Empire's Metropolis Money Time & Space in Colonial Bombay, 1870
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Empire's Metropolis Money Time & Space in Colonial Bombay, 1870-1930 by SHEKHAR KRISHNAN B.S.F.S., Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, 1998 M.A. (Lon), School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, 1999 Submitted to the Program in Science Technology & Society (STS) in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History, Anthropology and Science Technology & Society (HASTS) at the ARC UVE Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) I MASSACHUSETTSI I WIIU OF TECHNOLOGY SEPTEMBER 2013 DEC 16 2013 V 2013 Shekhar Krishnan. All Rights Reserved. LIBRARIES The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature of Author: Shekhar Krishnan History, Anthropology and Science Technology & Society (HASTS) 29 August 2013 Certified by: .f- / Michael M.J. Fischer Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities Professor of Anthropology and Science & Technology Studies Thesis Supervisor and Committee Chair Certified by: Merritt Roe Smith Leverett Howell & William King Cutten Professor of History of Technology, Science & Technology Studies and History Thesis Committee Member Certified by: / Sudipta Kaviraj Professor of Indian Politics and Intellectual History Columbia University in the City of New York Thesis Committee Member Accepted by: Heather Paxson Associate Professor, Anthropology Director of Graduate Studies, History, Anthropology and STS Accepted by: David Kaiser Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science, STS Director, Program in Science, Technology, and Society Senior Lecturer, Department of Physics Abstract The thesis utilises newly available legal and municipal archives to study the historical geography of colonial Bombay through five interlocking themes and periods from 1870-1930. This spans the period between the boom and bust in the cotton trade during and after the American Civil War - when Bombay was a colonial mercantile port - to its emergence as of one of India and Asia's largest industrial cities after the First World War. Separate chapters explore the history of railway and telegraph networks, standardisation and time-keeping, land acquisition and valuation, cadastral surveying and property registration, and the urban built environment. From the perspective of the colonial city, the history of these formations looks less like the smooth unfolding of singular standards of money, time or space, than a protracted war of position fought out across a century by experts, elites and the masses. This thesis seeks to deepen the social and political history of urbanization in South Asia beyond concepts of colonial technology transfer or nationalist resistance by examining the everyday politics of stock and real estate speculation, public clocks, land and private property, maps and topographical surveys, and buildings and streets in colonial Bombay. These "modern" technologies of calculation, coordination and control in the urban environment both created and depended on new scales of power and capital accumulation, or particular configurations of industrial technologies, civic institutions and urban space. Acknowledgements Thanks to my advisors Michael M.J. Fischer, Sudipta Kaviraj and Merritt Roe-Smith; my friends and teachers: Nikhil Rao, Eric Lewis Beverley, Svati Shah, Kaushik Bhaumik, Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, Schuyler Erle, Tim Waters, Matt Knutzen, Josh Greenberg, Dan Cohen, Will Glover, Anupama Rao, Arvind Rajagopal, Gyan Prakash, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Douglas Haynes, Keith Hart and Arjun Appadurai; the late Carol Breckenridge, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar and Hisham Sharabi; in Mumbai: Kamu Iyer, Deepak Rao, G. Nagarjuna, Meena Menon, Vinod Shetty, Anirudh Paul, Prasad Shetty, George Jose, Rahul Srivastava and Sanjay Bhangar; at MIT and Harvard: Hal Abelson, Danny Weitzner, Richard Sennett, Sugata Bose, Sven Beckert, Robb Eason, Benjamin Mako-Hill, Nick Buchanan and Etienne Benson; at STS HQ: Karen Gardner, Judy Spitzer, Kris Kipp, Debbie Meinbresse and Jerry Burke. All of my archival work was conducted in Mumbai at the Maharashtra State Archives (MSA) and the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), whose staff and officers offered unstinting support to my research, especially Suhash V. Kotkar, Gulabrao Kamble, Shweta Medekar, Chandrashekhar D. Chore, Vasant P. Prabhu, Jyotish Desai, Suprabha Agarwal and Ashok Kharade. For supporting my travel, fieldwork and writing, thanks to the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), MIT Libraries, Harvard University Libraries and the New York Public Library. Earlier versions of this work were presented between 2008 and 2010 at the MIT HASTS Graduate Student Writing Workshop, the Harvard Political Economy of Modem Capitalism Workshop, the Yale University and Hong Kong University Conference on Urban Ecolologies in Asia, and the AIIS Junior Fellows Workshop. Several pages of chapters 5 and 6 are based on review essays published in the Economic & Political Weekly, Mumbai: "Micro-History of Mumbai" (Vol. XLV, No.36, 4 September 2010) and "Do Buildings Have Agency?" (Vol. XLVI, No.30, 23 July 2011). Table of Contents 1 . S c a le s ............................................................................................. 1 2 . N e tw o rk s ...................................................................................... 3 1 3 . C lo c k s ........................................................................................... 6 5 4 . La n d s .......................................................................................... 10 9 5 . M a p s ........................................................................................... 1 5 0 6 . B u ild in g s ..................................................................................... 2 0 4 CONCLUSION .................................................................................. 248 A p p e n d ice s ..................................................................................... 2 6 8 Shekhar Krishnan 1. Scales [email protected] Page 1 of 291 1. Scales Gateway of India Empire's Metropolis: Money Time and Space in Colonial Bombay seeks to disentangle the various scales at which urban power was produced and contested in colonial Bombay. Focussing broadly on money, time and space in Bombay City and Western India, this thesis seeks to deepen the social history of modern cities in South Asia beyond narratives of colonial technology transfer and nationalist historiography by a study of five interlocking themes and periods from 1870-1930. Empire's Metropolis explores the urban dimensions of standard time, public clocks, landed property, maps and surveying, and the built environment, spanning the period of Bombay's growth from a colonial mercantile port city into a major industrial metropolis from 1870 to 1930. These "modern" practices of calculation, coordination and control in the urban environment both created and depended on new scales of urban power and capital accumulation, made possible what I argue are particular configurations of industrial technologies, civic institutions and urban space. From the perspective of the colonial city, the history of these technologies looks less like the smooth unfolding of a singular standard of time or space, than a protracted war of position fought out across a century by colonial and national elites and the masses in Bombay. In contrast to the teleology inscribed in "industrialization" or Shekhar Krishnan 1. Scales [email protected] Page 2 of 291 "urbanization", it is strategic claims and efforts to produce and maintain the scales of urban power and circuits of exchange and control - the multiple and disjunct scales of money, time and space of the city through which the city grows and reproduces itself - that we can locate the historical geography of colonial and postcolonial Bombay. Historically, cotton was the key commodity through which Bombay emerged as a "gateway city" or "global city" in the modern world economy. Much like today's global cities, the port cities of British India were central nodes in imperial networks of command and control which extended across colonial India. The networked infrastructures completed between 1860 and 1880 - the complex of railways, telegraphs, and steamships - made Bombay a central location in the circulation of people, money and goods through an expanding territorial and maritime frontier in Western India and the Indian Ocean. Since its first settlement in the 17' century, the small archipelago of islands and swamps in the natural harbour of Bombay had remained separated from its hinterland by the coastal mountains of the Western Ghats. These sparsely populated set of seven islands were ceded to the Portugese in the seventeenth century. Through the marriage dowry of Catherine Braganza when she married into the British royal family, Bombay ceded to the British Crown. The Crown, in turn, rented the swampy Shekhar Krishnan 1. Scales [email protected] Page 3 of 291 station to the East India Company, who maintained a military and trading establishment there in the eighteenth century. As the main outpost of the Company's power on the west coast of India, Bombay's influence deepened with the increasing control exerted over coastal trade by the Company's naval protection and commercial shipping, which diverted earlier patterns of Indian Ocean commerce centred on the Mughal port city of Surat, through the projection