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Class, Cotton, and ‘Woddaries’: A Scandinavian railway contractor in Western India, 1860–69*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2017

ALEXANDER BUBB
ALEXANDER BUBB*
Affiliation:
University of Roehampton, London, SW15 5PU, United Kingdom Email: a.bubb@roehampton.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article makes use of a recently unearthed archive in Sweden, complemented by research in the India Office Records and Maharashtra State Archives, to explore the business networks of the small-scale railway contractor in 1860s Bombay Presidency. The argument centres on the career of one individual, comparing him with several contemporaries. In contrast to their civilian colleagues, freebooting engineers have been a somewhat understudied group. Sometimes lacking formal technical training, and without an official position in colonial India, they were distrusted as profiteering, even corrupt, opportunists. This article will present them instead as a diverse professional class, incorporating Parsis alongside various European nationalities, who became specialists in local milieux, sourcing timber and stone at the lowest prices and retaining the loyalty of itinerant labourers. It will propose that the 1860s cotton boom in western India provided them with a short-lived window of opportunity in which to flourish, and to diversify into a variety of speculative enterprises including cotton trading, land reclamation, and explosives. The accidents and bridge collapses of the 1867 monsoon, and subsequent public outcry, will be identified as a watershed after which that window of opportunity begins to shut. The article's concluding section analyses the contractors’ relationship with their labour force and its intermediary representatives, and strategies for defusing strikes. Ultimately, small independent contractors were agents of modernity not formally affiliated with the imperial project, and forced to bargain with merchants and strikers without official backing. Theirs is a record of complex negotiations at the local level, carried out in the immediate post-Mutiny settlement.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 5 , September 2017 , pp. 1369 - 1393
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to express my gratitude to the librarians of Linnaeus University, and to its Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial studies, for funding and facilitating my research.

References

1 References to documents in the Huseby Archive are indicated with ‘Linn.’, followed by the box number and date or folder title.

2 Mediating Labour: Worldwide Labour Intermediation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, special issue of the International Review of Social History, vol. 57, December 2012.

3 See Linn. FIf:1 (diaries), 21 April 1861 and 11 February 1862 for such requests from a European sailor and ‘a tramp’. A ‘shabby looking Englishman’ also passes through on 11 September 1861. These interlopers may indicate a growth in European vagrancy following the end of Company rule and the reorganization of its armies.

4 Licht, W., Working for the Railroad: the Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1983, p. 24 Google Scholar.

5 The Engineer, vol. 27, no. 685, 12 February 1869, p. 121.

6 ‘Railways in Western India’, Bombay Quarterly Review, vol. 1, no. 2, April 1855, p. 284.

7 According to a note by Captain E. C. S. Williams, Brassey was unwilling to tender for the East Indian Railway before 1858 because he felt government was exercising too much control over proceedings. One of the wealthiest contractors of his day, he later undertook its ‘Chord Line’ from Calcutta to Delhi. See Settar, S. (ed.), Railway Construction in India: Select Documents, 4 vols, vol. II, Northern Book Centre, New Delhi, 1999–2009, p. 204 Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., pp. 487, 304.

9 Davidson, E., The Railways of India: With an Account of Their Rise, Progress, and Construction, E. & F. N. Spon, London, 1868, pp. 159, 206, 244Google Scholar.

10 Kerr, I. J., Engines of Change: The Railroads that Made India, Praeger, London, 2007, p. 44 Google Scholar.

11 ‘English life in Bengal’, Calcutta Review, vol. 33, no. 56, December 1859, p. 325.

12 Renford, R. K., The Non-Official British in India to 1920, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1987, p. 13 Google Scholar.

13 ‘English life in Bengal’, p. 311; ‘Indigo planters and missionaries’, Calcutta Review, vol. 34, no. 67, March 1860, p. 113.

14 Fischer-Tiné, H., Low and Licentious Europeans: Race, Class and ‘White Subalternity’ in Colonial India, Orient Blackswan, Hyderabad, 2009, pp. 49–50 Google Scholar. For press debates, see Mizutani, S., The Meaning of White: Race, Class, and the ‘Domiciled Community’ in British India, 1858–1930, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011, pp. 49–55 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Money, E., Essay on the Cultivation & Manufacture of Tea in India, Wyman, Calcutta, 1874, p. 2 Google Scholar.

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17 British Library, India Office Records (henceforward IOR), Photo.Eur.197 (Mann to his father, 16 January 1852). It also seems that Faviell, who was for example ten years senior to John Abbott, considered the company's engineers callow and fickle—a belated order to replace a level-crossing with a bridge seems to have particularly vexed him.

18 See Sharma, S. N., History of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, 1853–1869, Central Railway Press, Bombay, 1985, p. 91 Google Scholar.

19 Linn. FIf:1 (diaries), 18 February 1863, 9 May 1863.

20 Kerr, I. J., Building the Railways of the Raj, 1850–1900, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997, pp. 56–8Google Scholar.

21 The Engineer's Journal (Calcutta), 15 March 1869, p. 47.

22 Bombay Builder 3/3, 5 September 1867, p. 95. This accusation is amply borne out by the Bombay Almanack and Directory. From the end of 1864 to the end of 1866, the total number of contractors (mostly railway) in the Mofussil increased from 41 to 50. In Bombay city, contractors (mainly non-railway) rose from 21 to 48. The number of contractors’ agents and employees remained fairly constant.

23 Kerr, Building the Railways, p. 82; IOR/L/PWD/3/69—dispatch no. 12 (12 February 1869).

24 See discussion below, in the final section, of Dadabhoy Dorabjee and Venketish. Kerr's proposal is based on a remark by Thomas Brassey, quoted in Building the Railways, p. 151.

25 Ibid., p. 74.

26 Derbyshire, I., ‘The building of India's railways: the application of Western technology in the colonial periphery 1850–1920’, in Railways in Modern India, Kerr, I. J. (ed.), Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2001, pp. 271–2Google Scholar.

27 To give an idea of the sums involved, Stephens received Rs 12,921 from the GIPR for work done in April 1867, followed by Rs 21,405 in May. Linn/FIa:7 (GIPR Company's office Bombay, 1866–69).

28 Quoted in Kerr, Building the Railways, p. 57.

29 This venture bankrupted its English contractors Fox & Henderson, who had earlier built the Crystal Palace.

30 Probably Railway Construction (London, 1857). Several other illustrated manuals used by Stephens in India are still shelved in his former study at Huseby Bruk.

31 Though they must be received with circumspection, eloquent sources for this class prejudice can be found in Anglo-Indian fiction. Mr Brown, a former riveter turned wealthy contractor, is derided as ‘a bloated mechanic’ by PWD officers in Flora Annie Steel's novel, The Potter's Thumb, T. Nelson & Sons, London and Edinburgh, 1914, p. 424.

32 Linn. EI:8c, 23 December 1860.

33 Derbyshire, ‘The building of India's railways’, p. 273. For John Abbott's obituary, see Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 79 (1885), pp. 360–1.

34 Linn. EI:3a (George to Joseph Stephens, 29 June 1860).

35 A letter from John Abbott two years before Joseph's departure for India compliments ‘the decided improvement you have made in your English’. Linn. EI:8c (24 June 1857).

36 Linn. FIf:1 (diaries), 19 February 1863, 13 March 1863.

37 Ibid., 6 January 1862. Possibly this Belgian is the ‘Charmois’ mentioned later on 9 March 1863.

38 For Isaac Sargon of Cochin, a possible link, see Goldstein, J., ‘The Sorkin and Golab theses and their applicability to South, Southeast, and East Asian Port Jewry’, in Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550–1950, Cesarani, David (ed.), Routledge, Abingdon, 2013, p. 182 Google Scholar.

39 IOR/Eur.Mss.D.1184.2 (family memoir compiled by Arthur West), p. 206.

40 IOR/Photo.Eur.197 (Mann to his father, 13 January 1853).

41 Karaka, D. F., History of the Parsis, 2 vols, vol. II, Macmillan, London, 1884, pp. 253–5Google Scholar.

42 Linn. FIa:2 (J. R. Manning to Joseph Stephens, 13 December 1866).

43 Linn. FIa: 5 (G. B. Peck to Joseph Stephens, 17 June 1866); EI:2 (Joseph to George Stephens, 31 December 1868).

44 Linn. FIf:1 (diaries), 24 February 1863, 31 October 1862.

45 Ibid., 15 January 1862; FIa: 5 (G. B. Peck to Joseph Stephens, 10 February 1867).

46 Ibid. (G. B. Peck to Joseph Stephens, 28 June 1867).

47 Times of India, 2 and 3 July 1868. This was true: the consulting engineer, Colonel Kennedy, was well aware of shortcomings on the Nagpur Branch and had ordered that faulty bridges be reinforced before reconstruction could begin in earnest after the rains. See Maharashtra State Archives, P. W. D. (Railways), 1867, vol. 8, Compilation 186.

48 IOR/L/PWD/3/276 (enclosure to Bombay Railway Letter no. 19, 5 March 1868). Lieutenant Oldham, RE, described the section Stephens was principally active on—Chalesgaum to Pachora—as only mildly defective compared with the rest of the line.

49 IOR/L/PWD/3/66 (railway letter no. 118 and accompanying letter). The one dissenting vote on the Viceroy's Council belonged to General Mansfield, who testified to the ‘bad, scamping work’ which he had ‘heard a great deal of’ in the Bombay Presidency.

50 Times of India, 5 February 1868, emphasis in original.

51 Linn. FIa: 5 (G. B. Peck to Joseph Stephens, 26 July 1865, 10 July 1867); FIb:1 (contracts).

52 Linn. FIa: 5 (G. B. Peck to Joseph Stephens, 4 and 24 July 1867).

53 IOR/L/PWD/3/240 (letters no. 11, 21, 29).

54 Linn. FIa:1 (letter from Public Works Department, 4 February 1864); FIa: 7 (Mofussil Press & Ginning Company).

55 Linn. FIa:7 (Megji & Mulji); FIa: 2 (Hugh Swan to Joseph Stephens, 6 June 1866).

56 Linn. EI:2 (Joseph to George Stephens, 9 October 1868); FIa:7 (Oriental Bank Corporation). A fragment of newspaper in FIf:2 (Times of India, 24 January 1868) suggests that Stephens was monitoring how the value of his shares in the Elphinstone Company might be affected by an ongoing controversy involving its land scheme and government's pending decision over the site of Bombay's rail termini.

57 Linn. FIa:7 (Rogers & Co., 28 October 1864, 11 January 1868).

58 Linn. FIf:1 (diaries), 22 August 1860. He may have played in a second match on 29 September.

59 Linn. EI:8a (Ingeborg Abbott to George Stephens, 3 May 1859); EI:3a (George to Joseph Stephens, 19 April 1862).

60 Linn. EI:2 (Joseph to George Stephens, 17 December 1868).

61 Linn. FIa:5 (G. B. Peck's accounts for Paras Crossing Station, January–April 1868).

62 Like sardar, the term used by Tirthankar Roy for gangers in mill and plantation work, muqaddam ( in Hindi) has a honorific inflection and could even denote a village headman. Roy's multifaceted definition holds well for Stephens's men, too: ‘. . . in part a foreman, in part a headman, and in part a recruiting contractor’, though one might add: in part a creditor. See Roy, T., ‘Sardars, jobbers, kanganies: the labour contractor and Indian economic history’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 42, no. 5, 2008, p. 972 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Linn. Fie:1 (payrolls).

64 Kerr, Building the Railways, pp. 119, 70.

65 Linn. FIa: 5 (G. B. Peck to Joseph Stephens, 5 August 1865).

66 Linn. FIb:1 (contracts).

67 Bosma, U., van Nederveen Meerkerk, E., and Sarkar, A., ‘Mediating labour: an introduction’, International Review of Social History, vol. 57, special issue, December 2012, p. 2 Google Scholar.

68 Kerr, Building the Railways, pp. 91–2.

69 Kerr, I. J., ‘On the move: circulating labour in pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial India’, International Review of Social History, vol. 51, Supplement S14, December 2006, p. 87 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 See Ahuja, R., ‘Labour unsettled: mobility and protest in the Madras region, 1750–1800’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 35, no. 3, 1998 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 Kerr, Building the Railways, p. 152.

72 See for instance Enthoven, R. E., The Tribes and Castes of Bombay, 3 vols, vol. III, Government Central Press, Bombay, 1920, p. 138 Google Scholar.

73 ‘Railways in Western India’, p. 299.

74 Kerr, Building the Railways, pp. 190–1.

75 IOR/Eur.Mss.D.1184.3 (memoranda and occasional journal of Arthur West), pp. 43–4.

76 Ibid., order no. 493 of 1850.

77 Kerr, ‘On the move’, p. 99.

78 Thurston, E., Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 7 vols, vol. V, Government Press, Madras, 1909, pp. 422, 430Google Scholar, 434; Iyer, A., The Mysore Tribes and Castes, 5 vols, vol. IV, Mysore University, Mysore, 1928–36, p. 675 Google Scholar.

79 Manwaring, A., Marathi Proverbs, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1899, pp. 41–3Google Scholar.

80 Brown, M., Penal Power and Colonial Rule, Routledge, Abingdon, 2014, p. 112 Google Scholar.

81 IOR/V/9/5: Proceedings of the Legislative Council for India, vol. 5, for January to December 1859, Calcutta, 1859, pp. 217–18.

82 See Ghani, M. A., Notes on the Criminal Tribes of the Madras Presidency, Thompson & Co., Madras, 1915, p. 124 Google Scholar; Sastri, E. R., History of the Criminal Tribes in Madras Presidency, Sri Rama Press, Madras, 1929, p. 21 Google Scholar; and Kennedy, M., Notes on Criminal Classes in the Bombay Presidency, Government Central Press, Bombay, 1908, p. 166 Google Scholar. Statistics of the settlement camps in Bombay Presidency can be found in the annual reports (IOR/V/24/630)—it should be noted, however, that ‘Ghatti Waddars’ (the Bombay equivalent of Donga Waddars) far outnumber other Vadar sub-castes.

83 Kerr, Building the Railways, p. 109.

84 Linn. FIf:1 (diaries), 20 October 1862. Lanjud is about four kilometres west of Jalamb Junction station. Itinerant gangers’ habit of setting up camp where they saw fit was also a source of concern to the police: see Maharashtra State Archives, P. W. D. (Railways), vol. 26, Compilation 227.

85 Linn. FIf:1 (diaries), 14 February 1863.

86 Ibid., 24 March 1863.

87 Linn. FIa: 5 (G. B. Peck to Joseph Stephens, 10 August 1865); FIf:1 (diaries), 14 March 1863.

88 Ibid., 21 March 1863, 1 April 1863. Stephens did not it seems intervene but exploited the incident, and the prospect of the magistrate at Akola, to ‘frighten’ the suspects’ fellows and obtain compliance.

89 Ibid., 7 January 1862, 29 October 1863.

90 Kerr, Building the Railways, pp. 179–80.

91 Linn. FIa: 5 (G. B. Peck to Joseph Stephens, 5 March 1868).

92 Kerr, Building the Railways, p. 183.

93 Linn. FIf:1 (diaries), 7–9 March 1863.

94 Ibid., 21, 23 April, 18–22 May 1863.

95 Ibid., 21 October 1862, 8 March 1863; FIa: 5 (G. B. Peck to Joseph Stephens, 5 August 1865).

96 Ibid. (bill, 8 June 1866); FIa:1 (bill, July 1864).

97 See Linn/FIf:1 (diaries), 9 January 1862, 6 February 1862, 6 March 1862; FIe:1 (payrolls), April 1861.

98 Linn. FIa: 2 (Charles Brandt to Joseph Stephens, 24 September 1866).

99 IOR/Photo.Eur.197 (Mann to his father, 30 October 1851); IOR/Eur.Mss.C.401 (letters of Henry Fowler, 7 May 1851).

100 Linn. FIf:1 (diaries), 28 July 1860.

101 Ibid., 27 June 1863.

102 Kerr, Building the Railways, pp. 9, 55.

103 ‘Railways in Western India’, p. 288.

104 Rao, R. N., Social Organisation in an Indian Slum, Mittal, Delhi, 1990, pp. 63–4Google Scholar.