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- Convenors:
-
Erica Wald
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
Anna Gust (Five Colleges, Massachusetts)
- Location:
- C405
- Start time:
- 27 July, 2012 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel will examine the overlapping processes of (re)creating the city and explore the complex, competing narratives of city space in Bombay over the long nineteenth century.
Long Abstract:
In February 1803, a large fire tore through Bombay's Fort and Black Town, destroying much of what was the central town. The destruction wrought by the fire offered British military and government officials the opportunity to embark on an ambitious and complex campaign of city planning. It enabled the authorities to re-conceptualise the city space and, in so doing, to impose order and categorisation upon the city's diverse population. Thus, the fire began a long process of spatial negotiation and conflict between different social groups ranging from government, medical societies and mill owners. This panel will examine the overlapping processes of (re)creating the city and explore the complex, competing narratives of city space in Bombay over the long nineteenth century.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Anna Gust (Five Colleges, Massachusetts)
Paper short abstract:
Using petitions in the Town Committee reports, this paper explores the ways in which ideologies of colonial space clashed with the demands and practices of the local, Bombay population.
Paper long abstract:
In 1803, an accidental fire burnt down a large part of Bombay Fort, primarily affecting the properties of Parsi, Muslim and Hindu merchants who resided, traded and stored their produce in the same buildings. Referred to as 'the late calamity', the fire actually offered up the opportunity to re-create the layout of Fort in line with an ideology of what the town should be and who it should be for. The letters of the Town Committee that undertook this project are contained in the Public Diaries alongside petitions written disputing their actions and intentions. Altogether, they offer a fascinating insight into the ways in which Bombay Town was built up in the early 19th century but particularly the ways in which colonial ideology interpreted and negotiated the demands and claims of an extremely heterogeneous population. Using petitions in the Town Committee reports, this paper explores the ways in which ideologies of colonial space clashed with the demands and practices of the local, Bombay population.
Simin Patel (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the geography and internal worlds of early hotels in colonial Bombay. Run predominantly by Parsi proprietors and catering to a European clientele, hotels promised the material comforts and respectability of an English home in the midst of the bustling urban milieu of Bombay.
Paper long abstract:
Historians have yet to consider hotels in their landscaping and articulations of colonial India: as sites where the separatist discourse of imperialism was staged; in comparison with similar resort/retreat settlements like clubs, gymkhanas and hill stations; as a marriage of the otherwise antithetical commerce and domesticity, as institutionalizing the modern mobile urban condition. This paper will first focus on how hotels came to be located in the two hubs of Bombay, Fort and Byculla, to the exclusion of other strongholds like Colaba and Parel. Secondly it will consider why European travelers preferred staying in hotels to setting up temporary homes in the city, a feasible alternative given the host of residential premises available to let, some for six months or shorter periods. It will conclude with an account of the opening of The Esplanade Hotel in 1871.The Hotel was part of a wider state backed initiative, begun in the 1860's, to redesign the Fort with grand imperial institutions, erasing the older geography of ramparts and congested spaces.
Aditya Sarkar (Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Goettingen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces the transformation of industrial relations in the cotton textile industry of late nineteenth-century Bombay, between the Factory Act of 1881 and the global plague pandemic of the late 1890s.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the transformation of industrial relations in the cotton textile industry of colonial Bombay in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Its purpose is to trace the movement from a structure of labour regulation encased within the administration of factory law (initiated with India's first Factory Act, in 1881) to a more combative style of industrial relations in the 1890s, characterized by a greater frequency of strikes, and more open confrontations between employers and workers. To this end, the paper surveys three sites of transformation and plots their relations with one another:
- The spatial transformation of Bombay in the 1880s, as the city's cotton mill industry and workforce virtually colonized the northern part of the island and came, very rapidly, to dominate its urban configuration, both physically and politically.
- The logics of factory law, in terms of both legal enactment (the Factory Acts of 1881 and 1891) and its 'realization' in day-to-day administration.
- The emergence of a more militant terrain of industrial relations, characterized by a crisis of demand and recurring patterns of rapidly expanding strike action, in the 1890s.
Through these interlinked investigations, the paper tries to elucidate the shifting relations between the uncertainly defined domains of law and industrial politics, to identify the points at which a separation between these domains was effected as well as the points at which they irrevocably 'contaminated' each other, and to comprehend the structure and shape of industrial relations that emerged from these processes.