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The Problem of Traffic: The street-life of modernity in late-colonial India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2011

DAVID ARNOLD
DAVID ARNOLD*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL Email: d.arnold@warwick.ac.uk
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Abstract

In India in the early twentieth century the modern socio-technological phenomenon of traffic brought together many visible and accessible forms of everyday technology. However, in India modern motorized transport had to operate alongside earlier, seemingly ‘pre-modern’, modes of street-life. The emergence of traffic helped foster the expansion of late-colonial policing and the growth of the ‘everyday state’. It stimulated a new sense of a middle class identity and the proper ordering and disciplining of those who used the modern highway. But the technology of traffic was also contested—by those who evaded traffic rules as well as by those who were critical of technological modernity or the rising human cost of traffic accidents. The street at times became a site of open opposition to state authority or, through the deliberate disruption of traffic, a significant location for the exercise of political defiance and control.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1: Everyday Technology in South and Southeast Asia , January 2012 , pp. 119 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

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31 Bombay Chronicle, 13 January 1927, p. 11. As late as 1935, Bombay still had 2,189 horse-drawn victorias: see Annual Report on the Police of the City of Bombay, 1935, p. 42.

32 Administration Report of the Corporation of Madras, 1912–13, Appendix I, p. 91; Administration Report of the Corporation of Madras, 1934–35, Appendix I, p. 119.

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43 See, for example, Calcutta Tramways Committee, pp. 5–9.

44 For example, Richards, Report, p. 55, cited the Royal Commission on London Traffic (1905).

45 See, for example, Hollins, S. T., No Ten Commandments: Life in the Indian Police (London: Hutchinson, 1954), pp. 105–10Google Scholar; Annual Report on the Police Administration of the Town of Calcutta and its Suburbs, 1915, pp. 9–12.

46 Annual Report of the Police Administration of the Town of Calcutta and its Suburbs, 1908, p. 7.

47 Report on the Administration of the Police of the United Provinces, 1912, p. 35.

48 Administration Report of the Corporation of Madras, 1927–28, p. 6.

49 Report of the Police Administration in the Punjab, 1922, p. 8; Report of the Police Administration in the Punjab, 1926, p. 13.

50 Report of the Police Administration in the Punjab, 1931, p. 9; Report of the Police Administration in the Punjab, 1940, p. 9.

51 Report of the Motor Vehicles Insurance Committee, pp. 11, 14–15, 53. India still has the highest number of road fatalities, put at 130,000 a year in 2008: see The Guardian, 11 October 2008, p. 25.

52 Report of the Motor Vehicles Insurance Committee, p. 17; Annual Report on the Police of the City of Bombay, 1935, p. 41.

53 An example is the horrific episode in Madras in which a drunken European, L. F. Collett, collided first with a party of bandsmen travelling by rickshaw, injuring two bandsmen and two rickshaw-pullers, before driving on and hitting four Muslims carrying an empty bier, two of whom were killed. Collett was fined Rs 500 and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment: see Statesman (Calcutta), 20 December 1928, p. 10.

54 Report on the Administration of the Police of the Madras Presidency, 1937, p. 27.

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59 Report on the Administration of the Police of the Madras Presidency, 1939, p. 59.

60 See, for example, Madras, Judicial, Government Order [GO] 1427, 1 June 1916, Tamil Nadu Archives [TNA], Chennai.

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63 Ibid, p. 57.

64 Report on the Administration of the Police of the United Provinces, 1914, p. 28.

65 For instance, the Bombay Chronicle had a regular ‘Talk of the Suburbs’ column, which addressed such issues as poor bus services, the menace of stray dogs, and the causes of traffic accidents: see, for example, 1 June 1939, p. 5; and 6 June 1939, p. 5. On the utility of the Habermasian ‘public’ in colonial India, see Joshi, Sanjay, Fractured Modernity: The Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), IntroductionGoogle Scholar.

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73 See, for example, Police Traffic Signals: To Be Used by the Police and Drivers of Vehicles (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1906).

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75 Report on the Administration of the Motor Vehicles Act and Rules and the Madras Traffic Rules, 1940–41, p. 8.

76 Report on the Administration of the Police of the Madras Presidency, 1923, p. 57. By 1940–41, the number of convictions had reached 21,892 under the Motor Vehicles Act alone, with a further 52,663 under the Traffic Rules and 163 under the Indian Penal Code: see Report on the Administration of the Motor Vehicles Act and Rules and the Madras Traffic Rules, 1940–41, p. 13.

77 Report of the Police Administration in the Punjab, 1939, p. 11; Report of the Police Administration in the Punjab, 1940, p. 11.

78 See, for example, Report of the Police Administration in the Punjab, 1931, p. 10; Report of the Police Administration in the Punjab, 1934, p. 11.

79 For complaints about policemen demanding bribes from bus and lorry drivers in Calcutta, see Indian Chamber of Commerce, Annual Report of the Committee, 1936 (Calcutta: ICC, 1937), pp. 260–61. This raises the wider question of the role that changing technology played in the development of the ‘everyday state’: see Gupta, Akhil, ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist, 22 (2), 1995, pp. 375–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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81 Madras, Home, GO 224, 16 January 1942, Tamil Nadu Archives.

82 As in Delhi in the early 1930s: see India, Home (Police) 74/7/33, National Archives of India [NAI], New Delhi.

83 See, for example, Masselos, James, ‘Some Aspects of Bombay City Politics in 1919’, in Kumar, R. (ed.), Essays on Gandhian Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 178–79, 185–86Google Scholar.

84 Krishnadas, , Seven Months with Mahatma Gandhi: Being an Inside View of the Indian Non-Co-operation Movement of 1921–22 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1951), pp. 122–53Google Scholar.

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87 Ibid, pp. 18–20; also Tuker, Memory, pp. 156–63. Street-level violence and disruption to traffic continued in Calcutta during September 1946: see Statesman, 6 September 1946, pp. 1, 7; and 8 September 1946, p. 1.

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