Infrastructure and public works in colonial India: Towards a conceptual history

In 1697, the author Daniel Defoe, famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, wrote a book titled Essays Upon Projects. The word ‘projects’, during Defoe's times, meant unscrupulous means of making money, usually by building structures, such as housing or public utilities. The ‘age of projects’ as Defoe (1702) called it, inaugurated an era preoccupied with the built form. In the 19th century, this built form consolidated as ‘improvement’, or governments seeking to uplift subjects by building public works projects. In the 20th century, governments, private finance and experts all came together to recreate ideas of improvement into that of development or a common condition of progress for human kind. A key facet allowing a variety of actors to ‘improve’ and ‘develop’ societies has been infrastructure. That is, built forms which facilitate and enable (and disable) social life, economic activity, commerce, movement and aid colonial and postcolonial state formation. We employ the term infrastructure in an analytical fashion, arguing that a variety of new histories, in this case of colonial South Asia, can be anchored around the concept of infrastructure. Specifically, we argue that using infrastructure as a heuristic category allows for a re-evaluation of the history of the political economy of modern South Asia, which has been studied through the prisms of space, capital and the social. Anthropological research has defined infrastructures as physical and material objects, such as roads or water pipes, through which people, capital, finance, non-humans and technologies move through. Brian Larkin shows how anthropologists have explored the political rationalities that underlie technological projects, the systems that infrastructures are implicated within and the affect and sentiment they inspire. Other interventions have conceptualized infrastructure as a social relation (Elyachar, 2010) and as a form of ‘calculative reason’ (Mitchell, 2001) which informs a vast field including governance, engineering, transport and communication (Carse, 2017). To quote Larkin (2013, 339) again there are a number of ways to ‘analyse and conceive of infrastructures’. However as Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel and Akhil Gupta (Anand et al., 2018, pp. 8–9) argue, most ethnographies study the neoliberal era, but there is little discussion of the ‘public’ nature of infrastructures and their meanings in the colonial and postcolonial times. While some headway has been achieved in documenting the manner in which the category ‘public works’ was initially employed in the colonial archives to refer to the movement of goods and later on to describe more specific infrastructures meant for the transport of people, these works have anchored it on to narratives about empire and state building (Ahuja, 2009, Chap. 2). While not aiming to theoretically reframe this literature, we draw from it, and ask how the category of infrastructure understood more broadly as a socio-material and technical assemblage of practices and institutions, which enabled new forms of governance and claim making, circulation, appropriation and dispossession (Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, D'Souza, 2006; Goswami, 2010; Sinha, 2012). Combining theoretical and empirical approaches, these key interventions help in engaging with the history of ‘public works’ and its framing as part of an inherently progressivist and modernizing discourse of the state. In the third section, drawing on newer works in South Asian history, we explore how understanding the life worlds around public works projects and the material, environmental and speculative nature of such projects leads to new ways of thinking about infrastructure. In this section, we unpack the future directions of writing the history of infrastructure. One way is to write accounts of single public works projects and to document its effects on livelihoods, mobilization of multiple circuits of labour, the interactions between humans and the environment and the specific character that caste and class assumes. Second, by engaging with recent scholarship on the history of railways and urban histories, we argue that foregrounding everyday social and cultural relations around public works projects reveals how complex categories of governance and difference emerge. Third, we suggest that public works projects are fertile grounds to explore the complex and peripatetic life worlds of labourers, who both experienced unfreedom on account of them but also appropriated infrastructures towards their own ends. Fourth, we show that infrastructural projects shaped by and reshaped the environment, thereby creating new forms of market driven land governance. These were not forged in ways that were solely colonial or state driven. The scholarship on the history of public works, while perhaps not self-consciously so, has a rich lineage. Colonial officials wrote and argued over public works projects, their relative benefits and detriments. Similarly, Indian nationalist politicians responded to these claims, with their arguments on how public works projects facilitated a ‘drain of wealth’. The first generation of scholarship on public works in British India, pioneered by economic historians echoed the cost-benefit approach, while another strand of scholarship subsumed public works projects within the framework of the history of technology. Beginning from the 1830s, the colonial state, across British India began constructing large scale public works projects, namely, the railways and canals. These projects evoked interest among the British parliament, military engineers, colonial administrators, local rulers and later nationalist politicians. For instance, a famous debate ensued between the famous colonial engineer Arthur Cotton and Proby Cautley on the relative benefits of transportation by canals versus railways and on the productivity of canal systems (Cotton, 1864). Indian nationalists responded by equally focused on infrastructure; Romesh Chandra Dutt and Dadabhai Naoroji developed what was known as the ‘drain of wealth theory’ and argued that British infrastructure building served as a means of exploiting the Indian economy (Dutt, 1950; Naoroji, 2016). Early scholars replicated this balance-sheet approach of analysing colonial infrastructure, albeit with hindsight and aggregated data, which spoke to the extent of railway expansion and impact of the railways on the colonial economy. In the case of canals, Elizabeth Whitcombe (1972) argued that rather than expanding the arable frontier, irrigation canals had brought about waterlogging and salinization. Ian Stone (1986) opposed this perspective, arguing that while ecological costs existed, they were outweighed by increasing peasant incomes.1 These early studies, as Neeladri Bhattacharya (2004) suggests, were done through a calculative and cost-benefit modality, using data derived from colonial sources. The magisterial Cambridge Economic History of India systematically addressed the railways. John Hurd argued that there was no doubt that the railways had made transport quicker and cheaper by around 1900. However, Hurd (Hurd, 1983, pp. 742–743) also suggested that wasteful capital expenditure, the government-guaranteed rates of interest and the political location of railway tracks together contributed ultimately to the ‘drain’ of the Indian economy. Furthermore, according to Hurd, the British Raj prioritized the political control offered by the railway instead of investing in other infrastructural ventures, such as roads, irrigation technology, agricultural knowledge or canal and navigation building. Daniel Thorner, an economist writing in a similar vein on the British railways made two arguments, which have implications on how we understand infrastructure. First, Thorner suggested that the initial agreement enacted between the EIC and private railway contractors was heavily weighted in favour of private companies. Specifically, a clause in the agreement mandated that the East India Company pay a 5% return to the railway companies, no matter the fate of the investment (Thorner, 1950, p. 173). Thorner (1950, p. 178) argued that this was the ‘march of private enterprise hand in hand with the struggle for sweeping private aid’. In addition, the railways were heavily undercapitalised, charging high rates and carrying little load, rather than the other way around. Furthermore, according to Thorner (1950, p. 400), the railways integrated ‘self-subsistent but not egalitarian’ village units into a market economy, ultimately undermining agriculture as peasants were forced to cultivate cash crops for distant markets. The railways, it is important to highlight, were also a catalyst. That is, it pushed new kinds of industries into functioning and created new trade linkages, leading to new forms of work, which were embedded in older practices of industrial life. On the eve of independence, the railways were employing over 100,000 workers (Hurd, 1983, p. 748). Perhaps the most important of these ‘linkage industries’, as Hurd shows, was the coal industry. While early histories of the railways and indeed the Indian economy simply pointed to India's coal reserves as an important and underexploited frontier, coal had much broader implications in driving a diverse set of built environments and infrastructures and worlds of work (Hurd, 1983, p. 750; Lahiri-Dutt, 2016; Nite, 2016). However, as Hurd (Hurd, 1983, p. 749) points out, ‘Rails, points, fishplates, machinery, locomotives, even sleepers, were almost all built outside India.’ The subject of canal irrigation further inspired a host of studies exploring their politics and the nature of the colonial state. Minoti-ChakravartiKaul, for instance, showed how irrigation schemes led to encroachment of the village commons. David Hardiman (2002) explored how local caste politics influenced whom canal water benefitted. In response to scholarship suggesting that colonialism was the sole transformative agent of irrigation works in South Asia, Mosse and Sivan (2003) showed that precolonial in this case were not in nature but in kinds of In so, Mosse argued that precolonial water infrastructures and and during argued that canal irrigation within the colonial While officials were in the of were more in of these the study of the colonial state and its through using the of irrigation infrastructure. early way of together these infrastructure projects was the history of technology. 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