Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s (Anthem Modern South Asian History,Anthem South Asian Normative Traditions Studies)

Through a regional focus on Bihar between the 1760s and 1880s, ‘Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India’ reveals the shifting and contradictory nature of the colonial state’s policies and discourses on communication. The volume explores the changing relationship between trade, transport and mobility in India, as evident in the trading and mercantile networks operating at various scales of the economy. Of crucial importance to this study are the ways in which knowledge about roads and routes was collected through practices of travel, tours, surveys, and map-making, all of which benefited the state in its attempts to structure a regime that would regulate ‘undesirable’ forms of mobility. Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s'departs from the dominant scholarship in South Asian history that focuses narrowly on railways, and instead argues that any discussion of railway-generated changes needs to see such changes, at least up to the 1880s, as situated amidst existing patterns and networks of circulation within which roads and ferries were crucial. The volume also offers a detailed exploration of early colonial policies on road building and ferry improvement – an area that has hitherto remained unexplored. Just as the new development of steam technology required and necessitated ‘lateral growth'alongside the older technologies, so too were trade linkages marked by the interconnectedness of local and supra-local ties in which the world of peddlers intersected with that of native merchants and capitalist sahibs. This volume contends that the history of colonial communication is not a story of ‘displacement'alone – either of one means by another or of one group by another – but also of realignment. Combining the understanding of production of knowledge about routes with the ways the practice of surveying and mapping led to territorial construction of the national space of India, this book reinterprets the ‘colonial state–space'as constituting a series of layered components, both of ‘inherited spaces and networks'from pre-colonial times and of the processes of objectification that colonial rule initiated. The aim of this volume is to contribute to the ‘history of social spaces', a new field of study in which neither cultural nor economic discourse is overridden by the other. This is achieved via a micro-historical study of local circulatory regimes, together with an exploration of colonial and imperial cultural discourses on communications. FRONT MATTER 2 Half Title 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 CONTENTS 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 8 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 10 GLOSSARY 12 LIST OF TABLES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 16 MAIN MATTER 18 INTRODUCTION 18 Chapter 1 FROM AFFECTIVE FORMS TO OBJECTIFICATION: SPATIAL TRANSITION FROM PRE-COLONIAL TO COLONIAL TIMES 40 Pre-colonial Affective Spatialisms 40 Conclusions 61 Chapter 2 INDIA AND ITS INTERIORS 62 ‘Opening up the interiors’: A Polemical Cry? 63 Interiorizing India/Inferiorizing India 71 Steam, interior, picturesque 88 Conclusions 91 Chapter 3 GOING INTO THE INTERIORS 96 Vice-Regal Processions 98 Going into the Interiors 104 Company Rule, Communication, Bihar 112 Conclusions 126 Chapter 4 KNOWING THE WAYS 130 Route Surveys: Mechanisms and Implications 132 Road Books 140 Drawing Routes on Maps 146 Conclusions 153 Chapter 5 CONTROLLING THE ROUTES 156 Mobile Trading Groups and Regimes of Regulation 162 Gosains, Sanyasis and Fakirs 169 Mobile Sardars 177 Guarding the Routes 183 Conclusions 188 Postscript 190 Chapter 6 CHANGING REGIME OF COMMUNICATION, 1820s–60s 194 Ideas of Public Work 194 Roads and Ferries 203 Steamships 211 Conclusions 219 Chapter 7 OF MEN AND COMMODITIES 220 Men at Work 220 Nested networks 231 Conclusions 237 Chapter 8 THE WHEELS OF CHANGE 242 Politics of Funds, Alignments and Priorities 246 ‘Lateral Communication’ and Trade 256 Conclusions 269 CONCLUSION 272 END MATTER 280 BIBLIOGRAPHY 280 I. Primary Sources 280 A. Unpublished government records 280 B. Maps 280 C. Private papers 281 D. Published government reports and documents 281 E. Contemporary works, pre-1900 283 II. Secondary Sources 288 A. Published books and articles 288 B. Unpublished dissertations 300 INDEX 302 Introduction -- From Affective Forms To Objectification: Spatial Transition From Pre-colonial To Colonial Times -- India And Its Interiors -- Going Into The Interiors -- Knowing The Ways -- Controlling The Routes -- Changing Regime Of Communication, 1820s-60s -- Of Men And Commodities -- The Wheels Of Change -- Conclusion. Nitin Sinha. Revision Of The Author's Thesis (doctoral)--school Of Oriental And African Studies, London, 2007. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. This volume offers a detailed analysis of colonial policies in respect to communication in India? via roads, ferries, steamships and railways? and reveals how communication became an integral part of colonial governance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries