years leading
up to the contemporary transformation of our cities.

39.2 INDEPENDENCE/PARTITION AND

RESETTLEMENT
In August 1947, India became independent/partitioned, accompanied by large scale
violence in which neighbours and communities turned upon each other and millions had
to cross newly minted borders under the fear of death and destruction. With this, a new
urban life began in the shadow of death, as cities of residents and migrants became
camps of refugees. This was especially true of Delhi, the national capital and of Calcutta,
then India’s largest metropolis. Muslims from the rural hinterland were reported to be
pouring into Delhi right through the summer of 1947 to escape the violence that they
faced there, turning the city into a ‘refugee-istan’. Soon, many of them left for Pakistan
even as Hindu and Sikh refugees found their footholds in the capital city of independent
India. The emotional pain of partition and forced migration would find expression only
much later. By contrast, its physical manifestations were evident from the very outset:
These refugees flooded Delhi, spreading themselves out wherever they could. They
thronged in camps, schools, colleges, gurdwaras, dharamsalas, military barracks and
gardens. They squatted on railway platforms, streets, pavements, and every conceivable

*
34 Dr. Awadhendra Sharan, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi University, Delhi.
 space ... Houses in the old city ‘evacuated’ by Muslims were forcibly occupied by incoming Predicaments of Post
refugees. Government officials also encountered difficulties in trying to remove various Colonial Cities
forms of unauthorized construction, encroachment and occupancy. (Dutta, 1986: 444)

1. Refugees, Purana Qila, Delhi, 1947

Source: The Manchester Guardian, 27 September 1947
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Manchester_guardian_purana-
qila1947.jpg

2. Partition Exodus
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Old-sikh-man-carrying-wife1947.jpg 35
Colonial Cities - 2

3. Refugee Camp, Delhi, 1947

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Young-refugee-delhi1947.jpg

In contrast to Delhi, the refugee migrants of Calcutta came not all at one go but in
several different periods. The first group of ‘old’ migrants, consisting of slightly over 40
lakh people, were those who came to India from the former East Bengal in the period
1946-1958. Another wave of migrants came between 1958 and 1963 but seem to
have been denied the status of refugees while a third wave of populations that so migrated
between 1964 and 1971 were referred to as ‘new migrants’. Some among the early
migrants, especially those of the middle classes, had ties of occupation and kinship and
tended to gravitate towards Calcutta, while the lower and scheduled castes preferred
resettlement in villages and as these bhadralok migrants converged on the city, an
already congested city faced an even more severe housing crisis.
The resettlement of these refugee populations was an immediate and urgent necessity,
perhaps more so in Delhi than in Calcutta, where providing relief was the major
preoccupation of the government, at least in the immediate post-Partition years. Official
narratives emphasised the humanism of the Nehruvian state and the resilience of the
refugee communities. Refugees were settled at Kingsway camp (at one time housing
close to 30,000 people), Karol Bagh and Shahdara. By the end of 1950 close to
300,000 refugees had been housed, two-thirds in evacuated houses and close to a
third in new constructions. Over a thousand plots were allotted to displaced persons to
build their own houses. The rest were put up in temporary tenements.
Historians have shown that only those who could show that they had lost property
were given land in Delhi, thus leaving the poor who had been forced to migrate in the
cold. The official accounts stress successful rehabilitation; by contrast Ravinder Kaur
emphasises the ‘austerity measures’ that were adopted towards displaced person’s
colonies with refugees having to constantly negotiate with officials for space and quality
accommodation. In Calcutta, an even greater uncertainty prevailed than in Delhi, with
more persistent hopes of continual exchange of populations across the newly created
borders and perhaps less emphasis on immediate reconstruction through state efforts.
Instead, what developed were self-help initiatives to form either private colonies or
colonies of squatter settlements, the latter ranging from the forcible occupation of barracks
36
and empty country villas by individual families to the collective takeover of private, Predicaments of Post
government and wastelands. Colonial Cities

Of course, not all cities were thus burdened. Bangalore and Madras seem to have felt
little of the brutal churning that was the experience of the northern and eastern
metropolises, Bombay a little more so. In some instances, dealing with urban chaos
thus emerged as a prominent theme of nationalist urbanism. In other instances, redressing
the inequities of the colonial city was the more prominent concern. Finally, there were
attempts at fashioning new urban spaces in industrial townships and new capitals, which
envisaged the creation of new kinds of citizens. In all instances, the burgeoning slum
population and the blighted state of the traditional town was a primary cause of worry.

39.3 PRODUCING THE NEW URBAN CITIZEN

The various concerns – those relating to resettlement of refugees, those concerned with
chaos and disorder and those focused on housing and other amenities – came together
in a common discourse of a democratic city and the anxieties around the production of
the model citizen who would take the nation forward. The influential Delhi Improvement
Trust Enquiry Committee Report of 1951 noted that housing congestion was not
only a causative factor in the spread of tuberculosis and other communicable diseases
but also bred juvenile delinquency, accentuated the bitterness of class antagonisms and
fostered social discontent. ‘Where honest toil can produce nothing but squalor’, it
observed, ‘there need be no wonder that unsocial tempers rise.’ (Vol. I: 21) Industrial
progress, the Planning Commission feared, would be more than offset by ‘serious social
and other problems in urban areas’, unless there was adequate forethought and planning.
Cramped, insanitary living quarters also made for discomfort of body and discontent of
soul and thus accentuated bitterness. Om Prakash Agarwal, in his work on Town
Improvement Trusts in India (1945) had written that when people of the same sex
shared a room, the lack of privacy dragged ‘everyone down to the same level of squalor’,
degrading children and adolescents. Slums acted on the health and habits of the people
and ‘encouraged a lassitude of mind’ that reacted upon the body, ‘which hit people’s
resisting power and thus encouraged immorality, intemperance, gambling and other
rampant vices.’ Members of the post independence Parliament continued to draw
attention to the dangers on living in such close intimacy as was imperative in the slum
like conditions of many cities. ‘There is so much congestion in Harpul basti [in Delhi]’,
one member pointed out, ‘that many families live in a single room. Father, mother, son,
daughter-in-law, daughter, son-in-law are all huddled in the same room. Under the
circumstances how on earth can a person maintain his health (tandrusti), preserve her
shame (sharm/haya) or retain their morality.’ (Bhargava, 1955:1838) The Barve
Committee Report on Greater Bombay similarly reported on large sections of working
people being forced to live without the benefits of domestic life, ‘with all the inevitable
effect of this deprivation on social vice.’ These were matters of some concern to the
newly independent rulers of India. ‘Bad environment affects us all alike; we are choked,
each one of us ... by the meanness and squalor which stretch their tentacles up-wards
from the lives of our less fortunate fellow citizens. The slums hold us back; while they
exist, the roots of our civilization are rotten and our corporate existence as a people
diseased,’ noted the Delhi Improvement Trust Enquiry Committee report. (Vol. I,
1951:13) A city of slums was thus hardly the place ‘from which one could “fairly expect
high ideals of citizenship to emanate”. It was therefore in the interests of the newly
independent State that high priority be given to housing in any scheme of national welfare,
‘bearing in mind in particular the requirements of the poorest sections of the population.’
The primary aim of city planning from this moment would be social welfare, and 37
Colonial Cities - 2 convenience and utility of largest number the main test of all city planning. What was at
stake was not merely a new built form but the forging of a new society. If slums were
the anti-thesis of a civic order, new planned housing projects and secure employment in
public sector works would be the corrective measure – these would be the sites where
the bulk of the subaltern urban population would be educated in the virtues of citizenship.
Community Development Programmes were set up, with a view to creating a new
urban leadership and to help communities take initiative to articulate their own needs –
social, cultural and economic – while setting up a beneficial relationship between residents
and local governments.

39.4 A NEW IMPETUS TO URBAN PLANNING

Democratic city spaces that were also functionally efficient could not, however, be built
by good intentions alone. These needed technical expertise. Such expertise had not
entirely been absent in colonial cities, but the emphasis then had been on sanitarians and
engineers. Now, the practitioners of these disciplines were to be subordinated to those
trained in physical planning and land-use economics. Large scale comprehensive land-
use planning and appropriate zoning strategies thus emerged as key urban strategies for
building a distinctive postcolonial city. Planning offered ‘a dream site for the new nation
state, incorporating cosmopolitan virtues, internationalism, and an openness to new
design’, writes Ravi Sundaram. (Sundaram, 2011) This was not merely a promise of
‘improvement’ but of a new beginning. ‘We are talking of construction, not
reconstruction’, wrote Mulk Raj Anand in the opening issue of the journal MARG
appropriately titled Planning and Dreaming. A similar emphasis obtained in the Trust
Enquiry Committee Report which suggested a different approach to urban improvement
than had been the case in the colonial period, to be based on a civic survey and a
Master Plan. The necessary political space for the exercise of authority of the
professional planner was also created. Parliamentarians argued that as people’s
representatives, the burden of outlining the desired growth path was theirs. Having
suffered bureaucratic developments through the Improvement Trusts they were in no
mood to be subordinated to the Planner. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Minister for Health
and in-charge of urban developments at this point of time, deferred to this sentiment
and suggested that planning must be subordinated to legislative power, though not fully
subsumed by it. Politics could not be avoided, but the appropriate relationship between
the political class and the professional planner had to be clearly spelt out: ‘Non-officials
do not understand anything about town planning … But any plan that will come now
will come before this committee on which there are plenty of non-official members.
They can study it and make any suggestions. But the actual planning for a town or an
urban area must be done by town planners.’ (Kaur, 1955:1890) Professional planners
felt they were in the best position to deliver the promise of a positive urban imaginary.
Many Indian leaders, planners felt, were indifferent to the city, if not anti-urban. Their
hearts were in the villages that they considered ethically superior to the city and far
more habitable. The city could be tolerated, but there was neither a creative conception
of it nor a sense of identification with it. Urban dwellers thus had to be educated into the
art of city building by the planning experts. Most Indian residents too, planners argued,
lacked a sense of identification with the city, requiring special educational efforts in the
form of media campaigns and local meetings to help them to identify with the plans
made for them, and take pride in their cities.
The plans that followed had twin aims, on the one hand to improve conditions of existing
settlements and on the other, to reorganise the city spatially to make a rational and
enforceable separation between spaces of residence and those of commerce and
38
industry. The former required demolition and reconstruction; the latter necessitated the Predicaments of Post
adoption of zoning principles. For possibly a decade or more after independence/partition, Colonial Cities
newly elected people’s representatives insisted that demolition, relocation or any other
improvement measure ought to derive their rationale solely from the extent to which
they could provide better living conditions to the poorest segments of the urban society.
Displacement, most were agreed, must be temporary in nature and allow for the return
of original dwellers to better houses in the former slum areas. There was consensus too
on providing alternative accommodation and livelihood opportunities before effecting
any displacement. Prime Minister Nehru endorsed the proposition at the highest level:
‘The real difficulty is the lack of accommodation for those who live in the slums at
present. We have to provide housing for them before we can ask them to vacate.’ His
government remained committed that they would not remove slum dwellers until there
was alternative accommodation which would enable them to continue to earn their
livelihood. But this would not be easy. In the West ‘the social conscience that demanded
slum elimination’ had emerged after a large build up of capital and resources, whereas
in India, the moral, social and political pressure preceded ‘the buildup of resources to
permit of the massive attack required.’ So there would be practical limits, with Rajkumari
Amrit Kaur noting that ‘even with the best of desire to re-house all those persons on the
land which is reclaimed after these slums are cleared, all these various people cannot be
re-housed in the same area, because it cannot be a slum then if all of them could be
re-housed there. So a certain amount of shifting is inherent in the situation.’
The most ambitious and theoretically sophisticated Master Plan drawn up was for Delhi
which became law on September 1, 1962. A few years later, the influential journal
MARG published articles on ‘Planning for Bombay’ by some of the leading architects
of the city, carrying forward the ideas for the city contained in Master Plan in Outline
(1947) and Report of the Study Group on Greater Bombay (1961). Indeed, planning
was undertaken at a feverish pace, so that within a decade of the preparation of the
Delhi Master Plan, Central and State Town and Country Planning organisations had
prepared Master Plans for as many as 372 towns and cities in the country. Some
remained focused on planning for the city alone; others argued for Town and Country
Planning that would include a wider region. More importantly, guiding planning principles
including ideas of ‘optimum population’ and ‘dispersal’ both continued to find resonance.
Writing of the prospects for new towns, S. G. Barve pointed out that while it would be
irrational or even unfeasible to arbitrarily limit the population of any metropolitan city to
a particular size, a great deal was needed to ‘retard’ this population drive towards the
metropolitan centers through a policy of industrial decentralisation. ‘Numerous well
chosen and well dispersed “centers of growth”, he wrote, ‘must be selected at suitable
townships and industrial development decentralised over them by the provision of
infrastructural facilities as well as other promotional measures.’ (Barve, 1966:24) Others
such as Robey Lal talked of planning on a human scale, urban development as an area
with a boundary, the determinants of the area being the technology available for ensuring
limited travel time (not exceeding 20 minutes to work and commercial areas), housing
related to needs of the occupants and minimum water, power and sanitary services.
Consequently, the first goal of planning was envisaged as the balanced urban development
of industry, housing, education and health services in smaller towns, away from existing
large metropolis, achieved through the use of studies to determine the limits of urban
growth for optimum development. On the other hand, M. N. Buch ruled out dictatorial
policies for preventing migration from centers of starvation to centers of potential
employment, while simultaneously emphasising the role of middle level towns in absorbing
such migrants.
39
Colonial Cities - 2 There were more radical dissenting voices too. ‘We forget’, Asok Mitra wrote, ‘that
no vital city in any part of the world will agree to limits being set to its growth. For, no
sooner does the city cease to grow, that it begins to stagnate and decay.’(Mitra, 1966:11)
It was the vitality of the city that made it attractive, Mitra argued, squalor and filth
notwithstanding. Similarly Ashish Bose: ‘From time to time, recommendations are made
that the migration to the cities must be curbed. This stems from the philosophy that rural
migrants by swarming in the city ruin everything…This is a very perverse argument
which is really based on a ‘colonial’ view of urbanization which looks upon cities as the
exclusive preserve of the rulers, the rich and the supporting middle classes with the
paraphernalia of the service sector. If the city people wish to have fresh air and a nice
clean environment, they must pay for it.’ (Bose, 1973:15)

39.5 CRITIQUES OF PLANNING

By the middle of the next decade, things had begun to veer away from the script prepared
by planners, as cities grew in ways which were not foreseen, and began to trump all
planned conceptions. In Delhi, for instance, planners had imagined the city as evolving
into a balanced, harmonious unit, but the city soon imploded from within and stubbornly
resisted being ordered within the zoning grids. Some have seen this as a critical failure
of ‘implementation’. For instance, Gita Dewan Verma has written of the ‘great terrain
robbery’ that is entirely a consequence of the misplaced humaneness of those who
would speak in the name of the slums, rather than uphold the logic of a Plan; of those
who demand ‘progressive’ planning in place of the old-fashioned Plan. For Verma, all
that is desirable is already contained in the Master Plan and only its correct implementation
can ensure that an orderly and sanitary city is created rather than a chaotic and anarchic
one.
There were others who saw zoning and planning as foreign ideas, ill-suited to the Indian
city, a critique that was largely developed by planners themselves. John A. Hansman,
advising the Government of West Bengal on behalf of the Ford Foundation, thus wrote
that control of private development was extremely difficult to enforce under prevailing
Indian conditions and at any rate was unimportant. Indian cities, he argued, had as a
rule a mixed pattern of land use and ‘it would be very difficult to secure public
understanding and support of zoning ordinance.’ Further, a shared use of urban space
for residence and household industries was critical for the livelihood of many. Mixed
activities, such as shops and residences in the same space, may indeed be a blessing in
what was basically a ‘pedestrian movement system’. Controls may work with industries
that damaged the environment through noise, smoke or odour and in the case of traffic
generating activities, but his overall advice remained that ‘town planners in India should
leave zoning to the foreigners who invented it and concentrate instead on the stimulation
and coordination of direct public investments in the nation’s growing towns and cities.’
A decade later, the mid-term review of the Delhi Master Plan also noted that some of
its assumptions were at odds with the realities of the city: ‘As things stand, a substantial
proportion of economic activities in the city are in unorganised sector and are carried
out in a manner not amenable to the typically western planning approach based on a
complete segregation of Land Uses. It will be long before this segment of the economy
is completely eliminated (if at all), it is only reasonable to make for appropriate adjustments
in Land Uses consistent with felt needs.’
The old city met with the most debilitating fate, where ‘the percolation of all kinds of
noxious activities and trades in areas once meant for noble and graceful living’ had long
continued. This was true not only of Delhi, but of several older urban cores in Hyderabad
40 and Patna, where the walled city increasingly began to be blighted. The highly advanced
countries of the West, where the town-planners had acquired their professional expertise, Predicaments of Post
S.S.H. Jhabvala wrote, could afford high cost housing and community amenities, but Colonial Cities
there was no money in India either for parks or for an adequate number of schools and
hospitals. A. G. K. Menon considered ‘satellite towns’ and ‘green belts’ to be imported
solutions, perhaps inevitable given that the writings on the subject was dominated by
foreign scholars, but nonetheless for that reason too, requiring far greater effort in ‘finding
our own solutions to our own problems’. The ‘natural’ Indian city, Jai Sen proposed,
was one that was simultaneously rural and urban, with the majority of the people in
these ‘rural’ cities of Asia involved in service and small industry, making these very
different from the heavy-industry based cities of the West that had evolved under very
different conditions. And yet, planners and policy-makers, he argued, continued to
draw their lessons from those cities, and tried to remake Indian cities in those terms,
and in so doing, were doomed to failure.
At issue too was the nature of the built form itself. The planner in India, M. N. Buch
pointed out, had to take into account the fact that the space would be filled largely by
jhuggies, which, for years to come, would continue to be the symbol of human habitation
in the country. Charles Correa offered examples of densely packed, low rise housing
that could be found in Indian villages, in Casbahs of Algiers, in cities such as Jaipur,
Tokyo and London, the last being the most human and livable of all the great metropolises
in the world. I. K. Gujral too joined in, promoting low-rise, high-density patterns of
growth in place of ‘high-rise’ solutions. For Jagmohan, the conscious and sub-conscious
adoption of the western model of settlement was ruinous and smacked of ‘fake
modernity’. Instead of modern multi-storied buildings made of steel and cement, housing
for the urban poor required the use of local materials – thatch, mud, wood and brick –
and the construction carried out largely by the inhabitant himself, providing shelter, but
also, air, light, pure water and greenery, thus building ‘real and natural’ settlements
rather than settlements that were artificial and imposed from above.
However, not all were convinced. As one commentator wrote in the context of Bombay:
The other evening an internationally renowned Bombay architect-cum-city planner told a
TV audience in all seriousness that he thought it a pity that so much cement and steel was
being wasted on housing for the low income groups … low income housing ought to be
made of low cost material like coir-matting. Perhaps, he forgot that his hopes are already
facts. Most low-income housing is built of things like matting, scrounged squares of tin,
and bits of cardboard. The only trouble is, it gets washed away every monsoon and lets
in the slush, the dust, the damp, the heat, the early morning chill during the rest of the year.
(‘Cosmopolitan City’, EPW, 1972: 2275)

39.6 SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE CITY

As critics debated the urban question through the late 1960s and early 1970s, urban
policy tended to become increasingly inhospitable to the poorer and more vulnerable
sections of the society. A host of social and political movements developed in response.
For much of the 1950s and 1960s, as Partha Chatterjee has pointed out in the context
of Calcutta, the urban elites who had been active in the nationalist movement provided
moral and social leadership to the neighborhood which emerged as an important site of
cross-class associations, even if dominated by the upper and middle classes. In
Bangalore, the Gokhale Institute of Public Affairs studied by Janaki Nair and in Bombay,
the Save Bombay Committee and other similar institutions that feature in Gyan Prakash’s
Mumbai Fables, sought to provide similar pedagogical and civic leadership. These
initiatives seem to have reached their limits by the next decade, when a variety of social
movements gained prominence, some specifically addressing urban issues, and others
taking on a larger national canvas. Writing of feminist movements of the period thus, 41
Colonial Cities - 2 Raka Ray reveals the emergence of a strong Maoist politics in Hyderabad, struggles
against issues of sexual harassment and safe contraception in Bombay, and a more
‘pragmatic’ set of interventions in Calcutta, centered on issues of literacy, wage
employment, water and electricity. Anti-price rise movements were another prominent
field of political activity, often in alliance with trade unions and feminist movements. And
in cities across India, especially in Patna and Ahmadabad, movements for the
‘reconstruction’ of India, with huge participation of students and the youth, heralded
important changes in the national political scene. Working class movements too expanded
in scale, covering not only the larger cities, but also smaller urban centers such as
Faridabad and Ghaziabad.
Many of the features of these struggles – the link between the countryside and the
workers, the importance of the neighbourhood for carrying out struggles at the site of
the factory, and that of the link between formalised industrial sector workers and the
mass of organised labour – described by historians as characteristic of the colonial city,
continued to remain a feature of the post colonial struggles. Caste-based movements,
especially of Dalit groups in western and southern India, made similar strategic use of
the neighborhood settlements as sites of protest, while also struggling to gain greater
access to public spaces. They also grew more radical, with the Dalit Panthers of
Bombay (1972) especially gaining national prominence. Movements which were more
parochial and gave expression to the ‘sons of the soil’ argument, such as the Shiv Sena
in Bombay, begun in 1966, gained political prominence in poor and middle class
neighbourhoods through an engagement with everyday issues.
The responses of the state to the new social movements varied over time. It had been
possible in the 1960s to be relatively sanguine about the challenges being posed, but by
the next decade a more authoritarian response emerged. On the fateful day of 19th
April 1976, women, men and children at Turkman Gate in Delhi faced the onslaught of
an Emergency police bent upon ridding the city of the ‘encroachers’ on government
land and resettling them elsewhere; some died, many more were subjected to extreme
violence. In the ensuing clash between those who laid historic claims to this space and
those who were bent upon beautifying the city by getting rid of the poor, a new lexicon
emerged, one in which questions of law began to take precedence over those of justice,
in which ‘encroachment’ began to take precedence over ‘disease and darkness’; in
which the improvement of slums would not be about the residents of those spaces but
about ensuring that the rest of the city came to no harm on their account.
This was one response to the crisis of the city or, indeed a more general crisis of
democracy itself, through the brutal suppression of subaltern voices and the forced
redrawing of the existing spatial arrangements, with a new discourse of (il)legality, and
(il)legitimate state violence taking centre stage. However, in the years that followed,
there was another response to the breakdown of liberal urbanism, with the State
intervening through a process of accommodation, extending ‘exemptions’ without
formalising the demands for basic needs. From the 1970s, and into the 1980s, as
Partha Chatterjee points out, the logic of electoral mobilisation, on the one hand, and of
welfare distribution on the other, set up the terrain of what he characterises as ‘political
society’, to distinguish it from the more conventional understandings of ‘civil society’ in
which citizens were guaranteed their rights through law. The State, he argues, well
recognised that many of the spaces and practices of the urban poor were illegal; yet it
could hardly expect that they turn into proper citizens before such basic needs as housing,
water, electricity and transport had been provided to them. In order to achieve this,
without fundamentally weakening the Rule of Property and of Rights, it thus enunciated
various policies that were carefully calibrated to extend some facilities without allowing
42 them to be translated as matters of legal entitlements.
 Predicaments of Post
39.7 NEW RISKS AND CONTEMPORARY Colonial Cities
URBANISM
For a decade or so after, it seemed as if the excesses of the Emergency would yield to
policies favouring accommodation of the poor and the vulnerable. Very soon, however,
it became evident that the risks faced by low income groups would from now on be
translated into the environmental burdens posed by the poor. The environmental question
was posed as early as the 1970s when the Prime Minister inaugurated the first meeting
of the National Committee on Environmental Planning on April 12, 1972. The effort
was aimed at familiar domains of forests and wildlife, but also at the city, though not all
were yet convinced of the importance to be attached to this. One commentator asked
whether the National Committee on Environmental Planning plan would reorganise
services such as water supply, water treatment, sewage disposal, sanitation etc. ? Would
it spend large resources on managing industrial and radioactive wastes, planning rapid
urban transportation and superfine highways, as did similar bodies in the affluent world?
A piece on ‘Cosmopolitan Bombay’ took ‘clever, modern, scientific socialists of the
Raj’ to task: ‘some of them are now profoundly concerned about the pollution of “our”
air and water, when many people get no water, polluted or unpolluted.’ On the other
hand, the Report of the International Panel of Experts appointed by the Secretary-
General of the UN Conference on the Human Environment argued in favour of location
based solutions: ‘Pollution emanating from industrial development represents more of a
potential than an actual threat at this time in many developing countries …By taking
sensible decisions on the location of industries and their waste disposal … they can
avoid some of the worst environmental problems that have arisen in connection with
industrial pollution.’ Many in India concurred, though in a more circumspect manner.
To the extent that anti-pollution measures could be built into industrial development
without additional cost, S. B. Mukherjee of Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Organisation
argued, it might be a good idea to pay some heed to this problem. But except in such
circumstances, ‘let us temporarily accept the possibility of smoke nuisance, gas nuisance
and noise nuisance, because attempts to eradicate them will add to the cost of industrial
output … when at a future date we will have augmented our national income sufficiently,
we can use part of that income for adopting anti-pollution measures and restoring
ecological balance.’ (Mukherjee, 1975:24)The question, as with much else, was of
finance, and the issue was posed fairly starkly – industry, even if it came with environment
pollution.
For some other commentators the choice between environment and development was
a false one. What was needed were different combinations of the two, subject to two
constraints: an ‘outer limit’ avoiding development paths that would put human survival
itself at risk, and an ‘inner limit’ defined by poverty levels and basic human needs for
survival below which concern for environment could not be pushed.
By the middle of the 1990s the environmental question was no longer marginal but
instead gained a new salience, often through the intervention of the Supreme Court.
Together, the limit of the political resolution to questions of urban ‘failures’led to greater
emphasis on the issue of il/legality and the in/formalisation of urban spaces. When operating
in conjunction, the consequence has been the simultaneous extension of the body of
rights and the creation of new insecurities for the urban poor. On the one hand the
Supreme Court has argued that ‘Article 21 protects the right to life as a fundamental
right. Enjoyment of life… including [the right to live] with human dignity encompasses
within its ambit, the protection and preservation of environment, ecological balance
free from pollution of air and water, sanitation, without which life cannot be enjoyed.’
43
Colonial Cities - 2 On the other, the persistent presence of slum populations no longer evokes the automatic
protection of the Court or the State. If anything, there are increasing instances where
the illegality of slums and the aesthetic dislike of their apparent filth has become the
pretext for their demolition. From Operation Sunshine in Calcutta to the relocation of
the population living on the margins of the Yamuna in Delhi, slum politics in the 1990s
has been characterised more by dislocation than reconstruction. On the other hand,
new groups have emerged that once again evoke the neighborhood as the unit of politics
and governance, though in this instance reflecting more the aspirations of the middle
and upper classes. Resident Welfare Associations thus play an increasingly important
role in cities such as Mumbai and Delhi, while larger civic formations such as CIVIC,
BATF and ABIDE have gained prominence in Bangalore.

39.8 SUMMARY
The Unit has shown there was unanimity among nationalist leaders in the wake of
independence that cities should be more equitable and just, and that cities would provide
employment opportunities and housing benefits to all and which, in general, would be
open and hospitable both to the elite and to the poor. However, even at that time, things
had been harsher for squatters, those who happened to be illegal occupants of land,
and those for whom there were far fewer guarantees of security than for the ordinary
slum dweller: ‘when people build huts in unauthorized manner and spread dirt/disease
in the city’, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur then observed, ‘it becomes very difficult for the
New Delhi municipal committee to allow them to continue to live there.’ Not surprisingly,
eviction of the poor from squatter settlements was a periodic feature of all the large
cities of India even in the 1950s and 1960s. There is little denying, however, that since
then the emphasis on legality has grown to a much larger extent, possibly even to the
extent where the balance between law and justice that was characteristic of an earlier
era has been lost, leading several scholars to refer to the gentrification of Indian cities,
especially its large metropolises.
None of this, however, has deterred the migration of those desirous of creating better
opportunities for themselves, leaving rural areas for urban ones, or moving from one
urban area to another. They can no longer assert a confident right to the city, for they
may well be on the wrong side of law in terms of their habitations. They continue,
however to make efforts at obtaining some tenuous legal hold on a plot of land in the
city, through fragmentary claims based on ration cards or names on electoral rolls that
attest to their continual presence in a particular place. And when that fails, they engage
in other negotiations, forcing the ‘slum question’ to be articulated through a series of
shifting strategies – rights, when recognisable; exceptions, when negotiable; regularisation,
when possible. The politics of the city, caught between formal plans and informal
settlements/activities, between legal tenures and illegal habitations, between the elite
desire for order and the subaltern need for amenities and opportunities, thus signals a
new, more uncertain, urban future. It may still be possible that radical assertions from
below may reclaim the city in the interests of all its residents, including those of the most
vulnerable; it is equally possible that instead of the traditional walled cities we may
increasingly encounter ‘world cities’ that are dotted with gated communities that resolutely
keep their various proximate populations in distant, perhaps even confrontational,
relationships.

39.9 EXERCISES
1) In what ways were cities altered in the wake of the partition crisis?
44
2) What were the urban pressures that emerged in the immediate post-independence Predicaments of Post
decades, and how were they met? Colonial Cities

3) What types of land use planning and zoning strategies were adopted as part of key
urban strategies in post-colonial cities?
4) Discuss the critiques of planning strategies adopted in contemporary cities.
5) What impact did the ‘environmental burdens’ issue have on industrialisation and
housing after the 1970s?
6) Do you think that the spurt in social and political movements in post-independence
India was linked to poor urban planning?

39.10 REFERENCES
Barve, S. G., (1966) ‘Towns of Tomorrow’, Seminar, Vol. 79 (March).
Baviskar, Amita, (2011) ‘What the Eye Does Not See’Economic and Political Weekly,
Vol. XLVI, No. 50 (December 10), pp.45-53.
Bhargava, Pandit Thakur Das, (1955), Lok Sabha Debates, Vol.IX, Part II.
Bose, Ashish, (1973) ‘A New Look’, Seminar, Vol. 162 (Feb.).
Buch, M. N., (1975) ‘Town and Country,’ Seminar, Vol. 191 (March).
‘Bombay - Cosmopolitan City’, (1972) Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. VII,
No. 46 and 47(Nov. 18), p.2275.
Chatterjee, Nilanjan, (1990) ‘The East Bengal Refugees. A Lesson in Survival’, in
Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.), Calcutta. Volume I: The Past (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press), pp.70-77.
Chatterjee, Partha, (2004) The Politics of the Governed. Reflections on Popular
Politics in Most of the World (Delhi: Permanent Black).
Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, (1998) Imperial Power and Popular Politics. Class,
Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press).
Correa, Charles, (1973) ‘The Urban Explosion,’ Seminar, Vol. 161 (Jan.).
Correa, Charles, (1973) ‘Self-help City’, Seminar, Vol. 162 (Feb.).
Dasgupta, Biplab, (1978) ‘Environment Debate. Some Issues and Trends’, Economic
and Political Weekly, Annual Number (February), pp.385-400.
Delhi Improvement Trust Enquiry Report, (1951) (New Delhi:Government of India
Press),Vol. I.
Divan, Shyam, (2000) ‘Legislative Framework and Judicial Craftsmanship’, Seminar,
Vol. 492, pp.67-74.
Dupont, Veronique, (2008) ‘Slum Demolitions in Delhi Since the 1990s’, Economic
and Political Weekly, Vol. XLIII, No. 28 (July 12), pp.79-87.
Dutta, V. N., (1986) ‘Punjabi Refugees and Greater Delhi’, in R. E. Frykenberg ed.,
Delhi through the Ages: Essays in Urban History, Culture and Society (Delhi: Oxford
University Press), pp.442-462. 45
Colonial Cities - 2 Ghosh, Asha, (2005) ‘Public-Private or a Private Public? Promised Partnership of the
Bangalore Agenda task Force’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 40, No. 47,
Nov. 19-25, 2005, pp. 4914-4922.
Gujral, I. K., (1973) ‘Essential Ingredients,’ Seminar, Vol. 162 (Feb.).
Guha, Ramchandra, (2007) India after Gandhi. The History of the World’s largest
Democracy, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers).
Gupta, Dipankar, (1982) Nativism in a Metropolis. The Shiv Sena in Bombay (Delhi:
Manohar).
Hansman, John A., (1966-67) ‘Planning Yes, Zoning No’, Journal of the Institute of
Town Planners of India, Issue No. 49-50 (Dec. 1966-March 1967), pp.89-94.
Jagmohan, (1973) ‘The Only Choice,’ Seminar, Vol. 162, (Feb.), pp.17-20.
Jhabvala, C.S.H., (1966) ‘Middle Class Housing’, Seminar, Vol. 79 (March).
Kaur, Rajkumari Amrit, (1955) Lok Sabha Debates, Vol. IX, Part II.
Kaur, Ravinder, (2005) ‘Planning Urban Chaos. State and Refugees in Post-Partition
Delhi’, in Evelyn Hust and Michael Mann (eds.), Urbanisation and Governance in
India (Delhi: Manohar), pp.229-249.
Lal, Robey, (1972) ‘Transportation and Housing,’ Seminar, Vol. 160 (Dec.).
McGranahan, Gordon and David Sathherwaite, (2000) ‘Environmental Health or
Ecological Sustainability? Reconciling the Brown and Green Agendas in Urban
Development’, in Cedric Pugh (ed.), Sustainable Cities in Developing Countries,
(Earthscan), pp.73-90.
Menon, A. G. K., (1975) ‘Review Article’, Seminar, Vol. 91 (March).
Mitra, Asok, (1966) ‘The Problem’, Seminar, Vol. 79 (March).
Mukherjee, S.B., (1975) ‘Some Reflections’, Seminar, Vol. 191 (March).
Nair, Janaki, (2005) The Promise of the Metropolis. Bangalore’s Twentieth Century,
(Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press).
Prakash, Gyan, (2010) Mumbai Fables, A History of an Enchanted City, (Princeton:
Princeton University Press).
Ramanathan, Usha, (2006) ‘Illegality and the Urban Poor’ Economic and Political
Weekly, Vol. 41, No. 29 (July 22), pp. 31.
Ray, Raka, (1999) Fields of Protest. Women’s Movement in India, (Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press).
Sen, Jai, (2000; originally published 1976) ‘The Unintended City’, Seminar, Vol. 500.
Sundaram, Ravi, (2011) Pirate Modernity. Delhi’s Media Urbanism (London:
Routledge).
Tarlo, Emma, (2003) Unsettling Memories. Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi
(California: University of California Press).
Tawa-Rewal, Stephanie, (2007) ‘Neighbourhood Associations and Local Democracy.

46
Delhi Municipal Elections’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 42, No. 47, pp. 51-
60.
Town and Country Planning Organisation (TCPO), 1973, Reprint 1995) Review of
the Master Plan of Delhi (Delhi: Government of India Press).
Verma, Geeta Dewan, (2002) Slumming India. Of Slums and Their Saviours (Delhi:
Penguin).
Zerah, Marie Helen, (2007) ‘Middle Class Neighbourhood Associations as Political
Players in Mumbai’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 42, No. 47, pp. 61-68.

47
 UNIT 40 CASE STUDY: BOMBAY*
Structure
40.1 Introduction
40.2 The Origins and Growth of Early Bombay
40.3 The City in the Cotton–Opium Era
40.4 A City Transformed: Early Industrial Bombay
40.5 Bombay as a Working Class City
40.5.1 The Problem of Housing
40.5.2 A New Worker Consciousness
40.4.3 Community and Ethnicity
40.6 Summary
40.7 Exercises
40.8 References

40.1 INTRODUCTION
Bombay (now officially known as Mumbai) was, like several coastal towns of the
Indian subcontinent that developed into major urban centres during the modern period,
a product of colonial intervention in the Indian Ocean. From its early importance as a
port city, it became, by the late 19th century a major centre of industrial production, and
soon after, the financial capital of India. Indeed it was to become the most important
metropolis in the subcontinent, in colonial and post colonial periods as well – as it
became the centre of the new film industry. What are the ways in which this transition
occurred from a small nondescript set of islands to a major metropolis?

40.2 THE ORIGINS AND GROWTH OF EARLY

BOMBAY
Not very long after the Portuguese had occupied Goa in 1510, they established themselves
at Bassein, a short distance from the port of Surat, in the early 1530s. The several
islands that collectively came to be called Bombay are located in the Arabian Sea, off
the western coast of India, south of Bassein. These nondescript islands remained territorial
possessions of the Portuguese till the mid-seventeenth century when they were transferred
to the English crown (1665). The English East India Company, which was at that time
one of the minor European trading companies operating in India, acquired the islands
from the crown against a token rent of ten pounds per annum and a loan of fifty thousand
pounds to the government. The islands were transferred by the crown to the company
in 1668. Thus, the ‘Bombay’ group of islands came under the company’s control from
1668 onwards.
Bombay comprises seven islands: Colaba; Old Woman’s Island (or Little Colaba);
Mazagaon; Worli; Mahim; Parel; and the large ‘H’–shaped island Bombay (called
Bombaim or Bom Bahia by the Portuguese). Over the next 250 years the physical
geography of these islands was transformed by ‘reclaiming’ land from the sea to create
the unified urban space designated as Bombay (in the following discussion ‘Bombay
island’ refers specifically to the original ‘H’–shaped island marked by Malabar Hill at
one end and the Fort on the other).
*
48 Professor Amar Farooqui, Department of History, University of Delhi, Delhi.
The main reason why the Portuguese, and subsequently the English, were keen to hold Case Study : Bombay
on to Bombay was its proximity to Surat, the premier port of the Mughal empire. After
the islands passed into the hands of the East India Company they were placed under a
deputy governor of Bombay who was subordinate to the English factory at Surat (the
president of the Surat factory was the governor of Bombay). Although by the 1680s
the Company had more or less opted for Bombay as its headquarters in western India,
Surat was still thriving and continued to be the main focus of the Company’s commercial
activities on the west coast. Right until the end of the eighteenth century, Bombay ‘was
the Cinderella of the English settlements in India, the unhealthiest, the poorest, and the
most despised’. (Spear, 1963: 66) In 1788 Lord Cornwallis (Governor-General, 1786-
93) recommended a substantial reduction in the Company’s Bombay establishment.
Ironically, it was around this time that the port was emerging as the centre of a flourishing
export trade. From the mid-1780s sizeable quantities of raw cotton were being exported
from Bombay to China. Pamela Nightingale (1970) dates this development to 1784.
Raw cotton was required to pay for Chinese tea imported into England. As the Company
(which had a monopoly of trade with China till 1833-34) sought to meet the demand at
home for tea, shipments of raw cotton from Bombay to China grew steadily in the last
decade of the eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth century. It was in
these decades that the scattered rural settlements of the seven islands became the city
of Bombay.
Until the late eighteenth century, Bombay was mainly inhabited by fishing communities,
such as the Kolis. These communities also cultivated rice on a small scale and grew
coconuts. The entire stretch from north to south, enclosed by Mahim–Worli–Malabar
Hill in the west and Sion–Parel–Mazagaon–Dongri in the east was a huge swamp.
There were some salt pans between Sion and Sewri. (see Map) In the initial phase of
its colonial history, very few Europeans resided in Bombay. The celebrated physician
and botanist Garcia d’Orta (1502-68) was among the few Portuguese who lived there.
In the 1550s, he was granted possession of Bombay for life on the condition of
encouraging the extension of agriculture on the islands and the payment of a nominal
rent (foro). The East India Company later constructed its offices–cum–godown–cum–
governor’s residence, named ‘Bombay Castle’, at the site of his residence in the
southeastern part of Bombay island. Subsequently, a wall built in several phases during
the mid-eighteenth century protected the urban settlement that came up around ‘Bombay
Castle’. This area, which is known as ‘the Fort’ even today (though the Fort walls no
longer exist) was the nucleus of early British Bombay. The ‘Native Town’ was the
indigenous zone beyond the Fort—Girgaum and Dongri.
In the Portuguese era, the seven islands of Bombay were governed from Mahim. The
island group was one of the various administrative units of the Portuguese territory of
Bassein. Mahim, with its fort and customhouse, had been the head or caçaba (from
qasba or small town, in this context the equivalent of a tahsil headquarters) of the
administrative unit. The islands were rented or leased for varying durations to Portuguese
individuals, who then collected revenues from the villages. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century Mahim was still the most densely populated part of north Bombay.
After 1668, the centre of gravity of the colonial settlement gradually shifted to the island
of Bombay, which, in the Company era, was the first portion of Bombay to be urbanised.
Old Woman’s Island and Colaba were soon incorporated with Bombay island. The
fine natural harbour that the island possessed on its eastern shore gave it a distinct
advantage. Subsequently, docks and shipyards came up in this part of the island. The
swamp belt of central Bombay, in the vicinity of the harbour, was soon ‘reclaimed’ by
filling up the marshes of Byculla, Parel, Worli, Dadar and Matunga. These were to
49
Colonial Cities - 2 become densely populated localities in the industrial era. Mahim Creek, which separates
Bombay from its northern neighbour Salsette, was the northern extremity of the settlement.
A causeway linking Mahim with Bandra was constructed in the early nineteenth century,
and the process of integrating the seven islands with Salsette began in right earnest.
Today, the metropolis of Mumbai includes the localities of Bandra, Khar, Santa Cruz,
Vile Parle, Juhu, and Kurla in Salsette, which are not suburbs but form part of Bombay
proper.

50
 Case Study : Bombay
40.3 THE CITY IN THE COTTON–OPIUM ERA
Raw cotton grown in western India was exported to China in very large quantities from
the mid-1780s. This became a major reason for the emergence of Bombay as the
foremost colonial urban centre of western India by the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Cotton imported into Canton in English ships jumped from 12,82,829 piculs (one
picul is equal to 133.33 lbs. or 60.48 kg.) in the decade 1784-93 to 27,13,062 piculs
in the decade 1804-13 and 42,59,724 piculs in 1824-33 (after 1833, the East India
Company gave up the China trade). However, the Company found it difficult to raise
the resources for purchasing raw cotton in this area, unlike eastern India, where the
conquest of Bengal (including Bihar and Orissa) in 1757 made possible the plunder of
resources for the purchase of goods for the home market without actually paying for
them. The Bombay establishment was unable to sustain itself financially as the Company
hardly had any territorial possessions in western India.
This lack of resources was the basis of what Lakshmi Subramanian has referred to as
the ‘Anglo–Bania alliance’ in western India, namely, the Company’s reliance on western
Indian sarrafs for credit to solve the liquidity problem of the Bombay establishment.
According to Subramanian, the ‘implications of local credit intervention became more
pronounced and its ramifications more extensive’ in the last two decades of the eighteenth
century. (Subramanian, 1987: 493) The complex network created by the Company
that brought together Gujarati sarrafs, and Indo-Portuguese (indigenous inhabitants of
Portuguese territories in India) traders, such as Miguel de Lima e Souza, who contracted
to supply raw cotton to the Bombay establishment, facilitated the rise of Bombay.
Even more important for the emergence of Bombay as the commercial, financial and
industrial capital of western India was the growth of seaborne exports of opium from
the west coast, also to China, in the closing years of the eighteenth century. The relationship
of this commodity to the city is a complicated one, especially for the first few decades
of the history of the trade, and can only be understood with reference to the opium
policy of the colonial state. Soon after gaining territorial power in eastern India, the East
India Company established a monopoly over the opium produce of Bihar. The monopoly
was extended to Banaras–Ghazipur and other opium producing areas of the Ganga
region when these came under the Company’s control towards the end of the eighteenth
century. In 1797, the Company introduced a policy under which all the opium produced
in its territories in eastern India was directly appropriated from the peasants, and
cultivation strictly regulated through the grant of licences. Opium was procured in the
raw, semi-liquid, state from poppy cultivators and processed by the Company in its
own establishments. The bulk of this opium was intended for export, mainly to China.
The Company’s export opium was auctioned at Calcutta to private dealers who then
took the risk of smuggling the drug into China where import of the drug was banned.
The Company soon had to contend with competition from the opium produce of the
Malwa plateau (western Madhya Pradesh and some of the adjoining areas of Rajasthan).
The Malwa opium export trade was already well established in western India, with
Bombay as its main centre, by about 1800. Although the Company initially placed
restrictions on the export of Malwa opium via Bombay, from 1831 onwards private
traders were allowed to bring the drug to the port for onward shipment to China on the
payment of a moderate duty. The opium trade gave a fresh spurt to the development of
the colonial economy of Bombay, and the abolition of the East India Company’s
monopoly of the China trade in 1833-34 gave it a further impetus, with several Bombay
merchants working in close association with private British firms such as Jardine Matheson
to push ever increasing quantities of the prohibited Malwa opium into China. This was 51
Colonial Cities - 2 the backdrop against which Chinese officials tried to impose more stringent curbs on
opium trafficking leading to the First Opium War (1839-42). The victory of Britain in
the war implied that the Chinese market could now be flooded with opium both from
eastern and western India.
Indigenous shipping and the opium trade were closely interlinked. Most of the leading
opium merchants had their own ships, while most of the big shipowners of Bombay had
investments in opium. The most well-known firms involved in the trade in the early
nineteenth century, were Remington Crawford (which was a European company),
Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, Motichund Amichund, Nagardass Hirji Mody, Madowdass
Ransordass, Mohammad Ali Rogay, Rogério de Faria, Cursetji Ardaseer and Aga
Mohammad Suastry.
Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, for instance, owned seven ships, of which the biggest were Fort
William, Charlotte, Bombay Castle and Good Success. Motichund Amichund had
six ships, of which Cornwallis and Bombay were the largest.
The west coast had a long tradition of shipbuilding. Bombay had two dockyards, one in
Bombay harbour and the other at Mazagaon. The association of the Parsis with the
shipbuilding industry of Bombay is well known. The famous Wadia family laid the
foundations of shipbuilding at Bombay in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.
Many of the ships that transported Malwa opium to China were built at Bombay in the
early nineteenth century. (see Table)
Table : Ships Built at Bombay and Mazagaon Shipyards in the Early Nineteenth Century,
Engaged in Carrying Malwa Opium to China

Ship Tons Shipyard Year Owner

1. Anne 788 Bombay 1812 Pestonji Bomanji
2. Ardaseer 422 Bombay 1836 Cursetji Cowasji
3. Bombay 602 Mazagaon 1835 MotichundAmichund
4. Buckinghamshire 1731 Bombay 1816 Framji Cowasji
5. Caledonia 710 Bombay 1824 Viccaji Merji
6. Charles Grant 1253 Bombay 1826 Cursetji Cowasji
7. Charlotte 691 Bombay 1802 Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy
8. Clairmont 328 Bombay 1826 Aga Mohammad
9. Hannah 457 Bombay 1811 Motichund Amichund
10. Lady Grant 239 Mazagaon 1835 Motichund Amichund
11. Sir Robert Compton 346 Bombay 1835 Aga Mohammad

It would be obvious from the names of prominent opium dealers mentioned earlier that
businesspersons from several communities had a presence in the commercial world of
Bombay in the first half of the nineteenth century. There were the Indo-Portuguese,
Parsis, Konkani Muslims, Marwaris, Gujarati Banias, Bohras, and Armenians, to name
only a few communities, giving Bombay a cosmopolitan character.
A significant feature of Bombay was that Indians were not entirely excluded from
privileged urban locales, particularly the Fort. The southern portion of the Fort was
inhabited by Europeans, while Indians tended to occupy its northern end. This was a
reflection of the strength of indigenous elites in the city. On the other hand, they invested
heavily in real estate, indicating their weakness rather than their strength: in a colonial
society, opportunities for investment in other sectors were severely restricted. Investment
52
in real estate had increased in the latter half of the eighteenth century when a lot of Case Study : Bombay
property was bought by Indians in the Fort. Opium dealers and ship owners such as the
brothers Pestonji Bomanji and Hormasji Bomanji of the Wadia family cornered much
of the prime land in the area.
Bombay had over two lakh inhabitants by the second decade of the nineteenth century.
The population grew at a phenomenal rate in the two decades prior to the middle of the
century, by nearly 5.5 per cent per annum between 1826 and 1849. A census of 1849
recorded 5,66,119 inhabitants. After the mid-nineteenth century the rate of growth
declined to about 2.5 per cent per annum. In 1864, over 8,00,000 persons resided in
the city. The population was mainly concentrated in the Fort area, Dongri, Byculla,
Girgaum, Mazagaon and Colaba. Almost one-fourth of the people who lived in Bombay
were temporary migrant workers, mainly single males, who stayed in the city for a few
years, put aside much of what they earned, ‘and having saved from two to three hundred
rupees’, went back to their villages in western Maharashtra or Konkan. (Warden,
1861: 101) The development of the shipbuilding industry and the expansion of shipping
provided opportunities for employment in the shipyards and docks. The cotton export
sector created a large demand for casual labour for packaging the commodity (cotton
screws used for pressing cotton were manually operated, requiring a large number of
workers in the sailing season).
The distress caused by over-assessment following experiments with land settlements in
the 1820s and 1830s, compelled peasants to supplement their agricultural income from
other sources, bringing many of them to Bombay in search of employment for relatively
short durations. The migrant workforce included peasant proprietors from this section
who hoped to invest their meagre savings in land. In both cases, urban workers retained
strong links with the rural economy of western Maharashtra, Konkan and Gujarat, with
important consequences for the formation of new identities within the city.
Nevertheless, migration to Bombay speeded up the process of the integration of its
hinterland with the international capitalist economy, exposing it further to colonial
exploitation. The Bombay group of islands was physically isolated from western India
till it began to emerge as the privileged focal point of the transport and communication
infrastructure of the region during the course of the nineteenth century. These islands
were separated from the mainland not only by the sea but also by the Western Ghats
and the difficult terrain of the Konkan. The development of railways in the latter half of
the century finally ended the geographical isolation of Bombay. Furthermore, as an
administrative unit, Bombay Presidency had very few territorial possessions until the
end of the third Anglo–Maratha war (1818). After, 1818 political control over large
parts of western and central India, and the Deccan, gradually converted the entire
region into Bombay’s economic hinterland. It is no coincidence that there was a
substantial increase in the population of the city in the two decades or so after the war.
However, indigenous participation in shipping declined in the 1840s while new groups
were taking over the opium trade. As we shall see in the next section, Bombay made a
difficult transition to the industrial phase of its history.

40.4 A CITY TRANSFORMED: EARLY

INDUSTRIAL BOMBAY
In the late 1840s, indigenous merchants of Bombay began to withdraw from shipping
and the opium trade. Asiya Siddiqi’s seminal essay (1985) on the commercial activities
of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy has highlighted the difficulties faced by opium traders in
transferring their earnings from China to Bombay, leading to a crisis by the end of the
53
Colonial Cities - 2 1840s. Investing in opium was no longer lucrative. Mercantile groups which had
participated in the trade in the first half of the century were replaced by a new set of
traders, mainly Baghdadi Jews, of whom David Sassoon was the most prominent. Due
to the constraints imposed by colonial rule and the inability to compete with owners of
a new type of vessel known as the ‘clipper’ that was much faster than earlier ships, the
shipping sector too had to be given up by indigenous businesspersons.
Indians still had a strong presence in the raw cotton export trade. Initially, English textile
mills had shown little interest in cotton produced in western India because of its poor
quality. It was not cleaned properly and contained a lot of ‘extraneous matter’. Moreover,
what was known as ‘Surat’ (Gujarat) cotton was of short staple so that it was confined
almost exclusively to the manufacture of the weft, that which runs across the piece, and
not the warp. Yet, Lancashire was emerging as an important market for the commodity
by the middle of the nineteenth century, and trade was sufficient by the 1850s to warrant
the establishment of a rail link from Bombay to the cotton growing Vidarbha region.
In the 1840s, when the proposal for the Great Indian Peninsular Railway was under
consideration, the speedy transportation of opium to Bombay by rail was put forth as
the principal consideration for investing in the line. By the early 1850s, the supply of
raw cotton to England via Bombay became the main priority. Subsequently, the Lancashire
cotton ‘famine’ caused by the American Civil War of 1861-65 (when cotton grown in
the southern states of the United States of America ceased to be exported to Lancashire)
dramatically increased Britain’s dependence on Indian cotton. The line connecting
Bombay with Thane (a distance of about 21 miles) was opened in 1853, creating the
route along which the local trains of Bombay began to ply. Bori Bandar, the locality
from which the line originated is located at the northern end of the Fort area. The grand
Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, a UNESCO heritage structure)
was built between 1878 and 1888 at the site of the Bori Bandar station. The Bombay-
Thane line passed through Parel which became the centre of the cotton textile industry
in the latter half of the nineteenth century, connecting it with localities in which mill
workers resided.

1. First Indian Railway: Bombay to Thane

Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Dapoorie_viaduct_bombay1855.jpg
Original text : http://ogimages.bl.uk/images/019/ 019PHO0000254S3U00041000%5BSVC2%
5D.jpg(British Library)
During the cotton boom in Bombay, a new breed of Indian entrepreneurs, who were
54 mainly financial operators, came to the forefront. Premchand Roychand was the most
well known of these. Some of the wealth he earned from his cotton speculations went Case Study : Bombay
into the construction of grand public buildings in the Fort area, such as the magnificent
Rajabai Clock Tower located in the Fort campus of the University of Bombay which
was founded in 1857.
But the boom ended in 1865 leading to a financial crash in which several speculators
were ruined. A number of banks and insurance companies that had been established
during the boom were liquidated. Nevertheless, a class of Indian capitalists in Bombay
commanded sufficient resources to be able to survive the crisis, since they already
controlled part of the city’s financial infrastructure, dominated the trade in raw cotton,
and owned a substantial portion of urban land. Indians could no longer be entirely
excluded from financial institutions set up under European auspices. Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy
was one of the six directors of the Bank of Bombay (established in 1840), while Juggonath
Sunkersett and Ardaseer Hormasji were among the eight deputy chairmen of the Bank
of Western India (established in 1842). Framji Cowasji was one of the three trustees of
the latter bank. Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, Juggonath Sunkersett, Bomanji Hormasji and
Framji Cowasji were on the committee of management of the Government Savings
Bank (established in 1835). The Bombay Chamber of Commerce, founded in 1836,
was the product of a joint British and Parsi initiative.
In the mid 1850s, Indian capitalists also established the first cotton textile mills in Bombay.
A cotton spinning mill was first set up by Cowasjee Nanabhoy Davar in 1854 (the mill
began functioning in 1856), at Tardeo in central Bombay, and was entirely owned by
Indians. Within half a century, the city had more than a hundred mills, the overwhelming
majority of which were the result of indigenous capital investment. Bombay thus
developed into a great industrial centre. The setting up of new mills was preceded by
the final phase of the draining of the marshlands of central Bombay. In the latter half of
the nineteenth century the population of Bombay got concentrated along a diagonal
running from Dongri to Worli. This diagonal was equidistant from the factories lying to
the north and north-east of it and the commercial zone lying south and south-east of it.
The area came to be known as ‘Girangaon’ or ‘mill village’ with its own distinctive
social and political ethos.
These developments went hand in hand with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869,
and the expansion of the railway network linking Bombay with the rest of the
subcontinent. The shift to the Suez route, coupled with the switch-over to steam
navigation, revolutionised sea transport between Europe and India, particularly Bombay.
With the expansion of traffic to and from Bombay from the 1860s it became necessary
to provide more space and facilities at the port. The new dockyard at Mazagaon
encouraged the development of a locality of dockworkers, where mill workers also
began to live.

40.5 BOMBAY AS A WORKING CLASS CITY

Soon Bombay turned into a typical working class city, sharing the typical constraints,
especially the challenge of housing. Equally linked was the rise of working class
consciousness that led to trade unionism and hartals, a common feature of the industrial
city life. Associations and loyalties based on community and ethnicity, as well as nation,
also shaped collective actions in the city.

40.5.1 The Problem of Housing

As workers flocked to the textile factories of Bombay in large numbers, housing emerged
as a major urban problem. The colonial state, as well as Indian elites, perceived urban
development as a matter of confining the labouring poor, and apportioning as little 55
Colonial Cities - 2 space and resources as possible for the huge wage-earning class that was required to
sustain the city’s industrial economy. Consequently millhands had to live in extremely
congested residential localities that came up in central Bombay. These localities lacked
basic civic amenities, were unhygienic, and overcrowded. As early as the 1860s, within
a decade of the establishment of the first cotton mill, the local authorities found the
situation alarming. An official report noted that workers were housed in ramshackle
structures that had two or three floors, ‘and the various rooms were densely peopled,
and the floors of the verandahs were fully occupied, while to eke out the accommodation
in some of the verandahs there were charpaees or cots slung up and screened with old
matting to form a second tier of sleeping places for labourers that were employed in the
day.’ (Leith, 1864: 25) Sanitary conditions were abysmal, especially in shared facilities
such as latrines where ‘baskets which cannot retain liquid are used under the privy-
seats, and those privies have a flat floor, and ... the accumulated soil is left to flow out
on the pavement of the gullee.’ (Leith, 1864: 13)
The main features of the typical chāl (chawl), Bombay’s multi-storeyed workers’
residential compounds, were already in place by the 1860s (Leith’s report uses the
term ‘chāl’ for the structures referred to above). More systematic initiatives to provide
accommodation for the labouring poor were prompted by the plague epidemic of the
1890s (the spread of the disease was particularly serious in 1896), which led to the
formation of the Bombay City Improvement Trust (BIT), largely dominated by local
elites, in 1898. Among other measures, the BIT was expected to take over for
‘improvement’ localities that were identified as the most unhygienic and congested.
Workers were to be housed in tenements with sanitary conditions. However, the BIT
ended up by providing accommodation that was even more congested than that from
which the workers had been evicted. Moreover, whereas nearly half a lakh people
were displaced by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century due to
‘improvement’ schemes, less than three thousand rooms were available in the new
chāls constructed by the BIT. (Hazareesingh, 2007: 30)

2. Mumbai Chawl/Chāl
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chawl_-_Mumbai_2006.jpg
56
The housing shortage was acute on the eve of the First World War. After the war, a Case Study : Bombay
Development Department was set up in Bombay to construct fifty thousand single-
room tenements for workers and the lower middle class. The target was never met and
the city poor did not have the means to pay the rent for the miserable dwellings that
were actually constructed. Nevertheless, the ‘DD chāls (chawls)’, as these dwellings
built initially in Girangaon came to be known, laid down the norm for the kind of residential
accommodation and urban space to which the toiling people of Bombay were entitled.
The great sociologist and critic of colonial town-planning, Patrick Geddes, remarked
that the chāls of the city were intended not for housing but ‘warehousing’. It was
everyday life in these chāls that Mulk Raj Anand described so vividly in his novel
Coolie (published 1936): he portrayed a ‘three-storeyed tenement, built without any
planning of the space into a courtyard, garden, road or a playground, but closed in on
all sides by other chawls [chāls] separated from it by gullies barely a yard or two
wide’. Echoing Leith’s report, a chāl resident states in the novel that, ‘There are seven
latrines downstairs for two hundred men.’ (Anand, 1993[1936]: 195-6, 198)

40.5.2 A New Worker Consciousness

These very conditions of overcrowding created opportunities for class solidarity. Living
together in such close proximity fostered a consciousness of belonging to the same
class. This does not mean that the ties of religion, language or caste were suddenly
rendered irrelevant. What is significant is that despite these ties, the experience of living
in the chāl and sweating in the factory with people who belonged to diverse linguistic,
religious or caste communities, developed a working-class identity. The fact that
Girangaon was a compact space with mills interspersed with chāl (about 15-20 minutes
was all it took for a worker to walk from the chāl to her/his workplace) allowed the
entire area to evolve an identity that contended with other identities and sometimes
overcame them. This immense concentration of workers in a small area that contained
both places of residence and work was perhaps unique in the Indian subcontinent
during the colonial period. The ties of community, religion, caste and ethnicity, often
held ambiguous potential; they could form the basis for a strengthening of the class ties,
and at other times undermine them. As Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay has shown, the first
large scale action of the working class in Bombay was the communal riot of 1893;
(Upadhyay, 2004) some big, and successful general strikes were followed by communal
violence, as in 1929.
The few moments of leisure that the mill-hands could spare were spent with fellow
workers on the street, or in new (all male) social bodies such as mitra mandals
(friendship clubs) or akhadas (gymnasiums). The tamasha of (plays, acrobatics, story-
telling) street performers was often the only entertainment available to the residents of
these neighbourhoods. By the beginning of the twentieth century the mill district had
produced a rich working-class culture mainly in the form of songs, drama and poetry.
This culture created possibilities for working-class mobilization with the growth of unions
of textile workers and of other labouring people of the city.
The 1920s saw the formation of three major unions of mill-hands: Girni Kamgar
Mahamandal, Bombay Textile Labour Union, and Girni Kamgar Union. This decade
witnessed several strikes, culminating in the great textile strike of 1928 after which the
communist-led Girni Kamgar Union became the main working-class organisation in
Girangaon. During the 1930s and 1940s the growing involvement of artistes and writers
with the activities of the Girni Kamgar Union (Anna Bhau Sathe, Amar Shaikh, D.N.
Gavankar, K.A. Abbas and, somewhat later, Kaifi Azmi), gave rise to a leftwing cultural
movement that reinforced and was reinforced by organisations such as the Progressive
57
Writers’Association and Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association.
Colonial Cities - 2 40.4.3 Community and Ethnicity
As we have seen, the business class of Bombay negotiated with colonialism from a
position of relative strength, which in itself was a reflection of the success and confidence
of the class. Nevertheless, given the constraints imposed by colonialism, it was essential
for the indigenous capitalists of Bombay to build strong ties among themselves. These
bonds, cutting across communities, were more important than, as has often been
suggested, links with the British. Two additional factors, namely that a large number of
these merchants belonged to communities that were miniscule minorities (e.g., the Parsis)
and that many did not have their roots in Bombay, made the inter-community ties among
them even more necessary. That this class was multi-religious, drawn from diverse
social groups, and multi-ethnic, gave to Bombay its openness.
This is not to suggest that the city space of Bombay was free of all conflict and tensions.
The street emerged as the space between the home and the public sphere, as new
notions of private and public began to take shape. As many historians of the city have
noted, the neighbourhood was a source of information about jobs, a source of credit,
a space of festivity or leisure, a site of work solidarities at a time of strike, but also a site
of conflict. (Chandavarkar, 1994) ‘Dadas’, such as Keshav Dada Borkar, were
neighbourhood toughs, or big men, who could wield power on behalf of the mill, against
the mill, or for the landlord, as circumstances demanded. The ‘Dada’ also provided
credit, organised rations, controlled jobs and job information. Whether the identities of
caste, ethnicity and religion were subsumed by the development of class as a mobilising
factor is a matter of debate among historians, though most would agree that large scale
mobilisations of labour could exist side by side with continuing attachments and loyalties
to these other rubrics. The social and cultural milieu of Bombay did develop a unique
proletarian cosmopolitanism, even in such working-class neighbourhoods, which drew
equally from imbibed traditions of the port’s. hinterland as from the vistas opened up by
the Indian Ocean.

40.6 SUMMARY
Bombay, a conglomeration of seven islands, owed its initial position to its proximity to
the chief Mughal port, Surat. However, it emerged in the late eighteenth century as the
chief port on the western coast of India with exports of raw cotton, and later, in the
early nineteenth century of opium, to China. Bombay remained isolated for a large part
of the early nineteenth century. This isolation was finally broken with the introduction of
the railways in the region. Bombay till 1840s was largely an ‘entrepot’ and only after
the 1840s, with the decline of the opium trade and of shipping, indigenous business
moved towards it for setting up industries. From the 1850s textile mills came up in the
city. Within no time the city had over a 100 mills. These were largely concentrated in
central Bombay—in Girangaon or ‘mill village’. Soon Bombay emerged as the leading
industrial centre of the subcontinent, with a vast work-force, assuming the character of
a ‘proletarian cosmopolitan’ city. The city saw the growth of working class consciousness
and the emergence of ‘class solidarity’ which led to the formation of trade unions
accompanied by conflicts, strikes and, at times, sectarian violence.

40.7 EXERCISES
1) Trace the process by which Bombay islands were converted into a unified urban
centre.
2) In what ways did the ‘Anglo–Bania’ alliance and the ‘Opium trade’ facilitate the
rise of Bombay during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? With
58 what consequences?
3) What changes were brought about in the spatial pattern of urban locales of Bombay
from the eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries?
4) Discuss the factors that contributed to the rise of Bombay as an industrial town in
the late nineteenth century.
5) Examine the major issues faced by early industrial Bombay. What efforts were
made to overcome the problems?

40.8 REFERENCES
Anand, Mulk Raj, (1993) Coolie (New Delhi: Penguin; first published, London, 1936).
Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, (1994) The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India:
Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Hazareesingh, Sandip, (2007) The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity:
Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay, 1900-1925 (Hyderabad:
Orient Longman).
Leith, A.H., (1864) Report on the Sanitary State of the Island of Bombay, Selections
from the Records of the Bombay Government, New Series, No.80 (Bombay: Printed
for Government at the Education Society’s Press, Byculla).
Nightingale, Pamela, (1970) Trade and Empire in Western India, 1784-1806
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Siddiqi, Asiya, (1985) ‘The Business World of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy’, in Asiya Siddiqi,
ed., Trade and Finance in Colonial India, 1750-1860 (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press), pp.186-217.
Spear, Percival, (1963) The Nabobs: A study of the Social Life of the English in
Eighteenth Century India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition; first
published, 1932).
Subramanian, Lakshmi, (1987) ‘Banias and the British: The Role of Indigenous Credit
in the Process of Imperial Expansion in Western India, in the Second Half of the
Eighteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp.473-510.
Upadhyay, Shashi Bhushan, (2004) Existence, Identity and Mobilisation: The Cotton
Millworkers of Bombay, 1890-1919 (Delhi: Manohar).
Warden, Francis, (1861) Report on the Landed Tenures of Bombay, Selections from
the Records of the Bombay Government, New Series, No.64 (Bombay: Printed for
Government at the Education Society’s Press).

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