This chapter looks at two issues: one, the groups and people that made and managed the transport infrastructure; two, the commodities that travelled along these lines. While the first set of concerns tells us how roads were made and how the river transport infrastructure operated, the focus on the second informs us how these roads and rivers were used. Obviously, there were diverse usages of these communication lines, some of which we have seen earlier in relation to peripatetic trading groups; the thrust of the argument in this chapter is to look at the nature of networks – commodity spread, mercantile ties, sites of exchange such as melas and so on – to understand the relationship between means of communication and patterns of exchange. By doing so, this chapter aims to stimulate thinking about emerging spatial configurations, especially along trade networks, in terms of a more diverse and vibrant field of activity of which colonial necessities, which for a want of a better descriptive term can be called the ‘macro-networks’ of communication, were a part. This vivid field of activity has been characterized here as ‘nested networks’. The nexus of capital investment, prioritization of certain routes (as seen in Chapter 4) and interest in long-distance imperial commodities' trade obviously highlighted the primacy of macro-networks but they were both adapting to and changing the existing nature of trading networks.

Perusing Indian colonial records from the 1820s onwards one cannot but note the frequency of the phrase ‘opening up the interiors’. This holds true not only for state records, but also for many other books, tracts and pamphlets written and published around this time. If, in the preceding decades, the spread of Christianity had fuelled the idea of a civilizing mission, from the 1820s it was charged with the power of steam. The oft-repeated phrase ‘opening up the interiors’ and its means – new improved technology of communication, steamships and railways, together with good roads – became an emblem of this civilizational thrust. The general argument ran like this: since India had never enjoyed good means of communication, the country needed to be opened up; the increase in commerce, which would follow the opening up, would at the same time also civilize the indolent natives of the country. From the viewpoint of the state, such an opening up would enable it to control the country better, to speed up the dispersal of troops and information. Hence, communication in general and the opening up in particular was writ large on the colonial agenda of this period.

‘Opening up the interiors’ is a catchphrase that begs a very basic question: what was meant by ‘interior’? Was it a pocket of land or a pattern of untapped commerce through an unknown/uncontrolled area, or a corner of habitation where the jungli and the uncivilized resided?

Neither the accumulation of route knowledge nor the compilation of such was ‘colonial’ in origin. Imperial marches and journeys under Mughal rule often employed a class of people who measured the roads. Further, such calculations were followed by building coss minarets at regular intervals. This practice was followed not only when monarchs and kings travelled at a leisurely pace but also, as is evident from the hasty march of Shah Azam, in times of speedy journeys over a wide geographical distance. The prince, who took nineteen days travelling from Patna to Delhi, was constantly accompanied by twelve troopers, four footmen, one chobdar (mace carrier), one jarib-kash (road measurer) and two ghariwalas (time keepers). A famous text of the Mughal period is The Chahar Gulshan, written in 1759–60 by Rai Chaturman Saksena. It was a route table, together with, as Irfan Habib has suggested, ‘cartographic’ elements. Similarly, a map showing the northwest frontier regions together with Kashmir and the north of India, which, R. H. Phillimore suggests, dates between 1650 and 1730, ‘records the stages and distances between these towns [shown on the map], the crossings of the great rivers and the main passes through the border hills’. Registers of marches depicting actual measured distances (of course often without inflections and latitude) were kept, which James Rennell generously admitted as being superior to the vague report or judgement. Certain safarnamas (travel accounts) also gave information on routes and stages, and diaries gave information on itineraries.

Aware of the ‘limited gaze’ and institutional dependence on existing pre-colonial structures, the English East India Company-state's bureaucracy was clear right from the beginning about attaining maximum self-reliance in its administrative functioning. One way of trying to achieve this was to promote administrative mobility, which was based on the idea of seeing things in person. Among the variety of tours, some of which we have discussed in the previous chapter and some we will see in the next, were official tours, which are the main focus of this chapter. They were performed at different bureaucratic levels according to the cultural-bureaucratic functions of the Raj. They had graded meanings; the ones undertaken by higher officials, for instance, were more like public displays, to both constitute and represent authority. They also aimed at ‘inspecting’ things. In contrast, the local-level tours of district collectors on horses, elephants apart from representing authority, were of the nature of ground exercises in maintaining ‘law and order’, reviewing the work of the judiciary and police thannahs (police outposts), holding on-the-spot courts to settle judicial and revenue cases, collecting information about local trade networks, weather, communication and so on. They were acts of ‘knowing the countryside’ by ‘going into the interiors’.

The purposes of such tours were utilitarian (to generate knowledge) and also, complementarily, to strike a personal chord with the ‘natives’. One strand in the argument about the power of local-level officials is that ‘the British district officer was a prisoner if not a puppet of the local social forces’.

In our final chapter we set out to examine the role of railways in the larger matrix of communication policy and the effects they cast, in particular, on trading and commercial patterns. Clearly, the unity of empire and the steady flow of external trade were twin functions closely associated with the railways. Not surprisingly then, some scholars have therefore described the Indian railways as a crucial project of colonial rule. Politically, the Punjab wars in the 1840s reinforced the need for speedy means of communication. Simultaneously, the needs of industrializing Britain were pressing hard to ‘open up the interiors’, both for the supply of raw materials from the colony and for the sale of British-manufactured finished goods. For these reasons, the railways became the site of a fierce contestation between groups of different ideological pursuits. For a majority of colonial officers and policymakers the railways remained a tool of development, but for many others, especially Indian nationalist critics, they symbolized an instrument of economic exploitation and the draining of wealth. This divide resonates in several works on the economic history of nineteenth-century India.

The core of this chapter aims at addressing a few of the issues outlined above. It is difficult to discard our common-sense understanding that railways as the ‘wheels of change’ formed an inseparable part of the colonial project of rule, but any discussion of the relationship between railways and late nineteenth-century India within the framework of communication and circulation does need to address certain basic issues.