Sovereign dreams and bureaucratic strategies in princely Jaipur, c. 1750–1950

Abstract

This article focuses on Jaipur city, capital of the Kachhawa Rajput state of Jaipur in the Rajputana region of north-western India (present-day Rajasthan). It seeks to braid the narrative of modernity in Jaipur with the tripartite networks of capital, knowledge and infrastructure that were contemporaneous to different phases of the city's transformation. Through a genealogical analysis of Jaipur's modernity from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the article will present three distinct periods of its urbanization.

Introduction

Colonial metropolises have been the dominant templates of Indian urbanity since the nineteenth century. Scholarship on these cities focuses on colonial disciplining of spaces and bodies through interconnected discourses of health, hygiene and improvement.¹ Colonial cities emerged as both ‘spaces of social control’ and ‘spaces of autonomy’,² leading to contestations between the governors and the governed.³ The colonial city came to be seen as the site of emergence of the nationalist subject and a conduit of capital.⁴ In these dominant historiographies of urban India, princely cities received scant attention. Their contextual histories, spatial practice and social-political dynamics remained unexplored. The presumed ‘traditionalism’ associated with princely cities has marked their absence from dominant narratives of modernity in the subcontinent. An exploration of these multiple and often intersecting trajectories of modernity that were shaped in the crucibles of princely domains may complicate our understanding of modernity and its attendant urban form in South Asia.

Within the existing scholarly literature, princely cities have been examined from the lens of political economy and are characterized as spaces of competition between the landed nobility and the mobile mercantile class.⁵ Merchants became central to the growth and modern development of princely cities. The princely sovereign and his modernized bureaucratic apparatus also enabled the growth of new elite in these cities. This modernity, however, was very much ensconced within anachronistic structures of power. Janaki Nair argues that modernity in princely territories was a historically contingent process produced through practices of sovereignty that created a unique ‘monarchical modern’.⁶ One can add a political economic layer to Nair's argument in the context of Rajputana, where the sovereign spectacle of modernity in cities was marked by the consolidation of the nationalist bourgeois and Marwari mercantile community at the expense of older ‘feudal’ groups. The monarch's power was thus reinscribed within the twin regimes of property and democratic public sphere.

The contradictions of modernity in princely cities is also brought out by Eric Beverley who contends that Hyderabad's urbanity was an amalgam of ‘technical developmentalism’ and ‘ethical patrimonialism’.⁷ This urbanity was mediated with the advent of expert bureaucrats in princely cities. In this context, M. Visvesvaraya, Mirza Ismail and V.T. Krishnamachari emerged as significant administrators who circulated through several princely states like Mysore, Hyderabad and Baroda in the early and mid-twentieth century. They shaped urban spaces and social and administrative structures that manifested the ‘modernizing’ desire of sovereign monarchs and anticipated a postcolonial future.⁸

This article focuses on Jaipur city, capital of the Kachhawa Rajput state of Jaipur in the Rajputana region of north-western India (present-day Rajasthan). It seeks to braid the narrative of modernity in Jaipur with the tripartite networks of capital, knowledge and infrastructure that were contemporaneous to different phases of the city's transformation. Through a genealogical analysis of Jaipur's modernity from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the article will present three distinct periods of its urbanization. To begin with, modernity in eighteenth-century Jaipur could be discerned in the cosmopolitan and scientific exchanges with regard to astronomical knowledge under Jai Singh II. One also finds traces of Bhakti tradition in Vaishnava cults of the city, which drew connections to distant places like Vrindavan and Bengal. A more paradigmatic ‘modern’ turn emerged with the colonial mediation in the nineteenth century, resulting in the development of a new visual apparatus such as exhibitions, grand vistas in cities and Indo-Saracenic architecture. The British Arts and Crafts movement of this period was reflected in forms of knowledge and craftsmanship that developed in the city around the same time.⁹ Figures such as Sawai Ram Singh II, Swinton Jacob and Thomas Holbein Hendley were pivotal to this form of modernity. The last dominant phase of ‘princely’ modernity was a product of the reign of English-educated Maharaja Man Singh II and his wife, Maharani Gayatri Devi. The royal couple, along with Prime Minister Mirza Ismail, set the tone for the postcolonial capital city that Jaipur became in 1949. This was also a period marked by the nationalist space that opened up in the city through constitutional reforms and Praja Mandal politics. Each of these periods also marks a discrete congealment of the forces of capital, knowledge and infrastructure, which in turn shaped Jaipur's urbanity.

The celestial and the astronomical

Jaipur's foundation in the eighteenth century by Sawai Jai Singh II was a grand spectacle. The Kachhawa clan descended from the hill-fort of Amber to the barren plains of Dhoondar. Envisioned around the garden palace of Jainivas, the city stretched out to the south of the Aravallis. V.S. Bhatnagar writes that the site was chosen to ‘connect it with the Amber fort by the range of Kali Khoh, at the apex of whose re-entering angle he built Sudarshangarh [Nahargarh], which commanded this new capital’.¹⁰ It straddled major trade routes of that period.¹¹ Traders from Persia, Sindh, Delhi and Agra made it a flourishing centre of crafts and business.¹² Unlike many contemporary cities, Jaipur's spatial configuration reflects a grid-like pattern, comprising nine squares or chowkris. It is supposedly inspired by the mandala design. Mandala is defined as a grid plan in the traditions of Vastu Shastra. It is a principle of division of space and may be composed of any number of squares. Each mandala has a deity to whom it is devoted and is also inhabited by particular occupational and caste groups. Temples and the Palace are also integral parts of mandala architecture. ¹³ In Jaipur, three parallel arterial roads intersect the east–west route in the middle, forming the squares or chaupars. The markets or the bazaars are situated on these main roads, while the inner streets are meant for residential quarters, traditionally designed with one or multiple courtyards, known as havelis. A thick wall, having seven gates, encloses the entire city. The nineteenth-century topographical accounts of the city mention the presence of wells and reservoirs here, which could supply water to the city through a network of underground and overground canals.¹⁴ Monica Horstmann, in her account of kingship in Jaipur, links this layout of the city to kingly rituals. She notes that kingship was ‘constituted in public space and public space is constituted by and for the sake of articulation of governance’.¹⁵ The city became a representation, as it were, of kingship and sovereignty (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Walled city of Jaipur with all its chowkris and gates. Source: Survey of India, 1971.

The foundational geometric design of eighteenth-century Jaipur city has been cited as an example of early modern urban planning.¹⁶ Jawaharlal Nehru saw it as a reflection of the founder's ‘scientific approach’.¹⁷ Nehru wrote:

Jai Singh would have been a remarkable man anywhere and at any time. The fact that he rose and functioned as a scientist in the typically feudal milieu of Rajputana and during one of the darkest periods of Indian history, when disruption and war tumults filled the scene, is very significant. It shows that the spirit of scientific inquiry was not dead in India.¹⁸

M.F. Soonawala's study (1948), sponsored by the National Institute of Sciences, would go on to further strengthen this assessment.¹⁹ This study of the five Jantar Mantar observatories of Jai Singh II situated him as the harbinger of ‘science’ in medieval India. Jai Singh II became a celebrated figure of nationalist modernity, scientific temper and the Nehruvian narrative of development.²⁰

However, running counter to these modernist interpretations of Jaipur's design, epics from the royal court present a fabled blending of Jai Singh's sovereign will and divine geography in Jaipur's urban space. They contextualize his urban vision in the circulatory regimes of religious power, capital and knowledge in the eighteenth century. Girdhari's Bhojansara (AD 1739) and Krishna Dutt's Ishwarvilas Mahakavya (AD 1749) represent this imagination of Jaipur. In Bhojansara, Jai Singh's city came across as a space where mundane life of the market merged with mythical landscapes of the garden enclave through sovereign mediation. There is significant tension between the intensive and extensive, measured and eternal qualities of the places described in the verses. Describing Jainivas, the seed of the city yet to come, Girdhari wrote:

There were Mukatmahal, Rajamahal, Badalmahal, three doored verandahs, bathrooms and kitchens in that palace. Big canals were running. There were many reservoirs of water and tanks…Behold! Here are new trees, new leaves, new branches, new flowers and fruits, new beautiful parrots sit on them. New bees are humming and birds are singing…Sawai Jaisaha Maharaj Mukatmani has his Jainivas garden with a perennial spring reigning therein.²¹

This image of Jainivas is replete with expressions of newness, plenty and heavenly beauty. Simultaneously, it speaks of the ‘perennial’ spring in the garden of the king – indicating the enduring dispensation of his sovereignty. Idyllic gardens are integral to the divine topography of Hinduism. In similar terms, Jaipur here is conjured as a fabulous celestial space. These romantic descriptions are interspersed with more mundane life of the city and its infrastructural components. Girdhari attributed the plan of Jaipur to the will of Jai Singh II when he wrote: ‘He laid out many streets, and thus enhanced the joy of heart. He said to Vidyadhara that a city should be founded here. Jainivas should come within this city, and this is my wish. There should be many cross roads with shops on them. The backyards of houses should meet together.’²² The city becomes an extension of the sovereign space, beyond the garden of Jainivas. There is a community envisaged with connected backyards. However, there are complex detours away from this intimate sphere of garden, streets and homes and back towards the imaginations of urban enterprise. The city turns into a big market place, with commodities from diverse lands and merchants engaged in transactions. Girdhari described it thus:

There are many cross roads with shops on them and thousands of hats where merchants of different countries are plying their trades…Many elephants, Arab horses and camels from Kutch come here. Embroidered cloth and plain cloth and jewelled ornaments are brought to Jaipur for sale from different parts of the World…The Europeans also live here…They are very wise and intelligent…Hundis of lacs and crores are current here.²³

The city is represented here as a global marketplace, with commodities and merchants and significant sums of money coming from faraway places. This suggests that Jaipur was ensconced within vast trade networks and had exposure to European merchants. Apart from this, the city is also exhibited as a site of Hindu religiosity: ‘There are many temples here such as those of Govind deva, Gopinath, Siva, Ganesha and Sun…The Brahmans engage themselves in Yajnas from early dawn…in every house Katha is being performed. They all sing the 18 Puranas.’²⁴

Girdhari recreates divine landscapes similar to Jainivas, filled with temples, gardens, overflowing streams and lakes. Ishwarvilas Mahakavya also dwells on the religious life of the city. A hagiographic account of Maharaja Ishwari Singh, this work details the Asvamedha Yajna (horse sacrifice) conducted by Jai Singh before founding Jaipur and the grants given to priests.²⁵ Many of these priestly clans became important administrators in the court and their lineage remained influential until the late nineteenth century. Vidyadhar, the founding planner of Jaipur, was one such figure, as per several historical accounts.²⁶ Early twentieth-century scholars have traced Vidyadhar's genealogy back to his Bengali ancestors, who had arrived in Amer following Man Singh's (1573–1614) exploits in Bengal in the seventeenth century.²⁷ He rose to the rank of desh diwan in 1729 AD and received a sirpao (royal gift) for his assistance in the construction of the city of Jaipur.²⁸ In Bhojansara, Jai Singh instructs him to build Jaipur, alluding to precise measurements: ‘It [Jaipur] should be populated in one year and should be twelve kosas in extent. Merchants from different places should be called to stay here…there are shrubs, sand-dunes, gullies all over. These should be levelled up and then the havelis should be constructed…I have got immense treasure. Take what you want and use it.’²⁹ Here, the plan of Jaipur represents a violent, modernist, urban imagination, where nature is conquered by infrastructure. It also introduces the quintessential feature of the eighteenth-century walled city-havelis (courtyard houses). Later, these turned into workshops for gem-cutters, polishers and jewellery manufacturers.³⁰ The haveli represented both the intimate life of its residents and the world of commodities, bringing together the two strands that pull at each other in Jaipur.

Eighteenth-century Jaipur was therefore an amalgam of contradictory idioms: the sublime space represented in the verses of Girdhari and Krishna Bhatt were counterpoised to the astronomical and mathematical imaginations of Jai Singh II and his European conversations. Several Jesuit Missions had visited Jaipur during Jai Singh's reign from the French colony of Chandernagore. Blake Smith reads this connection between French Jesuit astronomers and Jai Singh in 1734 as the king's attempt to underline his political and cultural reach.³¹ Dhruv Raina has argued that Jai Singh's experiments reflected the distinct ‘cosmopolitanism’ of early modernity that ranged from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth century.³² He was well versed with Persianate astronomy originating in the treatise of Ulugh Beg of Samarkand and sought to revise it in his Persian work Zij-i-Mohammad Shahi, perhaps to assert his sovereignty through knowledge production.³³

Astronomical knowledge was therefore a significant site of political contestation in the eighteenth century. Jai Singh constructed his observatories at the heart of the Mughal Empire, in five cities, some of which were not even under his direct patronage. This has also fuelled the interpretation of his astronomical works as ‘Hindu’ and inspired by Jyotisha Shastra by Chandradhar Sharma ‘Guleri’³⁴ alongside a similarly religious understanding of his urban planning.³⁵ The knowledge of celestial bodies and astrological predictions gave rise to a speculative regime for governing one's future. Jaipur city was perhaps an astrological device embodying Jai Singh's political aspirations. These were the times when local governors of the Mughal Empire were gaining political influence. Jaipur's astrological geography and Jai Singh's Asvamedha Yajna may represent similar ambitions.³⁶ It may be confusing for a reader of his urban plan to accommodate these two images – a ‘scientific’ king and harbinger of the so-called Indian Renaissance – who is also simultaneously seen as a figure of ‘Hindu resurrection’ in Mughal India. This was also evident in his engagement with Bengal Vaishnavism.

At the moment of its foundation, the discourses of infrastructure, capital and knowledge were mapped onto two different registers in eighteenth-century Jaipur: ‘celestial’ and ‘material’. ³⁷ While the former symbolized the sovereign's relation to the divine or otherworldly, the latter put the city at the centre of commerce, trade and calculative rationality. Infrastructure was represented in terms of ‘temple–garden–palace’ and ‘markets–streets–havelis’. Capital was in the form of ‘royal treasures’ and ‘hundis/market exchanges’. Finally, knowledge was envisaged in terms of ‘jyotisha/astrology’ and ‘geometry and astronomy’ (see Table 1). The city was a staging ground for the dialectics of an eternal ritual space on the one hand and wheels of commerce on the other. Friction between these contradictory regimes of modernity continued for the next two centuries, first in the nineteenth-century ‘modernization’ under Ram Singh II and then in the mid-twentieth-century developmental paradigm initiated by Mirza Ismail.

Table 1. The celestial and the material in eighteenth-century Jaipur

Visual complex

The late nineteenth century in princely states saw the advent of a new visual regime, mediated by the colonial paramount and the ‘modernizing’ prince, which also had implications for urban space in Jaipur. The figure of the ‘modernizing prince’ has drawn much attention in historiographical narratives of the Indian subcontinent during the British imperialism.³⁸ This figure was typically educated in the mores of the English, well travelled and enlightened enough to keep his subjects at par with those residing in British India – his state replete with the latest infrastructure in the field of health, education, arts and politics. In Jaipur, too, Ram Singh II (1830–51) was the harbinger of these changes. Ram Singh was well ensconced within the colonial pedagogy and was trained in English mores by his private tutor from Agra. He was also an amateur photographer³⁹ and patron of arts and Parsi theatre in the city. During his reign, a Public Works Department and a municipality were established in Jaipur in 1860 and 1869 respectively.⁴⁰ Different kinds of public infrastructure were built, such as public lavatories and a garbage train (kachra rail) that collected waste from the walled city and dumped it near its southern periphery. Open boulevards and stately vistas marked urban space outside the walled enclave⁴¹ and Jaipur became a centre of industrial arts and crafts.

Just like Jainivas garden was the imaginary seed of Jai Singh's new capital city, the tripartite discourse of capital, infrastructure and knowledge came together in architectural developments that took place in the city during the nineteenth century, along with the advent of new technologies such as street illumination, a proscenium stage theatre and photography. Ram Singh II was known to be a photography enthusiast and established a ‘Foto ka Karkhana’ in the City Palace, which comprised 2,700 collodion glass plate negatives, 7,000 albumen prints, several photo albums, cameras, printing boxes, lenses and photo frames.⁴² A clock tower was also constructed in Ram Singh's period, whose temporal rhythms regulated the city around it. As in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, the clock tower represented an ‘omnipresent public eye’.⁴³ The new public parks such as the Ramniwas Garden generated a vista of openness outside of the walled city, which was modelled on the European cities of the time.⁴⁴ It is noteworthy, too, that during the nineteenth century urban planners in Europe were preoccupied with congestion and prescribed open green spaces in the form of public gardens and parks.⁴⁵

A central aspect of the colonial visual complex of the nineteenth century was the exhibitions in Europe, which displayed the ‘Orient’.⁴⁶ Spectacle was everywhere: in new machines, street façades in the cities and railways. The exhibitions also created a ‘façade’ of the Orient for everyone to see.⁴⁷ However, the ‘exhibitionary complex’ spilled beyond Europe with the institutionalization of arts and crafts in the colonies too. The Department of Science and Arts, opened in 1857 under the Board of Trade in Britain, standardized art pedagogy in colonial and princely India.⁴⁸ The founding of the ‘Jeypore School of Art’ was part of this project and the artists trained here famously assisted British ‘experts’. Two figures, in particular, brought their expertise and pedagogic concerns to Jaipur. The first was Swinton Jacob, chief engineer of the newly founded Public Works Department (PWD). He produced seven volumes of Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details from 1890 to 1913. It was envisaged as a design template for artisans, who may have wanted to embellish buildings with ornamentation. Art School teachers such as Lala Ram Baksh played an important role in the compilation of the portfolio, by training the draftsmen-students.⁴⁹ Under Jacob, Jaipur PWD garnered a reputation for its beautification and architectural works.⁵⁰ It often came into conflict with Raj Imarat, a royal department patronized by the Jaipur ruler for additions to the palace structure and other royal buildings. Lala Chiman Lal, a local master-craftsman, was the head of Raj Imarat from 1886. He famously designed Mubarak Mahal, a two-storeyed guesthouse in the City Palace to host European visitors.⁵¹ Rambagh Guest House in the suburbs came next, with a dining room, billiards hall, reception hall and verandahs. After serving as the residence of Man Singh II, the last ruler of Jaipur, it was turned into a luxury hotel.⁵² Thomas Metcalf argues that the architecture of Raj Imarat under Madho Singh was specific to the ‘constructed traditions’ of the colonial state, which required rulers to receive British guests in their palace. ‘The Indo-Saracenic palace provided them [rulers] the stage on which to enact their fantasies of “Oriental rulership”.’⁵³

The second British official crucial to the aesthetic fashioning of Jaipur was Thomas Holbein Hendley, the resident-surgeon of Jaipur. He was a connoisseur of local brassware, koft gari (gold or silver inlays in iron weaponry), blue pottery, textiles, wood carving, stone carving and other industrial arts produced in the Art School. He transformed the newly constructed Albert Hall into a museum, which exhibited a vast array of local industrial arts, frescos and specimens of minerals, rocks and fossils. In his address on the opening of Albert Hall Museum in 1887, Hendley expressed his interest in educating the public of Jaipur through this exhibit, noting that ‘it is desirable that the artists and inhabitants of Jeypore should have opportunities of seeing what is recognized by all nations as art work of the highest type’.⁵⁴ The permanent museum was preceded by a series of exhibitions in the city that showcased the arts of Jaipur to tourists, general public and buyers. The 1866 Indo-Colonial Exhibition in London devoted two courts to Jaipur's art and catapulted the city to international fame.⁵⁵ A Raj Imarat building – Naya Mahal in the outer courtyard of the City Palace – was the site for the ‘Jeypore Exhibition’ (1883) curated by Hendley. In his memorials patronized by the Jaipur court, Hendley annotated chromo-lithographs of the displayed wares in four volumes reminiscent of Jacob's Portfolio.⁵⁶

The exhibitions informed a physical and material arrangement of urban space, ordering a specific kind of ‘public’ in its wake. The opening of the museum saw an increase in the number of tourists to the city. Interest in arts intensified among the locals who visited the exhibitions and the museum in numbers.⁵⁷ These exhibitions and the museum not only curated the colonized people and their life as ‘exotic’, but also re-valued their objects as ‘artifacts’ arranging them in a particular logic and regulating the flow of visitors.⁵⁸ The executive committee of the Jeypore Exhibition had included Pandit Opendranath Sen, the principal of Jaipur School of Art, and Babu Kanti Chander Mukherjee, the prime minister of Jaipur. Both came from Bengal and were part of the English-educated elite of the city.

The social and political ascent of the Bengali gentry, who collaborated with British officials, signalled a reconfiguration of relations between the Jaipur court and the nobility since the nineteenth century. Power was increasingly centralized in the court, resulting in a growth of bureaucratic influence. Since the late nineteenth century, most bureaucrats in the Jaipur court were from outside the state. At first, they were drawn from the Rajput elite; later, they were mostly of upper-caste Bengali descent.⁵⁹ An ascent within the ranks of state administration meant an augmentation of status and wealth, which led to a competition between different bureaucratic groups in the state.⁶⁰ The rise of a Bengali elite in Jaipur progressively marginalized the Rajput nobles’ power within the state. This is reflected in the ceremonial position given to a Rajput noble in the Executive Committee of the Exhibition, a gesture designed simply to appease the royal lenders of artifacts.⁶¹

The ‘global market’ of Jai Singh's imagination had materialized in Jaipur by this time and capital was diversified through growth in tourism and trade. The exhibitionary complex produced through building, beautification and museumization reordered urban space and its vision. British experts and English-educated Bengali administrators mediated this sovereign spectacle. The princely figure was thus refashioned under indirect rule to resemble an Oriental monarch with modernizing aspirations that contended and collaborated with paramount power. The site of such contention was the ‘spectacular city’.

Mirza tod-fod and ‘radical distributive modernity’

In Jaipur state, the tenure of Mirza Ismail as prime minister under the reign of Man Singh II brought a surge of transformations. This period can be interpreted through the lens of what one might term ‘radical distributive modernity’. His policies enabled the folding back of capital from the colonial entrepôts to small-scale inland urban centres such as Jaipur. This generated a new set of political and economic negotiations between the sovereign, his kinsmen and his bourgeois subjects. Mirza Ismail introduced a new language of urban ‘improvement’ partly attributable to European urban planning and partly to nascent ideals of nationalist development. New institutions of politics, finance and governance marked Jaipur's twentieth-century urbanity. There was reconfiguration of revenue administration and commencement of economic planning.⁶² The English-educated bureaucratic elite, circulating through princely states along with a set of developmental and governance practices, replaced the Bengali bureaucrat of the nineteenth century in Jaipur state.

In 1942, Sawai Man Singh II appointed Mirza Ismail as the Diwan (prime minister) of the state. Loved and hated in equal measure in his brief four-year term, Ismail was an accelerant in the city's life. Previously, he had been the Diwan of Mysore and later became the prime minister of Hyderabad. As a ‘serial Diwan’,⁶³ his ideas were formed in Mysore and pursued in other states. He also brought several professional administrators from Mysore with him to Jaipur. S. Hirammiah, from among them, became chairman of Jaipur Constitutional Reforms Committee (CRC);⁶⁴ Mr Rollo became the special education officer.⁶⁵ Circulation of personnel and policies among princely states created the necessary infrastructure in these territories, which eased their merger with postcolonial India.

The administrative refurbishing of Jaipur state under Mirza Ismail's guidance furthered the formation of a bourgeois democratic sphere in the city. The setting up of CRC, the Legislative Assembly, the Board of Industries and Commerce⁶⁶ and a partly elected Municipal Board acted as its institutional pillars. A memorandum submitted to the Capital Enquiry Committee in 1949 by prominent city-based businessmen and nationalist politicians hailed Ismail's ‘modernist’ approach to urban development. ⁶⁷ His proximity to these groups was instrumental in shaping the post-integration urban politics in Jaipur.⁶⁸ Many members of this urban bourgeoisie were also part of the Congress-affiliated Praja Mandal in the state.⁶⁹ Some of them also got elected to the Legislative Assembly and the Municipal Board and took forward Ismail's urban vision. For instance, Devishankar Tiwari, a Praja Mandal member, went on to play a central role as chairman of the Urban Improvement Trust in the 1950s. Ismail's appointment gratified the Jaipur Praja Mandal, which had long demanded an ‘Indian’ prime minister.⁷⁰ But it also angered many others, who criticized the ‘progressive’ government of Jaipur for appointing an ‘outsider’ as the prime minister. This refreshed bureaucratic competition in Jaipur that had been in vogue since the eighteenth century, when Rajput nobility and mercantile elite had to contest for courtly power with Bengali ministers like Vidyadhar or Kanti Chander Mukherjee. The Rajasthan Times, founded in 1941, popularized the slogan ‘Jaipur Jaipuriyon ke liye’ (literally, ‘Jaipur for the Jaipuris’) in a bid to resist Ismail's appointment. It was banned from 1944 to 1947.⁷¹

The conflict over Ismail's appointment was reflected in his policies towards urban improvement in Jaipur as well. They were informed by two disparate idioms: one was the modernist template of Western urbanism and the other was the city envisioned by Jai Singh II. A New York Times article from 1942 compared Ismail's work in Jaipur to that of Robert Moses, who is known as the planner of twentieth-century New York City.⁷² Moses is infamous for his inorganic and violent imagination of urbanscape.⁷³ His urban imagination involved demolitions and accelerated gentrification of areas inhabited by the urban poor. In a similar way, Ismail's improvements in Jaipur also energized the urban land market through a series of institutional and material changes. Land was extracted from older networks of patronage and kinship and became alienable ‘private property’.⁷⁴ By the 1940s, all saleable land was annually assessed for revenue to be paid by the owner/buyer.⁷⁵ Hereditary ownership of land grants reduced considerably, decimating the priestly class and Rajput nobility, which had gained power over the last two centuries. Old havelis were demolished to build new markets within the walled city as well. Agarwal Bazar and Dhamani Market in the walled city were built on old plots of demolished havelis.⁷⁶ Many of these were eventually turned into godowns and commercial hubs.

Ismail's modernism was strategically interspersed with his invocation of princely past of Jaipur through beautification measures. He oversaw the earliest revitalization effort for the walled city – new coats of pink paint, renovation of verandahs and slum removal.⁷⁷ A tribute to him noted: ‘It occurs to me as though Maharaja Jai Singh, suddenly remembering that his work had been left unfinished, must have appeared in a dream to the present ruler and insisted on completion of his work. It is however inconceivable that any but Sir Mirza of all persons in India today could have undertaken such a task.’⁷⁸ Not all were as generous with their praise for Ismail. Many from Jaipur of his times remember him as ‘Mirza tod-fod’ (Mirza, the destroyer) suggesting the extent of demolitions he undertook to materialize his vision. ⁷⁹ Many accounts remember the cutting down of trees during Ismail's period.⁸⁰

Ismail's period in Jaipur was replete with tales of support and resistance. Ismail was instrumental in instilling confidence among the business elite. He is attributed with establishing Jaipur as the new capital city of postcolonial Rajasthan. Ghanshyam Das Birla, the Calcutta-based Marwari businessman and a close associate of Gandhi, personally congratulated Ismail on his arrival to Jaipur.⁸¹ On the other hand, local merchants, who were heavily invested in the walled city's infrastructure, resisted Ismail's policies. One Shyamlal Verma, editor of Jaipur Samachar and a member of the Hindu Mahasabha, resisted Ismail owing to his identity as a member of the Urdu-speaking elite.⁸² The Hindu Mahasabha and other fringe Hindu groups had shown their disdain towards Ismail's policies. Their main problem was the destruction of Hindu temples and street shrines.⁸³ In 1943, members of Hindu Sabha also led a fast in support of Hindi as the court language.⁸⁴ By 1947, they got together with walled city merchants against the policy of refugee rehabilitation, which had been initiated by Ismail.

The Hindu Sabha, under the leadership of Seth Sohanmull Golcha, a local businessman, met the home secretary of Jaipur in 1947 to discuss the ‘worsening communal situation’ in the city.⁸⁵ The Hindu Sabha was also concerned with ‘pollution’ in the city caused by the presence of refugees and advocated their rehabilitation away from the urban core. New markets were being created in the walled city by the late 1940s for refugee rehabilitation. The arrival of these new trading groups from Sindh had generated insecurities among Hindu baniya and Jain merchants in the city. Seth Sohanmull Golcha was not just a member of several civic associations, mineral development syndicates and patron of several public events, but also the founder of the first fully air-conditioned cinema hall in the walled city, Prem Prakash Talkies.⁸⁶ It was located in Chaura Rasta, at the cusp of the old and new markets of the walled city. The rooted economic and social power of such influential figures in the walled city was threatened by the arrival of refugee entrepreneurs.⁸⁷

The economic interests of local mercantile groups assumed a communal form and became a movement against the ‘external’ elements in the state. However, the Praja Mandal mitigated this conflict to some extent when they sided with Ismail against the landed nobility. Newspapers such as Lokvaani (edited by Devishankar Tiwari) and Jaidhwani (edited by Suryanarayan Chatruvedi and Ladlinarayan Goyal) were significant voices of support.⁸⁸ They were cognizant of Ismail's role in providing an impetus to industries in the state. These newspapers also participated in the modernist discourse on health, hygiene, public morality and municipal government. Similar views were also recorded in the meetings of the Jaipur Municipal Board, which had had representatives from the Praja Mandal since the late 1930s.⁸⁹ Activities such as soap-making, manufacture of leather, dyeing and tanning, which were targeted in the meetings and in the newspapers run by city's business elite or Praja Mandalists, were specific to Muslim and lower-caste groups. The exclusion of these groups from urban politics and space made politics in Jaipur akin to a ‘bourgeois democracy’.⁹⁰ The following section focuses on the reorganization of power in Jaipur state and the uneasy alliance between the monarchical government (durbar) and the Praja Mandal.

Return of capital

The nationalist bourgeoisie of Jaipur and the durbar had enjoyed cordial relations since the 1930s, when Man Singh II attained full powers after a phase of minority administration under British tutelage. On this occasion, two prominent figures from among the city's mercantile community – Jawaharlal Jain and Kesharlal Ajmera – published the ‘Jaipur Album’ (1935). Intended as a directory with a compilation on various aspects of the city, the Album's organizers were explicit in their loyalty to the young Maharaja.⁹¹ Both Ajmera and Jain were also close to the Praja Mandal leadership. By the 1940s, the demands raised by Jaipur's business community for fiscal, political and infrastructural support had come to fruition.⁹² There was a return of expatriate Marwari capital to the city and the establishment of several key industries by Birlas and Poddars. Jaipur Metal Industries, Jaipur Glass and Potteries Work, Jaipur Engineering and Construction Corporation, Jaipur Spinning and Weaving Mills Ltd and National Ball Bearings Corporation were some of the prominent firms.⁹³ In 1931, Maharaja Man Singh II began inviting businessmen from Shekhawati to invest in Jaipur city. He was partly successful with the establishment of a cotton mill in 1932.⁹⁴ It would take another decade for the expatriate Marwari capital to settle in the city. Conditions within and outside the state in the early 1940s saw a cascading entry of Marwari industrial capital and philanthropic establishments in Jaipur.

The 1940s were conducive for the ascendancy of industrial capital in Jaipur owing to several factors. First, Ismail's revenue policy and fiscal assessment of urban property made land available for industries. A number of jagirdaris (nobles’ estates) in the state changed hands, passing from the Rajput nobility to the industrial elite and the newly emerging, educated ‘middle class’ in Jaipur.⁹⁵ The nobility considered this as an onslaught on the ‘ancient aristocracy’ of Rajputana, of which the ruler himself was a part. They believed land grants to be ‘inalienable’ and bound by kinship to the ruling clan.⁹⁶ This disdain for the nobility engendered an unlikely alliance between them and the British officials in Jaipur against Ismail's policies.

The British also interpreted Ismail's urban improvements as extravagance at the cost of public interest during wartime.⁹⁷ In the 1930s, the British themselves had established the supremacy of the durbar over the landed nobility through the C.U. Wills Report.⁹⁸ However, in the 1940s, they changed their stance towards the landowners because of the growing nationalist presence in Jaipur state. Several big nobles (Thakurs) and small estate holders (Bhomias) sought British mediation against these forces too. A letter from the Political Department testifies to this:

Everybody including these Thakurs [Rajput landowners], talks about grants of cash and land made to Hiralal Shastri for his Banasthali School by Sir Mirza Ismail…The three Thakurs who visited are very bitter in their criticism of the Jaipur Government's policy that does nothing to encourage the loyal backbone of the state whose territories provide the most of the many soldiers serving with his Majesty's forces, while it actively propitiates and actually rewards the Praja Mandal that is the declared enemy of the Paramount Power. ⁹⁹

Secondly, the lands of nobility in the rural areas were being reassessed and tenancy was regulated. Revenue payments were commuted to cash. In some cases, lands were granted to Praja Mandal leaders like Shastri and to industrialists such as G.D. Birla for setting up educational institutions there.¹⁰⁰ Pilani emerged as a hub of engineering education in the postcolonial period.

Finally, the constitutional reforms in Jaipur under Ismail completed the political process of ‘re-allocating’ status from the nobility to the ‘professional bourgeoisie’.¹⁰¹ The Praja Mandalists had outnumbered the members of Sardar Sabha, a body of Rajput nobility in the Constitutional Reforms Committee.¹⁰²

By the early 1940s, the war had impeded the growth of overseas trade and forced merchant interests to move inland as ‘industrial capital’.¹⁰³ It also paved the way for a nationalist paradigm of industrialization expressed in the initial planning regime. There was also a shift in investment from commodity trade to industry. The inhospitable political environment in Bengal could have triggered the flight of Marwari capital from its bastion.¹⁰⁴ Anti-Marwari sentiment among Bengalis heightened during the cloth famine of 1940s.¹⁰⁵ A booklet from 1945 expressed this antagonism laced with an ethnic undertone: ‘These quota holders and wholesalers own the cloth of all Bengalis. Most of them are Marwaris; Kolkata's Burrabazaar is their main fort and Marwari Chamber of Commerce their main patron.’¹⁰⁶

Eventually, many Marwari business houses moved from trade in cloth and money lending to cement plants or metallurgical operations. This shift was helped along by the developmentalist aspiration of the indigenous bourgeoisie, anticipating the impending postcolonial moment. The Bombay Plan of 1944, which was authored by significant nationalist businessmen, reflected this aspiration.¹⁰⁷ Princely cities emerged as the new site for this developmental paradigm since World War II.¹⁰⁸ The career of Jaipur Metal Industry may be a case in point. It started in Calcutta, then shifted to Mehsana (Baroda state) and finally arrived at Jaipur in 1943.¹⁰⁹

The industrial ‘mode of production’ in Jaipur did not necessarily lead to corresponding ‘relations of production’, where the structure of class antagonism impeded the growth of capital. Cheap labour was available, but not organized enough to resist the industrial elite. This was in contrast to the colonial cities, where the long presence of capital had turned them into sites of sharpening class contradictions and resultant militant trade unionism.¹¹⁰ Most factory workers in Jaipur were landless rural migrants or Hindu refugees from Sindh who had settled in Jaipur post-1947.¹¹¹ The latter were termed ‘frozen man power’,¹¹² which also shaped their self-perception as ‘purusharthis’.¹¹³ This fed into the larger narrative of refugee labour for developmental works in postcolonial India, primarily in Bengal and Punjab.¹¹⁴

The increasing significance of Jaipur city in post-integration Rajasthan 1949 was premised on the dominance of the urban-educated elite in Praja Mandal politics. This educated, ‘professional bourgeoisie’ in the Constitutional Reforms Committee cultivated ‘personal, familial and political ties’ with the members of industrial elite, comprising local merchants and Marwari expatriates from colonial centres such as Bombay and Calcutta.¹¹⁵ These bonds of trust or ‘fraternal’ networks were conducive to industrial investments in Jaipur.¹¹⁶

The urban elite also co-opted other regional political forces and made the city into a centre of industry and development by the 1970s. One such alliance was between the Praja Mandal and Jat peasantry of Shekhawati in their struggle against the nobility. In 1938, the prominent leader of the Praja Mandal, founder of Bajaj industries and treasurer of the All India Congress Committee, Seth Jamnalal Bajaj, co-opted the Jat Kisan Sabha leader Harlal Singh. In 1939, another Marwari businessman and then Calcutta mayor, Seth Anandilal Poddar, attended a Kisan Sabha meeting in Sikar.¹¹⁷ The uneasy alliance of ‘co-belligerents’¹¹⁸ – Praja Mandal and Jat peasants – defined the character of Rajasthani politics for decades. Muslims, untouchable castes and small Rajput landowners (the bhumias) lost out in political competition.¹¹⁹ None of these groups, including the Jat peasantry, got enfranchised through the 1944 Jaipur Act. However, the infrastructural changes in Jaipur enabled the sustenance of a newly emergent professional middle class. Ismail's urban improvements in the 1940s and activities of the Urban Improvement Trust under Devishankar Tiwari in the 1950s were decisive factors in this regard.

The Urban Improvement Trust and the rise of the middle class

The ‘radical distributive modernity’ manifested in Ismail's urban improvements had empowered a section of the educated middle class in Jaipur. This class grew with the expansion of industries, banking institutions, education and so on. The Urban Improvement Trust (UIT) of Jaipur, formed in the mid-1950s, continued to strengthen the middle class in the city. The 1941 census registered a major growth in Jaipur's population.¹²⁰ New housing schemes were launched to absorb this growth. In these schemes, plots were sold at nominal prices to the residents, many of whom were part of the business elite and burgeoning professional class. Jaipur became a cultural and educational hub as well, a destination for All India Conferences of writers, scholars and political parties. This accelerated land development in the city. For instance, the site of the Congress session of 1948 was turned into three residential colonies: Gandhi Nagar, Bapu Nagar and Bajaj Nagar. The houses in these colonies belonged to the new class of government employees, small traders and urban professionals.

The UIT initiated many housing schemes under the chairmanship of Praja Mandal leader, Devishankar Tiwari, from 1958 to 1962. There were special schemes for employees of the Auditor General Office, Khadi workers and journalists.¹²¹ In 1957, three ‘classes’ of plots for different income groups came up in the Moti Doongri area, just outside the walled city. At the same time, nobles’ estates, like Uniara Bagh, Chomu House and Hathroi Scheme, became residential colonies at the behest of the Urban Improvement Trust.¹²² Another major spate of housing colonies in this period came up for refugee rehabilitation in and beyond the walled city. The Punjabi and Sindhi refugees were provided thurries (tenements) in the main bazaar streets of the walled city. Owing to the resistance of local baniya traders and shop owners, they were later accommodated in newly founded Bapu Bazar, Nehru Bazar (1959), Aatish Market and Indira Bazar (1977).¹²³ They were also provided land for houses in areas such as Raja Park and Adarsh Nagar.

These colonies changed urban life, food cultures, consumption patterns and reoriented Jaipur's development beyond the walled city. There were further transformations in urban space with the advent of private co-operative societies and the Housing Board in 1970.¹²⁴ Plots were then sold to the highest bidder, leading to a housing crunch for urban poor and lower middle classes. This encouraged illegal co-operatives in many parts of Jaipur, leading to ‘unplanned’ urban development that became a characteristic of cities of the Global South in the late twentieth century.¹²⁵ Ismail's urban improvements entailed a re-spatialization beyond the walled enclave, which became sites for new colleges, a university, schools, residential colonies and government offices. This trend continued in the postcolonial period as well, shaping Jaipur's space as the future capital city of Rajasthan.

Conclusion

This article has narrated the history of Jaipur through the conceptual prism of modernity, resting on the triad of capital, infrastructure and knowledge. Originating in the sovereign will of Sawai Jai Singh II, Jaipur's modernity was premised on the contestation between divinity and science. The city in the eighteenth century was ensconced within networks of astronomical knowledge, Vaishnavism and mercantile capital. The visual apparatus mediated by British officials informed Jaipur's nineteenth-century modernity. English became the lingua franca of administration. This saw the decimation of the kinship-based power of the Rajput nobility. The sovereignty of the ruler was centralized vis-à-vis his kinsmen; yet it was held together by legal and administrative machinery. The idioms of law and reform transformed social relations, economic structure and political power. The charismatic figure of royalty gave way to a monarch, circumscribed within the new political economic order. As royal treasures depleted and land was unshackled from older networks of sacrality and blood, the city became a centre of the aspirational elite. The discourse of democracy and freedom replaced the lore of inherited loyalties. The largely Hindu upper-caste bourgeoisie and upcoming middle class settled on the erstwhile estates of the Rajput nobility. The last monarch, Man Singh II, diversified into the fields of military and sports in a bid to reinsert the royalty within new regimes of cosmopolitanism and capital. Once a part of an ‘ancient aristocracy’, the sovereign ruler became a property owner and reverted to litigation to claim land in his own city. Past acts of sovereignty were reinterpreted in the new lexicon of urban land ownership and developmental imperatives of postcolonial urbanism. Several court cases and civic disputes between the state departments and the royal family point towards this conflict. Jaipur's contemporary urbanity continues to remain enmeshed in the play of sovereign spectacle and the developmental exigencies of the postcolonial state.