Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  In the process, many lives would be saved and harm prevented to those living under British rule. Yet this public health programme also entailed strong components of colonial ambition: the cleaning and draining of Bombay would provide a glistening testimonial to the technological capacity of the British Empire. The debate which had earlier engulfed Macaulay’s Calcutta – between those who believed in ruling in the slipstream of the culture and traditions of India and those who thought it wholly lost to superstition and so deserving of Western enlightenment – had been conclusively won by the Westernizers. Haileybury’s finest were now in charge of British policy in the East and the European virtues of evangelical Protestantism and Utilitarian governance were the lodestars of post-1850s imperial rule. Any vestiges of ‘oriental despotism’, with its heathen practices and caste discrimination, were to be dismantled.50 Embodying the new imperial ethos was the lieutenant-governor of Bengal and then governor of Bombay, Sir Richard Temple. He had passed out top of his class at Haileybury and, in the 1870s, unleashed all he had learned at the school of Malthus upon the starving Deccan of the Bombay Presidency. For if British policy was about saving lives in the city, when it came to managing the famines of rural India (whose victims soon started to flood the streets of Bombay) Temple emphasized the subordination of everything ‘to the financial consideration of disbursing the smallest sum of money consistent with the preservation of human life’. Under pressure from the Indian viceroy and governor-general Lord Lytton* to minimize any expenditure on famine in the Bombay Presidency, Temple defended the free market, blocked government intervention and put starving Indians to work on physically demanding public works projects. Infamously, his rigid Utilitarianism allocated the famished Indian peasantry a ‘Temple wage’ of one pound of rice per diem – significantly fewer calories than would later be provided to inmates of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Nazi Germany. As with the Bengal famines, grain was stockpiled in the cities, and between 1876 and 1878 some 1.2 million Indians in the Bombay province died of starvation. Rather than preventing famine, the new network of railways expedited the hoarding of rice in urban distribution centres and rural desolation. It is small wonder that Sir Richard Temple has been described by one modern historian as ‘the personification of free market economics as a mask for colonial genocide’.51

  But in the city a different type of efficiency was also in evidence. Here Utilitarian reform offered a test case not of inhumanity and penny-pinching, but of the superiority of British civilization – and into Bombay came a cadre of imperial administrators determined to show just how beneficent colonialism could be. Their vehicle was not the Royal Navy or British army, the Mission or Exchange, but the Department of Public Works, the Board of Conservancy and the Sanitary Commission; their philosophy was not about the divinity of free trade or an Empire of liberty, but the pragmatic capacity of the British Empire to improve urban conditions. Despite the administrators’ best attempts, their rational utility could never fully obliterate the cosmopolitan complexities of Bombay’s ethnic and caste make-up. Yet their science of government certainly transformed the urban landscape.

  Not least because they were determined to replicate tried and tested strategies which had worked at home, where sweetness and light had been brought to the ‘dark continents’ of inner-city London and Birmingham beginning in the 1830s. In Bombay, British colonial officials committed themselves to following the methods by which the likes of Victorian sanitary pioneers such as Edwin Chadwick and John Simon had investigated the industrial city; they mistakenly accepted the same flawed science of ‘miasma’ to explain the spread of fever (the ‘noxious matters’, ‘poisonous gases’ and ‘accumulated filth’ which they assumed were killers); and they aped their British predecessors in lambasting the unclean, immoral and feckless habits of the poor as mutually reinforcing components of urban pollution. Henry Conybeare thought that ‘municipal improvements can only provide the means of cleanliness to those who are willing to avail themselves of them’ and that many of the inhabitants of Bombay were sadly lost to filth.52 ‘At home and abroad, rulers and reformers identified the same practical problems, the unhygienic habits of the working class or native city dweller, and the same abstract predicament, the moral degeneration of townspeople living among “filth”, and applied the same environmental solutions,’ suggests historian John Broich. ‘In both places, British authorities saw reconfiguring the environment as a powerful tool for reforming society … Bombay and Manchester were “colonized” in the same way.’53

  Among the most dedicated advocates of this purifying imperialism was none other than the Lady of the Lamp, Florence Nightingale herself. Just as with James Mill, Karl Marx and an array of Victorian pundits on British policy in the subcontinent, Nightingale never travelled to India, though to her credit she did want to. ‘While others try to run away from India, I would desire more than anything else which I do desire … to go to India,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘I have studied the country so much, I seem to know so well what to do there, it appears to me as if I would be going home, not going to a strange country. But alas for me, it is quite impossible.’54 So, she sent missives from afar, drawing on her experience of the ill-effects of poor sanitation and lax public health in the Crimean War. This background in nursing reform made her an obvious candidate for membership of the Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army of India (1859–63). Beginning with the question of army barracks and military hospitals, she then went on to write a series of tracts demanding extensive sanitary reform within British India – including How People May Live and Not Die in India (1863); Suggestions in Regard to Sanitary Work for Improving Indian Stations (1864); and, co-authored with Sir Bartle Frere, Report on Measures Adopted for Sanitary Improvements in India 1868–69 (1869). Nightingale’s success in public policy had always partly been a question of nobbling the right kind of people, and she was soon in close correspondence with Indian viceroys, Presidency governors and fellow reformers like Andrew Leith and Sir Bartle. She also had direct contact with Indian activist organizations such as Poona Sarvajanik Sabha of the Bombay Presidency Association and would, in time, come to support the ambitions of the Indian National Congress, especially its female pioneers.

  Nightingale was shocked by the Empire’s lethargy in transferring the technological advancements it had made in British cities to India. ‘At home there have been great improvements everywhere in agriculture and in town drainage, and in providing plentiful and pure water supplies,’ she complained. ‘There is nothing of the kind in India. There is no drainage either in town or country.’ Contrary to popular opinion about the climate, deficient drainage and overcrowding, she believed ‘there is not a shadow of proof that India was created to be the grave of the British race’. The place simply needed a decent sanitary infrastructure: hygiene was the ‘handmaiden of civilization’. And if Britain was to have any ethical claim to Empire it had to ‘bring the appliances of a higher civilization to the natives of India’. ‘In holding India, we must be able to show the moral right of our tenure,’ and that meant practical improvement. ‘There is not a town which does not want – water supply; drainage; paving; cleansing. Healthy plans for arranging and constructing buildings.’55 Whenever the reforming impetus looked like faltering, her compelling persona was quick to urge it on. ‘We have made an impression on the sanitary state of that vast country,’ she declared in 1874, ‘but “impression” so far as this: only to show us the immense work that remains to be done; the immense success that can attend it.’ She had a particular hope for the Bombay Presidency: ‘Bombay, hitherto the pioneer; Bombay the active, not to say restless, the energetic Bombay. Bombay has for years done everything to drain itself, except doing it … it has had enough surveys, plans, reports, paper and print … The only thing it has not done is to do it.’56

  Nightingale’s criticisms caught the colonial mood, as the British Empire sought to prove itself by building up a healthy, stately Bombay. The sustainable growth of Bri
tish industrial cities in the nineteenth century had been heavily dependent upon access to a clean water supply. In Bombay this was doubly needed: first on public health grounds and, secondly, because demand for water was increasing so rapidly from both domestic and industrial users that it was now having to be transported into the city by boat and rail. As a result, the periodic droughts which hit the Presidency saw the city’s water supplies run dry with worrying frequency. By early June of the arduous summer of 1854 only thirty-seven of Bombay’s 136 public wells and monsoon tanks had any water in them. As Nightingale suggested, the solution was to follow the British model of urban improvement, so the city’s chief engineer, Henry Conybeare, was despatched to tour the great municipal water projects of Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow. He returned with his own plan for a Maharashtra Lake Katrine: like Glasgow, Bombay would be watered by a reservoir to the north through pipes flowing down to the city. What was more, in another precursor of Joseph Chamberlain-style ‘gas and water socialism’, the reservoir and transport costs would be borne by a general water rate. The Vihar water project (named after the Vihar valley in Salsette, 23 kilometres north of the fort) was the first municipal water project in India, begun in 1856 and completed in 1860. Despite numerous problems involving the transfer of Scottish Highland technology to west India – bursting pipes under the saline soil, lake algae formed by tropical sun – by the end of the decade, some 7,500 houses were connected to the Vihar pipes, reaching about 220,000 people. In the following decade water from the Tasso River was diverted into the Vihar Lake, and proper reservoirs were built first at Malabar Hill and then at Bhandarwada. The handmaiden of civilization was at work: Bombay now had the water it needed to grow.57

  With clean water coming in, there was an equally urgent demand to have human waste going out. The piles of excrement lining the streets, which Sir Dinshaw had complained of, were both an obvious public health risk and a source of civic embarrassment. ‘Of the many evils that the inspection of Bombay has disclosed that which is most prominent and at the same time most open to immediate remedy is filthiness,’ Andrew Leith stressed in 1864. ‘The maintenance of thorough cleanliness cannot be looked for without a general and efficient house drainage.’58 His Report on the Sanitary State of the Island of Bombay recommended the execution of a new drainage scheme, but also urged a series of intermediate measures – a larger number of filth-carts, a Building Act requiring the construction of proper privies, deodorizing drains and sewers with carbolic acid, widening streets to improve ventilation. In Britain, the problem of night-soil had been solved with a massive expansion of sewerage systems. As Henry Conybeare noted as early as 1852, London with a population of some 1.8 million had more than 1,100 kilometres of sewers, while Bombay with a population approaching half a million had less than 23 kilometres (most notably, the notorious Main Town Drain or ‘monster nuisance of Bombay’ down to Love Grove). Liverpool – with a population of some 370,000 – had built 27 kilometres in a year. Instead, Bombay’s excrement was carted off from the gullies between houses to beaches or dumped at sea – a practice which accelerating land reclamation projects and rising mortality levels made increasingly untenable. So the Victorians began in Bombay what they had done to their own cities some twenty years previously: building pumping stations and outfall posts and a sewerage system of drainage pipes which has lasted, like those in British cities constructed at the same time, to this day. When combined with Leith’s other improvements and the new Vehar Lake water supply, the effects on life expectancy were marked. ‘Bombay has had a lower death-rate on the last two years than London – the healthiest city in Europe,’ Nightingale gushed to Sir Bartle in 1869. ‘This is entirely your doing.’ Indeed, ‘if we do not take care Bombay will outstrip us in the sanitary race. People will be ordered for the benefit of their health to Bombay or to Calcutta, which is already healthier than Liverpool or Manchester.’59

  Not all were so effusive. Leading members of Bombay’s Indian merchant class were uncomfortable with the financing of the city’s sanitary improvements. ‘The project of bringing water from Vihar does not find favour with the community in general,’ Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy informed the governor in 1854.

  Many persons … do not think that it should rest with any Engineer or Architect, however high his repute or abilities, to have the devising and execution of the plans, an almost unlimited power of expending the public money … without any control whatever on the part of those who have to pay for the works.60

  In Britain, numerous ratepayer associations had been formed in the 1830s to oppose the cost of capital improvements to their city’s infrastructure. Local elections were won and lost on the cost of reservoirs, drainage schemes and water supplies. ‘The tyranny of the petty tradesman is a serious evil in municipal life,’ as George Bernard Shaw later put it. ‘The small shopkeeper does not understand finance, nor banking, nor insurance, nor sanitary science.’61 In Bombay there developed an equally well-organized resistance to the administration’s grand public health schemes, when many believed a more localized, organic series of changes would suffice. Inevitably, in British India, the issue of cost was also overlaid with that of imperial inequality, for behind much of the British Empire’s sanitary strategy was a determination to improve the health of its own military personnel in barracks and the living conditions of the governing class. Rate-paying, indigenous Indians were forced to fund major capital projects which more often than not benefited the colonial class and its contractors in charge of the piping, masonry and machinery shipped in from Leeds and Glasgow. It was Bombay’s European quarters which received the Vihar water and could afford to pay the rates, whilst the Native Town residents had their public wells closed and endured only a highly irregular supply from Vihar. Within Victorian Bombay, water and waste policy were not value-neutral tools of improvement; in fact, they subtly codified the inherent stratifications of urban colonialism. A small appendix to the 1869 Report of the Commission on the Drainage and Water Supply of Bombay deftly captures the frustrations of Bombay’s resident Indians. After complaining about leaking pipes, poor pressure rates which didn’t even push the water supply up to the second floor and the need for Parsi families to have a good 14 gallons per head per day, Mr Cursetjee Framjee made a more general point. ‘The natives look to the great wastage of Vihar water in watering our streets,’ he told the commission; ‘as only royal streets are watered, the poor envy the least drop of water wasted for the convenience of the rich. They would wish rather that water found its way in their mouths.’62

  The object of Framjee’s ire was the municipal authority as, once again, the British experience of managing industrial cities at home shaped the development of urban plans for India. Following the 1832 Great Reform Act, the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act had inaugurated the modern era of local government, when the medieval system of guild corporations which had historically ruled Britain’s towns and cities started to be replaced by democratically elected municipal authorities. By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain’s leading conurbations had accumulated a series of tax-raising and expenditure powers which allowed them not only to civilize their cities with sanitary improvements, but to beautify them with town halls and parks and enlighten them with libraries and art galleries. Bombay’s 1865 Municipal Act aimed for something similar, but with much more power vested in the single person of the municipal commissioner, who was appointed by the government for three years with extensive powers over the governance of the city. Supporting the commissioner was a controller of municipal accounts, a health officer (a statutory requirement in Britain since 1848) and an executive engineer, who combined to deliver exactly the kind of improvements urged by Andrew Leith’s 1864 Report on the Sanitary State of the Island of Bombay.*

  Bombay’s first commissioner was thirty-year-old Arthur Travers Crawford (chronicler of the booming Bombay of the early 1860s), who set to work with gusto: polluting industries were outlawed, burial grounds were cleared, refuse collection upgraded, slaughter-hous
es relocated, cholera-swamps drained, and old bazaars pulled down and the new Crawford Market erected – from whose stalls could be purchased, in the 1880s, ‘oranges from Nagpore, apples from America, grapes from Cabul, dates from the Persian Gulf’.63 ‘A vigorous administration, comprising a Health Department, is doing much good,’ noted the Sanitary Commission of 1865. ‘Drainage works are begun and increase to the water supply is contemplated; gas is used in lighting the streets.’64 The Bombay Builder concurred, suggesting in 1867 that ‘more has been done for the advancement of important works during the present than during any previous administration’.65 Indeed, Crawford’s zeal in office brought to mind Joseph Chamberlain’s great claim for his time in Birmingham: ‘The Town will be parked, paved, assized, marketed, Gas-and-Watered and improved – all as the result of three years’ active work.’66