History, Culture and the Indian City

This page intentionally left blank History, Culture and the Indian City Rajnarayan Chandavarkar’s sudden death in 2006 was a massive blow to the study of the history of modern India, and the public tributes that have appeared since have confirmed an unusually sharp sense of loss. Dr Chandavarkar left behind a very subsantial collection of unpublished lectures, papers and articles, and these have now been assembled and edited by Jennifer Davis, Gordon Johnson and David Washbrook. The appearance of this collection will be widely welcomed by large numbers of scholars of Indian history, politics and society. The essays centre around three major themes: the city of Bombay, Indian politics and society, and Indian historiography. Each manifests Dr Chandavarkar’s hallmark historical powers of imaginative empirical richness, analytic acuity and expository elegance, and the volume as a whole will make both a major contribution to the historiography of modern India, and a worthy memorial to a very considerable scholar. History, Culture and the Indian City Essays by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521768719 © Rajnarayan Chandavarkar 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2009 ISBN-13 978-0-511-64140-4 eBook (NetLibrary) ISBN-13 978-0-521-76871-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. To Sumana Chandavarkar who gifted to Raj his intellectual curiosity, his warmth, his love of Bombay and so much else besides Contents Acknowledgements page viii Publisher’s note xi Introduction by Dr Jennifer Davis, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge 1 Bombay’s perennial modernities 12 Sewers 31 Peasants and proletarians in Bombay city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 59 State and society in colonial India 83 Religion and nationalism in India 103 From neighbourhood to nation: the rise and fall of the Left in Bombay’s Girangaon in the twentieth century 121 Historians and the nation 191 Urban history and urban anthropology in South Asia 206 Aspects of the historiography of labour in India 236 Postscript by Professor David Washbrook, Trinity College, University of Cambridge 251 Bibliography of the published works of Rajnarayan Chandavarkar 260 Index 262 vii Acknowledgements A special debt of gratitude is owed to Gordon Johnson. It was Gordon’s idea to produce this collection of essays, that are either unpublished or that deserve to be brought before a wider audience. And it was through Gordon’s unstinting efforts that the project has come to fruition. Many others have made invaluable contributions to producing this volume. Steve Tolliday used his good judgement on the selection of the essays reproduced here. Kevin Greenbank gave unstintingly of his time and his intelligence to prepare the manuscript for Cambridge University Press. Doug Haynes commented on the manuscript. Richard Fisher at Cambridge University Press helped to smooth the path of this manuscript through to publication. A number of individuals read and commented on the Introduction: Orlando Figes, Raj’s dear friend and for a time his colleague at Trinity College; Eleanor Newbigin, Raj’s graduate student, who is keeping Raj’s legacy alive at Trinity; Andrew Larcombe, Raj’s cricketing chum and one of the first friends he made upon his arrival in England; Susan Penny- backer who, together with a host of others, helped to make the period during which Raj wrote his PhD intellectually stimulating and who remained a pal ever since; Humeira Iqtidar who, together with Justin Jones, ensures that the Centre of South Asian Studies remains on the cutting edge of research into the subcontinent; again Justin, who with Kevin Greenbank organized a conference in 2007 which brought together many of Raj’s graduate students from around the globe and demonstrated the scope of Raj’s intellectual inheritance and the lasting respect of his students; Ornit Shani, another dear friend who was instrumental in securing the manuscripts which go to make up this volume; and Steve Tolliday, old friend and companion in undergraduate cricket and so much else. Many other individuals have offered their support to this book, includ- ing Malhar and Janak Nabar and, of course, Sumana Chandavarkar. Thanks too should go to all Raj’s graduate students, who kept him young and engaged even while costing him his hair and regularly driving him to distraction. viii Acknowledgements ix If this book will help ensure that Raj’s invaluable contribution to historical study continues, so too will the work of all those he touched. Foremost among these are indeed his many graduate students, spread over the globe and producing important work of their own. Raj held his graduate students with deep affection and they him. Finally, a special thanks must go to Anil Seal who drew Raj into the study of Indian history and steadfastly supported him throughout his academic career. JENNIFER DAVIS DAVE WASHBROOK Publisher’s note With one exception, these essays were selected from a very substantial corpus of unpublished, semi-published and unfinished papers left by Dr Chandavarkar at the time of his death. The apparatus of each essay should be internally consistent, but no attempt has been made to impose any sort of uniform style or presentation, and there are inevitable sub- stantive and bibliographic gaps. Each essay remains, we hope, true to the author’s original intentions. xi Introduction The originality and the humanity of Rajnarayan Chandavarkar’s work, which infuse the essays contained in this volume, may be traced in some measure to his own experience as an Indian in England as well as to the intellectual milieu in which he found himself during his formative undergraduate and postgraduate years in Cambridge. These essays also reflect his enduring love of storytelling. By all accounts, not least his own, Raj had an idyllic, big-city childhood in Bombay in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1971, he won a British Council scholarship to study for two years at Lancing College. He claimed that, for him, the great attraction of Lancing was that it had a particularly impressive cricket field, was close to the Sussex County Cricket Ground and was in reachable distance of Lords.1 After Lancing, he spent a further five years as a student at Cambridge University where he obtained a BA and then a PhD. He went on to research fellowships at Trinity College and the Centre for South Asian Studies and then to a lectureship in Indian History. It was Raj’s spirit of adventure (and his love of cricket) that sent him to England. And then the trajectory of a distinguished academic career which kept him there. To understand his work, it is first important to understand that he never intended to leave India for good; and that on his frequent trips to India and to his beloved Bombay he always saw himself as an exile, though by happenstance rather than by choice, coming home. It was this love of both the country and city of his birth which spurred Raj’s research and which shines through much of his writing. When it came to Bombay, Raj was neither selective in his affections, whether it be of workers in Bombay’s mills, the fishermen of the Worli slum or the inhabitants of the gracious mansions on Malabar Hill, nor was he uncritical of the political and economic interests which were respon- sible for their existence or, in the case of the mill districts, their decline. Coming from a family which, both before and after Independence, 1 Information from Andrew Larcombe, Lancing, 1968–73. 1 2 History, culture and the Indian city had a distinguished record of public service, Raj regretted the loss of the idealism which had inspired some of the best and brightest Indians to dedicate their lives to creating a secular and egalitarian state. But he was also intrigued by the effects of the liberalizing of India’s economy which resulted in the great show of conspicuous consumption to be found today in the high-rises, the supermarkets, the clogged roads of Bombay and the society pages of The Times of India. And which exist alongside the enduring poverty of much of the city’s inhabitants. Raj’s refusal in his work to employ fixed categories, such as class, caste, race and culture, to explain human action at both the individual and the social level also arose, in some measure, from his personal experience of such labelling. Although an Indian, he was hard put to identify any essential ‘Indianness’ which might unite the inhabitants of the subcontinent, let alone his own family or the millions of other inhabitants of Bombay. Conversely, neither did he recognize an essential ‘Britishness’ from which he might be forever excluded. Thus, he wrote in 1990, about the Empire builders in India:2 To suggest that the history of the sub-continent since the mid-18th century pri- marily consisted of a continuing clash between British values and Indian tradition is to flatten and distort the subject. At one level, the very notion that there was a single, consistent interpretation of British values is scarcely plausible and it is hard to imagine how some essence of Britishness might be identified or distilled.

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