The global and the local: port cities in history

A recent publication, Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History, has called for a vigorous exploration of the connections between urbanization and globalization by focusing on their intertwined histories.Footnote ² Extending this approach to colonial port cities that were at the forefront of globalization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is hard to dispute the global reach of modernizing urban impulses in the form of civic planning, ideas of work and leisure and enabling of commerce and administration. However, the responses to these initiatives could not be universal, determined as they were by place, people, location and history. The dialogic nature of this relationship between the global and the local is fundamental to understanding modern global cities as being shaped by both, resulting in unique histories that are neither local nor global. Methodologically, close empirical study opens up to scrutiny grand narratives and exposes irregularities or ‘lumps’ in any preconceived framework, muddling up scales and temporalities.Footnote ³

Imperial port cities offer perfect case studies for examination as experimental sites for the earliest global networks of trade, commerce and modernization.Footnote ⁴ Economic efficiency, environmental adaptability and political control were some of the key features of their success, as was urbanization and modernization. How did global modernity sit upon premodern social formations, conurbations, economies and cultural traditions? Were these processes unequal and shaped by local commercial and political exigencies rather than homogeneously applied across the globe? Did they have the same impact on foreign shores as they did in their places of origin and were they embraced, indeed welcomed, by all?

The article asks some of these questions of Calcutta in the nineteenth century. As the premier port city in colonial India, it was subjected to a rapidly modernizing regime under the aegis of first the Calcutta Municipality and then the Calcutta Corporation. As will be shown, the deeply uneasy relationship between the modernizing, technocratic, authoritative and often racialized vision of colonial municipal governance and the pre-‘modern’ modes of living and being in the city opened up critical and deeply animated discursive spaces across all levels of the resident local society.

Earlier literature on the port city, following King’s classic study, has highlighted these as spaces of disciplining, control and segregation.Footnote ⁵ There are assumptions made in this scholarship about the inexorable pull of technology and modernization, given the critical primacy of these port cities in international trading networks, although differentially across the world.Footnote ⁶ Recent research has opened up newer perspectives. Su Lin Lewis’ study thus focuses on the port city’s global connections to argue that these spaces flourished as cosmopolitan crucibles of multi-ethnic, multilingual, cross-cultural solidarities and hybrid modernities.Footnote ⁷ Other scholars like Alice Mah have traced the contradictory ways in which global legacies of capitalism and empire gave rise to radical resistance at the sites of former port cities.Footnote ⁸ For South Asia, these conflicts have been highlighted in some significant studies on civil and urban society.Footnote ⁹ Post-colonial port cities in Asia, Latin America and Africa continue to be shaped by the legacy of imperialism and expansive capitalism, even while emerging as products of their own local and national contexts.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus, in the ‘making up’ of the colonial port city of Durban, Hofmeyr illustrates the tension between the built-up space on the waterfront and the informal spaces created by the mainly Zulu-speaking dockworkers – both above and below the waterline – that continue to be consolidated by beliefs and practices in post-colonial times.Footnote ¹¹

Over the past decade literature on colonial Indian port cities has continued to highlight the tightening grip of technologies of governance in the urban sphere, be it in sanitation, housing or general policing.Footnote ¹² The focus of these studies has usually been the built-up spaces of cities and technologies of control. But in the history of South Asian colonial urbanism, the city’s emergence as a space of social control was simultaneous with its emergence as a space of protest.Footnote ¹³ The recent body of scholarship on urban citizenship has steadily expanded as scholars have examined citizenship in relation to diverse urban processes in the context of globalization and its discontents.Footnote ¹⁴

The implications for colonial port cities, where the impact of globalization was most keenly felt, are significant. Studies have outlined a discourse of rights and claims to the port city – and the city more generally – that residents have vigorously articulated over time and across social strata.Footnote ¹⁵ Sandip Hazareesingh’s work examines confrontations over urban policies that shaped Bombay from World War I through to decolonization, reading critiques of the urban colonial regime as integral to the fight for the nation-state.Footnote ¹⁶ Sheetal Chhabria has shown how Bombay’s development as a port city was continuously shaped by the exclusion and ghettoization of those who impinged on its capitalist aspirations – migrants, labourers, famine victims and the poor – thus underlining inequalities in its foundational premises.Footnote ¹⁷ In this article I study some of the processes through which rights and claims in Calcutta were staked by resident groups when they clashed with the colonial municipal government, affecting urban development.

Originally starting out as a small trading outpost made up of a few villages in the late seventeenth century, Calcutta grew in size and impact after the East India Company captured power in the region in 1757. As the capital of British India and the nerve centre of its trade, commerce and administration, the port city’s importance in the nineteenth century cannot be overstated.Footnote ¹⁸ The central part of the city, with its mercantile offices, government buildings and trading centres, formed its main commercial and bureaucratic hub. Calcutta stretched longitudinally along a distributary of the river Ganges flowing into the sea. This was the Hooghly which bounded the city on the west and formed the busy commercial river front with its warehouses, jetties and ships. In all of this development, however, as Debjani Bhattacharya has shown, there was an intimate link between land and water, as real estate in the port city developed out of the tidal marshes. By the 1860s, extensive parts of the delta had been drained to create docks, urban parks and riverfront thoroughfares.Footnote ¹⁹

Comparing maps of the city between 1850 and 1901 devised for census and survey purposes, it is possible to see how Calcutta grew at a breathtaking speed within a span of just 50 years, with the total acreage increasing from about 5,000 to 13,000 during the period.Footnote ²⁰ Population figures show a commensurate increase, from over 200,000 in 1837 to nearly 900,000 in 1911.Footnote ²¹ The bulk of the Indian population in the nineteenth century was crammed into the northern part – labelled Native Town in colonial records – while mostly Europeans lived in spacious bungalows in Chowringhee and Alipore further south.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed rapid technologization and progress in Calcutta’s civic infrastructure, with the building of the Howrah Bridge across the river Hooghly in 1874, and from the 1860s onwards the introduction of underground drainage, motorized vehicles and tramways as well as the building of the Sealdah rail station to the north-east of the city. The huge growth of jute mills along the banks of the river also necessitated the building in the 1890s of additional wet docks at Kidderpore, slightly downstream from the original waterfront.

However, as this article will demonstrate, Calcutta in the nineteenth century comes across as a city riven with strikes, violations of municipal regulations and civic unrest as residents found it difficult to come to terms with the rapid urbanization and regimentation of Calcutta’s spaces and the ways of life of its residents. While recent works like those of Partho Datta trace the role of the Calcutta Corporation and the Calcutta Improvement Trust in fundamentally changing the cityscape and real estate business in the city, such processes went far from unchallenged both within the municipal administration and outside it.Footnote ²²

Initiated by the Riponian reforms of 1882 and continued by the Government of India acts, Indians could populate municipal bodies in the Presidency towns of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, although on considerably restricted terms. The resulting tension between local municipal and imperial interests have been studied for Bombay.Footnote ²³ In Calcutta, the extension of the local administration to include Indian representation meant that between 1876 and 1899 two-thirds of the members of the Calcutta Corporation were elected by ratepayers, and mostly comprised Hindu Bengalis.Footnote ²⁴ But the overriding powers of the executive constituted by the non-elected element, especially the chairman and the health officer, limited the power of the Indian commissioners. As shown by Mark Harrison, the conflicts during this period were played out for the most part within the Corporation itself between the Hindu Bengali and European members.Footnote ²⁵ Outside the municipal administration, resistance to the urbanization programmes, technologies and legislation can be traced in the ways in which Calcutta’s residents responded to the changes that affected their ways of living and being in the city.

Water, sanitation and clash of traditions

Calcutta was a city dominated by water in terms of its trade and port, fisheries and transport and, following colonial settlement, the demands of an increasing population on the waterfront. Even as the city literally grew on water – with colonial law and engineering, real estate and urban development working together to claim more and more of the watery marshes created by the river Ganges – safe fresh water was in short supply.Footnote ²⁶ Nor was its introduction to the city’s residents very straightforward.

Initially the city was supplied by a 20 horsepower engine set up at Chandpal Ghat, pumping water from the river Hooghly into two reservoirs which was then carried by aqueducts to certain parts of the town and pumped into public tanks.Footnote ²⁷ But this was not powerful enough, until eventually in 1860, a 25 horsepower engine with two boilers was installed at Nimtollah Ghat to pump river water through underground pipes into the northern parts of the city or Native Town where the bulk of the Indian population lived.Footnote ²⁸ The Calcutta Waterworks’ first pipe was laid in 1867, and from 1870 onwards, hydrants supplied filtered water along the main public roads in the city.Footnote ²⁹ The suburbs would only be supplied much later on as the water pressure remained inadequate. Nor was the filtered water always fit for drinking: snakes, worms and eels were reported in filtered water taps.Footnote ³⁰

For Calcutta’s residents the ritually pure Ganges water, however, remained in high demand even after the introduction of tap water. Prosperous households who could afford to hire water carriers would get water from the river Ganges and store it in earthen pots as drinking water.Footnote ³¹ In some cases, water carriers are reported to have muddied aqueduct water to dupe their employer into believing that it was Ganges water.Footnote ³² Widespread use of the municipal water supply took root only after prominent leaders of Bengali society authorized it. The Dharma Sabha thus declared the supply of filtered water fit for all uses except religious ceremonies.Footnote ³³ Dwarkanath Vidyabhushan, editor of Somprakash, also sanctioned its use in accordance with Hindu dharma and ritual in his newspaper.Footnote ³⁴

The supply of water in the city continued to be a major problem well into the twentieth century as we shall see below. The poor supply affected the availability of fresh flowing water for cleaning and drainage purposes. Under these circumstances people had to resort to the use of private and public water reservoirs and wells. Calcutta in the colonial archive earned a reputation for its filth and disease-ridden habitat, and although the Municipality passed a series of stringent sanitary measures, residents felt that customary traditions and practices were under threat, as were older modes of organization of labour and economy.Footnote ³⁵ They also felt repeatedly let down by the city administration.

Calcutta’s residents blamed piecemeal municipal regulations and inadequate services for their woes. Thus while the health officer O’Brien railed about a population ‘extremely filthy in their habits’, Calcuttans complained that the Municipality did not make provision for regular collections of household rubbish due to a lack of dirt carts and lorries.Footnote ³⁶ Householders therefore had no choice but to throw rubbish just outside their gates and on the road.

Regulations were arbitrary, top-down and not mindful of local concerns and practicalities. The elected Bengali representatives of the local population and the executive – constituted of the chairman and the health officer – remained locked in a battle for most of the duration of the Corporation.

From 1876 onwards, a serious point of contention arose with the Corporation’s adoption of a policy that ‘filthy’ water tanks be filled up with sweepings from streets.Footnote ³⁸ The health officer, Dr Payne, was of the belief that filling in the numerous public water reservoirs in the city (referred to as tanks in the municipal literature) was essential to bring down the incidence of cholera. In 1879 there were 534 tanks in the city, usually located in the middle of dense residential clusters, that were used for a range of household activities, from bathing to the washing of utensils.Footnote ³⁹ Under Payne, filling the tanks with road sweepings and refuse was pursued with great energy. But in a lot of cases the tanks were imperfectly drained and not covered with soil – as recommended – as there was a dearth of soil in the city and carting it in from elsewhere was expensive.Footnote ⁴⁰

Bathing platforms supplied with unfiltered water from pipes were meant to replace the tanks, but these were not being built at the rate at which the tanks were being dewatered. Thus while 36 tanks were filled up in 1884–85, only two bathing platforms had been built to replace them.Footnote ⁴¹ In 1876–78 there was a high number of complaints in the Taltollah area where tanks were being rapidly filled up but without any commensurate provision for clean water for bathing and other activities.Footnote ⁴² One reason for this was low pressure in the supply of hydrant water so that ‘the supply … [was] exhausted or turned off before half the people … [were] supplied’.Footnote ⁴³

Calcutta’s residents complained of the noxious vapours and filth resulting from rotting matter in tanks without top soil. Kshitindranath Tagore, resident in the northern part of the city, writing in 1930, recalls how the filling up of ponds and tanks in his childhood was a major cause of annoyance. Not only the stench, but the buzzing flies made life so miserable that the family had to leave their residence every year in mid-April and return only after the rainy season, when it was drier and the worst was over.Footnote ⁴⁴ In some cases charges against commissioners for tank-filling were upheld in courts of law. In 1881, in one such case where residents complained, the Municipality was ordered to remove the road sweepings and refuse, and cover up the tank with earth.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Indian commissioners too clashed directly with Payne over the subject of tank-filling. In 1877, the lieutenant governor admonished Dr Payne for the ‘hard language’ used in his report for ‘to make sanitation efficient in Calcutta, the people of the city must be led and not driven into co-operation with the Sanitary Department’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The resulting inaction caused by disagreements between the Indian commissioners and the health officer led to a period of inaction by the sanitary department. It is interesting to note that Bombay’s health officer recommended the retention rather than the removal of tanks insofar as they offered ‘breathing spaces or openings to localities’ and ‘impeded building concentration’.Footnote ⁴⁷

There was no direct corelation between the cholera figures and the presence of tanks in the area. Thus between 1875 and 1885, the areas with the highest death rates from cholera were in areas with very few or no tanks.Footnote ⁴⁸ In fact, cases of cholera and other diseases were reported on the margins of imperfectly filled tanks.Footnote ⁴⁹ Time and again the Municipality’s administrative reports admit that it was the inadequacy of clean water that led to the high incidence of cholera as residents were forced to resort to other untreated water sources such as unfilled tanks, despite the presence of police guards.Footnote ⁵⁰ As contemporary residents noted, the incidence of cholera subsided only after the introduction of clean tap water.Footnote ⁵¹

Sewerage issues, the supply of clean filtered water and increasing rates of taxation for the maintenance of municipal services had become thorny issues. But nowhere perhaps was the war so intensely fought as in the regulation of privies, house drains and sewers of built or pucka buildings, with private latrines in particular coming under the strictest surveillance.

While a dense network of sewers was operational in the southern part of the city from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, sewage in the Northern Division had to be collected and disposed of via sewers in the municipal depots.Footnote ⁵² In the traditional Indian system, excrement collected in receptacles placed some way below privies were emptied intermittently by mehters or scavengers. But under the municipal administration, tolah mehters or contracted scavengers serving private premises collected rubbish and night-soil from privies more regularly.Footnote ⁵³ Every householder had to pay 5–12 annas for the night-soil removal service, something they disliked doing.Footnote ⁵⁴

Drainage works commenced in the northern part of the city in 1869, and by 1874 main sewers ran from Canning Street and Mirzapore Street south to the extreme north end of Bagh Bazar.Footnote ⁵⁵ An integral part of the new drainage regime was the accompanying law by which householders and owners of private premises had to have their privies connected to public sewers at their own cost, instead of resorting to drains. Despite the law requiring householders to connect and notice being routinely served to properties, the figures for connected premises were dismal. Up until 1885, only about 8 per cent of the number of total private privies in the city had been connected, prompting the administration to comment how ‘drainage stops at the boundaries of private property’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Another factor was the failure of technology. One of the main reasons why householders refused to connect to sewers was technical.Footnote ⁵⁷ The advance in drainage works could not be matched by a critical supply of water needed to flush the sewers to keep them healthy. The water supply and the velocity of motion required for the carriage of impurities was insufficient to flush the privies, making the connections inconvenient and risky.Footnote ⁵⁸ Householders who were connected and paying the water rate were thus paying for services that were practically non-existent. Those without connections found themselves paying, over and above the water-rate, extra fees for the collection of night-soil from their homes.Footnote ⁵⁹

The problem was compounded by the fact that mehters were in very short supply, with the ratio of mehters to privies standing at 1:30 in 1878.Footnote ⁶⁰ In both cases, private privies opening on to drains outside the houses seemed the only practical option, despite this practice coming under heavy attack from the municipal administration. The Conservancy Act of 1863 drew up a significant list of conservancy offences punishable by law, including the throwing of night-soil into public drains, keeping private privies filthy and allowing sewage to flow into public streets. Between 1866 and 1872, prosecutions rose almost threefold, from 4,455 to 14,690.Footnote ⁶¹

Bengalis heavily resented the intrusion of the municipal administration into their homes. The general attitude of Bengalis to domestic inspection and sanitary measures was summed up by an administrative report in 1873 thus:

Bengali newspapers were critical when commenting on the draconian and even discriminatory sanitary regimes in the city.Footnote ⁶³ Popular literature too is reminiscent of the strong everyday police presence in overseeing the city’s sanitary measures.Footnote ⁶⁴ Popular pamphlets blamed the Municipal Commission and judiciary for disproportionate fines over small offences, overseeing the relentless pursuit of transgressors on every road and alleyway and general disruption.Footnote ⁶⁵

Bengalis could not really fathom the fuss with the privies. Even earlier, the literary wit Kaliprasanna Sinha (aka Hutom) noted, in his characteristic razor-sharp style, how the government had begun to meddle with both public and private hygiene in the city, while not doing enough in other areas of maintenance.

Municipal sanitary regulations in colonial Calcutta were neither easy to implement, nor practical. Some engineering measures remained a challenge – such as the supply of water – while others were met with severe resistance from the city’s residents as they violated customary practices and threatened traditional occupations, while residents were charged extortionate rates for their services. But this was as much about the failure of technology as it was about the racialization of bodily practices and sensibilities. Ultimately, sanitary measures were misdirected for lack of resources as well.

Regulation, practicality and the everyday port city

In the intensive reconstruction of cities that ensued in the early twentieth century, city improvement trusts (CITs) in India were given sweeping powers. However, the approaches of the CITs varied across locations. While in Bombay the priority was demolition and rehousing following plague in the city, in Calcutta the focus was on circulation and freeing up of roads. Broad avenues and radiating streets enabling the freer circulation of goods and services would not only open up Calcutta for mercantile traffic to and from the riverine harbours but also improve sanitation. The new streets would break up crowded slum areas and narrow insanitary lanes. The plan had the approval of local elites and landlords who would benefit from the demolition of slums, as Partho Datta has argued.Footnote ⁶⁷

Traffic was an important constituent of the street scene, and central to the discursive articulations of state power, global commerce and modernity, on the one hand, and challenges to it, on the other. The haste with which mechanized vehicles (trams: 1873; electric trams: 1902; motor cars: 1896; motorized buses: 1922) were introduced and the relentless securing of the urban landscape – both physical and human – for their smooth running was detrimental and confusing to pre-industrial modes of passage, occupations, lifestyles and sensibilities. But older forms of transport continued for a long time, hindering the speed of circulation in the city and leading to endless traffic jams. The continued presence of the cheaper bullock carts (mostly used for trade purposes) and horse drawn hackneys, as well as ‘careless’ pedestrians frustrated the colonial administration and led to strict laws and punitive measures to tackle the problems.

The obstructing of commercial vehicular traffic in the busy port city was a worry for planners and developers and in 1914, E.P. Richards, chief engineer in the newly established Calcutta Improvement Trust (1911–39), was commissioned to produce a report on the existing conditions of the city of Calcutta and surrounding areas, and suggest plans for improvement. The Trust’s plans became a blueprint for Singapore, Rangoon and Lagos later on.Footnote ⁶⁸ Richards set about the task with evangelical zeal, with two of his chief concerns being restoring streets to a ‘streetless’ city and enabling the speedier circulation of traffic.Footnote ⁶⁹

As Richards saw it, there were three intersecting zones driven by different purposes in the city: 1) the central Exchange area – what he also calls the ‘civic focus’ marked by the banks, mercantile offices, shops and hotels, 2) the shipping zone stemming from the river front and cutting across the centre dominated by the movement of goods, and 3) an overlapping ‘bridge route’ that ran from the Howrah Bridge to the city connecting the banks on both sides of the Hooghly.Footnote ⁷⁰ In addition, the movement of jute from the north-east of the city – the Hatkhola Market area – to the river front in the south-west, cut across it diagonally.

The report paints a picture of naturalized ‘traffic desires’ – raising concomitant expectations of their fulfilment – in the city.Footnote ⁷¹ Taking Budapest as his model (as it presented a similar landscape aspect as Calcutta), Richards suggested the building of a major road girding Calcutta with the river on the left, with radial connectors branching off it and cutting across the city in all directions. Traffic reform was, unsurprisingly, driven by commercial needs. Enabling the right kinds of circulation was important. For the heavily congested Canning Street, serving as trade goods connector between the Chitpore Road and the Strand Road along the river front, the need for relief was ‘very urgent’, while Dharamtolla Street, one of the two roads connecting north Calcutta to leisure spaces like the Maidan, with its mostly residential traffic, did ‘comparatively little work’ and was therefore in less urgent need of reform.Footnote ⁷²

In the early twentieth century Calcutta was a city dominated by bullock carts. While 1,790 motorcars and taxis had been licensed by 1912, they formed a miniscule proportion of other traffic such as horse drawn cabs and carriages, bullock carts and people on foot. Vehicular traffic, though, was rising at the rate of 32 per cent per decade.Footnote ⁷³ A large proportion of this traffic comprised bullock carts, with about 5,000 of these ‘pouring into Calcutta’ across the Howrah Bridge each day, either carrying goods destined for shipping or commodities for daily consumption in the city – primarily jute, but also other goods ranging from grain and oil to groceries, and timber and wrought iron to coir.Footnote ⁷⁴ At the start of his chapter on traffic, Richards introduces the ubiquitous bullock cart:

The heterogeneity of traffic in Calcutta was read as a sign of urban dystopia by European observers in the early twentieth century. An account in the 1920s describes streets marked by the busy daytime soundscape of ‘angry screech of motor horns’, ‘grating crash of brakes’ and ‘clanging, groaning tramcars’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Animals, humans and traffic competed on the streets:

The administration was intolerant too. A series of municipal and police acts converted normalized traffic behaviour into cognizable crime. ‘Street offences’ appears as a new category of crime in police records from the 1870s onwards with a very high conviction rate – these included driving without lights after dark; the obstruction of narrow crowded thoroughfares by carters and hawkers – with a high proportion of arrests actually translating into convictions.Footnote ⁷⁸ David Arnold notes how ‘… the amount of effort involved in even attempting to regulate road traffic remains a striking (if barely noticed) feature of late-colonial law enforcement and policing’.Footnote ⁷⁹

But the world of urban planning was often far removed from the reality of life on the streets. To begin with, cheap bullock carts would not be replaced until much later when motor cars began to prove more remunerative.Footnote ⁸⁰ Secondly, Calcutta’s streets were narrow to the point that they could only cope with a minimum load of traffic and certain speeds, without risking accidents. It rendered motorized vehicles impractical. Residents of Calcutta therefore continued to articulate their practical ways of being and living in the city, even as the municipal regulations tightened around them.

The new regulatory traffic regime, in its privileging of motor traffic over other road-users – from bullock carts to pedestrians – signalled the presence of bodies and traffic in the streets that were irresponsible, undisciplined and yet to be ‘modern’. Richards noted the high volume of foot traffic in the city owing to the limited tramways and traffic congestion.Footnote ⁸¹ But the narrowness of footpaths and the concentration of slow-moving traffic meant that foot passengers were forced onto the narrow roadways. Contemporaries recall how pedestrians were forced to walk on the roads because of insufficiently wide or muddy pavements, and were arrested by police as a result.Footnote ⁸² Although the narrow streets and bad road conditions played their role, officials were quick to blame the locals, both drivers and pedestrians:

In all of this the streets emerge as veritable battlegrounds, with the administration and residents alike fighting for control. Yeoh and Mrazek have noted this too in other colonial contexts.Footnote ⁸⁴ Brenda Yeoh has shown for colonial Singapore how the city’s streets wavered between functioning as smooth avenues for trade and commerce and becoming sites of protest, celebration and custom.

By presenting the global urban order as disciplined, rational, hygienic and technologically advanced, colonial port cities were ultimately perpetuating their own commercial interests and political power. And yet, for most inhabitants the mechanized and scientific city was a relatively new experience, one that had to be tested and tried out, resisted and ignored, before being accepted. The irrelevance of municipal notices and the modern civic regime to many inhabitants is also noted by Kaviraj, for ‘… those who promulgated the notice had one conception of what public space meant, and those who … [ignored] it had another. In their appropriate contexts, both concepts made sense.’Footnote ⁸⁵

Disruption, subterfuge and the disorderly city

Recent literature on colonial Indian cities has highlighted the tightening grip of technologies of governance in the urban sphere, be it in sanitation, housing or general policing. In Calcutta, in contrast to Bombay and Delhi, the municipal authorities struggled to be the ‘ultimate masters’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Various occupational and caste groups brought the city to a complete standstill over the long stretch of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, demanding lesser regulation and intervention in their trades which affected basic services such as transport and sanitation. In a port city that was heavily dependent on manual labour, this posed a significant problem. In addition, violent pockets of disruption manifest in street riots by sailors and traders to settle personal, ethnic and commercial disputes pointed to the presence of parallel punitive regimes in the city. Finally, the proliferation of crime in the port city, endemic within the systems of mercantile operations themselves, pointed to the limits of order and efficiency.

The image of a municipal administration being repeatedly brought to its knees by its manual workers is evident in the frustration that is expressed in its annual reports. Workers in the unorganized sector and the urban poor were well organized and could strike effectively at the shortest notice. They lived together in occupational, ethnic and caste clusters in the city in tightly knit communities.Footnote ⁸⁷ The presence of clan leaders or sardars among the Oriyas – perhaps the single largest workforce in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, supplying cooks, water-bearers, gardeners, etc. – who set down trade rules, settled disputes and intervened on the behalf of the community in negotiations with the municipal government, gave them a certain focus and purpose. They could raise subscriptions, arrange for written petitions and come together in times of trouble. But others too seem to have been strongly knit together in occupational groups and thus able to display similar capabilities to organize large-scale protest.Footnote ⁸⁸

The passing of the Hackney Carriage Act, applying chiefly to horse-driven carriages, but also extending to palkis or palanquins (wooden cubicle taxis carried at the end of long poles and carried by bearers) – both the chief means of transport in nineteenth-century Calcutta – brought together two important categories of urban workers in a resolute strike in 1864. Paying significant amounts in tax, both groups were already under considerable pressure.Footnote ⁸⁹ The Act required compulsory registration and fixing of appropriate licence plates to the carriages and cubicles, and set limits to their speed and the number of passengers on board. In each case, the strikes were broken but not before they had posed considerable challenges to the city’s administration.

One of the most resolute groups the administration faced were mehters or scavengers of the Conservancy Department. Night-soil in Calcutta was collected from houses and public latrines and kept in private depots outside houses, to be eventually retrieved and dumped in the river.Footnote ⁹⁰ A crucial workforce that helped keep the city clean, they refused to be regulated by municipal regulations and repeatedly went on strikes.Footnote ⁹¹ The dependence on sweepers and scavengers rather than technology is both baffling and explicable. Prashad offers an explanation by pointing out the gap between technological aspirations and financial constraints in colonial Delhi.Footnote ⁹²

In 1867 a strike followed the establishment of municipal depots which recruited mehters directly instead of via the Tolah depots run by clan leaders that had thus far supplied mehters as hire labour to householders. The new regime was stricter. Registers were to be maintained at each depot, so that mehters could not avoid detection if they failed to bring in their filled tubs for a single day. Tolah mehters at first refused and went on strike. With the administration remaining firm, however, the authorities declared with some relief that ‘a most unmanageable set of men’ had been brought under their firm control.Footnote ⁹³ But ten years later the mehters went on strike again when the municipality tried to introduce the halalcore system that had been pioneered so successfully in Bombay a few years earlier. It required all mehters in the city to be licensed. The tolah mehters were enraged and night-soil was not collected for several weeks. When the local authority tried to recruit fresh mehters from distant areas, they were met with threats and the new and potential recruits were intimidated.Footnote ⁹⁴

Such tactics worked for other groups too. Bheesties were thus not just content with striking when fined by the Municipality for not watering the streets properly, but also prevented other bheesties from being recruited.Footnote ⁹⁵ Together, such workers throw up a narrative of remarkable community organization, initiative and action within specific occupations, with sufficient clout being wielded by clan/caste leaders.

In fact, there is much evidence of parallel structures of command and control in the city, especially within occupational groups. Professional and trade disputes seem to have been frequently settled by intimidation and violence among rival gangs of scavengers, bricklayers and other groups.Footnote ⁹⁶ These did not involve firearms but were serious enough to be reported in police records. A riot between Peshawari traders and Bengalis was reported on Garden Reach road in 1889, while just a year later different factions of Kabuli (Afghanistani) traders were involved in a fight using sticks and stones over trading rights in the Burrabazar area.Footnote ⁹⁷ Violent settlements outside the courtroom in trade-related disputes were also known. A Marwari broker was thus severely beaten up with lathis (homemade batons or sticks) on Harrison Road following an ongoing court case with his trade associates.Footnote ⁹⁸

Trade was an obvious casualty in the circumstances because of other activities too. Despite the regimented nature of security and bureaucracy related to trading and commerce in the city, theft, forgery and informal practices regularly bled the economy of money and resources. Due to their avoidance of banks, cotton merchants and their godowns (warehouses) became targets as considerable amounts of stashed away cash could be found here.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Annual Police Report of 1878 maps out the range of crimes relating to the commercial areas of the city: on the river itself, wholesale thefts of opium, indigo, raw silk and other valuable products by the ‘bleeding of cargo bags’ was commonplace. In the north, all along the Strand bank lining the river, boatmen and carters found a ready market for stolen grain and jute pilfered from ships and cargo boats.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In Burrabazar, the heart of the city and centre of European and Bengali commerce, heavy thefts, forgeries and embezzlements by servants and carriers was rampant.Footnote ¹⁰¹ A range of indigenous terms in vogue lent pedigree to and proved the prevalence of the crimes. Thus carter crimes were churkee marrah; pilfering was chichkay, phoser kormo or chootkee kormo; money loots involving coolies were Doee er Kormo; and wholesale theft of goods from storage was Dhole Marrah. Footnote ¹⁰² False auctions and brokerage, and moneylending crimes were common.Footnote ¹⁰³ Altogether, such petty crimes undercut the commercial and banking infrastructure, draining resources and manipulating its technologies and logistics.

Urban collectivities that came to be forged in the face of an authoritarian municipal government produced a collection of political communities with an agenda of rights-claims that addressed city living as its substance; and the materiality of the city came to be reshaped (even marginalized) through conflicts over the terms and aspirations of urban life. This section also demonstrates the limits of technology in a socially and politically illiberal system where technological advancement was repeatedly weakened by lack of investment in civic infrastructure, while its grip tightened on manual labour and policing everyday practices of living and being in the city.