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1 Richard Salamé “Clocks and Empire: An Indian Case Study” E.P. Thompson’s seminal research on the development of a new time­discipline in industrializing England argued convincingly that the clock can be a technology of discipline and control, a material embodiment of abstract ideas of authority and ownership, and a tool for the alleged moral reformation of the working class.1 Here, the destruction of a British public clock in 1898 Bombay will be historically contextualized and examined with the goal of demonstrating that such an event has hitherto unrecognized significance historiographically, and possibly historically. Three separate narratives of British clock culture, Indian time politics, and late­19th century Bombay rioting will be brought into conversation with each other by the shooting of the Crawford Market clock in Bombay. This paper primarily challenges the framing of existing histories and, hopefully, also offers a new narrative of a specific subaltern response to the colonial experience. Scholars such as Thomas Metcalf and Sanjay Srivastava have argued that the public clock in British India established imperial authority and allowed the British to present a self­definition of ‘Britishness’ for the benefit of the native Indian onlookers.2 Metcalf has suggested that the massive and centrally located public clock towers installed by the British following the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 were deliberately intended to stamp the landscape with reminders of the “supremacy of the Raj” while simultaneously forcing the Victorian­era virtue of punctuality onto an India supposedly marked by 1 E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work­Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present, no. 38 (1967). The framing of the paper also owes much to Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 12–19. 2 See Thomas Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire,” Representations, no. 6 (1984); Sanjay Strivastava, Constructing Post­Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School (New York: Routledge, 1998); See also Judith Kenney, “Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Station in India,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85, no. 4 (1995): 702, where she argues that Hill Stations—British settlements safely removed from natives (at least in appearance)—did not make use of monumental architecture due to the lack of an appropriate audience for such a display. This seems to confirm the authority­establishing function of public monuments, of which the clock tower is a type. 2 “laziness and lethargy.”3 Srivastava extends Metcalf’s argument, writing that the clock tower, a spectacle made to be ever visible above the irrational and anarchic jumble of the Eastern city, was a “reverse Panopticon”—asserting authority by pulling inwards the gaze of others.4 These scholars provide the foundation for modern historical analyses of these clocks but, unfortunately, they do not integrate subaltern reactions into their works, ignoring anti­colonial struggles and their possible engagement with, say, architecture. Scholars Prashant Kidambi, Ian Catanach, and Rajnarayan Chandavarkar have looked at the violent struggles in Bombay in the 1890s and framed those conflicts in terms of clashes between natives and the colonial regime over the latter’s extremely aggressive and culturally insensitive plague prevention policies.5 It will become apparent that their reading ignores the potential interconnectedness of contemporaneous struggles over time control and market society and the political crises of the 1890s. Finally, the compelling history of Indian time politics that has very recently been told by Vanessa Ogle treats clocks as indicators of the outcome of political battles over time, but fails to spatially locate the contestations themselves in the physical clocks that occupied the landscape.6 What all three research agendas have in common is an overly narrow view of their subject matter, resulting in separate and disassociated narratives being created when, in fact, these three 3 Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire,” 55–56, 62. 4 Strivastava, Constructing Post­Colonial India, 55. 5 Prashant Kidambi, “‘The ultimate masters of the city’: police, public order and the poor in colonial Bombay, c. 1893–1914,” Crime, History & Societies 8, no. 1 (2004); Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007); Ian Catanach, “‘Who are your leaders?’ Plague, The Raj and the ‘Communities’ in Bombay, 1896–1901,” in Society and Ideology: Essays in South Asian History, ed. Peter Robb (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1993); Rajnarayan Chandavarkar Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c.1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998); Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Plague panic and epidemic politics in India, 1896–1914,” in Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, eds. Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1992). 6 Ogle takes pains to note which clocks kept which of the various time standards, but does not view those clocks as active in the determination of those time standards. Vanessa Ogle, “‘Whose Time Is It?’ The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s–1940s,” American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (2013): 1377, 1384, 1386, 1389. 3 histories ought to be placed into conversation with each other. A partial exception is Jim Masselos, who properly foregrounds the material dimension of time politics in his excellent review of the situation in Bombay.7 But his focus is still on legislative politics and ignores political battles fought outside of meeting rooms. This paper’s historiographical argument will be demonstrated by the Crawford Market clock shooting, which serves as one case study in the holistic interpretation of an event in the context of inseparable discussions of time and technology, imperial identity and anti­colonial resistance. Given the dearth of available material, the endeavor is speculative by nature, but hopefully indicates the potential for a new and richer understanding of the public clock and its historical role. British Clock Culture For the Crawford Market clock shooting to occur there first needed to be a Crawford Market clock, and that required a British cultural and political logic that allowed for its construction. 19th century British literary sources suggest that the clock was a salient part of British culture, and a vehicle for the expression of normative values such as regularity and punctuality. The poem “To a Clock,” published in 1840, calls the clock the speaker’s “companion,” consoler, teacher, and source of moral admonition. The speaker finds comfort in the regularity of the clock’s tick and implicitly denigrates the irregular rhythm of the human body.8 “Look at the Clock!,” an 1841 poem, places the clock as the evidentiary arbiter of a conflict between a married couple. A wife, angry at her husband’s late return from the tavern, uses the clock’s report as if it suffices on its own to prove moral wrongdoing without any reference to the human being necessary.9 An 1842 newspaper account of an assault attributed the cause of the situation to the agency of an anthropomorphized and recalcitrant clock. Curiously obscuring 7 Jim Masselos, “Bombay Time,” in Intersections: Socio­Cultural Trends in Maharashtra, ed. Meeri Kosambi (New Delhi: Orient Longman Limited, 2000), 169–173. 8 Caledonian Mercury, “To a Clock,” October 12, 1840, galegroup.com. 9 The Odd Fellow, “Look at the Clock!,” June 12, 1841, galegroup.com. 4 the ultimate subject of the reportage, the author mentioned the clock but not the assault in his title.10 The Old Church Clock, a short novel written in 1844, tells the story of a shabby middle­aged man recounting his relationship to the “OLD­CHURCH CLOCK,” which he calls “the oldest friend I have in Manchester.”11 Giving the machine human characteristics (and moral authority) the man says, “The old clock seemed to smile at my punctuality (emphasis in original).”12 By 1850, a treatise on clock making waxed philosophical on the clock as the ultimate memento mori and model of the ideal worker. Again appeared the implicit capitalist pathologization of human temporal irregularity, which prevented the human from “performing its appointed work by day and by night, with scarcely any interruption…”13 Later decades saw a couple more treatises on clock making, although none those are quite as interesting in terms of content as they are in the mere fact of their existence.14 In 1900 the Bombay Anglo­Indian organ, The Times of India—building off decades of literary humanization of clocks and, hitherto implicit, mechanization of humans—published an article boldly equating the human body (called a “seventy­year clock”) and “all other clocks,” meaning mechanical ones.15 One might speculate that this equation was not, by this time, shocking or upsetting to contemporaries. Reflecting on the preceding decades, Virigina Woolf’s 1922 book Jacob’s Room offers an ambivalent reflection on the clock as a technology of progress and abstraction.16 Her lack of faith in the clock is perhaps symptomatic of a post­World War I change in zeitgeist and bookends the discussion of 19th century clock culture. These 10 The Bradford Observer, “The New Tales of the Clock,” January 27, 1842, galegroup.com. 11 Richard Parkinson and William Wordsworth, The Old Church Clock (London: J.G.F. and J. Rivington, 1844), 2–4. 12 Ibid., 141–142. 13 Edmund Beckett Denison, A Rudimentary Treatise on Clock and Watch Making: With a Chapter On Church Clocks... (London: John Weale, 1850), 279. 14 See Thomas Reid, Treatise on Clock and Watch Making, Theoretical and Practical, (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1859); William Matthias Dawes, A Familiar Treatise on Horology: Being a Sketch of the History of the Watch and Clock… (London: K. J. Ford & Son, 1862); Edmund Beckett Grimthorpe (formerly Edmund Beckett Denison), A Rudimentary Treatise on Clocks and Watches and Bells.

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