by Sunil Amrith
The British justification of large-scale public works, too, had new dimensions. In precolonial India, though not as markedly as in China, the control of water lent legitimacy to local rulers. Irrigation works bolstered local resilience to drought, and ensured states’ coffers remained full. Maximizing revenue remained the be-all and end-all of British rule in India, from start to finish; behind every investment in infrastructure lay the aim of extraction. Like many local rulers before them the British government of India used irrigation works to signal their benevolence, to demonstrate their power, to satisfy their own vanity. But some British architects of water went further than this. Driven by an aggressive evangelical Christianity, engineers like Arthur Cotton saw their mission as going far beyond the sustenance of revenue for the state. Irrigation, alongside other technologies, would usher in the social and moral transformation of rural India: midwife to an ever-expanding universe of commerce and trade. The moral argument for infrastructure in India laid deep roots in the nineteenth century—it would not be long before it was turned against British rule.
In earlier times the benefits of hydraulic infrastructure resided entirely at the local, or at most the regional, level. In this sense, perhaps the most far-reaching change that British imperial engineering brought was its spatial expanse—in the imagination of British engineers and administrators and investors, the irrigation of a particular district of the Godavari delta or the Gangetic plain would have repercussions across the globe, as more and more of the products of India’s soil found their buyers in the markets of London and Liverpool, Hamburg and New York.
IV
The irregular availability of water was one challenge; the conquest of space was another. To take the augmented products of India’s irrigated lands to market, India’s great rivers had to be made navigable. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, little had changed since cartographer James Rennell’s description in the 1790s. The inland waterways of Bengal sustained “a system of regional trade that served a population of some 60 millions.” An array of specialist vessels plied the waterways of the Bengal delta: salt boats, the boats used by woodchoppers in the Sundarbans, the small craft for the traffic in betel leaf, and the distinctive port lighters that serviced European merchantmen, loading and unloading their cargoes. Higher up the hierarchy in this catalog of rivercraft were the bajra preferred by European employees of the Company, with a large sail on a single mast. Most luxurious was the pinnace, reserved for higher officials and the wealthiest Indian merchants. The river teemed with life, animated by the labor of boatmen with a panoply of specialized skills. A distinctive Anglo-Indian lexicon emerged to describe work on the river—the product of British translations and mistranslations, transcriptions and mispronunciations of local words.58 Serangs and tindals were boatswains; manjhees and seaconnies were steersmen; dandees, expert oarsmen, lascars, sailors. Each group knew the river intimately.59
But fluctuations in the Ganges River’s flow between the wet and the dry season, the heavy loads of silt that it carries, forging and undoing sandbanks and shoals along its course—these all made it treacherous for larger vessels. Sandbanks deceived the most seasoned boatmen. Insurance firms charged the same premium on freight going from Calcutta up the Ganges to Allahabad as they did to London. If anything, Company rule had slowed traffic along the river, because of its punitive taxation. This was the view of Charles Trevelyan, who traveled down the Ganges and the Yamuna in 1830 to report on the oppressions inflicted by countless customs posts, acting in the Company’s name, along the riverbanks. “These streams, intersecting, as they do, the whole of the Bengal Provinces from one end to the other and terminating in the Sea port of Calcutta,” Trevelyan wrote, “must be the great channels and high roads of trade of the country.” But they fell short of that potential. Trevelyan found that the number of customs inspections was enough “not only to embarrass the navigation of the Jumna, but to close it entirely for nearly half its course from the hills.” He noted how few of the “great staples” of salt, cotton, ghee, and asafoetida traveled by river—instead, merchants resorted to “tedious and expensive land carriage.” Only one cargo of salt arrived in Agra from Delhi in the year 1830 even though vast quantities were traded yearly from Delhi “for the consumption of our Eastern Provinces.” In his sloping copperplate hand, Trevelyan was damning: “It may appear extraordinary,” he wrote, “that the Officers who are charged with the collection of the customs should possess so imperfect an idea” of the inspections and exactions conducted in their name. Those who suffered most were the “poorer class of merchants and traders who can ill afford to pay.” Trevelyan noted that “speed is the Life of Trade.” Like so many other Company officers, he was a trader himself: he spoke from experience.60 Trevelyan’s report played a key role in the East India Company’s abolition of internal customs duties.
By the time Trevelyan made his voyage downriver, the Ganges was the site of some of the earliest experiments with steam technology in India. British administrators and businessmen looked eagerly to the expansion of trade and navigation upriver. The first steam engine to arrive in Calcutta, in 1817 or 1818, was there to clean the river Hooghly. The eight-horsepower engine from Birmingham powered revolving buckets to clear the river of the silt it carried from the hills. A few years later, the steamboat Diana, launched in July 1823 by the Calcutta shipbuilding firm Messrs Kyd & Co, drew large crowds to witness its maiden voyage. As a commercial proposition it failed. War spurred technical improvement. In 1825 the company launched a military expedition against the Burmese kingdom after tension along India’s expanding northeastern frontier. The old dredger was converted into a warship; unprofitable Diana was pressed into service to carry medical supplies and the wounded between India and Arakan, on the eastern littoral of the Bay of Bengal. It was deployed up the Irrawaddy River, where local people labeled the ship the “fire devil.”61
By the 1830s, steamboat agents had set up shop at every point along the river—most of them as a sideline to their primary occupations. Many profited from the arrival of steam. J. P. Leslie was by day a pleader at the Allahabad High Court; he made himself the government’s agent at the port and charged commission for overseeing the loading and unloading of cargo. Carr, Tagore, & Co., managing agents, secured the contract to supply coal to the government’s Steam Department from their mines in Burdwan, in eastern Bengal. The Ganges was a microcosm of India’s economic transformation. Steamboats began to carry to Calcutta the revenues on which the East India Company’s administration depended—the proceeds of the annual harvest. Steamboats were filled with “boxes loaded with five thousand rupee coins,” each one “roped, ticketed, and sealed with lead and wax” and guarded by one or more soldiers. Upriver, private money traveled from Calcutta merchants to Patna, Benaras, and Allahabad—advances on the crops eagerly awaited by traders in London and Liverpool and New York. The Ganges was a conduit for India’s economic integration with the world. The bulk of the cargo traveling up from Calcutta consisted of the material paraphernalia of British imperialism in India—arms, medical supplies, printing presses, seals for opium agents, compasses and theodolites for the staff of the Indian Survey, the mammoth project to map and survey every inch of British territory in India. Consignments of three commodities dominated steam traffic along the Ganges: cotton, indigo, and opium. Each was of global importance. Long transported to Calcutta on country boats, indigo was small enough to be stashed away—it was a favored way for company officers to smuggle their ill-gotten gains out of the country. From 1836, consignments began to travel downriver by steamboats.62
By the end of the 1830s, ironclad steamers traversed the 780 miles between Calcutta and Allahabad in three weeks, but beyond Allahabad they found their passage blocked.63 The Ganges continued to challenge the power of steam. Even under experienced pilots, steamboats ran aground. They foundered on the river’s treacherous shoals and sandbanks. Silt blocked the path of large vessels, confining them to the most easily navigabl
e stretches of the river. More nimble vessels lacked the power to push upriver. And steamboats were expensive. The most valuable commodities formed the bulk of the cargo on steamboats along the Ganges. But steam freight was too costly for most merchants. Bulk goods—rice, sugar, saltpeter, linseed, hemp, and hides—continued to travel on country boats, or overland.64 Far from supplanting earlier uses of the river, the steamboat took its place in a varied economy of energy and transportation: the oldest and the newest technologies coexisted and competed with one other. Often the river itself—its currents, its seasonality, its contours—set the boundaries of what was possible or financially viable.
In the end it was not road but rail that emerged as the biggest competitor to steam vessels on the river. Because of British investors’ embrace of the railroad, steam transportation along the Ganges never really flourished.
THE WORLD OVER, THE COLLAPSE OF SPACE AND TIME BY THE RAILROAD, the steamship, and the telegraph underpinned the transition to industrial capitalism. Writing of the same period in the nineteenth century, environmental historian William Cronon describes how Chicago’s tentacles reshaped the entire landscape of the American Midwest. Cronon writes of the “railroads’ liberation from geography”—their ability to operate “quite independently of the climatic factors that had bedeviled earlier forms of transportation.”65 But how much did this apply in India? Could rail operate “independently” of the monsoon, where river transport could not?
India’s railway dreams were born in the 1830s; by the 1840s, these visions had become a sort of “mania.” The construction of India’s railway network began in the 1850s and reached its zenith in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, financed by private investors at public risk, their returns guaranteed by the state. By this time railway lines snaked across Europe and North and South America. Now speculators eyed India with anticipation. After false starts and burst bubbles, construction began in the 1850s.66 In 1853 the Marquess of Dalhousie, governor-general of India, inaugurated the construction of India’s railways: investors were guaranteed a rate of return of 5 percent. As ever, military needs loomed largest in the government’s calculations. As Dalhousie told Parliament in a statement that inaugurated India’s railway age, a countrywide rail network “would enable the Government to bring the main bulk of its military strength to bear upon any given point in as many days as it would now require months.” He envisaged the “commercial and social advantages” of the railway as “beyond all present calculation.” Beyond calculation, too, were the “extent and value of the interchange which may be established with people beyond our present frontier.”67
Within three decades, civil engineer George W. MacGeorge estimated that the railway had reduced India to “one-twentieth of its former dimensions.” Trains could cover up to six hundred kilometers a day. Bullock carts could manage, at best, twenty to thirty kilometers a day; river boats could cover sixty-five kilometers a day going downstream, but even fewer than a bullock cart when battling upriver. The railway grid consolidated the state’s control over Indian territory. India’s cotton and indigo, jute and opium moved faster to the ports of Bombay and Calcutta for export. The railway implanted the colonial state upon the recently conquered lands of the northwest.68
Among those who watched with interest was Karl Marx, who saw the railway as a necessary tool to break down feudalism and social division. Rail collapsed distance. Rail integrated markets. Marx quoted from a British observation just a few years earlier, in 1848, that “when grain was selling from 6/- to 8/- a quarter at Khandesh, it was sold at 64/- to 70/- at Poona, where people were dying in the streets”; the sole reason was that “the clay-roads were impracticable.” In Marx’s view, one of the railway’s potential benefits lay in what it could do to the hydraulics of the land: it could “easily be made to subserve agricultural purposes,” he thought, “by the formation of tanks” along the railway embankments, “and by the conveyance of water along different lines.” A few years later, in 1860, railway engineer Edwin Merrall published a riposte to Sir Arthur Cotton’s condemnation of expensive railway construction in India; it was a defense of the value of railways, faced with Cotton’s alternative—investing in India’s waterways. For Merrall, too, water was central. Merrall insisted that the railway could overcome climatic variation, operating “at all seasons of the year,” whereas rivers swelled during the monsoon and dwindled in the dry season, leaving few months of the year when they could be traversed safely. India regularly suffered from famine, “from the failure of the periodical rains”; but “such scarcity,” he argued, “is not general, but partial and local,” and could “very easily be met by an increased supply of food from other and more fortunate districts.” The railway’s greatest promise was to connect the driest parts of India with those “which never want water.”69
It is difficult to write about India’s railways without a flurry of astonishingly large numbers. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, the Indian railways expanded to encompass twenty-four thousand miles of track, and India possessed the fourth-largest railway network in the world: by far the largest in Asia. India’s railways demanded a “prodigious consumption of mineral or vegetable food, in the shape of coal, coke, or wood,” vast quantities of iron and steel, and the complex manipulation of water to supply the engines. Because so many of the materials were imported, Indian railway expansion was a fillip to British industry.70
But what did this mean for villagers in a district facing drought or flood? Some observers worried from the outset that, contrary to the dominant view, transportation was no panacea for social and economic inequality. Writing in 1851, C. H. Lushington, railway commissioner, saw that the lands of the Ganges valley were “sublet in very small portions”; they were worked by the “poor and needy” who were “without capital who live from hand to mouth.” They lacked the stocks of grain that would “make it worth their while” to seek distant markets. He worried that railway lines would cut through small holdings, dividing them further; he feared the “serious and tangible injuries” that would come from the way the railway lines interfered with drainage by building over natural floodplains. A quarter of a century later, many of his fears would prove prescient.71
The railways reached deep into the interior. They carried the force of the state and the pull of global markets to even the smallest villages. An Indian economist writing in the mid-twentieth century described the railways as sparking a “revolution in the economic pattern of the country”: the “age-old walls of localized economy,” he wrote, “were collapsing.” Recent analysts reach a similar conclusion based on the modeling of district-level data. Dave Donaldson estimates that the arrival of the railroad in any given district raised real income by 16 percent, thanks to “previously unexploited gains from trade due to comparative advantage.” He echoes a sense widely shared in the late nineteenth century: “Districts that had been largely closed economies opened up as they were penetrated by railroads.” His data show that the dependence of local grain prices and even local mortality rates on local rainfall vanished at last with the arrival of the railways.72 But these numbers tell us little about how resources were shared within each village, district, or household. Markets grew more integrated, but many without land or capital were not well positioned to benefit from this expansion. And what effect did these transformations have on those—the lower castes, women and children, those ill or disabled—who had to look outside the market, to benefits in kind or to always-tenuous customary entitlements, for their security and survival?
Railway bridge over the Godavari River. CREDIT: Sunil Amrith
However dazzling its scale, the rail network met the needs of a colonial export economy, driving produce to the river mouth ports. It was designed to take India’s jute and cotton and tea and coal to where merchants needed them; it was designed to transport labor to the plantations and mines and factories. The massive expansion in mobility both within and beyond India in this period coexisted with deepening pocke
ts of social and geographical immobility. Swaths of India remained off the railway map. The inequality between regions that benefited from the change and those left behind grew starker. Where there were no rail connections, roads also tended to be poor, and waterways poorly maintained. The National Sample Survey of India showed that, even a century after 1870, no fewer than 72 percent of journeys in many parts of rural India were undertaken on foot. Always, the newest and the oldest technologies depended on one another: as historian David Arnold observed, “The railways relied on country carts to bring raw cotton and other cash crops to the railheads or distribute grain to needy villages in times of famine.”73
But in this age of evangelical faith in the “civilizing” effects of capitalism, of which British rule was the “Providential” vehicle in India, the railway seemed to augur an “extraordinary awakening”: a “wonderfully rapid subversion of previous habits of life and thought” in India. The engineer George MacGeorge’s encomium concluded that “one of the most rigid and exclusive caste systems in the world” had been “penetrated on every side by the power of steam.” Many Indian observers shared his enthusiasm. Madhav Rao, chief minister of the princely states of Travancore, Indore, and then Baroda, wrote of the “glorious change the railway has made,” as “populations which had been isolated for unmeasured ages, now easily mingle in civilized confusion”—it offered no less than the prospect of India becoming “a homogeneous nation.” Not only did the railway change people’s behavior, it transformed the landscape: trains ran through the rainy season and the dry, they crossed bridges across rivers and mountains, connected humid and arid regions. As they cut a track through the Western Ghats, railway engineers had turned “the stupendous natural inequalities of the precipitous hills into a series of uniform inclined surfaces,” and “the whole rugged and inhospitable region has been smoothed down.”74