Abstract
Abstract
Although sanitation and improvement were seen as key considerations among planners in modern cities around the world, they were used as an important mechanism of colonial propaganda in order to shape the colonial city in accordance to the state’s understanding of the urban space and the meanings that such a space held for them, politically and commercially. This article aims to investigate the terms of planning and to understand the so-called improvement projects carried out by the colonial state in relation to their imaginings of the city and how they understood the city space and what the city meant to them. By studying the various texts written by prominent Europeans in Calcutta in the nineteenth century and their memories of the city, one could gauge how and what part of the city did the administrators at large consider to be Calcutta, and how that had a bearing on the development or improvement projects in the city. This would help give a fresh perspective on the lopsided development and improvement of nineteenth-century Calcutta. The article would finally investigate the ways in which the city was viewed commercially to help tie the other end of the explanation of the kind of improvement Calcutta witnessesd.
During the nineteenth century the rhetoric of health, sanitation and improvement had come to dominate the discourse of the colonial administrators governing the city of Calcutta. This was in addition to the pride of place the city had come to occupy as the ‘second city of the empire’. Order and discipline for the population was another theme that was to guide the administrators. All these were interwoven to form a larger narrative about governance and the planning of the city. Historians trying to study the planning and development of major cities in colonial India have more or less accepted the fact that sanitation, health and improvement were the guiding factors for the colonial town planners and local officials. Some of them though have agreed to the fact that these ideas were part of a larger ploy of the colonial state to create a hegemonic discourse to rule efficiently and minimise the opposition to their plans and practices of rule.2
For a detailed discussion on the modes of colonial rule and the discussion surrounding the theme of improvement, see Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 1998), 30–39.
Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920 (Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 236–37.
Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Nationalism, Modernity and the Colonial Uncanny (Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2005), 70–73.
These historians studying the planning and development of Calcutta have, over the years, paid significant attention to the various ideas, intellectual currents and notions about the environment, the city, tropics and the resultant health issues that formed the discourse which came to be the driving force behind the planning of the city. Little attention was paid to the actual results that accrued due to the peculiar processes of colonial planning. It was agreed that there was uneven development in the city, especially on racial lines, but at the same time stopped short of making a proper scrutiny behind maintaining the segregation. Earlier studies by scholars like Anthony D. King spoke of a colonial model of growth and development which was based on the dominance–dependent model which worked at two levels, one where the colonial culture was dependent upon the metropolitan culture, and second, on the level of the city where the indigenous parts of the city were kept apart from the parts dominated by the colonisers.5
Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London: Routledge, 1976), 39.
Most of the earlier, and even some recent, works on planning and urban development do not go in to the nuances and intricacies of the meaning behind the discourse on planning and development. The question was not that health was a major consideration behind the planning and improvement of the city or that there was segregation and differentiation in the ways in which planning was carried out in different parts of the city. The question was rather why, despite the rhetoric of making the city clean and healthy and the Indian parts of the city being the breeding grounds of diseases, these same parts continued to experience a lack of development and improvement throughout the colonial period. What further needs to be probed is that why, despite the improvement measures adopted by the state in Calcutta, some of its areas and suburbs like Hastings and Entally had an increased, and not a decreased mortality rate in the nineteenth century. What the following pages would try to do is to unravel the actual reasons behind the stark differences between what the administration said and what it did with regards to the improvement of Calcutta. In short, why was there such a great difference between rhetoric and reality and what was being said and what was done on the ground.
A proper understanding and analysis of the thinking behind the ways in which the administrators planned and developed Calcutta, and in a way aggravated the disparities in the ways the different classes lived, would require a study of the ways in which the local administrators and influential people of Calcutta viewed the city and what it meant to them. It would be imperative to understand as to what space—physical and social—was seen by them as comprising the city, for only a comprehension of the ways in which the city was imagined and the material reasons behind such an imagination and representation would help understand as to why Calcutta came to be a city whose different sections received such disparate treatment and why it remained a city where as Rudyard Kipling once said, ‘poverty and pride reside side by side’.6
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Poverty and Pride Reside Side by Side, in Calcutta through British Eyes, 1690–1990, ed. Laura Sykes (Madras, OUP, 1990, p. 19). Originally published in Rudyard Kipling, A Tale of Two Cities (London: Macmillan, 1891).
The recent work of Swati Chattopadhyay has looked at the various ways in which the city was looked at visually and in literary texts by various sections of the city’s population. She went on to argue that rather than look at the colonial concerns for health and public good as the only factors behind the sanitary improvements and spatial layout of the city, one should look at the various representations of the space behind the plan. These representative strategies would feed in to the larger discourse on British imperialism in India.7
Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, 23.
This is precisely what the following sections of this article intend to do. They intend to probe as to why a particular picture of the city was painted by some prominent European writers on Calcutta and subsequently, why that picture percolated down to the actual improvement works carried out in the city. What did the city represent to those in power in its abstract sense, as this lay behind the subsequent policies regarding sanitation and improvement in the city? This article would not only look at the way these representations influenced planning, but also how these representations came up in the first place. The study intends to follow the line of arguments put forward by Henri Lefebvre that a system of knowledge goes behind the representations of spaces, which in turn play an important role in social practice.8
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 41.
Ibid., 285.
Ibid., 337.
Colonial Imagining of Calcutta—A Case of ‘Deliberate Myopia’?
Cities around the world have marked out spaces or important areas which have a great deal of political and social significance in the minds of the people, be it Trafalgar Square in London, Times Square in New York or India Gate in Delhi. All these places have acquired the status of politically and culturally important places in the minds of their city’s residents and also places which become centres of protests. In case of colonial cities, places gain importance in the imaginary realm of the current generation through decades, or even centuries, of long conditioning initiated by colonial administrators. Therefore, the part of Calcutta comprising the major institutions of power like the Writer’s Building, the Town Hall, the Governor’s House, the General Post Office (more fondly known as the GPO), the High Court and the adjoining areas like the Esplanade, Dalhousie Square, the Shaheed Minar (also known as the Ochtrolony Towers), Eden Gardens, Maidan and areas further up like Park Street have remained the centres of cultural and political significance for the better part of the last two centuries.
This being the area which was also roughly the centre of British imagination of Calcutta due to the meanings it attached to this place and also the obvious political importance attached to this area. The importance and meaning of the place has remained to this day and has been manifested in different forms. They have acquired the form of what Charles Taylor calls ‘social imaginaries’, whereby institutions rather than theories are taken up by society, initially though by an individual or a group, and a particular meaning is attached to it which, over a period of time and through processes of interaction acquires the status of the only meaning and any other meaning is thus seen as an aberration.11
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Public Planet Books/Duke University Press, 2007), 1–2.
Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, 23.
The very detailed description of a select portion of the city and a select people by most colonial writers and administrators gave minute information about the lives and activities of the people living in these parts of the city in the nineteenth century. The descriptions of these places are quite exhaustive and give specific information about each individual of consequence living in these areas. On the other hand, descriptions of the places in the town as well as the suburbs inhabited by the poorer natives and even poor Europeans is a picture painted with a general brush, that is, one of filth, crowds and the breeding grounds of the most contagious of diseases. This strategy of describing the city are derived out of what William J. Glover calls a ‘Utilitarian System’, which dwells on the principles of classification and enumeration, as they helped comprehend unfamiliar and dissimilar things comparable to one another by emphasising the range of features shared between them.13
William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 30–31.
Therefore, one of the first works on the medical topography of Calcutta written by James Ranald Martin also used this strategy of classification while writing about the city and its climate and the sources of its diseases. This book, written in 1837, points to a picture of utter chaos and decay of the places in the town and suburbs which were usually inhabited by the poorer sections of society. Places like Barra Bazar, Machua Bazar, Entally and Ballygunj received immense criticism with use of common tropes like crowded, chaotic, filthy and having a lack of ventilation and emitting foul odours;14
James Ranald Martin, The Medical Topography of Calcutta (Kolkata: Military Orphan Press, 1837), 26–27.
Martin’s work though, was not merely one limited to classification and enumeration, but also on proper noting and observation. There was obvious truth in these claims, but at the same time Martin also pointed out that these areas which were the unhealthiest were also the ones most neglected by the administration. In fact, he went on to say that it was easier to find fault than to actually rectifying these faults.15
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 1.
Partho Datta, Planning the City: Urbanisation and Reform in Calcutta, c 1800–1940 (New Delhi: Tulika, 2012), 97.
As pointed out earlier, the spaces mentioned and spoken of highly by the writers, European travellers and administrators in Calcutta do represent a significant political message and histories of these places were written in order to evoke a particular memory of the city and the British Empire at large. Histories of the city written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century alluded to the chivalry, benevolence and perseverance that, according to the writers of these histories, went in to the making of Calcutta and simultaneously the British Empire in India. In all this, the area around the Fort, Esplanade, Dalhousie Square up to the Armenian Ghat in the North and Alipore, which was part of the suburbs till 1889, the site of activity for the East India Company from the mid-eighteenth century, was shown in the light of the above mentioned values of the colonisers. Harry E.A. Cotton, a member of the law commission and an advocate in the Calcutta High Court, mentioned that one of the main purposes of his writing the history of Calcutta was to remind his audiences of the ways in which the Empire built its second city, which later came to be fondly known as the ‘City of Joy’ fighting and gaining victory over the forces of nature and it being reared amid every surrounding of difficulty and disadvantage.18
H.E.A Cotton, Calcutta Old and New: A Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City
(W. Newman & Co., 1907), 258.
The architecture of the place was seen by many writers as the proper reservoir of memories as other sources had perished, either from the ravages of time or the incuriousness of those in office.19
Ibid., 1.
Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of the Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (New Delhi/Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012), 264–66.
J.C. Marshman, ‘Notes on the Left Bank of the River Hooghly’, in Calcutta Keepsake, ed. Alok Ray (Kolkata: Ridhi India, 1978), 171. Originally published in the Calcutta Review iii, no. 6 (January 1845).
There are constant references of the loss of the ‘good old days’ in the early twentieth century due to the loss of European or Imperial exclusivity in the prominent parts of Calcutta. This was added to the loss of the values that had helped build Calcutta, and these were together seen as a precursor to the ultimate decay of the city which, according to some, would see the same fate as Delhi, Lucknow or Patna.22
James Long, Calcutta in the Olden Times: Its People and its Localities (Kolkata: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, 1974). Originally published in 1887, 3–6.
Montague Massey, Recollections of Calcutta from over Half a Century (Calcutta: Thacker, Sphinx & Co., 1918), 2.
Cotton, Calcutta Old and New, 280.
Any material or structural evidence which painted a picture contrary to these beliefs and imaginings were subtly destroyed and removed. The most significant of such evidence came in the form of the removal of bustees or clusters of dwellings comprising thatched roofed huts dotting the area along Dharmatollah, Theatre Road and Circular Road in the 1860s. These usually belonged to coolies and labourers. The authorities decided to do away with bustees like Money Bustee and the Bamun Bustee in the name of improvement. Considered to be a nuisance these were removed and broad roads were constructed with thoroughfares and iron railings on the side. The bustees were seen as an eyesore for the administrators.25
Government of Bengal (GOB), Judicial (Judicial), No. 5341, 20th December 1861, State Archives of West Bengal (WBSA).
Another significant move by the authorities in Calcutta to remove any evidence contrary to their imagination of the capital, was the clearance of Matiya Burj, in the Garden Reach suburb of Calcutta. Home to Wajid Ali Shah, the Nawab of Awadh exiled by the British in 1856 along with his family and entourage of servants. This place had grown in opulence and included a palace, libraries and harems. This area also came to be known as ‘Chota Lucknow’, and gave the semblance of the existence of a second capital of the Nawab within the Imperial capital to the colonial authorities.26
Chatterjee, The Black Hole of the Empire, 219.
Abdul Haleem Sharar, Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, translated by E.S. Harcourt and Fakir Hussain (Delhi: OUP, 1989), 71–74.
Cotton, Calcutta Old and New, 278.
Interestingly, similar structures belonging to zamindars and other political and economic collaborators of the colonial state, a section which formed the core of the local elites in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and were given titles like Raja, escaped criticism and many times destruction by the city authorities. Whatever mention is made of them and the places they inhabited is in the context of the ways in which they added to the regal paraphernalia. A good example of this is found in Cotton’s account of the dinner hosted by the Raja of Paikpara in 1875 to honour the visiting prince of England.29
Ibid., 270.
Ibid., 353.
Ibid., 345.
The Politics of Improvement and the Economics of Planning
Though there was a definite understanding and imagination of the city of Calcutta in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it would be erroneous to claim that the city itself had acquired a fixed shape till the last decade of the nineteenth century. The development of Calcutta began around the Old Fort area and the Mint from the mid-eighteenth century. This was the period when the English had started moving out of Sutanati to these places and rendered the former as a mere suburb. Topographers and planners considered the area to the South of the Fort to be the most favourable for European settlers. Medical reasons like the condition of surroundings, the direction of winds bringing miasmas and the atmospheric pressure were cited for the choice of settlement. The northern part of the city which was dominated by the Indians was glossed over as being unsanitary breeding grounds for diseases in order to show the colonial superiority of habit and lifestyle.32
Datta, Planning the City, 91–93.
The first official declaration of the boundaries of the city was made in 1794 when the limits of the city in its four directions were pointed out in a proclamation made on 11 September by the government which declared that
an Act for continuing in the East India Company, for a further term, the possession of British territories in India together with their exclusive trade, under certain regulation for establishing further Regulations for the government of the said territories and for better administration of justice within the same, for appropriating to certain uses the revenues of the said company and for making provisions for the good order and governance for the towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay.
The Act was passed which made the Governor-General in Council for Fort William the final authority regarding the limits of the town of Calcutta.33
E. Hay, ‘Proclamation of the Boundaries of Calcutta in 1794’, in H.J. Rainey, A Historical and Topographical Sketch of Calcutta, ed. P. Thankappan Nair (Kolkata: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, 1985). E. Hay was Secretary to the government. Rainey’s original book was written in 1876 and the piece was originally taken from W.S. Seaton-Karr, Selection from Calcutta Gazettes, Vol. 2 (1789–97) (Calcutta, 1865).
James Rainey, Historical and Topographical Sketch of Calcutta, 1.
Chatterjee, Black Hole of the Empire, 6.
Ibid., 104.
There were constant cases of legal disputes between the state and the ones whose lands had been taken away, with the latter complaining that such acquisition was creating a lot of financial and social inconvenience. These complaints, which were mostly made in the first half of the nineteenth century, spoke of the loss of monthly rent collected from these tracts of land which was a major source of profit and sometimes even income to these former landholders.37
GOB, Judicial (Criminal), No. 8, 4th September 1818, WBSA.
GOB, Judicial (Criminal), No. 36, 22nd August 1822, WBSA.
GOB, Judicial (Criminal), No. 193, 27th May 1841, WBSA.
Datta, Planning the City, 60.
Administratively, Calcutta comprised of areas which included both the rich and the poor sections of the city, but in terms of an imaginary and a developmental framework of the city chroniclers and administrators tended to focus on the parts inhabited by the rich and the neglect of other parts of Calcutta was reflected in the sanitary and ornamental improvements of the city and also in the maps and directories of that period. For example, the map that Jean Augaustine Schalch made at the behest of the Lottery Committee, and which came out in 1824, was more or less holistic with minute details. But, the engraved versions of the maps produced by the Lottery Committee a year later, excluded names of some Indian house owners, smaller ghats and some parts of the north. It also left blank spaces for the areas which had huts of the labouring poor. Thus, Partho Datta remarked that the state tended ‘cartographically disenfranchise’ the poor who were on the lower strata of the society.41
Ibid., 70.
This disenfranchisement extended from the cartographic and enumerative realm to that of planning and development. Right from the early nineteenth century to the 1870s the developmental works were skewed towards a limited portion of the city. Works like installing light, public latrines and urinals and the sweeping of the streets was limited to the richer and more affluent portions of the city. The projects carried out by the Lottery Committee were more of an ornamental nature like the widening of roads, putting lights and railings on their sides and beautifying the Strand. This, despite the emphasis on providing a healthy and clean environment in the famous Minute of Wellesley of 1803, was supposed to guide the future sanitary improvements in Calcutta. It is unfortunate that it failed to achieve the goals that it had set out to achieve.
An important work such as the illumination of streets which was crucial for the safety and security of the people was only limited to places like Esplanade, Chandpal Ghat up to Strand Road and Chowringhee. These were considered the principal roads of the city and crucial for the safe passage of goods in and out of Calcutta,42
GOB, Judicial (Judicial), No. 30, 16th November 1841, WBSA.
From a report in The Englishman titled ‘Lights, More Lights’, dated Saturday, 7 February 1837. This was later compiled and published along with other such old newspaper reports in Ranabir Ray Choudhuri, Glimpses of Old Calcutta, 1836–1850 (Bombay: Nachiketa, Publications Limited, 1978), 15.
Archival reports show the lopsided development of the city, where a person no less than the Police Commissioner of Calcutta, S. Wauchope complains of the inadequacy of proper drinking water to the poor of the city, other than the aqueducts whose water was filthy and bacterial and unfit for human consumption, along with a lack of public urinals in the major streets of the city other than the area around Tank Square. He also spoke of the lack of proper facilities for the removal of night soil. He further stated that rather than making stringent laws against insanitary behaviour it would be better to provide proper facilities for sanitation and sanitary amenities for all classes of people.44
GOB, Judicial (Judicial), No. 377, 2nd April 1864, WBSA.
A.K. Ray, A Short History of Calcutta (Kolkata: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1902).
Government of India (GOI), Home (Municipalities), No. 44–52, May 1891, National Archives of India (NAI).
GOI, Home (Municipalities), No. 36–41, March 1895, NAI.
GOI, Home (Municipalities), No. 14, January 1887, NAI.
Much of this depended on the interest groups that came to dominate municipal politics in Calcutta. Of these, a major chunk was formed by the Anglo-Indian groups; prominent among them was the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and the Calcutta Trades Association. By the 1880s, the former had become the mouthpiece of all commercial interest groups in the city. These groups had started demanding the acknowledgement of their economic interests through the grant of political status and symbols.49
Chris Furedy, ‘Interest Groups and Political Management in Calcutta, 1875–1890’, Communications Historiques, The Canadian Historical Association 8, no. 1, 1973: 193.
Act IV (BC) of 1876—New Municipal Act, GOB, Municipal (Municipal), 1876.
Furedy, ‘Interest Groups’, 206.
Claude Markovits, ‘Bombay as a Commercial Centre in the Colonial Period—A Comparison with Calcutta’, in Bombay: A Metaphor for Modern India, ed. Sujata Patel (Mumbai: OUP, 1995), 24–46.
Thus, right from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the state saw its priorities in the structural development of those areas of the city which it saw as important for the smooth commercial enterprise through the smooth transfer and movements of goods and people. This was seen in their emphasis of the building of key thoroughfares along the river, bridges and other roads. The speculated value of land after certain infrastructural projects had been developed on it, was a key consideration for taking up the structural improvement of the city. Although, health continued to be cited as an important factor for carrying out improvements in the city, it was the expected increase in the money gained through rent or the sale of property after such improvements that came to dominate the consciousness of the planners and administrators. The initiation of beautification and ornamental development of the areas which the state thought would provide a good rent also fulfilled the purpose of showcasing an orderly space and the god governance of the colonial state. This orderliness and cleanliness was showcased to attract potential increase in these properties and the capital generated through these investments and buying of these properties was used for future developmental works. The clearance of bustees in the 1860s in the Esplanade and Dalhousie area was part of the dual plan of creating a favourable picture and making the land more valuable for future investments. Since one of the main sources of income for the state, which it used for development purposes, was the income from the sale of property, therefore all attempts were made to make the property look attractive and worth buying to potential consumers. The lands that cleared off the bustees falling in these places, was to be sold for constructing houses for the rich Europeans, who were in a position to pay high rent for these properties, as the proceeds from these would help raise money for further works in the city.53
GOB, Judicial Proceedings, No. 23, 20th January 1859, WBSA.
Although, fear of miasmas from the villainous smells emitted and the spread of diseases cannot be ruled out as one of the factors for the clearance of bustees from different parts of the city, it has to be kept in mind that the advantages and profits which the sale of these improved and filth-free areas would accrue to the state was the overbearing consideration. Thus, considerations for building a thoroughfare from Jauna Bazar—an area dominated by the locals through Dharmatatollah—the business district of the city, and a further extension to Sudder Street pointed to an initial concern for people’s health, ventilation, the quality of air and cleanliness in the crowded parts of the city, but what seemed more important for the state was the rent it could earn from the lease of a much improved land it leased for a public institute or from the rent of the houses it made for the upper and middle classes.54
GOI, Home (Public), No. 3282, 18th July 1860, NAI.
GOB, Judicial (Judicial), No. 3721, 27th July 1863.
GOI, Home (Municipalities), Nos. 29–33, September 1896, NAI.
It is interesting to note that the state, while clearing bustees, was hardly doing anything for the labouring poor who were being displaced. These poor would move out of one bustee and move in to another which was already overcrowded and make them breeding grounds for diseases. It is also interesting to note that very little was being done in terms of improving the condition of the places which the state considered as the breeding grounds of diseases. The condition of the bustees and suburbs was pointed out by military officials or medical topographers like Ranald Martin. Though work was done for the richer suburbs, the poorer suburbs, neither found place in the imaginary framework of the officers and administrators nor was any work done for them. Their lack of sanitation was explained with excuses that they were not under a proper or efficient administrative set up.57
GOB, Municipal (Municipal), No. 2019, 30th July 1883, WBSA.
GOI, Home (Municipalities), Nos. 41–42, December 1884, NAI.
Memorandum of the Army Sanitary Commission on the Administrative Report for the city of Calcutta for the year 1885–6, NAI.
It is interesting to note that the practice of structural improvement in Calcutta was comparable to that in post-Napoleonic Paris. After attaining power in 1851 and declaring himself the Emperor Louis Napoleon Bonaparte decided to deal with the political unrest by repressing alternative political movements. The economic problems of labour and capital surplus were dealt with by the introduction of massive infrastructural projects. For Paris, it meant a total reconfiguration of its streets, drains and sewage under the guidance of Georges-Eugene Haussmann.60
David Harvey, ‘The Right to the City’, The New Left Review 53 (September–October 2008): 28.
Ibid., 26.
No wonder that most of these improvements were carried out in the affluent areas of the city and its suburbs, and the same areas fell in the imaginary realm of what consisted of ‘Calcutta’ amongst the writers, travellers and administrators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In fact, the imagination of an ideal space of Calcutta fit in perfectly with the needs and aspirations of a rate-paying upper middle class whose geographical spread and numbers increased in the late nineteenth century and with this increased the spread of the administrative machinery for improvements, albeit after some time in the twentieth century, but the focus of the administrative machinery continued to be the imaginary heart of the city, even with the incorporation of the suburbs in to the administrative fold of Calcutta. Even in the early decades of the twentieth century there remained a preferential treatment towards the owners of high value property giving the impression that for the state the focus of sanitary improvement and structural developments was the development of capital and capitalism. Therefore, in conclusion it would be safe to say that the commercial and capitalist heart of Calcutta also remained the imaginary realm of the city’s administrators, as the imagination and representation of these areas of Calcutta was to induce and attract potential investors and therefore, these same places saw improvements in the real terms. These improvement and sanitary programmes followed the principle of differential distribution and allocation of resources like drinking water or cleanliness to different localities of the city, depending on the rent paying capabilities and the inhabitants and the rent-generating capacity of the locality. Therefore, it came as no surprise that commercial hubs of the city were the ones which were portrayed as being the city and thus being substantially developed, as it was from these markets that the state generated a major chunk of its revenue. So for example, the municipality earned about Rs. 525,413 from taxes on trades and professions in the year 1891–92 and Rs. 122,478 from markets in the same year.62
GOI, Home (Municipalities), Nos. 13/17 Part B, 1891–92, NAI.
Through this unequal distribution of goods and services social inequalities were being reinforced by the institutions of local government. It was a strategy common to all the capitalist systems of the world whereby, it has been argued by historians, general access of all was restricted to the basic resources and facilities in the urban centres through a territorial compartmentalisation of the city in terms of housing. It has been seen and argued in other capitalist systems of the world, that in the urban centre the role of the state was reduced to a facilitator of the capitalist modes of production.63
Blair Badcock, Unfairly Structured Cities (Basil Blackwell, 1984), 243.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Professor Amar Farooqui, Department of History, University of Delhi and Dr Biswamoy Pati, Department of History, University of Delhi for their comments and suggestions. The author would also like to thank the two referees whose comments helped improve the article. The author would also like to thank Bidisha Chakrabarty and Sarmishtha De of the West Bengal State Archives for their guidance and help.
