by Jon Wilson
Most of all, though, it was the regular throb of water-borne steam engines which British officers imagined would allow them to consolidate their power throughout India. In the 1830s British entrepreneurs developed scheme after scheme for steamboats. To begin with, interest from the British who ruled India was slow. The first commercial steam vessels in Britain began to operate in 1811. By 1820 steam was a familiar presence on European and American coasts and rivers, but it was the Indian ruler of Awadh, Amjad Ghazi-ud-din Haidar, who brought the first steamboat to India in 1819, not the Company. The Nawab of Awadh also laid India’s first metalled road. In 1823, a committee of merchants was formed in Calcutta to lobby for a steam connection between London and Bengal. It was granted 20,000 rupees by the Company, but given no other support. It was only when steam seemed a viable tool of government that the authorities became enthusiastic.37
The first steamboat to be put to use by the imperial government arrived by accident. The captain of the Diana, a vessel chugging its way from London to Guangzhou in China, became ill so ended his journey in Bengal. The boat was originally intended to push the opium trade through China’s rivers. British anxiety about hurting ‘Chinese sentiments’ compounded by the loss of the captain led the boat to stay in Calcutta. The Company turned down the offer of buying the boat when it was first offered for sale at 60,000 rupees. It became more interested when war broke out with Burma. The Burmese were pushing the Company’s army back down the Irrawaddy river, and the government was desperate to buy anything that might give it an advantage. In April 1824, the Diana was purchased for 20,000 rupees more than the original price. It began to steam its way up and down the Irrawaddy towing gunboats. It was not long before Britons began to write as if their victory was made inevitable by their possession of the irresistible power of steam. As one commentator wrote sixteen years later, on the river ‘the muscles and sinews of men would not hold out against the perseverance of the boiling kettle’. The war seemed to demonstrate that steam ‘may become an element in reclaiming barbarians’. But the eventual British defeat of Burma was a close-run thing, and certainly not based on European technological advantage.38
The Company first commissioned steamships as vessels of war. After the Diana’s success, engines to fit two Calcutta-built boats, the Hughli and Berhampore, arrived from London in 1828. Both were intended to consolidate British power along the Brahmaputra river, where the conquest of Assam from Burma needed to be secured. The Berhampore set about this task, chugging its way to the north-east of India. But the newly arrived, technology-obsessed Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, wanted to see a steamship service open up along the Ganges between Calcutta and Allahabad. As a result, the Hughli was sent on an experimental journey up the river. In its twenty-day voyage from Calcutta to Benares, the steering failed and the vessel continually ran aground. The Hughli’s accommodation was too smelly and too noisy for any but the most junior officer to put up with, and the cost was extortionate. But the mere physical fact of a steamboat making its way 700 miles upriver allowed the experiment to be deemed a success. In other ways Bentinck’s government was desperate to cut costs, but along the Ganges it started to build the elaborate infrastructure necessary for a permanent steamboat service, commissioning engines to be shipped from London, finding stocks of coal and laying them out at coal depots, hiring boatmen and pilots to staff every one of the twenty-eight stations between Calcutta and Allahabad. By 1836, there was a fully working steamboat service along the river, charging its small group of passengers 1,000 rupees for the privilege of taking one month instead of two to travel to Allahabad.
To begin with, ocean-going steamships that could connect London and India were pushed by an assorted band of engineers and speculators.39 But it was Lord Elphinestone and Sir John Malcolm, the two authoritarian administrators who succeeded one another as Governors of Bombay who led the campaign. Elphinstone’s effort to persuade the Court of Directors to back a pilot voyage through the Red Sea was rebuffed in 1824. The first journey began six years later, when Malcolm decided to spend the Bombay government’s own money on an experimental journey.40
The vessel used was a 124-foot-long, 411-ton ‘armed steam vessel’ which had been commissioned from the Parsi shipbuilder Naoroji Jamsetjee initially to check piracy along India’s west coast. Launched in October 1829 it was named, ironically, the Hugh Lindsay after the Chairman of the Court of Directors who had refused to back the venture to start with. On its first journey it carried government despatches, 366 private letters and a single passenger, Colonial Campbell of the Bombay artillery. Able to store only five days’ worth of fuel, the ship was delayed at Aden, Jedda and then Cossar, the Ottoman ports where it needed to stop to load coal. The Hugh Lindsay’s final destination was Suez where Colonel Campbell and the letters of lonely British civil servants were shifted onto camel-drawn carriages for a quick and safe journey to Alexandria and then on to Marseilles and London. The vessel took thirty-one days there and thirty-seven back for a journey it was initially thought would take ten. Over the next two years, the Hugh Lindsay shuttled back and forth between Bombay and Egypt. A second, smaller and weaker vessel left Calcutta a few months after the Hugh Lindsay, but failed to make its way around the south coast of Ceylon. The British officer who had been sent with letters to reach it at Suez was left stranded, and limped his way slowly back to India by sail.41
Despite limited success, Malcolm’s successor as Governor of Bombay believed the ‘experiment’ of connecting London and India by steam had ‘succeeded beyond the most sanguine expectations of those who were well aware of the difficulties attending its navigation’. Steam was pushed by one committee after another in London, becoming a parliamentary obsession by the mid-1830s. Far more than an interest in commercial profit, the desire to create a more effective system of command drove their interest. Men far removed from India imagined vessels that were fuelled by hot air would help their rhetoric reach Asia more quickly and be obeyed more diligently than before.42
Historians often impute commercial motives to the East India Company’s effort to assert greater power in India in the 1830s. After all, this is often regarded as the era of free-trade imperialism, when Britons used their proconsuls and gunboats to crack open closed markets in other parts of Asia and elsewhere. The decade ended with the first Opium War, when Britain responded violently to Chinese efforts to regulate the East India Company-sponsored narcotics industry.43 Merchants in Calcutta and Bombay (some involved in the opium trade) initially supported steamboats, but commercial support ebbed away as the real costs were more than imagined and speeds far slower. The steam services that began to operate in the 1830s were far too expensive to be useful for trade. The coal needed to keep the Hugh Lindsay’s paddles turning alone cost almost 75,000 rupees (£393,000 in 2016 prices), and cheaper boats were too weak to make their way through the Arabian Sea. These high costs did not bring correspondingly huge revenues. On the Hugh Lindsay, postal charges for the letters brought in only 1404 rupees, with little more to carry passengers. To spend a month being conveyed in a cramped, noisy cabin on the Ganges from Calcutta to Allahabad, a Company officer would have to pay the same amount. Even if traders could pay there was no space for anything but the lightest ‘light cargo’. The purpose of steam was not to transport goods to be bought and sold, or to improve trade.44
Instead, steamboats and steamships were designed to give greater security to Britain’s fragile imperial power in India. Rather than being used to transport goods to be brought and sold, expensive steam engines were put into motion to accelerate the circulation of the small objects of empire, the silver coins and printed papers that the imperial hierarchy relied on. The quicker treasure and paperwork could be exchanged, the more secure officers felt about the deference of subordinates to their commands. A steam ‘communication’ ‘between India and the mother country’ would ‘entirely change the relation between the two’; the Company would ‘derive full indemnification for any expense which you mi
ght incur in the speedy transmission of your instructions’, Elphinstone wrote. The advantages were ‘incalculable’, Malcolm argued: just as well given the exorbitant cost of steam transport.
Steam communication was intended to create a more enduring and regular physical connection between the scattered sites of British power, linking the imperial capital in London, the presidency towns, district capitals and cantonments. But it could not assert authority over the spaces in between. The report by H. T. Prinsep, secretary of the government in Calcutta, on the Ganges noted that steamboats offered a safe way to transport treasure, because the mechanical pace of a steam vessel meant it could outrun the human or wind powered vehicles which raiders used. Prinsep noted that a battalion of soldiers was needed to defend 38 million rupees’ worth of treasure brought down by river from Agra to Calcutta. A steamboat would need only a small guard, ‘for no band of robbers could follow it or waylay it’. In the 1830s new technology allowed the British to escape, avoid and ignore violence rather than suppress it.45
Ten years later the same argument was made when the ‘experiment’ of creating a steamboat connection between Calcutta and Dhaka was being assessed. The service had run at a huge loss because merchants did not want to pay a higher price for marginally quicker access to markets with a service they believed would not endure. ‘[F]ew of the native merchants have as yet overcome their prejudices against the new,’ the controller of steam vessels condescendingly explained. At Dhaka imperial technology did not transform Indian ways of doing business. Its purpose instead was to make the loose frame of British power more secure. Private steam ventures were impossible the admittedly self-interested controller of steam conceded in 1847. But, ‘[w]ith a government very different considerations suggest themselves’ than making an immediate profit. The greatest justification for steam was the need to find a safe and stable way of shipping money collected from landholders in the countryside to the imperial treasury at Calcutta.46
The 1830s saw the proliferation of many other projects intended to create a more uniform and systematic structure of power in India. Law and steam took up much of senior Company officers’ time, but there were other schemes. There was the attempt, for example, to map Indian territory, resulting in the Great Trigonometric Survey. These years saw the growth of an increasingly systematized process of revenue collection based on the detailed surveyance of land. They witnessed, too, the emergence of the Post Office in India, as the East India Company attempted to suppress the thousands of courier (dak) services and then, in 1837, insist all correspondence was carried by its own system of collecting and delivering mail. They saw debate over ways of educating Indian officers so that the Company’s law courts and revenue offices worked more efficiently, in the process creating more standardized forms of instruction.
Historians sometimes argue that these efforts were part of a systematic effort to improve Indian society, signs that the 1830s were an era of ‘liberal imperialism’ when Britain’s despotic power in India was deployed with the intention of doing good.47 In fact, they were driven by far more mundane concerns. Each project was driven by the attempt to create an ordered system of rule, and so to protect the Company’s power in India from challenge. The ideal was to replace the haphazard scattering of institutions the Company’s conquests had created with a single structure that operated with the same mechanical regularity as one of Mawdsley’s steam engines. Notably, the 1830s saw an increase in the use of mechanical metaphors to describe the operation of the British regime in India.48
Summon no zamindars
The dispersed institutions of imperial power in India were anything but a machine. The project of creating a systematic structure of government was not successful in the way its authors intended. But these projects marked a change in the relationship between British power and Indian society. The 1830s saw the growth of a style of government that engaged with people through abstract systems and general categories. A steamship, a rational code of law or a revenue map did not need to pay attention to the particularities of specific places, or the circumstances of particular men and women. That, indeed, was their purpose. The aim of these institutions was to consolidate a regime suspended above the lives of its subjects, able to sustain itself while having only the thinnest connection with the people it was supposed to rule. At its crudest, that meant governing without the need for talking to Indians.
The practice of surveying provides a good example of the extension of government through forms and records rather than speech. The first half of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of the British effort to map India. These were the years of the aforementioned Great Trigonometric Survey of India, in which hundreds of surveyors measured every part of the Indian landmass, calculating the height of South Asia’s great mountains while doing so. Mount Everest was named after British India’s second Surveyor-General. Extensively studied by historians, such grand projects made no impact on British administration. The Great Trigonometric Survey had no connection to the far more prosaic but more important project of surveying land to aid the collection of taxes. British officers were permanently stationed in each district to produce maps that were supposed to delineate the boundaries of villages and define the limits of each landed estate. To do so, though, they were supposed only to use documents in the district offices. The Survey Department strongly discouraged their surveyors from interrogating potentially untrustworthy locals. ‘[H]e is to summon no zemindars [sic] and make no enquiries from any party,’ the Board of Revenue ordered. If confusion arose or something was contested, the surveyor was to talk only to the amin, or Indian revenue official.49
Whether it was from the bridge of a steamship or from behind a theodolite, there was no room either for picturesque detail or for extensive inquiries about local practice in the mid-nineteenth-century British officers’ view of India. ‘The steamer goes boring on without the slightest regard for our love of sketching,’ Emily Eden complained in 1837. Indian terrain was to be crossed at speed or drawn with the regular, homogeneous pen of the imperial map-maker; there was no place for complexity or care. The British government worked by creating a form of rule which was suspended, as if in mid-air, with nothing but the most perfunctory engagement with local society.50
Yet the detached institutions of British power created their own life, and in the process subtly changed Indian ways of doing things. The systems the British introduced to bolster their rule dispersed new procedures throughout India’s cities, towns and villages, interposing the authority of the state where it had not existed before, in the process moulding the conduct of Indians to abstract, depersonalized forms. Taxation, for example, was no longer about negotiating with particular local authorities, but a matter of paying the appropriate rate for a particular size plot of land. The East India Company’s new postal service asked letter-writers to send and receive their mail from fixed addresses, rather than relying on local knowledge about the identity of an individual. Litigants shaped the stories they told before the court so that their actions fitted the categories of the Company’s law; it was no use simply telling the facts of the case and then appealing to the Company ‘for justice’. A case could only be won if it conformed to the rules, whether enacted in regulations or distributed in privately produced manuals. Britain’s empire began to be asserted through Indian acquiescence to mundane, routine procedures and forms of paperwork.
The circulation of stamped paper is a good example of this process. From the very end of the eighteenth century, the East India Company insisted that various different documents, deeds, contracts, and most controversially newspapers, had a stamp on them bought from the Company. This was a classic colonial tactic for ‘raising a revenue for the support of the State’, as one regulation put it. Opposition to the Stamp Act in Britain’s North American colonies had, of course, helped bring about the American Revolution. Fifty years after American independence a much more intrusive regime was imposed on India. From 1824 no document without a pre-paid government
stamp could be presented in court. The range of documents that had to be so certified expanded as enforcement intensified, as contracts, deeds, conveyances, leases, powers of attorney, insurance policies, and receipts and, after 1824, newspapers were all brought under the scope of the law. By the mid-1820s, perhaps 5 per cent of the time and resources of each District Collector’s office was spent dealing with stamped paper, ensuring supplies, distributing stashes to the shopkeepers who sold them on, keeping registers, ensuring local merchants used them in transactions. The Collector of Rangpur in northern Bengal toured the offices of city merchants in November 1825 and found many were still writing on plain paper and that no one knew anything about the stamp laws. Five years later traders were coming to the Collector’s office asking to buy stamps to fix to old documents, in order to make them legal.51
Through time these stamps developed their own, seemingly free-floating authority. People imagined they could guarantee a promise even when far removed from the state’s effective command. A British lawyer in the early twentieth century recorded the story of an elderly Marwari man who used stamped paper to certify the chastity of his wife. He was worried his nephew was flirting with her, and forced the boy to promise and sign across a stamp ‘such as would have been affixed to a demand promissory note’.52