Broadly summarizing, so far we have covered the ‘history of communication’ from three perspectives: one, the nature and policies of the early colonial state towards communication between the 1760s and 1820s; two, the formation of a knowledge pool about roads and routes; and, three, the regulative measures adopted towards certain mobile groups. In evaluating the policies adopted towards communication we looked closely at the nature of trade, which influenced if not completely determined the course of action. We noticed the formation of one trunk line, the NMR, and also a growing interest in improving district-level communication networks. We argued (see Chapter 2) that a growing conviction in the idea of ‘roadless India’ became strong from the 1820s. This chapter carries the story forward into the next four decades until the railways come into the picture. An ardent belief in lack/absence/inadequacy of communication and the need for improvements propelled the colonial state to invest in public works during the period under review. This was the time when the GTRs were made and ferry communication was improved. Unfortunately, the colonial emphasis on railway building from the 1840s has also affected the historiography of transport in India. This is arguably because of the litany of discourse that divided Indian history into pre-steam and poststeam; needless to say, the latter represented recent ‘modern’ technology, promising a change in society and economy. In accounts following such divisions, the binary of old and new is reiterated.

This book in no way claims to represent the ‘right’ way of writing the history of communication. There could, and possibly do, exist many other ways in which this theme can be approached. I will use this conclusion to broadly reflect on the general outcome of this research but also on the possibilities of further ‘opening up’ the theme of communication in diverse directions.

One of the possible ways in which this account could be rewritten is by enlarging the field and scope of enquiry by including post and telegraph, which was introduced in roughly the same period as more focused debates on good roads, and later the railways, began to emerge, that is, in the 1830s. Roads, railways, and post and telegraph constituted the triumvirate of the new technological basis of ‘communication’ in colonial India. That the dak system had existed long before is undisputable, but the technological spread of services of postal and telegraphic communication that catered to a wider social base constitutes a fascinating area of research. In what ways this new technology fostered new types of mobilities and sociabilities by enabling migrant workers to remit money back home is one example in which the social and economic impulses of the nineteenth century can be understood through the intervention of technology. More conventionally, the role of the dissemination of telegraphic command in the consolidation of colonial rule would prove useful in understanding the techniques of governmentality that the colonial state promoted from the mid-nineteenth century.

This work primarily deals with the colonial period, that is, from the 1760s onwards, but in order to understand the nature of transition within a much established framework of ‘continuity and change’, it is important to delineate the trajectories of colonial practices and discourses as they emerged and interacted with the pre-colonial set-up. The changes taking place during the colonial period were both enabled and structured through these interactions. For instance, the colonial perception towards native criminality was not just a product of ‘colonial construction’ based on caste (and allegedly other enumerative features of colonial rule) but also a phenomenon related to the political decentralization in the early eighteenth century, to the rise of mercenary groups in state-formation and to the changed political conditions in the neighbouring region of Nepal. In the same vein, there existed a dialogue between the early colonial route surveys and map production on the one hand, and the late Mughal and Maratha practices on the other, which makes it clear that mapping, if seen in its essence as a ‘tool of empire’, was not innately ‘colonial’ in origin. Nonetheless, there definitely were moments in which colonial practices transcended, reconfigured and even altered the existing practices. Recognizing these moments requires engagement with pre-colonial times. In order to establish the coloniality of colonial spatial interventions, we need to examine some of the geographical and spatial politics and representations that existed before colonialism.

While the image of the indolent native who could be induced to move only by necessity thrived as typical throughout the early phase of colonial rule, in fact there existed a diverse range of mobile people and groups of which the Company-state was well aware. Men-on-the-road were a source of information for diverse areas of knowledge that many Company officials made use of, but such people's very mobility also made the Companystate anxious. They signified a ‘decentred core’ of power that, because of their travelling propensity, appeared threatening to the Company-state, both in regard to its exercise of authority and its control of revenue. As in other fields, this anxiety led the EIC to come up with a set of regulations to check and contain this diverse pattern of circulation. One natural outcome of this growing urge to regulate mobility was the formulation of stricter notions of crime and criminality. Peripatetic groups such as the banjaras, sanyasis and fakirs were, by the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, cast in the mould of criminal groups. This recasting, however, was not, as many current historiographical conventions would explain, an artefact of a paranoid colonial mindset, but was linked to the histories of mobility and disruption of prevailing patterns of trade and transport, and the livelihoods supported by them, consequent to colonial settlement and, in this region (eastern India), also to some extraneous factors such as the rise of the Gurkha kingdom in Nepal.

In December 1853, a British officer (whose name we do not know) started his journey from Calcutta towards the Parasnath Hill. He set off in a palanquin, which did not prove very useful because of the poor state of the road. He crossed the ferry at the Hooghly river and proceeded towards the coalfields of Burdwan. All the while he reported on the conditions of roads and bridges, the prospects of railways, topographical details, the beautiful scenery, the Hindu temples and the nature of villages and people. On 26 December he started for the hill from the village of Madhupur where he had hired three native guides (coolies), Kethu aged 18 (‘very active and loquacious’), Nilu aged 28 (‘very careful and active’) and Narain aged 25 (‘modest and not conspicuous’). While climbing, these guides started talking about their ascent the previous year, made with four sahibs who lived on the hill for ten days. The sahibs ate fowls and eggs and drank wine. This memory evoked loud laughter among the three guides. Our anonymous traveller suspected that some of those fowls and wine found their way to the guides and that in describing this previous journey they were actually making an indirect appeal to his liberality. For a moment, he paused to think about the caste taboos (which would theoretically regulate dietary practices) but then reasoned: ‘What have poor coolies to do with caste?’