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Between country and city: fluid spaces of provincial administrative towns in nineteenth-century Bengal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2012

TANIA SENGUPTA
TANIA SENGUPTA*
Affiliation:
The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, Wates House, 22 Gordon Street, London, WC1H 0QB
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Abstract:

By looking at the spatial cultures of nineteenth-century provincial administrative towns in colonial Bengal, this article problematizes notions of city, town or country and their relationships. It looks at colonial provincial governance within a framework that extended far beyond ‘formal’ governmental administrative spaces and thus engages with the complex overlap between categories like work, home and leisure. It argues that provincial urbanism in colonial Bengal defied clear-cut categories and in effect created a ‘fluid’ spatial culture, which was distinct from, but also calibrated between, metropolitan centres on the one hand and a vast rural hinterland on the other.

Type
Indian suburbs
Information
Urban History , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 56 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 The stronghold of the province of Bengal played a key role in the exercise and consolidation of British power in India especially in the period up to the shifting of the capital to New Delhi in 1911.

2 See e.g. Legg, S., Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chattopadhyay, S., Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (London, 2005)Google Scholar; P. Scriver, ‘Rationalisation, standardisation and control in design: a cognitive historical study of architectural design and planning in the Public Works Department of British India, 1855–1901’, unpublished Delft Technical University Ph.D. thesis, 1994; Glover, W., Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis, 2008)Google Scholar; Dutta, A., The Bureaucracy of Beauty (New York and London, 2005)Google Scholar; idem, ‘Strangers within the gate: public works and industrial art reform’, in Scriver, P. and Prakash, V. (eds.), Colonial Modernities – Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (London and New York, 2007), 93–114Google Scholar; V. Prakash, ‘Between copying and creation: the Jeypore portfolio of architectural details’, in Scriver and Prakash (eds.), Colonial Modernities, 115–26; Kidambi, P., The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920 (Aldershot, 2007)Google Scholar.

3 The word mufassil (variants: mofussil, mofussal, mufassal) in colonial Bengal referred to provincial or interior areas as against metropolitan ones. It was a widely used category in common parlance as well as in official documents.

4 Atkinson, G.F., Curry and Rice (London, 1911), 1Google Scholar.

5 Ibid.

6 Officer in district headquarter towns in charge of revenue collection.

7 Islam, M.S., ‘Life in the Mufassal towns of nineteenth-century Bengal’, in Ballhatchet, K. and Harrison, J. (eds.), The City in South Asia (London and Dublin, 1980), 224Google Scholar.

8 Devi, P., Purbakatha (Calcutta, 1982)Google Scholar.

9 Roy, J., Atmacharit (Bankura, 2002), 13–17Google Scholar.

10 The expression ‘civil station’ referred to centres of civil administration in provincial areas, as against ‘military stations’ (or cantonments) which were stations for housing and training the military establishment.

11 Chakrabatti, M., A Summary of Changes in the Jurisdiction of Districts in Bengal 1757–1916 (Calcutta, 1949), 19Google Scholar.

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13 Islam, ‘Life in the Mufassal towns of nineteenth-century Bengal’, 224.

14 ‘Sub-divisions’ or mahakumas were administrative units just below the ‘district’ in hierarchy. Each district consisted of a few (typically five to eight) sub-divisions.

15 ‘Divisions’ were administrative units just above the ‘district’ in hierarchy. Each division consisted of a number of districts.

16 Some of these key strategic considerations in selection of site, e.g. for the sadar town of Bankura, are very clearly enunciated in a letter issued in 1806 by William Blunt, the judge and magistrate of the Jangal Mahal district, to S.T. Goad, registrar to the nizamut courts in Fort William. Sinha, S. and Banerjee, H. (eds.), Bankura District Letters Issued 1802–1869 (Calcutta, 1989)Google Scholar, letter no. 5, 11 Jul. 1806.

17 See Arnold, D., The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science 1800–1856 (Seattle, 2006)Google Scholar.

18 Rennell, J., A Bengal Atlas – Containing Maps of the Theatre of War and Commerce on That Side of Hindoostan (London, 1781)Google Scholar.

19 For a detailed and authoritative account of the role of and European attitude to climate during the colonial period in India, see Harrison, M., Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–1850 (New Delhi, 1999)Google Scholar.

20 Bandopadhyay, B.K., Shahar Baharampur (Baharampur, 2003), 64Google Scholar.

21 Beames, J., Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian (London, 2003), 276, 277, 292Google Scholar. First published by Chatto and Windus, 1961.

22 Managing the land through urban engineering was taken up actively by provincial town municipalities from around mid-1860s. But there seems to have been immense struggle in coming to grips with this until the late nineteenth century. See British Library (BL)/India Office Records (IOR)/Bengal Municipal Annual Reports (BMAR) 1876–77, V/24/2850–5.

23 O'Malley, L.S.S., Bengal District Gazetteers. Birbhum (Calcutta, 1996, repr.), 143Google Scholar.

24 Based on the author's own surveys and discussions with the Burwan Raj family. See also Sarkar, N., Bardhaman Raj-itibritto (Burdwan, 2004)Google Scholar.

25 The Land Acquisition Act, empowering government to acquire immovable property at a fair price for construction of roads, canals and other public purposes, was enacted in Bengal province 1824 and extended to all of British India in Act VI of 1857. This is what is likely to have been used in the Dacca case.

26 BL/IOR/Bengal PWD Proceedings (BPP), Apr.– Jun. 1864, P/16/67.

27 BL/IOR/BPP, Mar.–May 1885, no. 100, letter from W.B. Bestic, under-secretary to the government of Bengal, PWD to the superintending engineer, central circle, P/2482.

28 K. Roy, Diwan Kartikeyachandrer Atmajibani (Diwan Kartikeyachandra's autobiography) (Calcutta, n.d.).

29 Ibid., 116.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., 117.

32 The continuity of Mughal territorial basis into colonial spatial landscapes has been discussed, for instance, by Yuthika Sharma in her study on landscape strategies of imperial Delhi. Y. Sharma, ‘From land to landscape: a survey of landscape strategies in imperial Delhi (1863–1913)’, unpublished Harvard Graduate School of Design Masters dissertation, 2005.

33 One of the 13 provincial courts in Bengal was located in Murali since 1781.

34 Westland, J., A Report on the District of Jessore (Calcutta, 1871)Google Scholar.

35 My typological identification of the pre-existing settlement-context of sadar towns here has some overlap with M.S. Islam's more general classification of pre-colonial settlements in Bengal. Islam identified four types – viz. the great metropolitan cities, the zamindari towns, the European factory towns and the transient mufassal towns (mostly small market or port settlements based on shifting patterns of patronage). Islam, ‘Life in the mufassal towns of nineteenth-century Bengal’, 227, 228.

36 These were usually already well-established settlements where the zamindar or the raja (feudal ruler) had been in charge of revenue, judicial, police and military duties under the pre-colonial Mughal rule and housed quarters for the zamindar's army, accountants, treasurers, clerks, shopkeepers, artisans and entertainers to service the zamindari establishment.

37 Chowdhury, R., Bankurajoner Itihaash Sanskriti, 2nd edn (Bankura, 2002)Google Scholar.

38 Mufassal (provincial) municipalities were created through a series of municipal acts, viz. Act XXVI of 1850, Act XX of 1856, Act III of 1864 and Act VI of 1868, with maximum numbers being created under the 1856 and 1868 acts. BL/IOR/BMAR 1876/77, V/24/2850.

39 For a detailed account of urban engineering and cleansing schemes in zilla sadar towns working towards a vision of urbanism centred on health and hygiene systems during this period, see Sengupta, ‘Producing the province’, ch. 2.

40 BL/IOR/BMAR 1873/74–1875/76, V/24/2850.

41 Municipal taxation system was related to valuation of property, and temporary constructions like mud, mat or thatch buildings naturally generated lower tax.

42 BL/IOR/BMAR 1873/74, IOR/V/24/2850.

43 There was growing discomfort with the overlap of work, home and leisure spheres in Calcutta by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Writers’ Building, built for accountants and clerks of the Company as a hostel and office, was apparently also used for private affairs and merry making. In 1836, the governor general William Bentinck banned ‘haphazard’ use of the building altogether, and set it aside for classified use only.

44 According to an account given by F.J. Shore, a judge-magistrate, as early as the late eighteenth century, work had to be done by the collector-magistrate both before and after office hours (9am–5pm) and some even had police reports read to them during breakfast. J.F. Bignold, a Bengal civilian, echoed a similar feeling in a poem in The Successful Competitor as late as 1873, once again reinforcing the unusually large overlap of work-sphere with domestic time and space: ‘the crack Collector, man of equal might, reports all day and corresponds all night’.

45 It is important to note here that the zamindars conducted their office not from within formal governmental spaces but from their own premises.

46 A range of letters from the ‘Unpublished records of the govt.’ between 1748 and 1786 dealt with subject matters like land scarcity and instructions to European officers not to indulge in gardens and cook-houses in their premises in Calcutta. See e.g. Rev. J. Long, Selections from Unpublished Records of Government, for the Years 1748 to 1767 Inclusive (Calcutta, 1970), court of directors’ letter no. 312.

47 The expression ‘environmental competence’, used mostly within environmental psychology or human-environment studies, refers to one's ability to cope and engage with the immediate surroundings in a constructive manner.

48 See e.g. Aitken, E.H., Behind the Bungalow (Calcutta, 1889)Google Scholar; Graham, G., Life in the Mofussil or the Civilian in Lower Bengal (London, 1878)Google Scholar; Atkinson, Curry and Rice; ‘The cook's chronicle’, Appendix C, in Hunter, W.W., Annals of Rural Bengal (London, 1868)Google Scholar.