Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City in North India: 1870-1930 9780367818906

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“Michael Dodson’s book on colonial bureaucracy and north Indian urbanism looks at the way in which urban meaning was produced in colonial India through the ‘incipient citizenship’ of Indians involved in an unequal but transactional relationship with the state. Rather than focussing on this rela­ tionship as a hierarchy of command, obedience and resistance, he explores it through the lens of infrastructure in a highly original way. This innovative piece of research is unusual in matching a finely detailed account of colonial bureaucracy with a big argument about the global making of modernity.” Faisal Devji, Professor of Indian History, University of Oxford

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City in North India

This book is a re-evaluation of modern urbanism and architecture and a his­ tory of urbanism, architecture, and local identity in colonial north India at the turn of the 20th century. Focusing on Banaras and Jaunpur, two of northern India’s most traditional cities, the book examines the workings of colonial bureaucracy and argues that interactions with the colonial state were an integral aspect of the ways that Indians created a sense of their own personal investment in the city in which they lived. The book explores the every-day and the mundane to better understand the limits of British colonial power, and the role of Indians themselves, in the making of the modern city. Based on highly localized archival source material, the author analyzes two key aspects of city-making in this era: the building of new infrastructure, such as water supply and sew­ erage, and new policies governing historical architectural conservation. The book also incorporates an ethnography of contemporary urban space in these cities to advocate for a more nuanced and responsible approach to writing the history of such cities and to address the myriad problems of present-day north Indian urbanism. Containing examples of bureaucratic procedure and its contradictions and enlivened by a set of personal reflections and narratives of the author's own experiences, this book is a valuable addition to the field of South Asian Stu­ dies, Asian History and Asian Culture and Society, Colonial History and Urban History. Michael S. Dodson is Associate Professor of South Asian History at Indiana University Bloomington, USA. His previous books include Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770–1880 (2007), Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories (Routledge, 2011), and Trans-Colonial Moder­ nities in South Asia (Routledge, 2012).

Routledge Studies in South Asian History

15 Foreign Policy of Colonial India 1900-1947 Sneh Mahajan 16 Women and Literary Narratives in Colonial India Her Myriad Gaze on the ‘Other’ Sukla Chatterjee 17 Gender, Nationalism, and Genocide in Bangladesh Naristhan/Ladyland Azra Rashid 18 Evolution, Race and Public Spheres in India Vernacular Concepts and Sciences (1860-1930) Luzia Savary 19 Democracy and Unity in India Understanding the All India Phenomenon, 1940-1960 Emily Rook-Koepsel 20 Memories and Postmemories of the Partition of India Anjali Gera Roy 21 Cultural Histories of India Subaltern Spaces, Peripheral Genres, and Alternate Historiography Rita Banerjee 22 Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City in North India 1870–1930 Michael S. Dodson For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/asianstudies/series/RSSAH

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City in North India 1870–1930

Michael S. Dodson

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Michael S. Dodson The right of Michael S. Dodson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dodson, Michael S., 1968- author.

Title: Bureaucracy, belonging, and the city in North India : 1870-1930 /

Michael S Dodson.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |

Series: Routledge studies in South Asian history |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019055706 |

Subjects: LCSH: City planning--India, North--History--19th century. |

Bureaucracy--India, North--History--19th century. |

- - nasi (Uttar Pradesh, India : District)--History--19th century. Vara Classification: LCC HT147.I4 D645 2020 | DDC 307.1/2160954--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055706 ISBN: 978-0-367-81890-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01723-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction A note on infrastructure and bureaucracy

ix

x

xii

1

24

PART I

The Banaras technoscape (and its discontents)

39

1 A riot in Banaras

43

2 Resorting to the language of stereotypes

52

3 Filth, disgust, and governance

63

4 Illness and hardship

71

5 Creating the modern from the traditional

76

6 Do you think the river is dirty?

89

7 Administrative infrastructures

94

8 Taxation and the transactional state

99

9 To contemplate what was and what might have been

115

PART II

The crafting of historical space

121

10 Lord Curzon tours Jaunpur, James Fergusson in hand

125

11 Ruination and un-ruination

138

viii

Contents

12 Files and archives

159

13 Three mosques and a committee

162

14 Not all tombs are created equal

175

15 Act VII and the not-seeing of Banaras

179

16 A Sharqi mosque in Banaras

188

17 A further note on whitewash

196

18 The ruins of now

199

Afterword: Infrastructure and the dismantling of the colonial self

207

Bibliography Index

219

231

Figures

0.1 1.1 2.1 8.1 10.1 10.2 11.1 13.1 15.1 16.1 18.1 18.2

The Banaras waterfront, 2018 The Bhadaini waterworks, as seen from Ram mandir, 2018 The front door of the Ram Halla Mandir, Banaras, 2018 Banaras old town hall, 2009 Jama Masjid, main façade, Jaunpur, 2010 Architectural detail, Atala Masjid, Jaunpur, 2010 Rambagh gateway pavilion, near Ramnagar, 2008 Jhanjhri Masjid, Jaunpur, 2008 View of Banaras from atop Dharahara Masjid, 2017 Main gate, Arhai Kangura ki Masjid, Banaras, 2010 Memorial obelisk, Chaukaghat Cemetery, Banaras, 2018 Jalasen Ghat, Banaras, 2012

11

45

53

103

129

134

150

169

185

194

203

204

Acknowledgements

To write a book is, invariably, to ask other people for help with it. And I have depended on a lot of different people during the course of this project. The ideas presented here were first tried out on audiences at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, the Nehru National Museum and Library, Jnana Pra­ vaha in Varanasi, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, City University of Hong Kong, Cambridge University, the German Historical Institute in London, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of British Columbia, as well as at the Madison South Asia Con­ ference, the Association of Asian Studies Conference, and at my home insti­ tution, Indiana University Bloomington. Thanks to all of those audiences for their comments and critiques, and to those who invited me, in particular Marwa Elshakry, Neema Kudva, Deepak Kumar, Tiziana Leucci, Harjot Oberoi, Ron Sela, Indra Sengupta, Amita Sinha, and Amit Suman. Over the years I have depended a great deal on the friendship and alwayssound advice of Brian Hatcher, who is as decent a human being as I have ever encountered. My thanks also to my friends and colleagues Daud Ali, Shalini Ayyagari, Ayaan Ali Bangash and the entire Khan/Bangash family, Ally Batten, Hayden Bellenoit, Ashish Chadha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Shalini Choubey, Faisal Devji, Maya Jasanoff, Shruti Kapila, Malavika Kasturi, O.P. Kejariwal, Christopher Lee, Denys Leighton, Javed Majed, Rochona Majumdar, Ankur Malhotra, Rebecca Manring, Michael McGerr, Marissa Moorman, Projit Mukharji, Rohit Negi, Ajay Pandey, Vijay Pinch, Pallavi Raghavan, Mina Rajagopalan, Sanjay Sharma, Ajay Skaria, Ulrike Stark, and Robert Travers. In Varanasi I owe a particular word of thanks to one of my oldest and best friends, Rakesh Singh, proprietor of the best bookstore in northern India. In India I worked principally at the Uttar Pradesh Regional Archive in Varanasi, at the (now defunct) Carmichael Library and the Banaras Hindu University library, as well as at the Uttar Pradesh State Archive in Lucknow. In London my research was conducted at the British Library, in Cambridge at the library of the South Asian Studies Centre of Cambridge University, in Chicago at the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago, and in Bloomington at the Lilly Library. Thank you to the staff at all of these great

Acknowledgements

xi

institutions for their assistance. Thank you also to my Varanasi-based research assistants Krishna Mohan Mishra and Vinay Kumar Sharma. Amanda Lanzillo helped me with translating the tricky Urdu documents and also fielded my occasional requests for photocopies while she was in London. Thanks as well to Laura Plummer who runs Indiana University’s scholarly writing program—a wonderful forum for the support of writing and the pro­ duction of scholarly comradery. I would not be the historian I am today without the late, and greatly missed, C.A. Bayly. Chris was there when I took my first tentative steps into academic life. He was there when I wrote my dissertation; when I published my first book; when I published it again in India; when I started new projects; when I had questions; when I needed advice; and when I wanted to talk about the structure of the revenue proceedings or something equally mundane. Chris was more than a mentor—he was a friend and someone I looked up to. And so, quite simply, I say: I raise my glass to you, Chris, in perpetual thanks. I hope that you are sitting quietly now, in the Reform Club of the Hereafter, cheekily sipping your large glass of Merlot under the portrait of Macaulay (and not with Macaulay, as that would undoubtedly be awkward). My family always deserve my thanks for their support, patience, and understanding, not least for enduring my prolonged absences in the wilds of Uttar Pradesh. My children, Sabine and Joshua, have been with me every step of the way during the writing of this book, and I am always grateful for their good humor, companionship, and love. My mother, Jo-Anne, was proud to display copies of my earlier work for visitors to our family home, even as she evinced little (or rather, no) interest in ever setting foot in the subcontinent. She passed away within just a few months of Chris. And to my partner, Sarah Imhoff, I would like to say a special word of thanks. She is a model and an inspiration, always reminding me not to write so much in the passive voice, to stop with the constant fiddling of my prose, and to always try to be my best self. She read this entire manuscript more than once, giving me great sugges­ tions and constant encouragement. I could not do this without her.

List of Abbreviations

ASI BL BM INC INTACH JNNURM NWP&O PWD Rs UP UPRAV

Archaeological Survey of India British Library, London British Museum, London Indian National Congress Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission North-Western Provinces and Oudh (1858–1902) Public Works Department Rupees United Provinces (1902–50); Uttar Pradesh (since 1950) Uttar Pradesh Regional Archive, Varanasi

Introduction

This is a book about the workings of colonial bureaucracy in the urban spaces of northern India and the relationship of bureaucracy to the ways north Indians created a sense of their own personal investment in the city in which they lived. It examines the creation of forms of localized urban identity, in other words, and how such local identities were produced, and lived, through interaction with the colonial state’s bureaucratic apparatuses. Living in Banaras1 or Jaunpur at the turn of the 20th century required many urban residents to enter into regular negotiations with the colonial state’s bureaucracy, concomitant with the expansion of municipal governance, renewed infra­ structural investment and modernization, and changes to property rights and taxation law. This is a book that looks to the paper artefacts left behind by those interactions and negotiations, now housed mainly in the archives of London and Uttar Pradesh, to understand bureaucracy as a productive socio­ cultural force – not productive as “good” or “beneficial,” but rather as some­ thing that made possible the articulation of residents’ wants and needs for their city’s present and future betterment. This articulation of wants is what I would call “incipient citizenship,”2 the forms of identity, allegiance, and ways of thinking about, and enacting, one’s role in the present and the future of a city that are elicited from urban residents by the daily operation of the colonial state’s bureaucracy. For several decades now, many scholars have viewed bureaucracy as some­ thing decidedly non-productive,3 an impediment to humanity and human con­ nection, and the opposite, in fact, of how Weber imagined that it would function as a liberating force opposed to the whims of personalized rule.4 Bertrand Rus­ sell wrote in 1952 that bureaucracy acts principally as a repressive regime. He was concerned with the increasing complexity of bureaucratic structures in the post-World War II era, enabled by “scientific technique,” and the resultant devolvement of state power upon petty and unaccountable officials. As such “new positions of power” proliferated, a bureaucracy becomes in Russell’s view a “tyranny of officials” – an “insolent aristocracy of Jacks-in-office” – that stands opposed to human agency, creativity, and social progress.5 More recently, Michael Herzfeld has examined the ways that bureaucratic functioning can produce “social indifference,” as clerks reject the “common humanity” of those

2

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

who stand before their desks.6 Kathy Ferguson argued the case for under­ standing bureaucracy as particularly destructive to women and feminist norms in a capitalist workforce.7 Akhil Gupta has linked bureaucratic indifference to the preponderance of arbitrary outcomes in state-sponsored attempts to provide better health care, education, and housing to India’s poor.8 And Matthew Hull has discussed how bureaucratic practices in Pakistan can become a form of collective action that isolates individuals from having to take responsibility on their own – a potentially dangerous task for civil servants in the unpredictable world of Pakistani politics, but equally a maddening process for those citizens who need to engage the state’s services.9 This book does not dispute such char­ acterizations. We have all been frustrated by the apparent indifference of a gov­ ernment clerk, and the small acts of pettiness and seemingly larger humiliations that accompany them. Equally, in a historical context, we must take seriously the colonial state’s exploitative, extractive, and controlling character, and the ways that its bureaucracy could create and perpetuate forms of inequality, impoverishment, and violence. What this book does, however, is to eschew this assumption as a starting point, and to ask instead how people crafted a sense of belonging to a place, a kind of partisanship on its behalf, through day-to-day interactions with a set of bureaucratic institutions designed principally to control a city’s populace and dictate the norms of physical urban form. How did urban residents engage with the laboratory of colonial urban development, and what did such engagement entail for the very meaning of a lived modernity in the north Indian city? Around the turn of the 20th century, north Indian cities grew quickly. They were also physically transformed through acts of colonial violence, new regimes of planning, forms of technological innova­ tion, and changes in the way that they were governed. This book examines, in particular, the major urban spaces of the Banaras Division, located in what is now the eastern part of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Places like Banaras and Jaunpur are not, by today’s standards, particularly large cities, but during the time in question they were significant centers of population and economic activity (and by any conventional reckoning, Banaras is now a fairly big place with an estimated population of about 1.5 million people). They were also cities with long histories. I seek here to uncover some of the ways that the recent historical development of India’s urban landscape was intimately linked to forms of human belonging, cultural identity, and Indian sociopolitical agency under the operation of British colonial rule. Impor­ tantly, this is a book that attempts to uncover the production of urban meaning in the everyday, the quiet, the ordinary, and specifically in the mundane interaction of urban residents with the colonial state, often through the mechanism of the bureaucratic, or administrative, transaction. This is a book that interrogates the impacts and limits of colonial govern­ mental power and the ways in which new voices were heard (and indeed crafted) through forms of limited self-government and administrative decentralization at the level of the city. Herzfeld asks at the outset of his

Introduction

3

discussion of bureaucracy, “who ‘makes’ the self ? The citizen or the state?”10 To this I add, who makes the city? And who determines what it means to live there? It is my contention that the cities of northern India were, by the early 20th century, thoroughly modern city spaces; no less modern, indeed, than Pitts­ burgh or Brussels. How, then, were these cities modern in my view? By virtue of their possession of certain technological infrastructures or their integration into a colonial, global capitalist marketplace and its cultural ethos? Partly. But the attribution of modernity here is also about recognizing that urban residents acted to create a future for themselves and their city in an ongoing critical engagement with the economic and sociocultural forces of imperial/ global homogeneity. This book therefore represents a historiographical repu­ diation of a long tradition of understanding these cities as looking backwards, as being associated principally with the past. Partly this has meant the colo­ nial understanding of Banaras and Jaunpur as possessing an unchanging antiquity, or indeed British ruminations about the romantic, ruined land­ scapes of northern India. Equally I am referring to the stereotypical char­ acterization of these cities (and here Banaras is in the forefront) as spaces principally defined as a religious and civilizational “other” to the European; as spaces where religious meaning took centre stage, or where the ground itself can be read principally in terms of religious symbolism. This was a common tactic for British popularizers of the Indian exotic, and I do not wish to repeat it here. When readers get to the end of this book, I hope that they will have a renewed sense of north Indian cities such as Banaras as labora­ tories for the emerging forces of capitalist globalization under colonial rule; as cities that were sites of experimentation in governance and administration, hygiene, applied science, history-making, bureaucratization, and resource extraction; as cities where people took their future in hand, actively thinking about its making. And not, principally, as “cities of light,”11 as spaces defined mostly by religious text or religious practice in isolation from the sociopolitical and economic landscapes of contemporary urbanism. Of course, it has not always been possible to get to the very heart of the matter that I am most interested in – to understand how people thought about interacting with the state, or what motivated them to resist a new kind of tax or the attempt to bring an ancient but beloved structure under new forms of legislated protection. The fact of the matter is that these sources do not often afford us such bold and unmediated insights. Much of the archival material used in the creation of this book has been recovered over many years’ work in the regional archives of Uttar Pradesh, and in particular in the state archive for Banaras Division located in Varanasi, as well as in the British Library in London. The archive in Varanasi, however, is especially rich in the day-to-day correspondence of the colonial state’s bureaucracy during the years this book addresses. It includes, for example, office notes, summaries, and correspon­ dence conducted between different levels of the local colonial administration (the Commissioner, the Magistrate, and so forth), minutes and summaries of

4

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

meetings of relevant municipal boards, copies of petitions and letters from Indian subjects, legal and financial documentation relating to property and taxation revenue, and much besides. In most cases, however, even this material offers only glimpses into the motivations, thoughts, and feelings of those who worked outside the bureaucracy itself. The people who lived in Banaras and engaged the bureaucratic state are represented within the archive only dimly, through layers of mediation and interpretation.12 (And women, it must be said, because they rarely interacted with the colonial state through its bureaucratic structures, are mostly missing from this book, with the notable exception of the Rani of Barhar, who makes an appearance in Section I).13 Inevitably, then, substantial sections of this book are, in fact, concerned with understanding how the colonial state itself, through scholarship and policy and prejudice, came to view the cities of northern India, their people, and their histories. There are moments, however, when Indians residents of these cities speak for themselves, in the forms of collective petitions and individual letters to government. These glimpses are often enough, I believe, to help us to think rather differently about how the colonial state operated in northern India at this time, and to re-evaluate the limits of its abilities to remake the Indian world in its own image. This is also so when one encounters the written work of Indians who worked within the bureaucratic structure of government as well, such as Babu Bireshwar Mittra, a prominent member of Banaras’s municipal board and a free-thinking critic of both Indian tradition and colo­ nial rule. Of course, I could consult other kinds of sources, such as the novels of Premchand, vernacular newspapers, etc., to find other voices that speak about the city and the people in it, but that is not the point. This book is intended to demonstrate that Banarsis (the people of Banaras), for example, cared about how their city was governed, as well as the development of its physical form, and that interacting with the colonial state’s bureaucracy, on a multiple of levels, was itself a key aspect of that “taking care.” I should say, as well, that this is not a history of architecture, as con­ ventionally rendered, nor strictly is it a history of the evolution of urban form. But it is a history of ideas, cultural processes, and a local politics that nonetheless places buildings and built space at its very center. The transfor­ mations that I am interested in here, in other words, are those constituted by the inter-relationships of physical form, colonial governance, globalizing economies, and cultural meaning.

Indian urbanism in the 19th century The 19th century was a time of substantial urbanization in India, just as in Europe and the United States. In India, the nature of city growth was sub­ stantially linked to transformations wrought by colonial rule, including changed patterns of regional and global trade, the onset of industrialization, advances in transportation and infrastructure technology, and the opening of Indian markets to wider European capital investment. Urbanization was also

Introduction

5

marked by a corresponding expansion of governmental, military, and bureaucratic institutions through which the colonial state exercised mechan­ isms of population control, resource extraction, and taxation. In the larger cities of India, such as Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, the latter half of the century also saw the creation of new and fairly robust forms of local selfgovernment through the establishment of municipal boards, as well as of local associations for the promotion of Indian commercial and occupational inter­ ests, such as trades and mercantile associations. These local sociopolitical power centers sat in an often-uneasy relationship to the more established bureaucratic institutions of the colonial state.14 Calcutta, the colonial capital throughout the 19th century, saw its population grow from about 612,000 people in 1876 to nearly 850,000 in 1901 (about 40% over 25 years). The bulk of Calcutta’s residents were employed in manufacturing and trade, although government employment accounted for about 5% of the city’s workforce. The principal manufactures of the city, including clay and brass work, and the milling of foodstuffs, were destined primarily for local consump­ tion. It was the facilitation of international trade – the raison d’être of Calcutta’s establishment back in 1690 – that spurred on Calcutta’s growth, with vast increases in the handling of jute, oilseed, and tea exports, in particular, during the 19th century.15 Export values more than doubled from 1875 to 1904, from about Rs 245 million worth to nearly Rs 550 million.16 In his 1905 history of Calcutta, Binaya Krishna Deb attributed Calcutta’s “unprecedented” growth from “a small collection of villages in the midst of a swampy land” to “a great and magnificent city” principally by reference to this international (and, for the most part, colo­ nial) commercial activity – to Calcutta’s status as an important hub of global trade – rather than the city’s role as seat of the imperial government.17 Concomitant with this growth, larger cities such as Calcutta also served as an early testing ground for the colonial state’s strategies of infrastructural improvement. By the early 19th century British officials recognized the increasingly insalubrious nature of the urban environment (and not just as a means of critiquing the “indigenous city”) and their own responsibility in regulating the terms of major cities’ evolution. The Governor General, Richard Wellesley, for example, wrote in 1803 of the poor water drainage in Calcutta, especially during the rainy season, and the potential for negative impacts on residents’ health. Importantly, Wellesley recognized that it was “a primary duty of government” to provide for the “health, safety, and con­ venience” of the inhabitants of Calcutta by ensuring that there was in place a “comprehensive system” for the improvement of roads, drains, and water­ courses, as well as a set of laws and regulations that governed city construc­ tion. These would include, for example, basic guidelines for housing quality and restrictions on the location of certain public “nuisances,” such as slaughter houses and burial grounds.18 Calcutta’s drainage would remain a problem for many decades, however, and it was not until the late 1850s that a large-scale scheme was drafted by government that would recommend the routing of waste water into the Hooghly River. (The strategy of draining

6

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

liquid waste into nearby rivers would dominate other schemes put into place in northern India in the years to come).19 In the case of Calcutta, as else­ where in the subcontinent, the practical experience of British engineers working on mechanisms for the disposal of sewage more safely from the metropolis of London – especially following the “great stink” of 1858 – played an important role in driving such plans to completion. In the north Indian Gangetic plain, urban growth generally proceeded at a fairly rapid pace as well, and similarly, such growth was conventionally linked to these cities’ integration into wider marketplaces of primary and manu­ factured goods, the increased presence of foreign capital investment, and the creation of new regional and national transportation infrastructure. Kanpur (Cawnpore) was the most dramatic example of this sort of change. In the ear­ lier 18th century it was little more than a village until occupied by the East India Company’s military following the signing of the 1773 treaty with the Nawab of Awadh. After the rebellion of 1857 the city grew further in impor­ tance with the establishment of a more robust military presence. Kanpur then grew from about 123,000 people in 1872 to slightly less than 189,000 twenty years later (an increase of more than 50%), thanks to the city’s rapid indus­ trialization, itself a result of shifting market conditions for cotton, especially, with the onset of the US Civil War. A rail link between Kanpur and Calcutta was completed in 1863; large-scale cotton-spinning and weaving factories were established from the late 1860s, with more than 6,000 people finding employ­ ment in that industry by the end of the century. Kanpur was also home from this time to a series of tanneries that produced a range of leather goods for military and domestic purposes.20 European capital investment was key to this industrial development, with many mill owners having their roots in entrepre­ neurial indigo cultivation, although Indian capital did play a role in the tan­ ning industry, especially, in later years.21 Other north Indian cities grew less quickly than Kanpur, but many reached a significant size by the end of the 19th century. According to the 1891 census, Lucknow was home to 273,000 people, making it the largest city on the Gangetic plain; Allahabad had 175,000; and Agra 169,000.22 Banaras was the second largest of north India’s cities, and its most densely populated, with 219,000 people in the same year (on a par with cities such as Antwerp, Alex­ andria, and Bristol).23 Of course, not all towns grew larger or, indeed, more prosperous during the 19th century. In the case of Mizapur, for example, its status as a flourishing trading entrepôt on the Ganga between central and northern India was significantly undermined by the expansion of railway transportation, the decline of the Maratha Deccan states, and broader inter­ national changes in the cotton trade.24 Moreover, population growth did not always mean increased prosperity for a city’s populace. The weaving industry, long a “traditional” economic mainstay of Banaras, was similarly diminished in the second half of the 19th century, with the result that many traditional weaving communities there saw their livelihoods disappear, often forcing a migration of some members to the industrial mills at Kanpur.25

Introduction

7

Accommodation, displacement, innovation In the older commercial cities and towns of the north Indian plain, the governing practices of the colonial state were inflicted upon extant economic, political, and social structures with deep roots. These were urban settlements such as Banaras, Jaunpur, Mirzapur, and Ghazipur, as well as Agra, Lucknow, Bareilly, and many others, which pre-dated the colonial metropolises of Calcutta and Bombay, sometimes by many centuries. Thus, the physical and socioeconomic transfor­ mation of many north Indian cities during this period was embedded in more complicated, and often antagonistic, processes of accommodation, change, and the gradual displacement of older urban institutions.26 In Banaras, for example, influential mercantile associations, not unlike European guilds, regulated impor­ tant aspects of commercial activity prior to colonial rule, but saw their influence decline in the 19th century as new groups of traders emerged from the economies of the East India Company’s policies of free trade. Banaras’s economy, and ele­ ments of its social elites, became increasingly dominated by what Chris Bayly called the “new men” of the capitalist colonial economy: merchants, traders, and land-holders who took advantage of the economic opportunities that the Com­ pany’s early state provided, such as entering into newly created markets for the rights to land revenue or supplying goods demanded by European markets.27 Similarly, traditional banking families, which had formed an economic corner­ stone of the Company’s ability to expand its territorial holdings in the 1760s and 1770s, were gradually displaced in Banaras by other forms of institutional capital and lending, including, not least, the establishment of a branch of the “national” Bank of Bengal in the city in 1862 and the rise of other indigenous money-lenders from “new” mercantile families.28 Gosains – organized groups of mendicant-sol­ diers who dominated much of north India’s trade with the Deccan – were simi­ larly displaced by the Company’s wars of pacification in the Deccan during the early 1800s (and the British suspicion of religion linked to militarism), eventually abandoning their fortresses and retiring into obscurity.29 Such socioeconomic changes were accompanied by the gradual movement away from forms of traditional Indian authority and governance towards hybrid and, in time, more overt colonial institutions. Indeed, the institutions that underpinned colonial rule in north Indian cities themselves evolved from a rootedness in local Indian practices and symbols to take on increasingly liberal, modern, technocratic shapes. Here one might think of the gradual evolution in institutions of policing and the courts in a city like Banaras. Following the shortlived rebellion of Raja Chait Singh in 1781, the Company sought to stabilize its control over the region by installing Ali Ibrahim Khan as the Chief Magistrate of the city. Displacing the raja’s traditional roles, Khan oversaw for the Com­ pany the operation of civil and criminal courts, and was considered the city’s final, and highest, legal authority until his death in 1792. This was a personalized form of governing authority, which the Company valued both for Khan’s “even­ handedness” and his long experience in late Mughal statecraft.30 In later years, however, policing, in particular, was judged most efficacious by the British when

8

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

removed from the realm of existing inter-personal allegiances and, instead, “professionalized.” The colonial state built an infrastructure of thanas (police stations) on the basis of standardized plans that they felt promoted operational transparency, solidarity with the state, and good police practice, while also severing older financial ties between local police forces and established land­ holders. This is not to say, however, that the urban institutions promoted by the British state always successfully displaced older forms of living, acting, and belonging to a place. Instead, forms of accommodation always co-existed alongside, and within, forms of displacement. For example, many of Banaras’s basic maintenance and infrastructure services, as well as security and even the arbitration of disputes between neighbors, were managed by hyper-local neigh­ borhood associations, often headed by a mukhtar (a neighborhood leader). But in the latter half of the 19th century an elected municipal board, answerable largely to the priorities of the colonial state, sought to provide just this range of services to residents, but on a city-wide basis. Municipal boards, then, often served to mediate between the desires and expectations of the colonial state, on the one hand, and those of the local populace, on the other. It was a fraught middle ground that Francis Robinson has described as a site of constant nego­ tiation between competing and often irreconcilable interests.31 Physically, the established north Indian city was also re-shaped by processes of innovation and accommodation during the course of the 19th century. It became, in essence, a mélange of the old and the new, piled upon and next to one another in often unpredictable, and surprising, ways. The marshlands and natural lakes that dotted the interior parts of Banaras for several centuries and served as natural repositories during the rainy season were built over as the city expanded, necessitating the construction of a series of artificial drains by the East India Company’s government in the 1820s. Such lakes reappeared only with the monsoon, like a sort of ghost making an unexpected visitation. But even these drains became a problem that needed solving by the 1880s, as they clogged and over-flowed with the crush of new populations.32 Elsewhere, land was routinely appropriated by the colonial state in order to build the new infrastructure of governance: police stations, for certain, but also hospitals, colleges, courthouses, revenue buildings, and much else. These structures, often large in scale, sat in the midst of older neighborhoods, hemmed in by multi-storey, multi-family dwellings, as well as the kaccha (“unfinished”) houses of the poor. Many of these buildings were constructed in a British style, such as the neoclassical Chetganj police station and the churches of Godaulia, or the neo-Gothic Sanskrit College nearby in Jagatganj. However, increasingly, the physical infrastructure of governance under British rule in northern India exhibited an Indo-Saracenic style. The 1913 civil court house in Banaras’s cantonment, designed by John Begg, the magnificent carved sandstone town hall and clock tower in Mirzapur (1891), the new thana in Banaras’s chowk (c. 1903), and even the utilitarian new Collector’s court in Jaunpur (1911), all fused aspects of Indian architectural form and styling into a new built context intended to serve, ultimately, British colonial ends.33

Introduction

9

But perhaps the processes of accommodation, displacement, and innova­ tion I am describing can best be glimpsed through engagements with urban land-holding – specifically how land ownership was transferred from one indi­ vidual to another and how it was taxed during this process. Northern India was in fact a patchwork of legally distinct kinds of agricultural land and landtenure: the mahalwari land-tenure and taxation system, prevalent in northern India, could operate as a pattidari or bhaiachara, for example.34 In the cities land could be owned outright by an individual, held in a trust or as a land grant, assigned to a specific purpose by government, held on a long-term lease (known as parjauti), or simply belong to the state (including as nazul, which was land that had reverted to the state’s ownership). The passing of the imperial Transfer of Property Act of 1882 curtailed the ability to hold land in perpetuity, instilling land with greater free-market qualities,35 although this patchwork of old and new mechanisms for land ownership and transfer remained more or less intact well into the 20th century. Importantly, in the example that follows, the role of innovator was held not by British adminis­ trators, as one has come to expect in accounts of a place like Banaras, but by Indians, thus serving as a reminder that these processes of urban change are not somehow pre-set as a sort of British sawaal, Indian jawaab.36 In the relatively prosperous post-World War I period, as property prices boomed in northern India, some residents of the city of Banaras lobbied the provincial government to abolish the future levying of a heavy, traditional form of land taxation that prevailed in certain parts of the city. This was known as haq-i-chaharam, or “the right to one fourth.” Haq-i-chaharam was routinely levied by zamindars (land-owners) on the sale of house properties that were located on land that they owned, but leased to the occupant on a fixed, long-term basis (parjauti). As the name suggests, the zamindar claimed in such cases of sale one quarter of the purchase price back from the seller. The colonial state understood this practice as having its origins in the unset­ tled days of the 18th century, and to be related to the practice of giving gifts to a local leader in return for a guarantee of physical security and the right to conduct commerce freely (nazrana). It had its benefits and its draw-backs, to be certain. On the one hand, the colonial state recognized that this tax restricted the free transfer of land, and probably resulted in collusion between buyer and seller to under-report sales figures and thus also reduce stamp duty. It also led to an increased pressure on demand for housing, as the tax was a disincentive to property development, and this was a particular problem in a city such as Banaras that had, more so than other cities in the north, a rela­ tively fast-growing population. On the other hand, the state understood that the tax prevented the development of highly speculative land markets and the over-building of already dense neighborhoods. This had been a particular problem in places like Naini Tal, where land leased on favorable terms to developers had generated huge increases in housing costs, with little addi­ tional revenue for the state.37 In Banaras, the “Kashi Chaharam Nivarini Sabha” (the “Banaras Eradication of Chaharam Society”) argued specifically

10

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

in the early 1920s that the tax was little more than a “custom” that was now outdated and served only to suppress the operation of the free market. Moreover, the tax was the continuation of a sort of feudal arrangement in which the land holder “suck[s] the blood out of his tenant’s hard earned money,”38 in the words of one of the society’s petitions. Haq-i-chaharam, in other words, was for many Banarsis a relic of a different era that had no place in a city that aspired to capitalist modernity.39 To recognize the historical and on-going layering of a city such as Banaras – in the forms of its physical structures, legal and bureaucratic arrangements, its sociocultural practices – is also to recognize the need for a methodology that can adequately account for these layers, and for the ways in which individuals confronted the colonial state to produce change, provide accommodation, and suffer forms of displacement. In the next section I will outline my general approach to writing about such urbanism through two principal concepts – “infrastructure” and the “transaction” – and explain how these relate to a dis­ cernment of “incipient citizenship” in the colonized north Indian city.

Infrastructure, transaction, and urban citizenship In recent anthropological writing, especially, the notion of “infrastructure” has been theorized as a dynamic site of investigation that links the physical to the social; a site to theorize human “aspiration and expectation, deferral and aban­ donment,” in other words, through reference to the material forms of city life. To study infrastructure is to study how things (social things, institutional things, and material things) are rendered possible or impossible, and to see the world in which we live as “both already structured and always in formation.”40 I am interested here in how infrastructure creates the potential for political and cultural spaces (both physical space and “transactional space” – a term that I will explain below) in the city and how it promotes the expression of ideas and desires related to place. I am also interested in infrastructure as a corresponding metaphor for governance, in that it allows us to think of cities and their attendant sociopolitical lives in the terms of relationships of layering and distance – in nearly spatial or physical terms, that is – rather than necessarily as a hierarchy in the colonial scheme of things. Infrastructure embodies moments of displacement and accommodation as forms of accretion and layering. There are three component parts to my own understanding of the notion of “infrastructure” that I wish to highlight here as particularly relevant to a study of the historical north Indian colonial city.41 First, understood at its most conventional level, urban infrastructure was composed of steel pipes, road stones, brick and wire, concrete, glass, and whitewash. When put together in a particular fashion, these materials created the physical elements of water dis­ tribution, sewerage, and transportation, of governance, tax collection and public safety, of education and recreation, and, through the practices of archi­ tectural restoration, of “historic” spaces prone to the crafting of narratives of historical belonging or estrangement. The provision of a domestic water supply

Introduction

11

Figure 0.1 The Banaras waterfront, 2018 Image supplied by author

might allow for transformations in a household’s daily routine; better sewage disposal could reduce the likelihood of contracting cholera; and the expansion of road or railway infrastructure might allow for new types of commercial or religious activity to emerge. These were all forms that provided a physical interface with which to engage the services provided by the state, as well as their attendant ideologies. Second, new legal, administrative, and bureaucratic regimes (for short, “l/a/b”) were created alongside these physical configurations by the colonial state. These defined the nature and extent of taxation for city-dwellers – for example, the ways in which land-holding rights in urban contexts were recognized and arbitrated by the state, as well as the institutional mechanisms for interacting with the state itself (including the cadre of clerks and sub-inspectors, their offices, chairs, pens and paper, standardized forms, etc.). These l/a/b structures fashioned the categories of the “tax-payer” and the legitimate city “resident,” sought to define his or her relationship to the city through mandatory financial commitments, and created expectations of privileges and reciprocal service as well. We may, then, add a third element of infrastructure to this aggregation of the physical and the l/a/b: the social and the cultural milieus in which urban residents enacted their daily routines. This might include their historical experiences, their emotional connections to place, their senses of entitlement, belonging, or estrangement, social and community identities, as well as indi­ vidual and collective aspirations for the future. I am not suggesting that

12

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

physical or legal infrastructures were placed into an existing cultural context in the north Indian city – as though they were created in a vacuum of some sort and then plopped down into a pre-existing cultural space – but rather that the physical and l/a/b components of infrastructure were co-created in on-going, reciprocal, and necessarily uneven forms of “dialogue” with historical and contemporary forms of sociopolitics and culture.42 The metaphor of “engraft­ ment” – the notion peddled by Britons that Western ideas could flourish, and also transform, the Indian context through a kind of implantation – is not very successful here for understanding how north Indian cities evolved during the colonial period.43 Better, I think, to use terms such as “accretion” and “multi­ plicity.” Considered just as a physicality, I would point to the metaphor of new pipes being added to older ones, necessitating new connections and forms of improvisation, as closer to what I am thinking of. Or of a new road, made from widening and paving the dirt lanes and footpaths forged by people over many centuries, but which also remain just below the surface, partly but never entirely forgotten as a way of moving from one place to another. In this char­ acterization, the city is always in a state of “becoming” as new things accrete alongside the old, as hope and fear coexist, and pasts and potential futures multiply and jostle for view. This book attempts to always analyze these three elements together – the physical, l/a/b, and sociocultural context – as a dynamic, and to treat infrastructure not a thing, per se, but instead as a set of practices and possibilities related to city life. In the context of a colonial regime, however, questions of power differ­ entials and the capacity of the governed to act in their own interests remain central to any analysis of the practices of the state. The changes to the urban fabric that I discuss in these pages were often intended by the colonial state to create a modern city and a modern subject population – a city that was con­ ducive to the betterment of residents’ health and a certain sort of economic development, as well as the maintenance of a kind of sociopolitical stability (although in ways defined by the state itself). In framing the colonial con­ struction of infrastructure in this manner, I am drawing fundamentally on Foucault’s ideas about bio-power, modern pastoral power, the transformation of humans into subjects, and governmentality. Through the development of these concepts, Foucault sought to direct analyses of government away from “political structures [and] the management of states” towards “the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed;” the study of governing, in other words, understood as the structuring of “the possible field of action of others.”44 I appreciate Foucault’s emphasis upon the “mechan­ isms” and “tactics” deployed by the state through its institutions in the pro­ duction of forms of subjectivity (the regulation of behavior and the attendant notion of self-regulation), but I also wish to (re-)emphasize, first, how mechanisms and tactics were born from the ideological project of infra­ structural modernization, and second, the importance of revealing the colo­ nial state’s desire for a transformation of self, thought, and conscience in those whom it governed. The complex of infrastructural forms brought to the

Introduction

13

Indian city at the end of the 19th century served to modernize its physical form, certainly – to deliver people into aspects of greater healthfulness through sanitation and to transform their commerce to serve a wider set of (largely, but not entirely) colonial interests. But the state also intended these forms to produce a revolution in ways of thinking about the Indian self in the colonial city. In significant respects, I see the colonial state as composed of a set of mechanisms and individuals that tended to refuse, or at least devalue, the “interpretive labor” of creating shared frames of reference, jointly understood meaning, and common goals for the future of both Indians and Britons.45 Indian transgressions of the expected behavioral norms of colonial subject-hood tended to be met with threats of violence, actual violence, and/or civilizational mockery rather than determined efforts to understand their motivations. It is indeed not uncommon to read in the colonial administrators’ archive paragraphs in official correspondence that begin with “I fail to understand …” or “it is inconceivable to imagine …” The building of infrastructure, as a project of city modernization, was not somehow embedded into a wider British effort to create a greater understanding of Indian norms, values, or aspirations. Modernization and infrastructure (as steel pipes and forms of legislation, for example) were intended instead to create predictable sociopolitical and behavioral outcomes in the very place of the work of interpretative labor. The British approach to the modernization of the colonial city might be understood, then, as an attempt to create new forms of Indian interiority and motivation – predictable ones that would obviate the need for crossing the sociocultural boundaries of personal interpretation – through the creation of a set of transparent relationships between ruler and ruled. But the reality, of course, was rather different. The creation of the modern city in northern India was the product of endless negotiation, arbitration, demands made, demands ignored, misunderstandings, unilateral action, and much besides on the part of both Indians and Europeans, inside the colonial bureaucracy and outside. Thus while I remain interested in how the colonial state attempted to dictate meaning through the creation of infrastructure, I am committed to also always ask whether attempts at creating shared frames of reference and common understandings, even within the pursuit of differ­ entiated goals, existed more robustly in the realm of the everyday in the city than the colonial state would have us believe, especially as urban residents and their colonial overseers navigated the real work of building a city’s infra­ structure in forms of (often unequal) partnership. The ideologically driven refusal of shared interpretative labor existed, that much is true, but how might such labor have existed in any case under an imperial regime that seemed to increasingly favor forms of decentralization while also clinging to the self-given right to make determinations about future development? This is where an examination of the lived dynamics of the third element of infrastructure (“sociocultural context”) plays a key role in this book. If the colonial state was, in promoting the modernization of the city, attempting to

14

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

define its subject populations and the conditions under which people “belon­ ged” to a place, as a part of this new modern, colonial world order, then the counterpoint is that urban residents in Banaras, and elsewhere, also performed as a part of this process their own identities as “subject-citizens,” and that they drew these identities from a range of sources outside the direct purview of their colonial overseers. The terminology of citizenship used here needs elaboration. Within a colonial regime, urban residents in cities such as Banaras were not citizens per se, understood as holding membership in a nation-state, complete with a derived set of rights and a set of interchangeable political relationships to the state.46 Indians were, instead, a population subject to essentially non-repre­ sentative rule that, despite occasional protestations to the contrary, often vio­ lated its own norms of governance to deny basic freedoms to Indians.47 What I seek to invoke here is a looser form of connection, something more akin to the sense of belonging to a place; an emotional, social, economic, and cultural con­ nection to it, and investment in it shaped by longer-term sociocultural condi­ tions, as well as colonial rule. This might be termed a kind of “incipient citizenship,” as I noted before, but on the understanding that it is not necessarily intended to invoke the early forms of an expected progression of political rights or obligations: Banarsis in the 1890s had no reason to anticipate the emergence of a democratic regime or a nationalist uprising, after all. Instead, the incipient nature of this citizenship, this allegiance to the city, this claim-making on its present and its future, is one that was open-ended and in-process, and, in important respects, political as well in that it was at least partly forged in inter­ action with the colonial state.48 I am reluctant to tie this notion exclusively to the idea of “resistance” to the state, however, and instead to cleave more closely to Foucault’s concept of “counter-conduct.”49 Yet even here I will turn not neces­ sarily to acts of opposition, but instead to what we might call “quiet acts of the ordinary;”50 acts that brought about change to the experience of urban life and contributed, in some ways, to creating forms of belonging to it. Indians in a city like Banaras or Jaunpur very often turned their backs to the demands of the colonial state, certainly, but equally they also engaged in cooperative endeavors with it, although such endeavors may have meant different things to different people. The building of infrastructure, in other words, opened new spaces for the expression of forms of incipient citizenship through modes of interaction with the demands of the colonial state. It is of course true that not all meaning is made in a place like Banaras through interactions with the state. One can think of plenty that happens outside the purview of that particular interface. But my argument is that this is one important, and under-explored, space for under­ standing the creation of belonging in the historical north Indian city. The last part of the methodological apparatus that I wish to elaborate here speaks specifically to the nature of this “new space” created by infrastructural modernization. I want to ask after the qualities of the interactions between urban residents and the colonial state that, in time, led to the creation of new forms of urban belonging and personal investment in city space. In addition, to ask how an individual’s perception of his/her role in a city was made visible

Introduction

15

to the state, and, by extension, to the historian through the pages of the colonial archive. The answer to these questions, I think, is not just through the notion of the “small action” of the “everyday,” but specifically through the “transaction,” rendering infrastructural space at the same time a transac­ tional space. I propose here that Indians were in fact deeply entangled with the workings of a colonial state that sought to control their expectations, their behavior, and to elicit certain types of intentionality, and that this entangle­ ment resulted in a multiplicity of transactions with the bureaucracy of the colonial state, in the form of pleadings, negotiation, refusal, ascension, and conflict. Such transactions were made in written form, and were also written about. In other words, infrastructure was deeply implicated in the continuous interaction of people with one another, with legal and bureaucratic institu­ tions, and with the lived realities of physical space. I prefer to think of forms of interaction with the bureaucracy of the colo­ nial state as “transactional” for a number of reasons. First, as a term that draws its inspiration from Georg Simmel’s early essay on the “metropolis and mental life,” the transaction invokes notions of monetization and capitalism, reminding us that the colonial state was first and foremost an extractive enterprise dedicated to tax farming, sourcing cheap primary materials, as well as creating investment opportunities and goods markets. Equally, Simmel saw the transactional qualities of city life as essentially creative, in forms of intel­ lectual vitalization and the making of “enlarged horizons.”51 Unlike Simmel, however, I see the transactional nature of infrastructural modernization as potentially rife with emotional content: city life need not turn human beings into just the functional objects of capitalism, in my view, but can elicit curi­ osity, anger, frustration, pleasure, and much besides. Second, “transactional space” tells us something about the colonial state and allows us to assess its nature at an operational, rather than ideological, level. It allows us to recog­ nize that the colonial state was not an administrative monolith, as many scholars seem to sometimes think,52 and that within its myriad moving parts there were spaces available to create meaning about the places and people its agents came into contact with. Equally, understanding the state as transac­ tional permits a conception of it as not just a force allied with centralization, but as mechanisms that allowed for the emergence of local understandings as the state’s bureaucracy confronted the importance of coming to terms with the mofussil (the small country-town), the district city, and all the people who lived in such places.53 Indeed, it is a core argument of this book that it was not legislation or the bureaucratic structures of governance themselves, as disembodied entities, that brought into being a form of “localness,” under­ stood here as an identity related to space and community, but that the trans­ actions elicited by such structures did. An affinity to local urbanisms, in other words, was (partly) created through an interaction with the colonial state’s bureaucracy, and not by that bureaucracy itself. Third, and finally, the notion of the transaction seems to me historiographically useful because it makes it possible to understand forms of bureaucratic interaction as productive of

16

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

meaning for people, even when such interactions might not produce sub­ stantive change in policy or practice. The mundane, everyday interaction with the directives and agents of the state can be meaningful, then, as in what Foucault calls “a multiplicity of often minor processes,”54 but importantly not just for the state itself, but also for those who must interact with it. Lastly, let me say once again that it is most certainly not the case that Indian municipal constituents, or Indian urban inhabitants, made meaning only through interaction with a European colonial state. I understand the colonial state in India principally as a series of micro-processes and microstructures, in which Indians and Europeans interact with one another, with ideologies, with law and with bureaucratic precedent, both inside the state’s administrative structures and at its outer limits where it encounters the wider world. These are what I think of as the realms of the everyday: the realms of setting and collecting taxes, of designating a structure as historically impor­ tant, or of choosing the “where” and the “how” for the construction of a new civic building. This state was not omnipresent, however, and there were plenty of meaningful realms which it did not, and could not, access.55 But it is an important site, and an examination of its workings can, I think, tell us much about how to revise the contours of recent debates that place the colonial state at either the center, or the periphery, of epistemic production in the north Indian city. To my thinking, the colonial state remains a crucial aspect of meaning-making in northern India, just not in the way that earlier advo­ cates of the undifferentiated power of the colonial state have thought. *** The structure of this book is intentionally fragmentary in places. It also pivots between analyses of the past and narrations of the near-present. This format reflects the partial nature of the archive from which the material for this book is drawn. This is not a book that offers a comprehensive interpretation of the past, in other words, but rather one that sticks closely to the source material and con­ sistently allows for the recognition of limits in what we might know about the past. This is a reflection not simply of the ways that archives have been kept in India in recent years, but rather of the documentary practices of the colonial state itself – this was a state that sought to know certain things and not others, and often ignored that which did not fit with the world view of its constituent admin­ istrators. But more importantly, the book is written in this manner as a strategy for revealing my own role in creating the narrative herein. I write in these pages about my own encounters with these places, the processes of doing research, and my own personal entanglements with, and desires for, a place like Banaras. To reveal aspects of one’s self is a potentially risky venture in a work of history, I admit. This is not our standard discursive practice. I have done this, however, for two reasons. First, and most simply, I see it as a way of encir­ cling my own authority to reveal something of the process behind the writing of this text, including the limits of what I know. I do not ever imagine myself to be speaking on behalf of Banaras, or India – to do so would be to recreate

Introduction

17

an inherently colonial voice – but instead to be speaking from my own per­ spective and knowledge base in favor of a city that I feel a profound affinity to. Second, and more important, I seek here to turn my contemporary investment in Banaras, especially, to a different end than the consolidation of my own scholarly authority. I want in these pages to link the past to the pre­ sent, to make historical scholarship relevant to the creation of urban futures, and to write history on behalf of those who seek to make places like Banaras and Jaunpur more responsive to their inhabitants’ needs. South Asia’s future is one of cities – this much is clear. Urban population growth in India now outstrips that in the countryside, and by 2050 most of India’s citizens will live in cities. Mumbai and Delhi will be the world’s largest conurbations.56 There have been several initiatives in recent years by the Indian government to address the problems of infrastructure to support this new scale of urbanism – the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), which ran from 2005 to 2014, for example, aimed to utilize central government funds to provide urban residents sufficient elec­ tricity, clean water, adequate sewerage, and better road and public transpor­ tation.57 But such initiatives have not been able to keep pace with the rate of urban growth, nor has generally weak municipal-level governance been able to empower local constituencies with effective, proactive decision-making in their own interest.58 In Banaras, the place that I know best in India, a 2009 JNNURM-sponsored “comprehensive mobility plan” did little but recognize the crushing traffic and overcrowding of the city, its poor electrical and water infrastructure, and weak regulation enforcement and then prescribe a “cookie-cutter” solution in the form of road-widening, overpasses, and belowground parking lots.59 Banaras’s most recent development venture, the Vish­ wanath Corridor, a controversial project that has demolished hundreds of homes and shops to provide easier access to the Vishwanath temple, deep in the heart of the old city, was promoted principally by the Uttar Pradesh state government, with the backing of the Prime Minister. Many Banarsis felt betrayed by the wanton destruction of familial homes, lack of meaningful consultation, and the meagre compensation provided.60 All of this raises the question for me: how do I write a history of a place like Banaras that is not a mere antiquarianism, nor simply an engagement in historiographical debates of little relevance to those who now make Banaras home? How instead do I write a history that is also a form of advocacy? The answer is that I am motivated by the animating spirit of Lewis Mumford’s magisterial The City in History, first published in 1961. Mumford wrote that history plays an important role in understanding the trajectory of a city – its evolution of form and its patterns of inhabitation – and serves as the foundation for creating, and then realizing, new, more egali­ tarian visions of our urban future. The study of the past provides us sufficient “momentum” to act on the future, in Mumford’s words.61 Mumford clearly wished to understand the ways that cities have served to better human life. A knowledge of these past functions could, then, help us to craft those yet to be

18

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

“called forth” from the city. Mumford also recognized the presence in the city of nearly forgotten forces, crafted long ago, that still influence our lives for better or for worse. The identification of such forces could, Mumford thought, allow us to consciously accept, or reject, them and in so doing enable our own visions of the future city to be realized.62 Not all would agree with Mumford’s optimism about urban life, nor his emphasis on the past as a means to the future. On the latter, Nietzsche, following on from Schopenhauer’s dismissal of the necessity of history for philosophical enquiry,63 recognized that the leaving-behind of history was a crucially impor­ tant aspect of our basic humanity and creativity: “no artist would achieve his picture, no field marshal his victory, and no people its freedom, without pre­ viously having desired and striven for them in that sort of unhistorical condi­ tion,” he wrote in 1874.64 I certainly recognize the attractiveness and potential transformative power of Nietzsche’s idea of newness, but equally my experience in the city of Banaras has taught me to value, above such newness, Mumford’s emphasis on creating an understanding of the historical underpinnings of what I will call an “urban trajectory.” Mumford famously claimed that he was writing a partial history of cities because he could write only in mean­ ingful ways about the places that he knew intimately. I would go further and say that Mumford teaches us that it is history itself that allows us to develop an intimacy with place, and in so doing create an ability to act meaningfully on behalf of it. My intimate place is Banaras, and as you, the reader, will soon see, I have a few stories to tell about it. *** The recent history of north India’s cities can, then, in my view, serve not only to inform present decision-making, but also serve as a palpable reminder of the vitality of urban identity processes and their links to spatial forms, even under essentially non-representative forms of government. What I will show here is that in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century, the modernization of Banaras (and to a lesser extent, nearby Jaunpur) was in fact a highly contested process at several levels of decision-making (including the hyper-local, the municipal, and the provincial) with profound implications for how people thought about their city, their place in it, and its future. The urban “functions” of these cities’ built form, I will argue, transcended the provision of basic transportation or hygienic services, for example, to speak directly to personal identity, sociability, belonging, relationships to the state, and the conception of future lifeways. In the first major section of this book I examine one of the most well-known instances of infrastructural improvement in northern India at the turn of the 20th century; namely, the construction of sewerage and sanitation infra­ structure in the 1890s. Banaras was rocked by a riot in 1891, set off, apparently, by residents’ concerns about the impact of these new forms of technology on their cultural and religious lives. The colonial state understood the process of creating this infrastructure essentially as a form of “engraftment,” in which a

Introduction

19

European technology would transform the city by its very presence. That is, the state hoped that such technology would not only improve the healthfulness of Banarsi residents but also turn their civilizational horizons towards a specific model of Western sanitary modernity. In the colonial view, the riot was in essence a refusal of that modernity. But as the state promoted this project and attempted to reap its ideological benefits, the truth of the matter was that the city’s new municipal government was the body most directly responsible for bringing the project to completion. As such, this section of the book traces the longer-term debates within that body, and among its constituents, about how it could best serve the city’s interests through better sanitation practices. Pushing aside the focus on the riot also allows a more central examination of how appropriate taxation became the key mode through which a range of Banaras residents engaged the demands and benefits of infrastructural modernity. In the second section I begin with an examination of the nearby city of Jaunpur and the local workings of the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904, an imperial directive intended first and foremost to be a form of historical landscape curation. As Lord Curzon’s pet project, the restoration and protection of India’s historical infrastructure under the Act was intended – like other infrastructural projects – to both reflect the colonial state’s identity as the best “guardian” of India and to put into place a series of policies that would promote Indians’ understandings of their home spaces, and even their history, as physically dependent upon British rule. However, Jaunpur’s architecturally unique mosques were mostly taken care of by a parallel body of local officials who operated between the spaces of colonial administration and colonial legislation, often frustrating the intentions of the Act as a form of “care-taking” to offer, instead, their own views of what constituted a historical monument, what it meant to local people, and how it was to be used and maintained for the purpose of the future. And moving beyond Jaunpur, this section examines how colonial attempts to extend this legislation through the state’s bureaucratic apparatus in Banaras could often lead to extended negotiations and claim-makings on the vestiges of the past by those who lived among the “ruins” of that past. Such claims often included a willful assertion of hereditary privilege, for example, but also a different model of what “care-taking” looked like. But before we move on to the core of this book, I offer you a short medi­ tation on the nature of bureaucracy in northern India. This next chapter argues that there existed at the very center of the colonial state’s mode of governance an unresolvable difficulty, in the form of the colonial state’s need, through its bureaucracy, to mediate the local within a universalizing totality. Bureaucracy is, in my view, the space that we should look to in order to understand the creation of meaning, at the level of the local and at the level of the city, and also to recognize the inherent instability of bureaucratic forms for the totalizing colonial system.

20

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

Notes 1 I will employ the term “Banaras” throughout this book, rather than Varanasi, following local usage. The alternative, antiquated spelling of “Benares” will be used only in citations. 2 This is not a new term, as renditions of it can be found most especially in the lit­ erature of political science. See, for example, E. F. Isin and P. Nyers, eds., Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies (New York: Routledge, 2014). 3 Take, for example, Jay Banning’s photograph of a civil servant in Bihar, part of his project “Bureaucratics,” that adorns the front cover of A. Gupta, Red Tape: Bureau­ cracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 4 M. Weber, “Bureaucracy” in G. Roth and C. Wittich, eds., Economy and Society, Vol. II (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978). 5 B. Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1952): 48–50. 6 M. Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993): 1. 7 K. E. Ferguson, The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1984). 8 Gupta, Red Tape: 6, 22–24. 9 M. Hull, “The File: agency, authority, and autography in an Islamabad bureau­ cracy,” Language & Communication, 23 (2003): 287–314. Also, M. Hull, Govern­ ment of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012). 10 Herzfeld, Social Production of Indifference: 1. 11 Cf., D. Eck, Banaras: City of Light (Princeton: Knopf, 1982); and R. P. B. Singh and P. S. Rana, Banaras Region: A Spiritual and Cultural Guide (Varanasi: Indica: 2006 [2002]). 12 On the archive, its construction and navigation, see N. B. Dirks, “Colonial Histories and Native Informants: Biography of an Archive” in C. A. Breckenridge and P. van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 13 Moreover, those who worked in the colonial bureaucracy were wholly men at this time, as were the municipal counsellors, and most, if not all, city “notables.” Women are occasionally talked about in the colonial archive I examine, but it is even more rare that they appear as petitioners or participants in public debate. 14 On Bombay, see especially P. Chopra, A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 15 On the growth of the jute industry in Bengal, see chapter 2 in D. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 16 The Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. 9 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908): 266–70. 17 B. K. Deb, The Early History and Growth of Calcutta (Calcutta: Romesh Chandra Ghose, 1905): 1–3, 127–65. 18 “Minute of the Governor-General on the Improvement of Calcutta,” 16 June 1803. Reprinted in J. Marriott and B. Mukhopadhyay, eds., Britain in India, 1765–1905: Vol. 6, The Public Realm (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006): 10–12. 19 See W. Clark, The Drainage of Calcutta: A paper read at the Bengal Social Science Congress, held at the Town Hall, Calcutta, on the 2nd February 1871 (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, & Co., 1871). 20 Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. 9: 315, 318–19. 21 T. Roy, A Business History of India: Enterprise and the Emergence of Capitalism from 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018): 108.

Introduction

21

22 Population figures extracted from the appropriate volume of The Imperial Gazet­ teer of India. 23 See D. C. Baillie, Census of India, 1891, Volume XVI, The North-Western Pro­ vinces and Oudh, Part I: Report and Provincial Tables (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh Government Press, 1894): 95–6. 24 Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. 17: 376. 25 V. Raman, The Warp and the Weft: Community and Gender Identity among Banaras Weavers (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010): 67. 26 This is a key insight of C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991 [1983]), esp. chapters 8 and 9. Also, G. Pandey, “‘Encounters and Calamities:’ The History of a North Indian Qasba in the Nineteenth Century” in R. Guha and G. C. Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 27 The term “new men” appears in a variety of places in Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, but see p. 268. 28 D. A. Washbrook, “Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c.1720–1860,” Modern Asian Studies, 22, 1 (1988): 57–96. 29 W. R. Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2006). 30 This is not to say that Khan’s work in Banaras did not include aspects of innova­ tion – it did – but that the Company perceived Khan as an authoritative figure because of his embeddedness and experience in the governance of Mughal succes­ sor states. See N. Chatterjee, “Hindu city and just empire: Banaras and India in Ali Ibrahim Khan’s legal imagination,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial His­ tory, 15, 1, (2014), e-journal. See also, “Notification, November 12, 1781,” Calen­ dar of Persian Correspondence, being letters which passed between some of the Company’s servants and Indian rulers and notables, Vol. 6, 1781–5 (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1938), no. 292. 31 F. Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Pro­ vinces’ Muslims, 1860–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [1974 orig.]), esp. 50ff. See also J. G. Leonard, “Urban Government Under the Raj: A Case Study of Municipal Administration in Nineteenth-century South India,” Modern Asian Studies, 7, 2, (1973): 227–51. 32 James Prinsep’s 1822 map of the city shows many of these old lakes and marshes. For his plan to drain the marshland around Machodari, in northern Banaras, see BL, WD4276, J. Prinsep, “Map of the area around the Machhodri tank,” 1825. 33 For more on the Indo-Saracenic, see T. R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 34 On these points see, for example, J. A. Rorabacher, Property, Land, Revenue, and Policy: The East India Company, ca. 1757–1825 (London: Routledge, 2017); E. Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 35 See R. Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009): 93–4. 36 Literally “question – answer,” a typical motif in both Urdu poetry and normative/ juridical literature. Although perhaps this metaphor does not work quite right, as the British tended to see themselves as the ones with all the answers! But I will use it in any case as a way of characterizing typical ways of conceiving of the taking of policy initiative in these contexts. 37 For example, UPRAV, Collectorate Records, List 7, Box 8-C, File 9, Commis­ sioner, Benares Division, to Sec. to Govt, UP, Revenue Dept, 21 January 1924; and ibid., S. S. L. Dar, “Report on Haq-i-Chaharam,” 12 December 1923. 38 UPRAV, Collectorate Records, List 7, Box 8-C, File 9, “Humble Memorial of the Citizens of Benares,” n.d.

22

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

39 Unfortunately the colonial state disagreed and rationalized the decision by noting that it was unwilling to interfere in matters of contract. 40 See H. Appel, N. Anand, A. Gupta, “Introduction: The Infrastructure Toolbox,” Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology, website, 24 September 2015. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/714-introduction-the-infrastructure-toolbox 41 I have been inspired here by how Nikhil Anand has treated his subject in Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 42 I do not like the term “dialogue” very much, as it intrinsically infers a kind of equality in power relationships, but it is useful in that it can also invoke a notion of back-and-forth, negotiation, disagreement, and compromise. See also, E. Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1895 (Berkeley, CA: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1994). 43 This was, in fact, a popular metaphor among British “constructive orientalists” who wished to encourage Christianity and other forms of “advanced civilization” through a Sanskrit-based education in useful knowledge; to “engraft” modernity onto ancient learning. See M. S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Cul­ ture: India 1770–1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): chapter 3. 44 M. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry, 8, 4 (Summer 1982): 790. 45 See D. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015): 68. 46 See G. Procacci, “Governmentality and Citizenship” in K. Nash & A. Scott, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), esp. 343. Ruth Almy has written recently about the disputed nature of “imperial subjecthood” and its distinction from the rights of citizenship in the context of South Asian migrants to Canada. See R. Almy, “Law, Nation, and Migration in the Komagata Maru Inci­ dent of 1914,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Indiana University Bloomington, 2017. 47 The freedom from being murdered being a prime example. See, for example, K. A. Wagner, Jallianwallah Bagh: An Empire of Fear and the Making of the Amritsar Massacre (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2019). 48 One can compare this with the idea of the “inhabitant” as formulated by Jean Casimir in “Haiti’s Need for a Great South,” translated by E. Colon and M. Koerner, The Global South, 5, 1 (Spring 2011): 14–36. 49 See R. J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), chapter 5. Also, M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978, transl. G. Burchell, ed., M. Senellart (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 50 I draw here on Mike Davis’s invocation of Asef Bayat’s “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” as a similar process. See M. Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006): 39. 51 G. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” [1903] in G. Bridge and S. Watson, eds., The Blackwell City Reader (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002). 52 The broad characterization of the Company’s, and later the Crown’s, state in India as “colonial” is often intended by writers to do a specific kind of con­ demnatory work, as in instances when T. B. Macaulay’s derogatory 1835 memo on education is used to “stand in” for a broad swathe of educational policy in India during late Company rule. It is not my intention to say that the state was not colonial, but that it was colonial in a variety of ways over time and place that deserve our detailed attention. See, for example, on Macaulay: G. Vishwanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015 [1989]); on the ideological use of characterizing the state as uniform: M. S. Dodson, review of N. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain, (review no. 622), www.history.ac.uk/ reviews/review/622

Introduction

23

53 This is essentially a reversal of John Brewer’s thesis in Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 54 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, A. Sheridan, transla­ tor (London: Penguin Books, 1991): 136–9. 55 I think most immediately in this respect of R. Tagore, The Home and the World (London: Macmillan, 1919 [1916]), but also P. Chatterjee’s pioneering work on nationalism, including The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 56 See, for example, R. I. Crane, “Urbanism in India,” American Journal of Sociol­ ogy, 60, 5 (March 1955): 463–70; “60 per cent Indians to live in cities by 2050: govt,” The Indian Express, 27 July 2016; “About 70 percent of Indians live in rural areas: Census report,” The Hindu, 15 July 2011; and D. Hoornweg and K. Pope, “Socioeconomic Pathways and Regional Distribution of the World’s 101 Largest Cities,” Global Cities Institute Working Paper No. 04, Toronto, Canada, 2014: https://131c34f3-641e-3778-b6f8-7f4cb1fce3f0.filesusr.com/ugd/672989_62cfa 13ec4ba47788f78ad660489a2fa.pdf 57 See: http://mohua.gov.in/cms/jawaharlal-nehru-national-urban-renewal-mission.php 58 Janaagraha Center for Citizenship and Democracy, “Annual Survey of India’s City Systems, 2016: Shaping India’s Urban Agenda.” http://www.janaagraha.org/rep orts/ASICS-2016.pdf 59 “City Development Plan for Varanasi. Final Report, August 2006” The full report is available via: http://jnnurm.nic.in/cdp-of-varanasi.html 60 K. Agarwal, “In Modi’s Varanasi, the Vishwanath Corridor Is Trampling Kashi’s Soul,” The Wire, 8 March 2019. 61 L. Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, 1961): 3. 62 Ibid.: 3–4. 63 I am thinking here of Schopenhauer’s notion that it was only philosophy, and not history, that could penetrate the essential nature of human existence. History was, he thought, always the same thing repeated but with a different outward appear­ ance: “eadem, sed aliter.” 64 F. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, translator. I. Johnstone, (Arlington, VA: Richer Resources Publica­ tions, 2010 [1874]): 5.

A note on infrastructure and bureaucracy

A dangerous ambiguity In the middle part of the 19th century, Henry Carre Tucker privately pub­ lished a small guide to the East India Company’s labyrinth of criminal and revenue regulations.1 Tucker was the son of a prominent financier and early Company notable, and he spent much of his working life as an administrator in northern India.2 “Tucker’s Note Book,” as it came to be known, was at first just the author’s own short-hand reference book, his own personal guide to enable him to refer to the appropriate laws and government orders when conducting his official duties. But he published it in 1848 because he felt that it could serve as a useful introduction and user’s manual, of sorts, for “the large and important rising class of Uncovenanted Deputy Magistrates and Deputy Collectors.”3 Relatively small-time local officials, in other words. Tucker used an alphabetical ordering for his topics, which included things as diverse as “child stealing,” “khas lands,” “highway robbery,” and “magis­ trate’s powers,” among much else. Each entry included a short summary and reference to the appropriate regulation. For example, under the entry for “khas lands,” (which is fallow land essentially owned by the government, and not held in private hands), there is a reference to “S.36.XXVIII.03,” which indicates that the Collector possesses the powers of zamindari over such land. Under the entry for “treasury” there is a reference to page 82 of the appro­ priate “manual,” which notes that transactions between the treasurer and tuhvildars (those charged with actually collecting tax revenue) should always be made in hard cash and never in promissory notes. Tucker also included blank spaces throughout his book, so that the official who owned it could add in references and summaries of any regulations or orders passed on the topic by government since the book’s publication. This was a text clearly intended to help a local official in the Company’s service: a deputy magistrate or deputy collector, as Tucker noted, or other revenue and judicial officials who found themselves isolated in the mofussil (the countryside). It may even have been a document passed down from administrator to administrator over time. The text comprised, in essence, an infrastructure – what Tucker called a “skeleton” – that allowed access to, and

A note on infrastructure and bureaucracy

25

application of, the “heterogeneous mass of rules” that defined the relation­ ships between ruler and ruled. But as an infrastructure it also contained a potentially dangerous ambiguity. In a later version of the Note Book, edited by Patrick Carnegy (himself a revenue official and author of a specialized “kutcherry dictionary”),4 the fundamental problem contained within the Note Book was articulated: was this text just a simplification and guide to the regulations, or was it something else as well? – a local perspective on the regulations; a personal, mofussil-level rendering of a set of principles and procedures that had been intended to be universal (or at least applied uni­ formly throughout northern India)? To push Tucker’s metaphor a little fur­ ther, did this book reveal, unchanged, a skeletal structure hidden beneath the body of the regulations, or did the book in fact create that skeleton and thus provide an opportunity to change the form of the body? The age-old problem of the human interpretation of law rears its head here, of course, but beyond the writing-down of that interpretation – the execution of it in print – the objection raised by Carnegy seems to be the possibility that the mofussil itself, the context of India as lived by the Company’s servants, could have some effect upon the very nature of regulations intended, fundamentally, to impose an order, a transparency, and a uniformity as well, to Indians’ economic and social lives. The text – its lines of summary, short-hand referrals, and blank spaces – represented, therefore, a nexus of abstraction and application; the ideal and the practical; the imperial and the local; the universal and the per­ sonal; but also a form of written institutionalization where the appropriate balance of such interests might be thrown into disarray. Carnegy himself dismissed the possibility of the regulations being institu­ tionally subverted to local perspectives, arguing that the purpose of the book was simply to act as a finding aid, and that its use might prevent a local official in the countryside from doing anything erroneous.5 If the possibility existed, one might say, it was a lesser danger than a rookie administrator let loose upon the Indian countryside on his own. Yet Carnegy should not have been surprised by the objection raised to Tucker’s seemingly modest endeavor. This play between the interests and perspectives of the Indian local, on the one hand, and the universalizing nature of the colonial state, on the other, had been present in conceptualizations of the Company’s bureaucracy since the late 18th century. The local knowledge, and input, of the district admin­ istrator had long been understood as an important aspect of “good” colonial governance from the center. But equally it had been just one aspect: the other was the ideological apparatus, invested in the institutions of the colonial metropolis, which underpinned the cultural validity of extractive and nonrepresentative forms of governance. Tucker’s Note Book, then, in a strange and unexpected way, embodied an unresolvable difficulty at the heart of colonialism and its forms of government. This is, I contend, the space that we should examine when attempting to understand the creation of meaning within the colonial sphere. It is the space that we look to in order to understand the ways that colonial administration

26

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

itself worked to universalize and create its other, how local ways of knowing and living impacted imperial policies, and how a new sense of “the local” was fashioned from the collision of the two. In this short section I will review some of the history of colonial bureaucracy in India, and in particular the way that it often acknowledged the importance of local knowledge for the sense of its own justification as “good government.” Understanding the structure and ideology of the Company’s – and then the Raj’s – elaboration of bureaucracy on this model is key to exploiting the ambi­ guity that Tucker’s Note Book presents us with as historians.

Bureaucracy, good government, colonial despotism European philosophers and political theorists have for many centuries con­ templated the nature of good government. Jeremy Bentham was among the most influential of modern British writers at the end of the 18th century to express the importance of good government to the promotion of individual liberty and the overall health of society. Under a well-constituted (or welladministered) government, he wrote, “men’s moral sensibility is commonly stronger” and their “sympathetic affections more enlarged.” People are more likely, under such government, to be immune to irrational religious dictates and better able to direct their efforts to the creation of a community guided by the pursuit of a common “utility.”6 Bentham understood the importance of revised administrative structures to support the broadening role of the British state in the regulation of industry, health, labor, and education, for example. But he also wrote at length of what features were essential to good government itself. These lay, for example, in the promotion of a common interest for rulers and ruled; the interchangeability of those in power with those over whom power is exercised; the transparency of governmental deci­ sion-making; the freedom of the press; and the freedom to gather to make one’s views more widely known.7 During the middle part of the 19th century it was John Stuart Mill, Ben­ tham’s intellectual heir, who was arguably most active in seeking to understand the nature and functioning of bureaucratic structures and their relationship to government and personal liberty. Mill himself was well aware of the potential danger that a bureaucracy might become a sort of despotism – a feature that he linked principally to an unchecked expansion of governmental power. Mill’s fear was centered on the possibility that a bureaucracy might become a desired end in itself, an institution of self-aggrandizement and exclusivity, which gath­ ered power for itself to such a degree as to become an independent instrument of governance, as he perceived had happened in the Russian and Austrian empires. These were political contexts, he noted, marked by “oligarchies of officials.” For Mill, such a bureaucratic state emphatically did not represent an advanced civilization. Equally, bureaucracies that remained over-supervised, even repressed by their governmental overlords, might become stagnant and literally die of routine. But Mill did nevertheless recognize the central

A note on infrastructure and bureaucracy

27

importance of a bureaucracy within the maintenance of a representative gov­ ernment. He argued that the “conduct of affairs by skilled persons, bred to it as an intellectual profession” (i.e. the administrative class), together with a “gen­ eral control vested in, and seriously exercised by, bodies representative of the entire people” combined to the best effect for the safeguarding of personal liberty and governmental accountability. In other words, bureaucracies pre­ vented popular governments from degenerating into disorder, while popular government, with its traditions of public debate, prevented bureaucracy from stagnation and self-referentiality.8 The impetus to refining ideas of good government and the elaboration of an effective administration was, in the 19th century, a rather different affair than in the time of Thomas Hobbes or John Locke: this was, after all, a century of unprecedented national self-assertion, militarization, and expansionism for the British state. In India, the East India Company was creating a state structure that was intended to address a wholly different set of circumstances than Ben­ tham was principally concerned with. These included a rapid territorial expan­ sion and conquest of other polities, the incorporation and then displacement of pre-existing local and regional administrative arrangements, financial con­ siderations (including near bankruptcy), and, certainly not least, the emerging ideological nature of the colonial enterprise. The Company’s government was not to be a representative one – there was to be no interchangeability of those in power with those who were governed. Mill’s point of entry to discussions of an imperial polity was the self-evi­ dent truth of India’s essential unsuitability to be governed by anything other than a paternal despotism. Yet his views on representative government filtered through in some ways to his ideas on colonial rule. Mill thought that the Company’s bureaucratic despotism in India was not liable to corruption or degeneration (even in the absence of popular representation and public debate) because of the internal structure of the Company itself, which allowed for the raising and debating of numerous different policy positions internally. Thus, while the representative element of governance was missing in India, its spirit was fulfilled by processes of decision-making within the Company, the processes of oversight exercised by the Board of Control, and charter renewals conducted between the Company and Parliament. In other words, as the “public discussion” required for good government was lacking in India, it was to take place instead within the governing body itself, within the bureaucracy and government.9 On two particular instances, first in oral testimony before the House of Lords in 1852, preliminary to the Charter Act of 1853, and second, in writ­ ing, when it was proposed that the East India Company be abolished in the immediate aftermath of the Indian uprising of 1857, Mill elaborated upon his ideas for India’s bureaucratic despotism at some length. He argued principally for the continued importance of combining an imperial government to direct the “general affairs of the nation” with an “intermediate body” for the administration of “all local affairs.” Britain’s governmental ministers, Mill

28

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

noted, could not possibly make themselves adequately acquainted with the local affairs of a particular district or even a particular region in India, and so “not only would [these local affairs] be almost sure to be mismanaged, but the power and patronage which their management would confer, and the habit engendered of looking entirely to the Ministers of the Crown as the source of all authority, would be dangerous to the liberty and safety of the nation.” India, for Mill, was a country as different from Britain as one could possibly imagine, and so the governance of such a place and such a people required a long training and association that could not be obtained remotely.10 In this sense, Mill was decidedly in favor of what he called “double gov­ ernment” and “divided responsibility,” in which local affairs were adminis­ tered in the first instance by British officials with local knowledge, although under an umbrella of imperial superintendence and general direction.11 When asked whether the Company’s administration did not often act inde­ pendently of London in matters of principle, however, Mill insisted that although it might sometimes appear that way, in actuality, the government of India, by the very nature of its strong bureaucratic links to London, worked inherently within the principles and limits imposed upon it by its overseeing bodies. Imperial oversight was to be maintained through a loca­ lized administration of record-keeping, in which every decision and action was to be placed onto the written record for transmission up the chain of bureaucratic command. As an example, Mill cited the case of the overthrow of Pratap Singh, the late Raja of Satara, whom the Bombay government had unceremoniously removed from the throne in 1839. Here, Mill noted, the actions taken were hierarchical and subject to revision or appeal, from the British Resident at Satara, to the Government at Bombay, to the Govern­ ment of India at Calcutta, up to the Board of Control, the Company Directors, and lastly Parliament in London.12 But Mill spoke in favor of maintaining strong local governance in India, not only to allow for a hear­ ing of the expertise and opinions of local governmental and bureaucratic agents, but also to reassure Britain’s Indian subjects that they were not, in fact, dealing with a remote and unknown power. The abolition of such a “double government” would be, in Mill’s view, a dangerous exercise in the over-centralization of governmental function. Mill’s imagining of India’s bureaucratic despotism fundamentally empha­ sized the importance of local knowledge and local administration in the suc­ cessful governance of that colonial possession. Localized government, although of course dominated by Britons, became the voice of the Indian people, representing their opinions and (to some extent or other) their inter­ ests to imperial policymakers in London. But what is interesting here is that in Mill’s scheme, a colonial bureaucracy by necessity must also be organized along a spatial (and not only hierarchical) structure, as a mediator between the imperial center and the cultural distinctiveness of India and its regions, lest it become “the most complete despotism that could possibly exist in a country like this.”13

A note on infrastructure and bureaucracy

29

Double government in north India In the late 1820s and early 1830s Governor General William Bentinck insti­ tuted a series of administrative reforms intended to improve the efficiency of revenue collection and the Company’s precarious financial standing. There was an important element of ideological utilitarianism behind Bentinck’s reforms, but also a recognition of practicality and decided need: by 1828 the Company’s “embarrassed finances” included a debt of over £44 million.14 Bentinck’s first substantial reform, and most important (for our purposes), was the abolition of the provincial boards of revenue and their replacement by a series of smaller commissionerships – a first, important step towards what Mill would call “double government.” The provincial boards had acted as large, and cumber­ some, institutions that mediated between local officials responsible for the col­ lection of revenue from the countryside and the Company’s supreme government in Calcutta. This had resulted in little effective oversight of revenue collection at the district level. Commissionerships, in contrast, would invest a single indivi­ dual with control over the revenue and, in addition, judicial officials working within a “division” (in essence a collection of several districts) – a kind of “nat­ ural” area of control. This would ensure that revenue subordinates would be personally responsible to a single individual – the Commissioner – who could travel and inspect the workings of his division. The Commissioner was, in turn, personally responsible to the provincial government.15 The intermediary revenue board was essentially broken down, then, into a series of small parts, with single men overseeing a personal territory over which they held a great deal of power.16 Banaras Division, when it came under the authority of the newly created gov­ ernment of the North-Western Provinces (NWP) in 1836, was constituted by the districts of Benares, Jaunpur, and Mirzapur.17 It would later grow to include the districts of Ghazipur and Ballia and incorporate more than 10,000 square miles of territory and 5 million people at the beginning of the 20th century18 – rather larger than a single man could personally superintend. But the Commissioner of Banaras Division nevertheless wielded significant influence over the adminis­ trative workings of these districts, as well as the cities contained within them, through a regime of written correspondence with multiple local officials (includ­ ing collectors, magistrates, engineers, and so forth) that became increasingly sophisticated and detailed as the 19th century progressed. The post-1857 period was marked by further administrative decentralization. Under the leadership of Viceroy Lord Mayo in the early 1870s, for example, the practice of highly centralized imperial government control over provincial expenditure was abandoned in favor of providing provincial governments with some measure of genuine financial and administrative responsibility over public works, education, policing, and so forth. The central imperial government provided each province with an annual grant, as well as the ability to raise funds locally through forms of direct taxation. Mayo’s rationale for this was partly financial – the imperial government was a loss-making operation and this substantially “passed the buck” to the provincial level. Equally, however, it

30

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

was also a policy that found justification in a rhetoric of local governance and informed responsibility; that better decisions would be made by the provincial authorities who were in close contact with local officials. Mayo wrote: local interest, supervision, and care are necessary to success in the man­ agement of funds devoted to Education, Sanitation, Medical, Charity, and Local Public Works. The operation of this Resolution in its full meaning and integrity will afford opportunities for the development of self-government, for strengthening municipal institutions, and for the association of Natives and Europeans to a greater extent than heretofore in the administration of affairs.19 What is particularly important in Mayo’s formulation is that good govern­ ance was constituted, at least partly, by a meaningful interaction between Indians and Europeans, and that this interaction would help to further strengthen forms of local governance, including those of the municipality. In the years that followed, the policy of decentralization resulted in substantial changes to the ways that the provinces were funded and governed. Act XVIII of 1871, for example, allowed the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (NWP&O) government to tax landholdings (in addition to levying other forms of estate taxes, etc.). These funds were to be put toward projects of “provincial utility” including the maintenance and construction of roads and canals, the construc­ tion of schools, provision of scholarships, and so forth.20 This transfer of tax liabilities and spending from the imperial level to the provincial, however, was not without controversy, as some felt that the overall tax burden for Indians increased (especially in the NWP&O) under this new arrangement. Other acts that were passed in the early 1870s empowered the provincial government to create works of public utility, to appropriate land for such public works, and so forth. The Irrigation and Canals Act (Act VIII of 1873), for example, allowed the province to clear land, inspect private dwellings to determine the nature of their water use, create and regulate the use of canals, levy a water rate, and, in some circumstances, essentially conscript a local labor force.21 The most significant change to arise from the policy of decentralization during the 1870s, however, was the gradual but marked empowerment of municipal government under the supervision of provincial authorities. This was, arguably, the most important measure of decentralization during this period. The NWP&O municipalities acts of 1873 and 1883, and later of the United Provinces in 1916 (all of which substantially expanded on a first, tentative act in 1868) defined the basic rights and responsibilities of the province’s municipal boards. Boards were permitted to raise funds from local residents in the form of taxes on property, modes of transport, and on specific professions, as well as the levying of octroi duty upon goods imported into a city for consumption or sale there. Boards were also empowered with the ability to make and enforce a lim­ ited set of bylaws regulating such items as public nuisances, for example, as well as rules for collecting taxation. From the funds raised they were to provide for a

A note on infrastructure and bureaucracy

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local police force and also undertake “local improvements” of “general utility,” including the repair of roads and waterways, the promotion of education, the building of poor houses, dispensaries, markets, and to provide for measures of sanitation and conservancy. Lastly, the acts determined the constituent nature of the municipal boards, the processes of appointment, election, and removal of its members, the election and confirmation of the chairman, and so forth.22 In each case – in the acts of 1868, 1873, 1883, and 1916 – power gradually devolved further from the province to the municipal level, whether in terms of the ability to elect members locally (as opposed to having them appointed) or in the institutionalization of greater consultation on matters of policy between the board and the local Commissioner. In 1881 the imperial government took further steps to increase the “practical development” of Mayo’s intentions by shifting yet more control over taxation and spending to the local level. In a letter to the heads of provincial governments written that Fall, for example, the Viceroy, Lord Ripon, asked what items of “receipt and charge” might be shif­ ted from the “provincial” to the “local;” what legislative measures might be required to ensure “more local self-government;” and how local taxation might be equalized across the empire while also ensuring some measure of affinity with popular local opinion.23 Decentralization, and the strengthening of local self-government, was then enshrined in a famous 1882 Resolution by Lord Ripon, who felt strongly that such policies constituted a form of “political and popular education.”24 Over time the Lieutenant Governor’s “controlling power” over NWP&O’s municipal boards was, in effect, gradually curtailed. Yet negotiation remained a central feature of municipal governance throughout this period. Negotiation with the province (always through the intermediary office of the divisional Commissioner) for the component parts of a municipal board’s operating budget, for example, or even on matters relating to a board’s ability to hire (on loan) experts on sanitation or engineering from the provincial Public Works establishment. As Francis Robinson has argued, municipal boards held sub­ stantial local influence, even though the Board was normally chaired by a member of the colonial government service (in Banaras this was typically the Magistrate, until at least the post-World War I era), and its major decisions had to be officially approved by the divisional Commissioner. The Board’s majority of local Indian notables could, in effect, override directives from the Commissioner’s office and win governmental approval for their own budgets, taxation schemes, and infrastructure projects if they could convince their overseers of their local utility.25 Much of this history is well known, not to mention the fact that the links of municipal governance to the emergence of Indian nationalist sentiment is a common feature of scholarship on India’s larger cities, for example.26 But I think that it is possible to argue that even in moments marked by the assertion of a stronger imperial center (such as under the Viceroyship of Lord Curzon, 1899–1905), negotiation with local authorities remained a key feature of initiatives that required the input of local knowledge. When Curzon decided to

32

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

claim imperial custodianship over national historical monuments through Act VII of 1904, the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act, for example, the legal processes for extending such control required not only substantial investigatory work by local officials, but also elicited a wide range of local responses, as I discuss in Section II. But before we end this discussion of the historical importance of the local to the governance of India, we might just reflect on one more robust colo­ nial advocacy for decentralized governance articulated by a local adminis­ trator in the late Company period; an advocacy tested, and even strengthened, moreover, by the author’s personally traumatic experience during the violent events of 1857.

Charles Raikes on local knowledge, revenue settlement, and Indian loyalty In the late 1840s and early 1850s, Charles Raikes, a long-time member of the East India Company’s civil service, published in the Benares Magazine a series of essays that sought to encapsulate his knowledge and experience of working on the north Indian plain.27 Collected together and published in London in 1852, these essays also became a defense of the East India Com­ pany’s governance practices in the debates over the renewal of the Company’s charter in 1853. (In short, they represented the status quo position amidst growing concerns of British politicians and social leaders that India had not materially advanced since the most recent charter renewal in 1833, and that the Company had continued an aggressive, and probably ill-advised, practice of military expansion).28 Raikes’ essays, moreover, are the counterpoint to John Stuart Mill in his testimony to the House of Lords in the same year. Raikes was voice of the “local” Indian administrator, in other words, to Mill’s voice from the imperial “center.” Raikes’ essay on the development of the revenue system of the NWP under the Company is a story of the importance of local knowledge to successful governance and revenue collection.29 Raikes began by lauding the revenue system of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, describing it as being of “liberal spirit, carefully matured and vigorously carried out.”30 Only the British system, in its own full maturity in the NWP, in his view, had surpassed that of Akbar, bringing prosperity and stability to the Indian countryside: “In Akber’s imper­ ial city,” he noted, “shall the fame of Akber be eclipsed.”31 But the Company had not always made the correct choices when elaborating its revenue system during the initial conquest of the subcontinent, he wrote. And these mistakes were most often the product of either the necessity of compromise in the Company’s early years, or of plain ignorance about Indian subjects on the part of British administrators and the ascent of ideological, rather than pragmatic, rule. For example, following the entrenchment of local zamindars (landlords) as the nexus of power in the countryside during the failed reign of the Emperor Aurangzeb (1658–1707), the government of Warren Hastings (1772–85) had little choice but to conform to existing practices of revenue collection, given the

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fragility of the early Company state. But in the following decade, when it came time to assert a more robust system of revenue collection, it was the theoretical knowledge (and feudal/capitalist ideology) of Philip Francis, rather than the practical knowledge of Hastings and James Grant, that won out.32 The result was the disastrous Permanent Settlement of 1793 – in Raikes’ view a financial giveaway of inestimable proportions that tended only to weaken the integrity of the Company’s state while shifting financial resources and effective local power to the corrupt and “land-jobbing” zamindars. In later years, however, as the Company expanded its land-holdings well into northern and central India, a different set of ideas about appropriate governance and revenue extraction began to gain ground among the Company’s leadership. The turning point, Raikes tells us, is Act VII of 1822 (Bengal), the Land Revenue Settlement Regulation for the Ceded and Conquered Provinces (encompassing, essentially, the northern plains), which had as its origins a tour taken of the region by the Governor General and Holt Mackenzie. It was, in other words, based in observation and knowledge of local conditions of land tenure. The 1822 Act sought to determine the nature and extent of different claims to ownership or proprietorship of the land, the fertility of various tracts, the nature of its pro­ duce, etc. through a physical survey and acts of recordation conducted by a British Collector and his staff, and then, if necessary, juridical settlement.33 The Act stipulated, for example, that the Collector ascertain “as accurate a record as possible of all local usages connected with landed tenures, as full as practicable a specification of all persons enjoying the possession and property of the soil, or vested with any heritable or transferable interest in the land or the rents of it, care being taken to distinguish the different modes of possession and property, and the real nature and extent of the interest held.”34 The process encapsulated in this settlement, however, resulted in “an amount of detail and of labour … [that] was more than [the British collector] could bear,” Raikes noted. (There was, it turned out, the possibility of too much local input into the Company’s regula­ tions and governance, I suppose). But following remedial legislation in 1833 that provided the government with a more expedient means of settling competing land revenue claims, the system in place in northern India was, in Raikes’ view, perfected. As such, the “scope and liberality” of Akbar’s land revenue was aug­ mented by “the exactness of European science.”35 What is most important here, however, is the way in which Raikes character­ ized the two revenue settlements: the first, Permanent Settlement of Philip Francis “forbade and eschewed local inquiries of a close and searching nature … they forgot the ground on which they stood to look for analogies which had no exis­ tence … full of theoretical justice, they did solid wrong.” The second, mahalwari settlement of 1822, was established in contrast by “a wide observance of the real state of things, by comparison, by analysis, by patient investigations.”36 The latter was, for Raikes, the sign of a just, benevolent, and merciful government, con­ cerned with the welfare and uplift of the people over whom it ruled. A more rapacious government would have simply supported the local zamindars and taluqdars (hereditary landlords), regardless of how they oppressed the local

34

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

populace, in an effort to maximize land revenue. Yet Raikes believed that even the rapacious middle-men and landlords deserved fair treatment, and the 1822 set­ tlement ensured that even those without properly documented rights could con­ tinue to reap a share of revenue. It was not the government’s intention, in other words, to bankrupt established local elites and restore the countryside to some sort of idealized village community, but it was its intention to do justice by a range of local claims and concerns.37 The Revolt of 1857 might best be described as the moment when the local got away from the British state. Indeed, in the aftermath of these events, Raikes would come to adopt far harsher sentiments about Indians, perhaps understandably, as several members of his immediate family were killed (including his daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren). In his discussion of the events of 1857 he called for using the utmost severity in dealing with those sepoys (Indian soldiers) found to have participated in the uprising, lest British leniency be mistaken for weakness: “severity is the truest mercy in this case, and the only safety,”38 he noted. But even in his grief, and apparent thirst for revenge, Raikes still recognized the fundamental validity of his ear­ lier writings on governance. The principle of ruling through a robust knowl­ edge of local conditions was still conducive to cultivating Indian loyalty and affection.39 The events of 1857 were in fact a testimony to this notion: the severe treatment of local notables in Awadh in 1856, in which taluqdars were rapidly disenfranchised and thrown into relative penury, was in Raikes’ view a key reason for the unrest in that part of northern India.40 Raikes would conclude his assessment of 1857, however, with the recom­ mendation of a far simpler, and also far more unified, system of governing India moving forward. He wished to see a “quasi-Oriental” system introduced in the NWP&O, on the model of the one that prevailed in the Punjab at that time, in which all local power at the district level was held by a single administrator. Raikes did not, for example, envision any sort of gradual empowerment of “native subordinates” such as deputy collectors, deputy magistrates, munsifs, and tahsildars. This was obviously a move away from Mill’s notion of internal checks and balances and toward a form of paternal despotism based solely in the body of the local British administrator – as a kind of single colonial strongman. Although such a scheme subverted Mill’s notion of internal discussion and debate (Raikes described the local adminis­ trator and the regional Commissioner as “two men working as one”), for Raikes, at least, it remained a despotism in which local knowledge remained crucial for its correct functioning.41 *** In the following pages, the importance of local knowledge to the perpe­ tuation of colonial governance in India, together with its perceived dangers and ambiguities, will remain at the forefront of my analysis. Rather than accepting Mill or Raikes on their own terms, or indeed the claims of the colonial state to “collect” and “arbitrate” such local knowledge in the

A note on infrastructure and bureaucracy

35

perpetuation of its own power and agenda of Indian “improvement,” we will shift our attention to the space encapsulated by Tucker’s Note Book: the space between the British government of India and the Indian locality itself; a space continually co-created in the process of increasingly decentralized gov­ ernance. Ultimately I am rather less interested in how a colonial knowledge of local norms and practices was created, in other words, and rather more in how ideas of localness were created in Indians’ interaction with the colonial state’s decentralized practices of statecraft. This book now moves away from a description of how Europeans understood colonial governance was to be formulated, to ask how localness was lived, utilized, and articulated by Indians as a part of their everyday transactions with the colonial state.

Notes 1 H. C. Tucker, Tucker’s Note Book of Rules and Regulations, Criminal and Revenue, 3rd ed. revised and enlarged by P. Carnegy, (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1857 [1848]). 2 Henry Carre Tucker (1812–75) was son of Henry St George Tucker (1771–1851), who rose from the position of writer to become a Director and then Chairman of the Company. The elder Tucker was a colorful and problematic figure who, among other things, was convicted of attempted rape in 1806. See Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, Vol 57, via www.wikisource.org; and C. E. Buckland, Dic­ tionary of Indian Biography, (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1906): 430. Henry Carre Tucker’s civil service career culminated in him being appointed Commissioner of Benares Division. 3 “Compiler’s Preface to the First Edition,” in Tucker’s Note Book. 4 P. Carnegy, Kutcherry Technicalities, or, Vocabulary of Law Terms, as used in the Moffusil Courts N.W.P., (Allahabad: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1853). The “kutcherry” (or kachari) is the administrative offices for tax collection and the administration of justice. 5 “Preface to the Third Edition,” in Tucker’s Note Book.

6 J. Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, (London:

T. Payne & Son, 1789 [1780]): lx–lxi. 7 J. Bentham, A Fragment on Government, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891 [1776]): Chapter IV, Section XXIV. 8 J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, 2nd ed., (London: Parker, Son, & Bourn, 1861), esp. “On the Infirmities and Dangers to Which Representa­ tive Government is Liable”: 112, 116–7. 9 See “Of the Government of Dependencies by a Free State” in ibid. Also, A. Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the age of its Global Reproducibility (New York: Routledge, 2007): esp. 62–5. 10 J. S. Mill, “A Constitutional View of the India Question” in Writings on India, eds. J. M. Robson, M. Moir, Z. Moir, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). 11 Ibid. 12 J. S. Mill, “East India Company’s Charter” 1852 testimony, in Writings on India. 13 Ibid. 14 Memoir on the Affairs of the East-India Company, (London: J. L. Cox, 1830): 210 [no author]. 15 E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989 [1959]): 151–2. As Stokes notes, many of these ideas go back to Bentham: the ability to inspect, personal authority over subordinates, etc.

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Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

16 The basis of this system is laid out by Holt Mackenzie in a letter from the Bengal Government, Revenue Department, dated 10 December 1828, reprinted in Great Britain, House of Commons, Appendix to the Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons, on the Affairs of the East-India Company, vol. IV, Judicial, (London: Honorable Court of Directors, 1833): 260–2. 17 The North-Western Provinces (NWP) was preceded for a short time by the Pre­ sidency of Agra, created in 1834. The ceded territories of Awadh were jointed to the NWP in 1856, creating the North-Western Provinces and Oudh. This territory was then renamed as the United Provinces in 1902, before becoming Uttar Pradesh after Indian independence. I will always use the correct name for that time period when referring to this region. 18 See B. B. Misra, The Administrative History of India, 1834–1947: General Admin­ istration, (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1970): 252–3; Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series, vol. II, (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1908): 123–4. 19 The Imperial Gazetteer of India, the Indian Empire, vol. IV (administrative), (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907): 287. 20 Act XVIII of 1871 (NWP&O) in The North-Western Provinces Code, (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1877): 199–203. 21 Act VIII of 1873 (NWP&O) in The N.-W. Provinces and Oudh Code, 3rd ed., (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1892): 168–91. 22 Act VI of 1868 (NWP&O) in G. S. Fagan, The Unrepealed and Unexpired Acts of the Legislative Council of India, from 1834 to 1870 inclusive, vol. III, (Calcutta: Central Press, 1871): n.p. Act VI replaced a much more limited act for the improvement of towns in India, Act XXVI of 1850. Act XV of 1873 (NWP&O) in The North-Western Provinces Code, 233–43. Act XV of 1883 (NWP&O) in The N.­ W. Provinces and Oudh Code, 584–611. 23 BL, IOR, P/2206, NWP&O Local Self-Government Proceedings, 1884, No 1, Resolution of the Government of India, Department of Finance and Commerce, No 3353, 30 September 1881. In reply, NWP&O’s Lieutenant Governor, Sir George Couper, urged caution, noting that a vigorous system of local self-govern­ ment would only grow in accordance with “popular sentiment and aspiration,” and could not be imposed on people “by administrative order.” See ibid., No. 7, Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, to Sec. to Govt of India, Department of Finance and Commerce, 3 November 1881. 24 Resolution of the Government of India, 18 May 1882, in G. F. S. Robinson, Speeches and Published Resolutions of Lord Ripon, Viceroy of India, from June 1880 to May 1882, R. C. Palit, ed. (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1882): Part II, 35–51. 25 Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: 50ff. 26 See C. A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880–1920, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); also, R. K. Ray, Urban Roots of Indian Nation­ alism: Pressure Groups and Conflict of Interests in Calcutta City Politics, 1875– 1939, (New Delhi: Vikas, 1979). 27 Raikes was, at this time, Magistrate and Collector of Mainpuri, just east of Agra. See C. Raikes, Notes on the North-Western Provinces of India, (London: Chapman and Hall, 1852). These essays were first published separately in the Benares Magazine (c. 1848–52). 28 For context, see, for example, R. J. Moore, Sir Charles Wood’s Indian Policy, 1853–66, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966). 29 I do not intend to suggest that Raikes was in any way progressive, or that he actually possessed good local knowledge of Indian contexts. He is, rather, a pur­ veyor of derogatory stereotypes and an unabashed believer in the necessity of paternalism in ruling India.

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30 Raikes, “The Rise and Progress of Our Revenue System,” in Notes: 51. 31 Ibid.: 77. 32 See R. Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement, (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1963). 33 This was the third land settlement conducted by the Company, known as the mahalwari settlement of 1822. For background, see B. B. Misra, The Central Administration of the East India Company, 1773–1834 (Bombay: Oxford Uni­ versity Press India, 1959): 213ff. For a near-contemporary overview of the inten­ tion of Act VII of 1822, see J. Thornton, Sec. to Govt, NWP, to G. A. Bushby, Sec. to Govt of India, Home Dept, 30 March 1847, reprinted in Selections from the Records of the Government, North Western Provinces; Mr Thomason’s Despatches, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1856): 408–12. 34 Bengal Act VII of 1822, Section 9. See https://www.latestlaws.com/bare-acts/state-a cts-rules/west-bengal-state-laws/bengal-land-revenue-settlement-regulation-1822/ 35 Raikes, “Revenue System”: 68–9. 36 Ibid.: 70. 37 Ibid.: 71–2. 38 C. Raikes, Notes on the Revolt in the North-Western Provinces of India, (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1858): 155. 39 Ibid.: 6n. 40 Ibid.: 168–9 41 See Appendix “B” in ibid.

Part I

The Banaras technoscape (and its discontents) Banaras is an ancient city book-ended by two prominent forms of the colonial modern. To the city’s north lies the Dufferin Bridge (now known as the Malaviya Bridge), an impressively tall, double-storied steel truss over a kilometer wide. Lying on the path of the Grand Trunk Road, the bridge carries rail, road, and pedestrian traffic across the river Ganga. To the south of Banaras is the Bhadaini water intake pumping station, which by way of a series of large engines and pipes provides water from the river to the city’s entire population. Both were constructed at the end of the 19th century, both are technical accomplishments rendered on a huge scale, and both feature prominently in contemporary British accounts of Banaras as sym­ bols of the civilizational superiority of the West. They are signs, in essence, of the constructive and transformative potential of British colonial rule and its technological appliances. In “The Bridge-Builders,” Rudyard Kipling writes: There stood his bridge before him in the sunlight, lacking only a few weeks’ work on the girders of the three middle piers — his bridge, raw and ugly as original sin, but pukka — permanent — to endure when all memory of the builder, yea, even of the splendid Findlayson truss, has perished. Practically, the thing was done.1 Kipling’s 1898 story of engineers working on the Dufferin Bridge hinges on just such a symbol of Western civilizational superiority, rendering the bridge a product of European personal accomplishment and professional fulfilment amid the context of the challenging landscapes of the Indian countryside and its laboring classes. But if the bridge and the pumping station are bookends to this city, then one might also reasonably ask about the books on the shelf in between. How were these understood through that same colonial lens? The answer, predictably, is as the opposite of modern and technologically advanced. The bookends were, as we will see, not only sym­ bols-in-themselves, but also often made to serve a cajoling of the “non­ modern” into a never-quite realized form of modern subjectivity.2 Arjun Appadurai pioneered the use of the term “technoscape” to indicate a kind of exchange, “flow,” and interconnection in globalized capitalism: that

40

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

of informational and mechanical technology.3 Here I focus less on how forms of technology moved – on the actual exchanges of technology through the mechanisms of British colonialism – and more on what instances of technol­ ogy might mean once they get to where they are going. In this case, I examine the creation of a sanitation and water distribution infrastructure for Banaras. In this section I investigate the ideological importance of sanitary technology for notions of civilizational superiority so intrinsically linked to British colo­ nial rule. But I am also interested to look past attempts at making such symbolic meaning to examine the sociopolitics of amending an urban land­ scape with forms of technological innovation. I do not wish to accept a par­ ticular colonial presentation of technology as transformative in a certain way, but instead to look to micro-processes within city building to reveal the wider array of meanings that people might have attached to the processes of city “modernization.” Like Appadurai, I argue that the technoscape, in the colo­ nial context, is not one-dimensional, but rather is prone to contestation and nuances of meaning. A technoscape may well represent large-scale processes of movement and transfer that traverse continents, but it is also a form that elicits renewed notions of localness. What it means to be Banarsi – a resident and partisan of Banaras – evolves in interaction with the transformation of the colonial technoscape. As I have noted in the introduction to this book, I understand the meanings created through new forms of infrastructure for a city to be constituted at least partly through transactions – micro-processes of interaction between people in and out of government that entail an expression of cultural understanding and identity. In this section I discuss some of the key legal, governmental, and administrative structures that I believe framed the “transactional” nature of city re-fashioning in Banaras at the end of the 19th century. I do this with particular reference to the functioning of Banaras’s municipal government as it considered, and then undertook, substantial forms of infrastructural improve­ ment in the city. Municipal governance in India was often understood as a form of decentralized decision-making. This is true, although such decen­ tralization was also subjected to forms of hierarchical bureaucracy and over­ sight. The virtue, I think, of conceptualizing local identity as having this transactional quality is that the presence of such colonial oversight need not mean that the Commissioner’s office, or that of the Lieutenant Governor, had a monopoly on how to understand and characterize urban change. The munici­ pal commissioners of the city were a key part of this process, together with their constituents. Transactions are productive, in other words, even when conducted within an authoritarian hierarchy, and even when there are clear attempts on the part of the colonial state to elicit certain sorts of outcomes. My historiographical modus operandi is in this section fairly straightfor­ ward, I think, and is more or less repeated through much of the rest of the book. I begin with an invocation of the obvious: the distinctions made in colonial sources between (European) “modernity” and (Indian) “tradition,” for example, and the ways that the British colonial state attempted to

The Banaras technoscape

41

establish a discourse of self-regard through the creation of a “modern” citys­ cape in a place such as Banaras. Then I try to use the strength of archival evidence – records that document the processes of transaction – to begin to undo that distinction and to ask a new set of questions of the available evi­ dence. While a dichotomy of modern/non-modern may well have been held sacred by some British writers, and often used to considerable rhetorical effect, I seek to show that it consistently failed to capture the dynamic and equivocal nature of colonial rule at the level of the city. If the urban land­ scape can be understood to communicate values and ideas about the past and the future of a place, I argue that the colonial state also consistently over­ estimated the extent to which they could control narratives about built space. This is not to say that the colonial archive presents us with incontrovertible evidence of Indian cultural thinking and urban values – it does not – but it does provide us with suggestions of complexity and some alternatives to the obvious. This section begins, then, with an account of an event that is often deemed typical of the traditional character of Banarsis’ engagement with forms of Wes­ tern technological innovation: namely, a riot. This event, which took place in 1891, has been recounted many times – in official colonial accounts of Banaras as well as in more contemporary academic analyses of colonial rule in the city. What I will do here is invoke this event as a starting point only and then look beyond that day’s violence and point to the laws, regulations, governance prac­ tices, economic changes, petitioning, other forms of personal advocacy and engagement, and community mobilization that constituted the wider set of engagements with one particular form of infrastructional improvement. In so doing, I hope to illustrate that the construction of the brick and concrete towers, the installation of the steel pipes, and the widening of roads associated with the Banaras waterworks project held a variety of meanings for the city and its inha­ bitants as they confronted the colonial modern and co-created it; meanings that inevitably transcended those ascribed to them by the official state and its aco­ lytes. I want to tell you a different story, then, one not dominated by invocations of civilizational difference, as has so often been the case.

Notes 1 R. Kipling, “The Bridge-Builders,” in The Day’s Work, (New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1898). Kipling sets his story in Kashi, but the descriptions of the bridge seem to have been heavily influenced by his reporting on the Sutlej Bridge in the Punjab. See http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_sketches_40.htm 2 For my ideas on cajoling, I’ve drawn on Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry. See H. K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man” reprinted in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 3 A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

1

A riot in Banaras

In the early afternoon of 15 April 1891, a crowd of people assembled near the Ram Chandraji temple at Bhadaini, a small muhalla (neighborhood) located in the southern reaches of Banaras. The crowd numbered some 5,000 at its height and was composed of a variety of the city’s residents – both Hindu and Muslim – including the “town badmashes,” according to police reports. The men who had gathered were apparently concerned by rumors of the imminent destruction of the temple by British engineers constructing a nearby water-pumping station on the ghat (a kind of stepped platform on the riverfront made of large stone). This was part of an ambitious plan undertaken by the city’s Municipal Board, with the assistance of the government of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, to bring an infrastructure of water distribution and sanitary conservancy (estimated to cost some Rs 40 lakh [40,00,000]) to Banaras.1 Crowds had been present at the temple for several days as construction on the waterworks proceeded, but on this day things soon spiraled out of control. As the crowd swelled in Bhadaini, the 15 or so members of the police were soon hopelessly outnumbered. They sent for reinforcements from their head­ quarters at Kotwali, and later from as far afield as the northern muhalla of Adampura. But these men arrived too late. A cry of “destroy the machinery!” arose from the crowd, and it quickly descended on the water pumps, boiler, and supply pipes, ripping them from their foundations and throwing them into the river. The police opened fire, injuring one, and the crowd dispersed to wreak havoc on other, far-flung parts of the city. Men attacked and looted the telegraph office in Bisheshwarganj, cutting the wires and destroying the machinery there, as well as emptying the safe. The Telegraph Master, Mr Ludgwick, was caught and beaten while trying to escape over his back wall. The private houses of sev­ eral notable men were ransacked and looted. The railway station at Rajghat was vandalized: telegraph wires were cut, and a bar of silver taken from the vault. Street lanterns were smashed throughout the city.2 Calm returned to Banaras by the evening hours, only to be followed on the next day by widespread arrests and the deployment of the military to protect key points of civil infrastructure.3 The temple at the heart of the events of that day was a small but ostensibly quite ancient one, dedicated to the god Rama with additional murtis (images of the deity) of Sita, Lakshman, and Hanuman consecrated within it. It was favored principally

44

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

by the wealthy Gujarati banias of the city as well as the Rani of Barhar, a woman by the name of Bendeshri Prasad Kunwar, who also acted as a key sponsor of its establishment.4 As early as six months before the disturbances of 15 April, it was clear to many of Banaras’s residents that the planned water infrastructure project would have significant effects upon the established physical landscape of the city and the everyday life of its inhabitants. It was noted in one account that sites all around Bhadaini and Assi muhallas were being surveyed for new building, with the taking of measurements and drawings being made by Public Works Depart­ ment officials.5 This would undoubtedly have caused some nervousness amongst local residents. A newspaper article from November 1890, for example, had also warned of the danger posed to this particular temple by British engineers, the disrespect with which they treated this sacred structure, and the acute anxiety that local Hindus felt about its fate. The correspondent from Bharat Jiwan even claimed that the chief engineer routinely entered the temple with his shoes on and openly threatened to demolish it if any of the worshippers interfered with him.6 The Rani sent a petition to the government, as did the newly formed Bhadaini Temple Protection Society, right up until the unrest occurred, pleading for con­ struction work to stop and the temple to be saved. Importantly, these appeals routinely identified the local agents employed or sanctioned by government as the main culprits in endangering the temple and, by extension, the public peace. It was their recklessness with the religious sensibilities of the local population, in other words, that was the issue. The petitioners also emphasized that the provincial and imperial governments had a long history of ensuring non-interference in religious matters, as they understood the importance that people placed in the maintenance of their religious structures. To tear down their temple was to tear at “their very heart-strings,” the Rani noted in her plea. It was thus ultimately up to them to intervene and ensure the temple’s safety.7 Yet the petitions went unanswered by the province’s Lieutenant Governor, and the matter was left in the hands of the city’s Municipal Board, the body that had financial and (some) practical oversight of the project. The digging thus went on, and deep excavations were made all around the temple. In the months before the riot, the Magistrate of Banaras (who was also the Chairman of the Municipal Board) noted in a letter his to superiors that he was now being openly threatened with death over the issue, and that he had even attempted to contribute Rs 500 of municipal money to fund the removal and re-consecration of the murtis else­ where.8 Nothing, however, had defused the crisis of confidence between local officials and the city’s populace. The Magistrate proposed that the only evident way to proceed was to leave the shrine in place while constructing the engine house for the pumping machinery a few yards away. This seemed to him, how­ ever, to still pose fundamental difficulties that would leave nobody satisfied. Indeed, rumors circulated throughout the city that the municipality was in fact actively attempting to undermine the temple’s foundations in the hope that it would somehow collapse “naturally” and clear the way for further building.9 Such rumors were key to the mobilization of violence on that day. ***

A riot in Banaras

45

How different things must have seemed just 15 months earlier, on the morn­ ing of 15 January 1890, when the foundation stone for the Banaras waterworks project was laid at Bhadaini Ghat by Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clar­ ence.10 On what would have been a crisp and foggy morning, the Who’s Who of Banaras society gathered to welcome the young prince to the city, including the region’s chief administrator, the Commissioner of Banaras, J. J. F. Lums­ den, the local Magistrate, James White, as well as a range of other civil and military officials. Representatives of the leading royal families of the city (such as the Maharajas of Banaras and Vizianagaram) were also in attendance, together with local city leadership, most of whom were members of the city’s Municipal Board. The Board’s most prominent member, lawyer and educator Babu Bireshwar Mittra, was co-chair of the welcoming committee.11 The foundation stone ceremony was a symbolic moment for Banaras in several ways. First, it would have provided the city’s municipal government with a formal recognition that it possessed the ability to manage major civil infrastructure projects. A display of confidence, in other words, by higher levels of the colonial government that Banaras could meaningfully participate in its vision of a hierarchical cooperation with Indians, and that municipal counsellors could work for the betterment of their urban constituents within the framework of a decentralized yet still partially unrepresentative form of governance. Second, the ceremony was also a moment that indicated that

Figure 1.1 The Bhadaini waterworks, as seen from Ram mandir, 2018 Image supplied by author

46

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

many elite Banarsis possessed an ambition to leave behind important ele­ ments of their city’s ancient character and join the “modern era” through the installation of expensive and high-profile mechanisms of sanitary improve­ ment and technological innovation. To be present at this ceremony, then, probably indicated some form of attachment to a particular vision of the future of Banaras and the mode of its governance, as well as to the transfor­ mative potential of technology. Few people at the ceremony that morning could have imagined the diffi­ culties that lay ahead of the municipality in bringing this project to its com­ pletion, however. The civil unrest of 1891 was in many ways the least of their worries, although the violence on that day clearly exposed the deep distrust that a good number of Banarsis felt for their local representatives, not to mention their ambivalence towards the “improvements” that they espoused for the city through the construction of the waterworks. In fact, what had begun in the early 1880s as a modest project of improved sanitation for the city – a project that involved little more than the regular repair and cleaning of an existing drainage system – in the Municipal Board’s hands soon bal­ looned into an elaborate and dramatically more expensive plan for providing city-wide water distribution, drainage, and sewerage. The expansion of the waterworks project was driven principally by con­ cerns among municipal counsellors to meet “modern” standards of sanitation and to provide a more comprehensive set of public services to the city. And in this respect it was the board’s chairman, the Magistrate James White, who pushed the hardest, even resorting at one point to veiled threats against municipal counsellors if they wavered in their support.12 But with this larger ambition came costs that were soon unmanageable and an ongoing series of legal and political battles over appropriate levels of taxation and rights of access to land for excavation and construction. Even in the late 1890s, nearly a decade after the setting of the foundation stone, the municipality was still devising ways to reduce anticipated expenses and raise taxes to enable the project to move to completion. These measures included the installation of smaller water-pumping engines (which, it turned out, would wear out prema­ turely) and the re-use of older sewerage pipes, for example, as well as the raising of existing octroi, water, and house tax rates. The board also con­ templated altogether new taxes, including a controversial measure that would impose tolls on pilgrims arriving in the city by train. By the early 1920s the city’s local government was in a state of near insol­ vency, and Banaras was routinely held up by the provincial government as a paradigmatic example of disastrous municipal financial mismanagement. The city’s balance sheet showed that expenditures routinely outstripped income, with repayments on debts owed to the provincial government for the water­ works being the single major expense item. This also meant that the munici­ pality rarely possessed the funds to conduct anything but basic maintenance on existing city infrastructure, and sometimes not even that.13 Much-needed addi­ tions to transportation infrastructure, for example, often went unbuilt, while

A riot in Banaras

47

those projects that went ahead often did so explicitly on the basis that they would produce additional tax income for the city, even if they were paraded as something else. In 1915, for example, a municipal project to redevelop the market area at Bisheshwarganj according to the most recent sanitary “light and air” requirements was viewed by many not as a “work for relieving a congested area” so much as a plan for “developing property with a view to improve municipal income” through increased rental rates.14 Banaras was not alone in this situation, however, as the other larger municipalities in the United Pro­ vinces,15 including Allahabad, Lucknow, Agra, and Cawnpore, found them­ selves in significant financial distress from carrying out their own water infrastructure schemes.16 In many ways this is the historical origin of con­ temporary under-investment in urban north India, and Banaras was usually viewed as the worst case scenario. *** The trappings of urban modernity did not come cheaply, or easily, to Banaras. But it is often the riot itself, rather than the wider context of its making, that has remained a central feature of contemporary scholarly writing about the infrastructural modernization of the city. Historians have interpreted the violence of that day as an event representative of popular resistance towards urban change through the application of technology in that “traditional” city, as well as “colonial attitudes” towards those whom they governed. It is seen as a symbolic moment, in other words, steeped in a discourse of cultural and civilizational difference. For example, Sandria Freitag has written at length about the role of the riot in Banaras’s colonial history, arguing that this was a form of collective social action that expres­ sed a set of values distinctive to Banarsi society. The unrest of 1891, in Freitag’s account, was caused by the colonial state’s encroachment upon established, and cherished, cultural norms through its imposition of a poorly understood “imported technology.” The riot thus represents for her a col­ lective assertion of the inviolability of those norms as embodied in a struc­ ture such as a neighborhood temple.17 Likewise, Gyan Pandey has characterized that day’s violence as a form of resistance to “colonial encroachment” into Indian social and cultural milieus; the culmination, moreover, of a recent series of such clumsy interventions by the state.18 Chris Bayly has invoked the riot as the culmination of a series of assertions of Hindu collectivity that sought to protect older forms of religious liberty.19 The fact is, however, that the riot of 1891 was of limited practical impor­ tance to the city, given that the disturbance was short-lived, had little effect on the progress of construction work at the Bhadaini site, and its “ring-lea­ ders” were soon imprisoned to three years’ worth of hard labor.20 Indeed, Edwin Greaves, writing for a popular audience about Banaras’s sacrality just a decade later, noted that the riot was “of no political importance … a little scrimmage stirred up by a few of the roughs of the city.”21 Of course Greaves, and others, may have downplayed the event in subsequent years from a desire

48

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

to paper over uncomfortable memories of British vulnerability to sudden acts of violence. Or perhaps he just did not know any better. The riot was rapidly followed by an extensive enquiry by the Provincial Government into its causes. Hundreds of pages were produced in the weeks after 15 April that meticulously recorded the momentary endangerment of the colonial state’s civil authority on that day.22 These pages clearly indicate, for example, that the rioters had directed their ire towards the infrastructure of British rule and commerce – the waterworks, streetlamps, telegraph lines, and government offices – as well as towards the colonial state’s apparent Indian supporters. It was, for example, the house of Sita Ram, a member of the city’s municipal government and a key advocate of the waterworks scheme, that was thoroughly looted and vandalized in the early stages of the disturbances. Yet the records also indicate that the British administration struggled at times to understand the exact nature of the riot in the weeks that followed and assigned to it a range of causes and characters. It was unclear, for example, whether the violence was orchestrated beforehand or was spontaneous in nature. The role of the so-called “badmashes” (bad characters) was seen sometimes as central to explaining the events of that day, and sometimes not, while the presence of Muslim weavers, the Julahas, among a dominantly Hindu crowd upset about the apparent demolition of a Hindu temple, served only to further complicate things for colonial observers. Was this a failure of proper policing, an expres­ sion of discontent about taxation and food shortages, a product of notorious malcontents, or something more closely related to hurt religious sentiments? All, frankly, may have played a part in motivating people to violence. The question that British administrators kept returning to, however, when searching after Indian motives was just this: was this a riot by Banarsis against the importation of “Western” modernity to the city? Put another way, was it a reaction of local (and mostly non-elite) residents bewildered (and inspired to violence) by the transformation of their traditional urban landscape by the spatial-technological engraftments of the colonial state?23 The Magistrate, James White, certainly held this view, as he wrote unambiguously in official correspondence of his belief that the riot was “clearly prompted by a strong popular prejudice against modern improvements.”24 White’s rationale for the loss of British authority might be dismissed as mere excuse-making (he was, after all, both the Magistrate and the Chairman of the Municipal Board at the time), yet it also closely corresponded with the long-standing practice of char­ acterizing Indians as “ignorant” and “bigoted” when the colonial state encountered resistance to its dogged pursuit of what it considered India’s moral and material progress.25 But that is not all. White was also articulating here a renewed rationale for colonial governance that emphasized a disparity of out­ look within India; a disparity based in two communities’ respective approaches to conceiving and bringing about India’s “modern” future.26 In the weeks after the riot, once all of the evidence and testimony had been collected, the province’s Lieutenant Governor issued an austere account of the events, eschewing any supposed ambiguity about Indian motives, as well

A riot in Banaras

49

as outlining his intentions moving forward. Sir Auckland Colvin dismissed the idea that Banarsis could be seriously aggrieved at increased levels of taxation in the city, or that the temple was ever in any real danger of desecration. Banar­ as’s municipal tax level was about average in the province, he noted, and Banaras was a wealthy city. Moreover, only the out-buildings of the temple were ever in any real danger of collapse, and they were not even considered sacred. There was, in other words, little real justification in his view for the day’s outbreak of unrest. The riot must have been the product, therefore, of mischief-makers and heightened passions. The resolve of the colonial state to move forward in India was undiminished. Colvin noted that while the British government of India welcomed open discussion and appeals from the public, defiance of the authority of the state, in the form of violence, would not be tolerated. As a result, he warned that further unrest would be met with a heavy police presence in the city, the costs of which were to be borne by the residents of Banaras themselves. General access to the temple would also be tightly controlled by the police.27 Colvin left, then, little doubt that he counted India’s British overseers as holding the moral high ground on this particular occasion. Colvin’s official reply to the 1891 unrest was harsh, no doubt, but less so than his initial instincts dictated. On 16 April he had written to F. N. Wright, the incoming Officiating Commissioner of Banaras, of his desire to rapidly acquire the Ramji temple under the Land Acquisition Act and to demolish it, to punish the ringleaders of the unrest with “utmost severity,” and to sanction “punitive” police action in the city.28 In later letters he further stressed to Wright that he would not allow the Municipal Board to back away from the waterworks scheme, and that any public statements from them would need to be approved beforehand by government. The Board had, in effect, ceded its moral authority in this matter to the state government, he felt, by virtue of the unrest.29 The Government could not be seen to climb down from the project of modernity because of some degree of public opposition. Such an act would be to relinquish the arbitration of India’s future. *** In the pages to come I will tell a different story about the infrastructural modernization of Banaras as it related specifically to the building of a largescale water infrastructure and sewerage scheme in the late 19th century. This is an account that will draw on many of the same sources as those that I used to relate the narrative above, but I will shift the frame of reference, instead bringing to the fore the ways that the colonial state, the Municipal Board, and Banaras residents interacted on a day-to-day basis outside the realm of riotous violence. In the greater scheme of things, these small interactions over the course of several years are far more important than this moment of vio­ lence, I argue, for understanding how Banaras became modern. But before doing this, I want to invoke some prevalent stereotypes about Banaras; stereotypes that allowed colonial authorities to speak consistently about the city in certain ways – as essentially religious, irrational, and

50

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

traditional. These stereotypes were used to justify certain kinds of actions – and reactions – to events by colonial administrators. They have also, in some significant sense, been at the forefront of a continued scholarly study of Banaras that emphasizes its essentially sacred stature and status as a cultural other. I seek here to tear down the entire edifice and erect something far more mundane – mundane in the sense of the world, of the temporal, and of the material – in its place.

Notes 1 A lakh is 100,000. 2 This is a synthesized account of the 1891 riot drawn from the files of the NWP&O General Department for September 1891. See BL, IOR, P/3828, NWP&O General and Education Proceedings, 1891, September: No. 51, Col. A. Ollivant, InspectorGeneral of Police, NWP&O, to Chief Secretary to Govt, NWP&O, 23 April 1891; No. 55, F. N. Wright, Offg. Commissioner, Benares Division, to Chief Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, 28 April 1891; No. 56, J. A. S. White to J. Woodburn, Chief Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, 17 April 1891; and No. 60, memo dated 20 April 1891 from J. Ludgwick, Telegraph Master, Benares. 3 BL, IOR, P/3828, NWP&O General and Education Proceedings, 1891, September, No 47, File 255B, telegram dated 16 April 1891, Magistrate, Benares Cantonment, to Allahabad. 4 Ibid., September, No. 71, “Narrative of Events.” The Rani was part of a minor landholding family, from the Agor-Barhar estate, in nearly Mirzapur district, and then resident in the southern part of Banaras. 5 Ibid., September, No. 3, “translation of a memorial, dated 11 December 1890.” 6 Ibid., September, No. 2, “Selections from the Vernacular Newspapers of Upper India” [November 1890]. The engineer would later claim that he only went onto the roof of the temple with his shoes on, not actually inside it. 7 Ibid., September, No 3, “translation of a memorial, dated 11 December 1890;” No. 11, “petition, dated Benares, 29 November 1890;” and No. 25, “telegraph dated 31 March 1891.” 8 Ibid., August, No. 10, letter dated 15 January 1891, J. White, Magistrate to Com­ missioner, Benares Division. 9 An illustration in The Graphic of 6 June 1891, clearly shows the temple surrounded by deep excavations; several men stand in the trench with their heads well below the level of the temple’s floor. 10 Albert Victor (1864–92) was the grandson of Queen Victoria (not to mention a leading suspect in the “Jack the Ripper” killings). 11 BL, IOR, P/3598, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1890, December, No. 61, memorandum, “laying of the foundation-stone of the Benares Water Works,” dated 31 December 1889. 12 See, for example, BL, IOR, P/3142, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1888, July, No. 2, letter 14 May 1888 J White to Commissioner, Benares Division; P/3374, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1889, February, No. 13, minutes of Municipal Board Meeting dated 4 January 1889. 13 BL, IOR, P/5587, NWP&O, Municipal Proceedings, 1899, June, No 44, letter dated 16 May 1899, Commissioner, Benares Division, to Sect to Govt, NWP&O. 14 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Departments, 1901–1929, Box 64, File 188, Under Sec. to Govt, UP, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 16 Sep­ tember 1915.

A riot in Banaras

51

15 Recall that the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (NWP&O) was reorganized as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh from 1902 onwards. I will use the term, and acronym, appropriate to the time-frame under discussion. 16 BL, IOR, V/24/2826, Report on Municipal Administration and Finances in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh during the year ending 31st March, 1920 (Allahabad: Government Press, 1920): 9. 17 She also notes, however, that increased levels of taxation by the municipality to fund such infrastructure were also a major source of hardship and disgruntlement. See S. B. Freitag, “State and Community: Symbolic Popular Protest in Banaras’s Public Arenas” in S. B. Freitag, ed., Culture and Power in Banaras: Community, Performance, and Environment, 1800-1980 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989): 220–3. 18 G. Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, 2nd ed., (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006): 159. 19 Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: 183. 20 BL, IOR, P/3828, NWP&O General & Educational Proceedings, 1891, September, No. 98, letter from Inspector-General of Police, NWP&O, to Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, dated 20 June 1891. 21 E. Greaves, Kashi, the City Illustrious, or Benares (Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1909): 12. 22 BL, IOR, P/3828, NWP&O General & Educational Proceedings, 1891, September, Nos. 47–109. 23 I have written elsewhere about the concept of “engraftment” as a conciliatory colonial education policy. See my Orientalism, Education, and National Culture, chapter 3. The motif of engraftment was frequently used to discuss the waterworks project in Banaras, including by the engineer who oversaw the project, A. J. Hughes. He wrote at the end of 1888, mouthing the voice of municipal counsellors: “show us [Indians] what this plant of Western civilization is which you propose to graft on our ancient city …” BL, IOR, P/3374 NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1889, February, No. 11, A. J. Hughes, “Report on the Drainage and Water-Supply of the City of Benares,” n.d. [December 1888 or January 1889?]. 24 BL, IOR, P/3828, NWP&O General & Educational Proceedings, 1891, September, No. 56, letter J. A. S. White to J. Woodburn, Chief Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, dated 17 April 1891. In his final accounting of the riot, the province’s Lt Governor was less sure, preferring to underplay the riot’s seriousness and point instead to reli­ gious misunderstanding and the influence of trouble-makers. See ibid., September, No. 88, Resolution of 774 of 1891. 25 Most famously, the notions of an ungrateful and disloyal “Asiatic character,” the discourse of cultural incompatibility, and the perceived virtue of the British cause were utilized as powerful tools of self-justification for British actions during the uprising of 1857. See, for example, G. Hutchinson, Narrative of the Mutinies in Oude, compiled from authentic records, (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1859). 26 I’m drawing here on Reinhart Koselleck’s notion that a key feature of modernity is the desire to impose forms of control on the future. See his Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated by K. Tribe, (New York: Columbia Uni­ versity Press, 2004). 27 BL, IOR, P/3828, NWP&O General & Educational Proceedings, 1891, September, No 88, Resolution of the Lt Governor of NWP&O, 19 May 1891. 28 BL, IOR, Mss Eur F/385 (Macleod Papers), no. 4, Notebook on “Benares Riots,” letter 1, A. Colvin to F. N. Wright, 16 April 1891. 29 Ibid., letter 5, telegraph to Commissioner, Benares Division, from Lt Governor.

2

Resorting to the language of stereotypes

In the days preceding the 1891 riot, the Magistrate James White wrote a letter to the Commissioner of Banaras that drew heavily on ideas of British and Indian difference. White perceived the situation developing at Bhadaini as the product of an essential incompatibility between two civilizations, or at least of their two civilizational trajectories, as embodied in their relationship to tech­ nology. He described the earth around the Ramji temple trembling “with the motion of cranks and fly-wheels,” and the “divine hero” of Rama constantly befouled by smoke and coal dust.1 (Ironically, the temple is now known as “Ram Halla Mandir” – “halla” means “noise.”)2 One, an ancient society that worshipped rough images hewn from stone, the other adherents to the possi­ bilities engendered by the motion of steel gears, were in a standoff. Trouble was clearly on the horizon. Despite the official framing by the Lieutenant Governor of the riot as a law and order problem, and despite the fact that it had few, if any, longer-term practical consequences for infrastructural development in the city, British responses to, and later accounts of, that day’s unrest revealed a set of entrenched colonial preconceptions and anxieties about Banaras and Banarsis. These were, in essence, the forms of received wisdom and the elements of public discourse that enabled the riot, the rioters, and thus the city itself, to be posed by the colonial state in the terms of a broad, caricatured civilizational dichotomy: the West as modern, India (and, in particular, Banaras) as not. I think here that the ideas expressed by British administrators in their accounts of 1891 were linked not just to worries about the undermining of their civil authority in the city, but principally to an anxiety that their moral, civilizational authority might also be imperilled. This was a concern fundamentally about Banarsis’ apparent refusal of the colonial state’s role as the creator of a future for Indians; a non-recogni­ tion of their self-appointed role as India’s modernizers, in other words. In this chapter I argue that colonial images, imaginaries, and their corre­ sponding anxieties must first be read, but then also be read through (and the historian is, of course, reading) to account for the wider legal and adminis­ trative context of Banaras’s urban refashioning, the changes that accom­ panied its integration into an imperial marketplace, as well as the wider variety of epistemic and cultural processes at work in this city. To

Resorting to the language of stereotypes

53

Figure 2.1 The front door of the Ram Halla Mandir, Banaras, 2018 Image supplied by author

acknowledge the colonial state’s use of certain kinds of language as a form of rhetoric is, most certainly, to glimpse the power of derogatory stereotypes. There is similarly plenty of evidence to suggest that the stereotypes of civili­ zational difference that flourished in travel literature, for example, could hold significant importance in determining how a new place and people were con­ ceptualized by the visitor.3 The “resort” to civilizational stereotypes, I would also argue, is an early strategy that the British followed in moments of failed communication with their Indian subordinates and, thus, in moments of failed governance – a sort of fall-back position. But the act of “resorting to” such language should not be taken at face value, as wholly representative of the broader, more complicated, dynamics of shared responsibility and shared governance at the end of the 19th century. I do not wish to grant too much authority to forms of derogatory colonial discourse at certain levels of everyday urban living, in other words, without evidence of how governance functioned outside the realm of the per­ ceived emergency.4 This is, I think, a first step towards recognizing Banaras as a burgeoning, but also distinctive (and distinctively Indian), modern urban space under colonial rule. *** The stakes of the imperial project and its attendant narratives of civiliza­ tional progress were felt nowhere as keenly by the British as in Banaras, I

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Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

would venture, and the city held the status of an important laboratory for social and cultural experimentation by the colonial state. The notion of Banaras-as-laboratory was founded upon the idea that the city held a unique place in the Indian sociocultural landscape; that is, a “centrality” to Hindu religious traditions (Banaras is, after all, an important site of pilgrimage and the site of one of the 12 jyotirlingas, the Kashi Vishwanath temple.). Fur­ thermore, many writers have thought of Banaras as possessing a character somehow representative of the rest of India, either through its ethnic/cultural diversity, perhaps, or by being an exemplar of Hindu civilization. These ideas are not a colonial invention, per se, but were mobilized to particular effect through their use by colonial administrators.5 Such ideas also rendered Banaras a potent augur of India’s future in colonial eyes. Christian missionary accounts of the city tended to portray Banaras as the “fountainhead” of Hinduism and the “lynchpin” to the conversion of Hindus. Missionaries were impelled to concentrate their efforts there, believing that the city’s Hindus would be the “first domino” to fall in the Christianization of the subcontinent. In an advertisement in the London Missionary Society’s magazine in 1836, for example, a call was made for additional recruits to come to Banaras to work in spreading the Gospel. Banaras was, the magazine reported, the “stronghold of Brahminical influence in India” as well as “the abode of its deepest superstition.” As the “Jerusalem of Hindustan,” the city was seen as a center to which all Indians came for religious practice – all Indian languages and cultures were represented there – and thus with con­ certed effort, missionaries might convert it to the “well-spring of the water of life, sending forth its healing tide over the surrounding countries …”6 Simi­ larly, Matthew Sherring, a prominent missionary in the city, began his 1868 account of Banaras by claiming that: The history of a country is sometimes epitomized in the history of one of its principal cities. The city of Benares represents India, religiously and intellectually, just as Paris represents the political sentiments of France. There are few cities in the world of greater antiquity, and none that have so uninterruptedly maintained their ancient celebrity and distinction. In Benares, Buddhism was first promulgated; in Benares, Hinduism has had her home in the bosom of her most impassioned votaries. This city, therefore, has given impulse and vigour to the two religions which to this day govern half the world.7 For Sherring, too, the city’s unique position in India rendered it a commodity to be co-opted for the purposes of conversion to Christianity: “As Benares has held a foremost place in the history of India for two thousand five hun­ dred years, at the least, so, in all likelihood, she is destined to retain that position in the new era of enlightenment which has already dawned upon the land.”8 These ideas of the city’s centrality and representativeness to Indian religious culture also lent considerable importance to the “constructive

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orientalist” education scheme conducted at the Benares Sanskrit College in the middle part of the century under the superintendence of J. R. Ballantyne, for example. There Ballantyne attempted to redirect the cultural authority of the city’s learned class, the Sanskrit pandits (learned men), towards a project that valorized a singular narrative of civilizational advancement through rational philosophy and experimental sciences towards the reasoned accep­ tance of a Christian worldview.9 As went this “Hindu” city, so would the rest of India, in other words.10 But equally Banaras was not necessarily a place thought to be receptive to new ideas from Britain, and so writers often characterized it as being held captive by its historical and religious character. That is, as a city, and a community of people, it was inscrutable and apparently immune to civilizational change. If one could overcome the city’s resistance to Western modernity, founded most of all in its stubborn traditionalism and the cultural tyranny of brahminism, then one could also unleash an unstoppable wave of change throughout the subcontinent. Or so the theory went, at least. *** Many Britons understood the riot of 1891 as consistent with a long-stand­ ing pattern of urban violence endemic to the city’s residents, and that often defined Banaras’s character for the British, at least as much as its apparent religiosity. This was a peculiar history (and pattern) of political instability, unpredictability, and, indeed, inscrutability, which heightened the colonial sense that Banaras was ungovernable and nearly always potentially danger­ ous, or at least that its residents rarely truly understood what was in their best interests. At the very outset of the Company’s political presence in Banaras, several notable moments of insurrection and violence established this pattern. In 1781 the Banaras raja, Chait Singh, refused the demands of Governor General Warren Hastings for additional tribute payment and chased the British from the city, at least temporarily, in an early show of the Company’s vulnerability. The artist William Hodges was in the city at the time, and his account of the uprising included repeated depictions of the Banaras raja as duplicitous and cruel – he held a “sanguinary disposition,” Hodges noted. Hodges also remarked that the political loyalties of the people walking the streets of the city were unknown (perhaps, even, unknowable). The streets were full of armed men, Hodges wrote, often “observed secretly consulting” one another.11 Similarly, the deposed Nawab of Awadh, Vizier Ali, challenged the Company’s state with a short-lived rebellion in the city in 1799 that killed the Governor General’s political agent, Mr. Cherry, and several others as well. In this act too, British writers found ample evidence of “Asiatic treach­ ery,” in general, and Vizier Ali’s deceitful character, in particular, as well as the tendency of certain classes of people in the city to join in any potentially successful insurrection against British rule. In a letter composed on 16 Jan­ uary 1799, Major General James Cock wrote of the intense feelings of unease, alarm, and insecurity that British residents felt on the day of Vizier Ali’s

56

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violent uprising. He recounted the story of a Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, having taken shelter in a nearby bungalow (where they thought “there was a chance of not being attacked”), witnessed a prolonged assault on Samuel Davis’s house and “expected every moment to be put to death themselves.”12 Indeed, in a later account of the insurrection, written in 1844, John Davis wrote of the crowds that had assembled in Banaras transforming, without warning, from mere spectators into active participants as arsonists and assailants, as well the rapid influx of “banditti and adventurers” into the city, poised to take full of advantage of the chaos.13 These broad characterizations of Banarsi inscrutability and treachery had become received wisdom by the early 19th century. In an 1814 report to gov­ ernment, the Banaras Magistrate, William Wilberforce Bird, described the difficulties of keeping order in the city, owing to the residents’ “warlike” and “mixed character,” their intrinsic predisposition to public unrest, and the presence of numerous “adventurers” in the city who were always keen to “avail themselves of every favorable opportunity of disturbance.” “The moral state of their society is indifferent to us,” he argued. Moreover, Bird observed that Banarsis could “assemble in multitudes in any given spot on the shortest notice” through a secret, mystical system of messengers who threaten “eternal vengeance” upon those who do not gather at the time and place appointed. Such a system of rapid mass mobilization to violence invariably required recourse to the military, above and beyond the local police, he argued, to keep order in instances of religious dispute or the imposition of “unpopular mea­ sures” by government, such as occurred in 1810, when the government intro­ duced a new house tax. There existed in Banaras, in other words, a system of organized civil unrest beyond the understanding and control of colonial gov­ ernment: beyond knowing, beyond rationality, into the realm of the religious, the mystical, and the secret.14 How could the colonial state overcome this problem in Banaras? For Bird, the answer was relatively straightforward. He recommended a regularization of all traditional forms of Indian law enforcement (including village watchmen) so that they would come under the supervision of the regular police establish­ ment, and thus owe their loyalty to the colonial government. He also wanted to curtail the influence of powerful landlords over the police and to compensate those holding positions of responsibility in the city police force more gener­ ously. In short, Bird wished for a police force that answered only to the terms of government initiative and oversight, without any ambiguities of loyalty.15 Sev­ eral decades later the provincial government expressed similar sentiments over the terms of remunerating rural police officers. Rather than compensating the village police by assigning them their traditional jagirs (land grants), which may leave them penniless in years of bad harvest or in thrall to local landlords, upon whom they might become financially dependent, they were to be paid a regular salary so as to make them “as independent as … possible.”16 In both of these cases, the loyalty of the police was to be best effected through a formalization, and modernization, of the institutions of policing –

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a move away from the older Indian ways of doing things. In addition, when it came to the question of criminality, a wide variety of other initiatives were undertaken during the 19th century aimed explicitly at producing a British knowledge of Indian interiority and intention, or rather, the contours of Indians’ personal motivation towards violence and unrest. One might point to W. H. Sleeman’s ethnographies of the criminal “thugs,” and his attempt to decode the secret languages associated with them,17 or William Crooke’s extensive racial biographies of the “tribes” of northern India in the later part of the century.18 For now it is worth noting that the riot of 1891 eventually betrayed even the notion that the colonial state had achieved the goal of transparent, modern policing. In an anonymous letter to the Magistrate of Banaras, received two months after the unrest, some “poor subjects” of the city complained that it was the conduct of the city police that had in fact caused the riot of 15 April, and that their bad behavior continued even now: the police routinely extorted money from common men under threat of arresting them for suspected participation. The point that would have most concerned colonial officials, I expect, was the claim made by the authors that on 15 April police officers, and even the kotwal (police chief), were heard to tell the swelling crowd that they were in fact their sharik – a word of Arabic origin meaning “partner” or, in this context, their “co-conspirators.”19 It is little wonder that the British felt insecure – they were never able to under­ stand Indian motives (or to understand that there was no such thing as an Indian motive, per se) and never able to regularize Indian behavior through institutionalization in the manner that they so clearly wished. *** The notion that the built city (both its individual buildings and its overall urban structure) somehow embodied the sociocultural values of its inhabitants was also intrinsic to British colonial depictions of Banaras. The European imagination has long associated Banaras’s waterfront with the paradigmatic romantic Oriental cityscape – one defined by religious imagery and emblematic of particular civilizational traits, including those of stagnation and ruination. Again, the painter William Hodges, in his images of the city from the 1780s and 1790s, communicated a picturesque and tranquil setting for Banaras; one of dilapidation and near-abandon­ ment. In these images the Ganga flows quietly alongside lightly populated riverfront ghats, while trees seem to be winning the years-long competition for daylight with the slowly crumbling palaces of a bygone political era. Hodges’ “The Ghauts at Benares” (1787), for example, depicts the river Ganga apparently in flood, its surface nevertheless as smooth as glass. Several small boats calmly navigate the deserted city-front vista, belying the destructive violence of the river at monsoon.20 These are images of a city becalmed by the weight of time and communicate an understanding of Indians as non-energetic, apathetic, or resigned to the downfall of their own polities.21

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Hodges’ images also tended to constitute profound evidence for the British that religion dominated the lives and personalities of the city’s inhabitants (rather than, say, commerce). His portrayals of Banaras as a “pure” Hindu space, “undepraved by any intermixture with the Mahomedans” is predicated on the consistent inter-relationship of Hindu “manners, arts, buildings, and cus­ toms.” The ghats are the site of Hindu bathing ritual and the immolation of a Hindu widow, in his account, while the temples dominate his visual depictions of the city. Even the presence of the Alamgir Masjid, a religious outlier towering over the city, is explained by Hodges by reference to Aurangzeb’s religious zeal.22 In addition, however, Banaras’s built structure could be a source of anxiety and danger for the British. The city’s dense network of narrow alleyways and its resistance to being seen in its totality23 reflected for observers such as Hodges the indecipherability of people’s intentions and the city's potential danger to Eur­ opeans. Hodges described the closeness of Banaras’s buildings as turning the city into a furnace, for example, rendering it a place unwelcoming to British con­ stitutions, while the height of the buildings themselves could be used to strategic advantage by those intent on killing or maiming the city’s new overlords.24 In Hodges’ text and images, Banaras is a city foreign in all its components and sensibilities, like the people who inhabited it. These motifs continued essentially unaltered into the 20th century. In the 1901 edition of his guidebook to Banaras, the Reverend Arthur Parker opened with an expression of the difficulty of understanding Banaras’s char­ acter – “she does not yield her secrets easily,” he noted (at least not without his guidebook!) – and then began his account in earnest with a description of the city as approached by train, a well-worn cliché even then. As he approa­ ched the city’s waterfront, the view takes in many temple spires and mosque minarets – features that render it “one of the most imposing and impressive sight in all India.” Such elements were obviously intended to signal Banaras’s essentially religious and traditional character for the reader – “spires and minarets standing clear out against the brilliant blue of the eastern sky.”25 Equally, he viewed the city’s riverfront as being framed by symbols of British technological innovation: the steel Dufferin bridge, over which one crossed into the city, at its north, and to the south, the water pumping station at Bhadaini. Indeed, the bridge is the subject of a full paragraph devoted to signalling British technical and military prowess.26 Such was the perceived power of these physical structures, together with the “fine metaled roads” that run from the European cantonment deep into the “heart” of the old city (not to mention the “practical and energetic race” that constructed them) that Parker wrote enthusiastically about the British ability to “transform” the “conservative” city and its inhabitants into more recognizably modern sub­ jects.27 Parker was, apparently, not one for subtleties in either his claims for the master race or his metaphors. *** There are plenty of other examples of this sort of writing about Banaras, in particular, but I trust that the point has been made.28 It may be worth noting,

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however, that this mode of cultural critique was never limited to British writing about India. Augustus Pugin (1812–52), for example, an early advocate of neoGothic revivalist architecture in Britain, famously used contrasting images of the English cityscape to mount a critique of the mores of modern society. In an image from his 1841 tract, Contrasts, Pugin depicted the simplicity and moral value of an earlier form of English town life through a panorama dominated by church steeples and then juxtaposed it with an accompanying image of the “new town.” The latter image was marked by the smoke stacks of exploitative industry, the houses of the wealthy, uninspired, utilitarian design, and, boldly in the foreground, a prison modelled on Bentham’s panopticon.29 As with British depictions of Banaras, Pugin was creating here an evaluative landscape that communicated his belief that civilizational values had gone awry. Archi­ tectural decline was causally linked to a decline in the Christian faith because architecture embodied the quality of one’s faith.30 But equally, Pugin under­ stood landscape and cultural values to sit in a mutually constitutive relation­ ship, such that changes (rather, improvements, in his view) in architectural form, which included for him the popularization of the neo-Gothic and its religious symbolism, could also prompt positive changes in people’s value sys­ tems and bring them to a renewed sense of religious awakening.31 Architecture could, then, constitute both an evaluative and a transformative landscape. Back in Banaras, the evaluative landscapes conjured by Parker or even Sherring gained their rhetorical value not just from vivid descriptions of otherness, but by way of comparison with the rationality, cleanliness, and morality of the West. I mentioned earlier the notion of cajoling the non-modern in the evalua­ tive texts of colonialism. This idea incorporates both the colonial desire to transform the perceived non-modern other, but also the simultaneous desire to perpetuate it in the service of the modern self. To cajole the non-modern is to make rhetorical value through the modality of comparison, while claiming a constructive, transformative impulse for the colonial state, and to consign the non-modern for as long as possible to Mill’s waiting room of history.32 The modern, sturdy steel bridge is thus contrasted with the tumble-down stone temple; the superstitious and lazy Indian is compared with the energetic and inventive Englishman. The act of cajoling, however, is made all the more mean­ ingful through the shift from evaluative writing to the physical and the transfor­ mational (even if such transformations are always limited). The colonial state did not just describe the apparently tragic state of its Indian possessions (both city and people), but worked to transform them: the waterworks tower embodied the science of sanitation in the midst of a city defined by filth and disease, and served thus both as an architecture of ideological import and practical purpose. In Banaras this move to the transformational from the rhetorical is activated, I will argue, at least partly through the mechanism of disgust. *** Let us return to the riot of 1891 for just a moment. I do not intend to write anything further about it in these pages, except to say that the characterizations

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of it by the colonial state seem like a further act of cajoling and willful nonunderstanding. Who could possibly oppose sanitation, healthfulness, and a longer lifespan except those in thrall to the backward and the non-rational? The truth is, there are plenty of reasons why Banarsis might riot other than a hostility to innovation. They had a range of other grievances linked to the transformations taking place in Banaras’s economic, legal, and epistemological landscapes as it was integrated ever more intimately into an imperial/global marketplace. Food prices had been rising steadily in Banaras in the late 1880s, for example, not because of famine, but because foodstuffs were increasingly being exported as a part of that colonial economy. Equally, forms of mechan­ ization were displacing traditional livelihoods in Banaras’s weaving industry. Even the banking families of the city – the lifeblood of Banaras as a trading hub – faced challenges from international banks and insurgent small lenders. But in some ways this is not the point. The riot was a tactic and it contained meaning. I am not interested in explaining why it happened, however. I am not sure that anybody can do so definitively, in any case. I am interested instead in displacing it from the center of our conversation about urban transformation in Banaras at the end of the 19th century.

Notes 1 BL, IOR, P/3828, NWP&O General & Educational Proceedings, 1891, August, No. 10, letter dated 15 January 1891, J. White, Magistrate to Commissioner, Benares Division. 2 In fact, the Ram Halla mandir is now named after the 1891 disturbance – “halla” also means “protest.” When I visited there last the temple’s guardian told me its origin story: the temple was made by the Gujarati community of Chaukhamba after one of their members had a dream of Ram. In the dream, Ram asked the community to come find him as he was stuck underwater. After some searching and praying, the community members found him in the mud banks of the Ganga at Bhadaini and built the temple around the murti. This was the reason that the community was so resistant to moving the temple in 1891. Thanks to Ajay Pandey for helping with this. 3 For an example of this process in the late 20th century, see J. Hutnyk, The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity, and the Poverty of Representation, (London: Zed Books, 1996). 4 Similarly I argued in my Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture that Macau­ lay’s infamous, intemperate education minute of 1835 while certainly an example of British racialist discourse revealed little about actual education policy in India around this time. 5 Not to mention, in later years, Indian nationalists (such as Malaviya, Gandhi, etc.). For a general treatment of the idea and its stakes, see D. N. Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism?” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41, 4, (October 1999): 630–59. 6 W. Buyers, “Call for Additional Missionaries at Benares,” The Missionary Maga­ zine and Chronicle, November 1836: 524–8. 7 M. A. Sherring, The Sacred City of the Hindus: An Account of Benares in Ancient and Modern Times (London: Trubner & Co., 1868): v. 8 Ibid.: vi.

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9 Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture, esp. chapter 4. 10 G. Lowes Dickinson said it plainly enough in his book of collected travel essays: “Benares is India.” See G. L. Dickinson, Appearances, being notes of travel (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1914): 56. 11 These events are described by William Hodges in Travels in India, during the years 1780, 1781, 1782, & 1783 (London: 1793): 47–56. 12 Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington, Glenn Horowitz India Collection, letter from Maj. Gen. James Cock, Benares, to Thomas Twining, Calcutta, dated 16 January 1799. 13 See J. F. Davis, Vizier Ali Khan, or, the Massacre of Benares: A Chapter in British Indian History, (London: Spottiswoode and Co., 1871 [1844]: 39, 42). John Davis was the son of the “hero” of 1799, Samuel Davis, who was the city magistrate. John Davis was present at the siege of his father’s house by Vizier Ali, which plays a key role in the narrative, though he was about four years old at the time. Davis senior died in 1819, so this book seems less like a tribute to a heroic father than it does an indictment of Indian political leadership at the time of the Company’s final territorial consolidation. 14 BL, IOR, H.Misc/775, Home Miscellaneous, W. Wilberforce Bird, “Report on Benares,” 20 August 1814, ff. 451–506. Bird makes very little mention of the role of women in public life in Banaras. There is only one reference to them in his entire report, which indicates that under Aurangzeb’s rule men and women did not bathe at the same ghat together as they did in Bird’s time. 15 Ibid. 16 C. P. Carmichael, “Note on the Remuneration of the Rural Police in the N. W. Provinces,” (dated 23 February 1855), in Selections from the Records of Govern­ ment, North Western Provinces, vol. IV, (Agra: Secundra Orphan Press, 1856): 419. 17 See, for example, W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language used by the Thugs (Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1836). 18 See W. Crooke, The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1896), vol. 1 (of 4). 19 BL, IOR, Mss Eur F/385 (Macleod Papers), no. 5, (miscellaneous papers), item 2, anonymous 6 July 1891 letter to the District Magistrate of Benares. 20 W. Hodges, “The Ghauts at Benares,” oil on canvas, 1787, Royal Academy of Arts, object 03/210. See also G. H. R. Tillotson, The Artificial Empire: The Indian Landscapes of William Hodges (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2000) and G. Quilley & J. Bonehill, eds., William Hodges, 1744–1794, The Art of Exploration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 21 The Daniells’ images, as well, produced a decade or so later, are impossibly empty of people and commercial activity, while massive stone structures, ancient trees and a broad cloudy sky dominate the river and its immediate landscape. See Part II, below. 22 Hodges, Travels in India, 61ff. 23 I am thinking here of the relative paucity of photographic depictions of the city other than views of its waterfront (or the Vishwanath temple). 24 Hodges, Travels in India: 51, 61–2. 25 Banaras sits on the western bank of the Ganga, and when approaching it from the direction of Kolkata over the Dufferin (Malaviya) Bridge the cityscape is in fact seen against the western, not eastern, sky. I suppose, however, that this was not Parker’s point. 26 An 1887 text celebrates the engineering marvel of the Dufferin Bridge, noting the technical prowess of its steel structure but also the difficulty of finding “solid footings” for it in the Banaras soil. A further physical metaphor, perhaps, for Britain’s hardships in bringing “improvement” to India. See The Dufferin Bridge (Benares/Lucknow: 1887).

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27 A. Parker, A Hand-book of Benares, 2nd and revised ed. (Trivandrum: Travancore Government Press, 1901): 1–5. 28 If you need another, though, try W. S. Caine’s Picturesque India: A Handbook for European Travellers (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd, 1891), in which all the Banaras stereotypes are trotted out, including its ancientness, sacredness, dilapidation, and then contrasted with “the magnificent steel bridge.” 29 The image in question can be found behind the appendix in A. Pugin, Contrasts: or, A Parallel, Between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages, and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste (London: 1841). 30 Ibid.: 3.

31 Ibid.: 4–5.

32 See the discussion of Mill’s “waiting room of history” by Dipesh Chakrabarty in

Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000): 8.

3

Filth, disgust, and governance

In a report to government written in late 1888, the North-Western Provinces’ chief engineer for city infrastructure, Mr. A. J. Hughes, wrote in stark terms about the filthy state of Banaras’s streets and riverfront, and the resulting poor state of health suffered by the city’s inhabitants. Banaras “reeks with smells, stinks, and sewer gas,” he lamented, and he described the lanes of the old city as essentially “elongated cess-pools” or “middens” (i.e. dung heaps). The city’s sewers discharge “sluggishly foetid filth” into the river adjacent bathers and sacred sites, and drinking water wells are “saturated with the filth of centuries.” It was, he said, impossible to imagine a city’s populace living in more unsani­ tary conditions. Hughes also believed the situation to be getting rapidly worse. With Banaras’s quickly growing population (there was, for example, a 10% increase between the censuses of 1872 and 1882), combined with its popularity as a pilgrimage center, Banaras was, Hughes reported, now certainly recog­ nized as “one of the permanent homes of cholera” and a “great center” for the spread of disease across India.1 Hughes estimated in his report that the average life expectancy in Banaras in the late 1880s was little more than 28 years of age. But equally he was optimistic that this shockingly low number could be increased – perhaps even doubled – with the application of modern sanitation technology. After all, he noted, the introduction of a centralized water supply and the provision of running water for sewers in English towns had had the effect of rendering cholera and “enteric fevers” practically a thing of the past. The principal difficulties that he envi­ sioned for Banaras were not about the engineering of the new system – this would be a formidably large-scale project but it could be done by following the pathways of the older drains now in existence. The main difficulty, he imagined, would be administrative. The Banaras Municipal Board would by necessity have to interfere with the rights of private property and compel the city’s inhabitants to pay for these new sewerage connections.2 This would be an innovation to a city steeped in tradition, in other words, and would undoubtedly encounter resistance without some means of local facilitation. In that same year, 1888, James White, the Magistrate of Banaras, wrote that the city’s drains and sewers remained an unpleasant mystery to the vast majority of the city’s population – their location and condition could only be

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guessed at, for the most part, although one could certainly make a decent estimate when, in White’s words, “the black mud forces its way upwards and bubbles up through the stone paving of the streets and lanes.”3 Homeowners had attached their house drains to principal sewer lines wherever they had seen fit, he reported, and within most houses there existed wells “more or less full of sewage.” Compounding the problem, he observed, was the fact that few drains from the city center to the river seemed to actually operate, such that “the whole of the sewage of the greater part of the city lies festering and fermenting in these vast drains until the rush of storm-water in the mon­ soon.” Here White also objected to a plan making the rounds in the city to send men into the sewers to clean them out occasionally. This, he argued, would bring death and disease to still more in the city. “Is it not wonderful,” he added, “that cholera should be in such a foul pesthouse as is the sacred city of Kashi [i.e. Banaras]?”4 It was a rhetorical question, of course. *** The language of filth was intended to shock and disgust the European reader of these letters and reports. Images of decay, dirtiness, and disease served to produce a temporal and physical dislocation from the European and the modern; from the progressive colonial state. The intimation of Indian indiffer­ ence to filth, moreover, was intended to create grounds for the evaluation of civilizational difference and a justification for British intervention. This is the “language of modernity,” in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, an “order of aesthetics” grounded in ideas of public health and hygiene.5 Equally, it is a colonial paternalism steeped in the rhetoric of rationalism and science, on the one hand, as opposed to tradition and superstition, on the other.6 As the colonial state matured in the early 19th century, and the Company secured its political control over northern India, images and accounts of Banaras, in particular, were distinguished more by the pestilential than the picturesque (although the ruined character of the picturesque landscape could be said to have played a role in the production of said pestilence). Filth, dirt, death, disease, and dilapidation became key signifiers for Banaras by the middle part of the century as European images of the ghats increasingly became crowded with people, religious activity, stray animals, and, of course, cremation. The busyness, disorder, and apparent realism of Samuel Bourne’s photography replaced the idealized, becalmed images of William Hodges. These later, more “realistic” images are best understood as testaments to the scope and difficulty of Britain’s colonial burden in India. For the missionary Matthew Sherring, disgustingness, filth, and decay were integral parts of his descriptive analysis of the city’s physicality and his critique of its attendant Hindu religious practice. The tank at Manikarnika Ghat was filled with fetid water, he said, but attracted thousands of pilgrims who believe it possessed healing power, while the “Gyan Bapi” well, which Sherring described as the place where Shiva resides, “emits a most disgusting stench.” Temple wells contain “putrid water” with a “disgusting fetor” in which pilgrims immerse

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themselves “wishing for long life.” It was, he noted, a cruel deception of the people and made a mockery of those searching for salvation.7 Similarly, in his 1894 travelogue, Pictures of the World, Clement Scott contrasted the “inde­ scribable filth” that marked Banaras’s waterfront, in particular, with the “anti­ quarian interest” in which Banaras was so often held by visitors. The city was here rendered in Scott’s colorful prose a “tumble-down, dilapidated, dirty” place, reminiscent of the site of an earthquake, in which religious devotees “assemble on broken arches, ruined pillars, half-submerged pediments, and under the shadow of hideous prostrate gods” to bathe in the Ganga, considered by Scott to be “pestilential” because of the dubious practices of Hindu funer­ ary rites.8 In these accounts, the city is filthy because, given its status as a center of Hindu religious practice, it could not possibly be otherwise.9 *** Despite the ubiquity of such literary clichés, many administrators, and Banaras residents themselves, increasingly understood filth not as somehow endemic to the city, by virtue of Hindu cultural practices, but as principally a product of inadequate infrastructure and failed governance in the late 19th cen­ tury. The Magistrate James White, writing in 1888, thought that the continuing unsanitary condition of the city was the product of governmental inaction. Not the inaction of the colonial government, mind you, but of the local municipal board (and here he undoubtedly meant its Indian members) which had for some years possessed the official authority to promote improved sanitation but had done nothing concrete in this respect. Indeed, he accused the municipality of accepting the endemic nature of cholera in Banaras as “an unpleasant necessity.” In addition, White felt that the city’s “wealthy men” were unconvinced by the health benefits to be gained through “the appliances of western civilization,” preferring to keep their hands in their pockets and take their water from the river directly, as they had for generations.10 White’s accusations were essentially untrue, however, in a number of respects. The specific state of Banaras’s streets and lanes, the corresponding pollution of the river Ganga from the city’s drains, and the potential impli­ cations of raw sewage for human health in the city were not unknown to the colonial government in the decades before the advent of municipal govern­ ance, but while several steps were taken to address the problem, these might also be characterized as woefully inadequate. As early as 1790 Francis Wil­ ford, orientalist extraordinaire and army surveyor, reported that Banaras was characterized by “filthiness and an intolerable stench” that stalked the city’s residents throughout their daily activities.11 During Jonathan Duncan’s resi­ dency in the city (1788–95) he attempted several measures to improve sanita­ tion, including an initiative that utilized court fees and fines to build public latrines and pay for a regularized system of street sweeping.12 Although cho­ lera’s exact etiology was not yet well understood, many Britons thought that the epidemics of the early 19th century originated with the insanitary envir­ onments of north Indian towns and cities. As many as 15,000 people were

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reported to have perished from “spasmodic cholera” in Banaras during just two months in 1818, as part of the first cholera pandemic that stretched out­ wards from Bengal, along the Gangetic plain to as far afield as China and the Persian Gulf.13 Perhaps as a result, in 1823 the Company allowed local goods levies in cities such as Banaras to be utilized for infrastructural improvements intended to promote the “healthfulness” of the city. Overseen by James Prin­ sep, together with members of a local “Benares committee,” roads were widened and low-lying pools and marshes were connected by drains to the Ganga. The “Mutsyoduree tunnel”, for example, completed in 1827, served to drain a small inland lake behind Trilochan Ghat, in the north of Banaras, to the river through an underground passageway. This was reported to have improved the area’s “salubrity” and reclaimed space for a grain market and bazaar.14 Other water- and sewage-ways were also constructed at about this time, although by the 1880s administrators could no longer locate any records detailing their exact size or location.15 At least as early as 1869, Banarsis themselves also understood all too well that the existing system of drains in the city left much to be desired. They wrote to the colonial government asking for help, clearly abandoning what the British had earlier characterized as a cultural indifference to filth and an obstinacy to sani­ tary innovation (if, indeed, they ever held such views in the first place). In a petition to government dated that year, several residents suggested that a large central drain be built in the city running from Shivala, in the south, to Rajghat, in the north, in order to collect all of the city’s waste and then deposit it into the Ganga beyond the city limits, where it would be carried away. The newly formed Municipal Board apparently discussed this scheme, but dismissed it because of its cost. The same idea was again raised in 1881 in another petition, this time directed to the Viceroy, the Marquess of Ripon, by Manohar Lal and Durga Prasad (who identified themselves as residents of Assi Ghat and devotees at the temple of Jagannath), on the occasion of the Viceroy’s visit to the city in that same November. Lal and Prasad noted that in comparison with the other large cities of northern India, Banaras was “far backwards” in terms of its sanitation infrastructure. They bemoaned the presence of human filth (i.e. excrement) on the riverbank and in the waters of the Ganga, where it imperilled human health and impacted age-old religious practice. In order to pay for the drain, they sug­ gested levying a “proportionate rate” on the city’s inhabitants: each would pay according to his or her income and assets, with the rajas, maharajas, merchants, and bankers shouldering the main part of the cost.16 In his published remarks to the Municipal Board on the afternoon of 29 November at Town Hall, Lord Ripon made no mention of the petition, nor the city’s sanitation or indeed its filthiness, expressing only his gratitude at seeing the ancient city and his faith in the workings of municipal government.17 For their part, the Municipal Board rejected the scheme at a meeting in March of the following year, citing the wildly inaccurate cost estimates that Lal and Prasad had proposed (Rs 34,000 soon turned into Rs 1,34,000!) and a general disinclination on the Board’s part to continue the dumping of human waste into the Ganga. Moreover, in the late

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1880s, as plans and preparations for an approved sanitation scheme moved for­ ward, local groups were formed to help to raise money or to lobby against new taxation. The Ganges Anti-Pollution Society, acting on a proposal of Raja Shiva Prasad, resolved in 1888 to collect subscriptions from the city’s notable men to “secure the sanitary welfare of Holy Kashi.”18 Lastly, in contrast to White’s claim, in the two decades before the unrest of 1891, the Municipal Board was in fact itself directly (and indirectly) involved in several attempts to first understand, and then improve, the city’s sanitary infrastructure. The first of these dated to early 1872, when an (unsuccessful) attempt was made to bring Calcutta’s sanitary engineer, William Clark,19 to the city as a consultant. Later in that year Colonel Davidson drew up pre­ liminary plans for the city’s sewerage, but they were rejected on the basis of the high cost.20 Then, during the winter of 1875–76, T. E. Heaford, an engineer with the PWD, was contracted by the municipality to prepare a full survey of the city’s drainage problems as well as a scheme for improving its overall sani­ tation. This proved to be yet another false start, however, and an expensive one as well: the Board spent over Rs 20,000 on Heaford’s salary and attendant costs with little (or rather, nothing) to show for it. Heaford died in late 1878 without, apparently, writing anything. Heaford had claimed in a rushed series of letters to the Board, to justify the delay, both “ill health” and a desire to wait for the latest information on sanitation from Britain before actually embarking on the project in earnest.21 Later enquiries by the Board suggested that Hea­ ford was thinking of mechanically pumping water from across the river at Ramnagar up to the Rajghat plateau (a distance of between 4 and 5 miles, and obviously highly impractical). Heaford’s assistant, a Mr. Male, when ques­ tioned somewhat later about Heaford’s proposal, was said by his interrogators to possess a mind that was a “perfect blank” on the issues at hand.22 By the early 1880s several more ideas were actively being considered for Banaras, including a sewage farm to the north-east of the city, which would allow the use of human waste as manure; an electric tram system for the carriage of night soil to the city’s outskirts (more on this later); and water supply tanks on the Rajghat plateau.23 The most notable, and comprehensive, of these schemes was authored in 1880 by Frank FitzJames, a senior engineer with the Public Works Department who had, nevertheless, admitted earlier to his superiors that he really had “never given a thought to drainage or water­ supply.”24 FitzJames’s report recommended the construction of a large central sewage drain that emptied out into the Varuna river near its confluence with the Ganga, together with a system of fresh water supply.25 The cost would be in the region of Rs 20 lakh [20,00,000, or 2 million] – a substantial sum indeed. On receipt of the report, the Municipal Board expressed numerous reservations to the Commissioner. First and foremost, they felt that the cost was such that it necessitated moving forward with great caution. The FitzJames scheme also would end up polluting the Ganga, and given that “in Europe no sanitary system is considered perfect which results in pollution of river water,” the Board wondered why they should accept one that did, and

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for such a high cost as well. Other concerns included the potential for under­ ground drains to clog or to undermine house foundations, as well as the wasting of potentially valuable manure by depositing it directly into the river. As such, the Board requested to see all other sanitation schemes that had been drawn up for the city so that it could make a more informed decision.26 The Board was clearly frustrated: it had spent large sums on surveys, maps, and various schemes to deal with the city’s drainage and sanitation problems, but it was still working from incomplete information. By 1882 none of the schemes proposed could responsibly meet with their approval.27 In a later letter, even Banaras’s Commissioner expressed his sympathy for the efforts that the Board had taken and the difficult position in which it had been put.28 The point, however, is that by the early 1880s the main contours of the Banaras sanitation “debate” had essentially been determined. And it was an active, ongoing debate. The colonial government, the Municipal Board, and many of city’s residents agreed that something needed to be done to address the city’s problems, and their concerns included both the protection of human health and the preservation of a sacred city and river. Banarsis themselves, including the municipal counsellors, were deeply engaged with the problem, certainly not indifferent to it. But there was still no agreement between the Board and the government on what a new sanitation scheme would look like. Was it to be modest or ambitious? Would it dump sewage into the river or would it utilize some form of dry-earth conservancy? Would there be only a drainage scheme or would the provision of fresh water be included? Who was going to pay for all of this? How would the money be raised if the municipality would need to fund it without the financial help of the provincial government? What safeguards would be taken to ensure that the rights of private property were not unduly interfered with? Did the Municipal Board have all the information it needed from the colonial state to make the right choice?

Notes 1 BL, IOR P/3374, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1889, February, No. 11, A. J. Hughes, “Report on the Drainage and Water-Supply of the City of Benares,” n.d. [December 1888 or January 1889?]. 2 Ibid. 3 BL, IOR, P/3142, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1888, July, No 3, J. White, Magistrate, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 7 June 1888. 4 Ibid., July, No 2, J. White to Commissioner, Benares Division, 14 May 1888, and No 3, J. White to Commissioner, Benares Division, 7 June 1888. 5 D. Chakrabarty, “Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze,” Economic and Political Weekly, 27, 10/11, (March 1992): 541–7. 6 See K. D. Alley, “Ganga and Gandagi: Interpretations of Pollution and Waste in Benaras,” Ethnology, 33, 2, (Spring 1994): 127–45.

7 Sherring, Sacred City of the Hindus: 53–4, 67, 74.

8 C. Scott, Pictures of the World (London: Remington & Co., 1894): 113–15.

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9 The shift of Hindu religious imagery that spoke of calmness and meditation (18th century) to filth and disease (19th century) is most certainly a part of that wider cultural shift Thomas Trautmann described as the transition from “Indomania” to “Indophobia.” See T. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, CA: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1997). 10 BL, IOR, P/3142, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1888, July, No 2, 14 May 1888 letter, J. White, Magistrate, to Commissioner, Benares Division. 11 “Remarks on the Town of Benares by F. Wilford Surveyor,” [1790], quoted in B. S. Cohn, “The British in Benares: A Nineteenth Century Colonial Society,” Com­ parative Studies in Society and History, 4, 2, (January 1962): 182–3. For more on Wilford, see C. A. Bayly, “Orientalists, Informants, and Critics in Benares, 1790– 1860” in J. Malik, ed., Perspectives of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History, 1760–1860 (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 12 V. A. Narain, Jonathan Duncan and Varanasi (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukho­ padhyay, 1959): 182–3. 13 “Progress of the Indian Cholera,” Niles’ Register, 3 September 1831: 15–16. 14 The tunnel is depicted in an 1825 drawing by James Prinsep: BL, IOR, WD4277, “Map and cross section of the drainage tunnel from the Machhodri tank to the river, Benares.” See also, H. T. Prinsep, “Memoir of the Author,” in J. Prinsep, Essays on Indian Antiquities, vol. 1, ed. E. Thomas, (London: John Murray, 1858), v–vi. As well, an account of the digging of the tunnel can be found in J. P. [James Prinsep], “Geological Section in a part of the City of Benares,” dated August 1, 1827, in Oriental Magazine, XIV (June 1827 Proceedings of the Benares Literary Society), 11–14. Prinsep’s earlier map of Banaras (1822) shows a large lake here, connected by a natural canal to other inland water bodies to the west, most of which eventually drained into the Ganga via a small river (now disappeared) in Godaulia. The lake area he drained is now centered on Macchodari Park, which to this day still contains a small pond in its center when it rains. Lastly, see Eck, Banaras: 46–50. 15 Near Shivala Ghat one of these early drains can still be found, semi-operational, and I have seen a few references to a further drain built by a Mr Gubbins (perhaps c. 1857) near Dasashwamedh Ghat. This, I assume, was an attempt to divert under­ ground Godaulia’s small river and use it as a sewageway. In an ironic turn, it was noted in a 1928 letter that Banaras’s municipal engineer had not kept records of the location of Banaras’s new drainage system, built in the two decades prior. His superiors were not amused. See UPRAV, Varanasi Division, Different Departments, 1901–29, Box 145, File 353, Superintending Engineer, Public Health Department, Lucknow, to Chairman, Municipal Board, Benares, 5 September 1928. 16 UPRAV, Varanasi Division, Miscellaneous List 2, Box 50, File 119, Petition of Manohur Lal and Durga Pershad, dated 27 November 1881. 17 G. F. S. Robinson, ed., Speeches of the Marquess of Ripon, Viceroy and Governor General of India, 1880–1882, vol. 1, (Calcutta, Star Press, 1883): 147–8. 18 BL, IOR, P/3142 NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1888, July, No 9, letter of 16 June 1888, Sadho Lal, Secretary, Ganges Anti-Pollution Society, to Chairman, Municipal Board, Benares. 19 See Clark, Drainage of Calcutta. 20 UPRAV, Varanasi Division, Miscellaneous List 2, Box 53, File 3, 23 July 1878 letter, W. Kaye, President, Benares Municipal Council, to C. O. Carmichael, Commissioner, Benares Division. 21 BL, IOR, P/1813, NWP&O PWD Proceedings, January–July 1882, No. 88 of July, 17 June 1878 letter, W. Church, President, Municipal Committee, Benares, to Offg. Commissioner, Benares Division. 22 UPRAV, Varanasi Division, Miscellaneous List 2, Box 53, File 3, July 1881 letter, F. FitzJames, PWD, NWP&O, to Joint-Secretary to Govt, PWD, NWP&O.

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23 See, for example, ibid., 9 February 1881 letter, F. FitzJames, Superintending Engineer, to Sec. to Govt., PWD, NWP&O. 24 Ibid., File 3, July 1881 letter, F. FitzJames, PWD, NWP&O, to Joint-Secretary to Govt, PWD, NWP&O. 25 F. FitzJames, Preliminary Report on the Sewerage and Water Supply of the City of Benares (Allahabad: Government of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, 1880). 26 UPRAV, Varanasi Division, Miscellaneous List 2, Box 53, File 3, 2 March 1881 letter, H. G. Ross, President, Municipal Committee, Benares, to Commissioner, Benares Division. 27 Ibid., Box 50, File 119, extract from proceedings of a General Meeting of the Municipal Commissioners held on the 14 March 1882. 28 BL, IOR, P/3142 NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1888, July, No 6, Note by J. J. F. Lumsden, 18 June 1888.

4

Illness and hardship

The difficulties and hardships of our research, our archives, our travels, and, occasionally, our relationships to our mentors and their bodies of scholar­ ship, are narratives formative of our academic selves. They are also stories for the bar at conferences; stories that we use to demonstrate to our Amer­ icanist colleagues that we need more money in our personal research accounts (research in far-away places is often expensive); stories that account for the long time between books, perhaps; and stories that help us to find our way out of the extended adolescence that is graduate school. These are stories that can serve as commodities and forms of authority; that can act as the building blocks of professional and personal identities; and that may become professional currencies to be compared and traded. I can recall hearing numerous (mostly male) friends’ and colleagues’ stories of surviving malaria and dengue fever, of traversing the badlands among ban­ dits and of being robbed at knifepoint, of State Department evacuations, of close calls with Maoist kidnappers and the Indian mafia, of run-ins with grizzly bears, the Russian mafia, and aggressive Russian prostitutes. All are now a part of professional lore, and all are intended to make our academic work, and our academic selves, more authentic, more authoritative, more interesting, and yes, more manly.1 Stories of illness and physical hardship are no longer stories exclusively linked to one’s skin color, per se, but are usually stories based in a perspective of the possession of modernity (although I recognize the potential for sub­ stantial overlap here). On occasion, when meeting someone new at a party in south Delhi, that person will be amazed at my willingness to subject myself to the sanitary conditions of Banaras – its chaos, congestion, and its aggressive tout culture – how brave I must be, indeed. Such conversations are usually peppered with accounts of their friends who have fallen ill in the city, or been pickpocketed at the train station, and a resultant fear of visiting. My role in the discussion usually seems to lurch between providing a videshi (foreigner’s) validation about the backwardness and dangers of Uttar Pradesh (the “other” across the border), on the one hand, and defending the reputation of Banarsis as mostly honorable, mostly friendly, and mostly misunderstood, on the other. Only one of these roles do I ever choose to inhabit.

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There is a long, mostly colonial, genealogy of narratives about the physical dangers and filthiness of the non-West, as well as stories of Western hardship and survival against inhospitable climates and disease in the East. Today it is Asianlineage avian influenza A (H5N1) and A (H7N9); Ebola; malaria; killer bees; Dustin Hoffman in “Outbreak;” or Naomi Watts in “The Impossible.” These ideas of danger and survival are co-constituents, I think, that make one another meaningful as narratives of an authoritative modernity and, of course, to con­ structions of “manliness.”2 Growing up, I was a regular reader of Wilfred The­ siger, T. E. Lawrence, and Robert Byron; so much so that I left home at the age of 20, utterly naïve, to travel alone in the “Arab world.” I prepared myself by watching Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, reading Lonely Planet, and poring over my father’s 30-year-old atlas.3 The absurdity of my younger self is palpable to me, although those months of early solo travel remain in many ways important to my sense of self. In later years, despite recognizing the problematic perspective of such texts, I would consume historical/adventure travelogues such as Ian Thomson’s Bonjour Blanc (about Haiti), and even more recently, Rory Stewart’s The Prince of the Marshes. I am astonished now to recall in these pages their casual racism. Stewart begins his memoir in this way: … There was a strong smell of kebabs and stagnant river water, and the lanes were choked with carts selling clothes and electronic goods. … I walked alone through groups of men who wore the shiny Western clothes and sunglasses I had seen in the Balkans … I visited a family of eight living in a single tenement room behind the illegal weapons market in Sadr City. … the Coalition had just raised [the father’s] salary from five dollars a month to sixty, fifty-five of which he was spending to rent the thirty-inch television that sat in the corner of the room. … his youngest child, three months old and weighing seven pounds … had not been able to feed for three days, and he and his wife thought their child would soon die.4 Stewart’s modernity – his difference from Iraq and Iraqis – is constituted by his noticing the strong smells of food and filth intermixed; his unspoken inti­ midation by men on the street but also his ability to sneer and laugh inwardly at their cheap, shiny, eastern European clothes; and, of course, his casual passing of moral judgment on the apparent choice to rent a large television set rather than to take care of one’s child (a passing made all the more repugnant by its use as a simple stage-setting device). *** I had never been to Banaras before I moved there in February of 2000. Several years earlier I had made the decision to write my PhD on the history of Sanskrit education during the 19th century, with a particular focus on Banaras, despite the fact that my India experience during the late 1990s was limited mostly to backpacking around Delhi, Agra, Kolkata, and Dharam­ shala (although I had ridden a camel through the Thar desert for a week

Illness and hardship

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once – I do not really recommend it). I had always been interested in the Gangetic plain, drawn no doubt by my obsessive reading of Eric Newby as a teenager, but Banaras had always eluded me when I was in India then – missed trains, cancelled trains, a lack of money, the draw of the mountains, and occasionally a youthful trepidation at encountering this mythical city. The week before I left Cambridge to begin my Indian research in earnest, my supervisor, the late Chris Bayly, took me as he often did to The Eagle5 for a drink or (usually) two. Sipping his Merlot across the table from me (then, as now, I prefer an IPA) he recounted with some subdued glee the story of how he nearly died in Banaras. It was the 1970s, and he was working with the records of the city’s banking and merchant families – work that would later materialize into his magisterial Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars.6 His story was set during a religious holiday of some sort I think – I forget now which one – and he began by saying that he had been feeling increasingly unwell for several days. He had lain in bed hoping to recover until, one morning, he awoke and was surprised to find that he had turned mostly yellow. Somehow he ended up in a hastily composed stretcher (he did not really remember how), and was carried through the streets of the old city by a number of acquaintances he called “hippies” to the local hospital, where he was poked and prodded and put on an intravenous drip. There, he eventually recovered from what I guessed was probably Hepa­ titis A. Quite apart from the fact that I found it inconceivable that Chris knew any hippies, he seemed unconcerned by the details of his illness – what he might have had and its potential severity. It was now, instead, just a part of his own Indian mythology: when you go to Banaras, he said, you will inevitably get sick. It is simple and unavoidable. I did wonder at how this was a helpful story to tell me at the time. He was, I suppose, reminiscing about his youth as much as he was providing me with a cautionary tale. Many years later, in January 2015, I had the opportunity to travel to Banaras with Chris for a symposium in celebration of his career and the academic friendships that he had made over some 40 years. I stepped up to the podium to talk about the “making” of the modern city through municipal governance in the 1880s and ‘90s – a version of this section of the book that you are now reading – but first I began to recount back to him the story of his illness, and its original telling, with the addition of my own experience of life-threatening illness in the city: as the first summer of my time in Banaras approached I had myself fallen quite sick after eating dinner at one of the local dhabas (informal street restaurants) in Assi (for some strange reason I decided I wanted macaroni and cheese for dinner). My bowels emptied themselves mercilessly, and I became increasingly dehydrated and incoherent. The speed with which this overtook me was astounding – by 2:00 a.m. I was moving in and out of consciousness. Luckily I was living at the time with Ron Barrett, a PhD student from Stanford who was then working on Aghor medicine and who (also lucky for me) was also a former US Army nurse.7 Ron helped me to a cycle rickshaw and took me to a local maternity clinic (I later realized that he guessed I might not survive the trip all the way to the hospital in Lanka). The doctors were awoken after Ron paid a

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Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City

small incentive to the attending nurse. He then went to the chemist to fetch some broad-spectrum antibiotics. Meanwhile one of the doctors tried to get an IV into my arm, but was having substantial trouble – my veins had apparently collapsed (or something like that). I lay there quietly, breathing shallowly, not reacting to the jabs in my arm, and with a white sheet over my head to protect me from the mosquitos. Or so I was told. My companion said later that she thought the white sheet was a particularly macabre flourish, suggesting, perhaps, that something of the ghostly had already overtaken me. Eventually, through a vein in my hand, I was filled with saline and other concoctions of which I was only vaguely aware. I had fully recovered consciousness by noon the next day, and after a week or so I was again working, although my hand remained bruised and sore for some time afterwards. In my telling of this story for Chris, I added an additional, fictional flourish: carried away from my house in Assi, I told him that I had raised my fist and cursed “that Bayly … he told me so and I didn’t believe him!” He chuckled, as did the rest of the audience. It was not the last time that I would see Chris alive (he passed away unexpectedly in May of that year) but it is one of the memories of him that I cherish most. It was a moment of laughter in which we connected, after a long hiatus, over a shared experience and a shared love of that most difficult-to-love of cities. *** I am not immune to the perspective of modernity.8 I can do little to erase my middle-class Canadian upbringing or the experience of being raised as a boy or the cultural perspectives bequeathed to me by my British father and grand­ parents. My thinking is patterned by such a modernity. What I hope I can do, though, is to strive to understand what such experiences, such lived realities for me, bring to my thought and my scholarship on India. I do not wish to perpe­ tuate stereotypes about other people or other places, or to sneer at the back­ wardness of Banaras. And I do not feel comfortable in over-commoditizing my time in the city, even if it is an inevitable move of scholarly authorization. These interludes in this text are intended, rather, to demystify my presence behind this book. The alternative, I fear, to recognizing my perspective of modernity (apart from the obvious danger of turning into Rory Stewart) is to get lost in a charade of “inhabitation” – the attempt to “pass for” someone who I am not (I think here, of course, of the impersonations of Richard Burton). This is a particularly common affliction, I am afraid, for white people in Banaras. Do not get me wrong. I love Banaras. I love being there, and I feel a profound affinity for the city and my friends there. But I also understand that I am not of it. Whether this is an asset or a detriment to this book is for you to decide.

Notes 1 See, for example, R. Willerslev, On the Run in Siberia, translated by C. ÓhAi­ seadha, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

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2 The www.artofmanliness.com has a list of 50 “must-read” adventure books about men – indeed, white men – who explored and conquered and survived incredible hardship. I guess the list is supposed to be instructive. 3 I should have read Robert Young Pelton’s unintentionally hilarious The World’s Most Dangerous Places. 4 R. Stewart, The Prince of the Marshes, and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books, 2007): 3–4. 5 Most famous as the site where Francis Crick and James Watson reportedly announced the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. 6 Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars. 7 See his wonderful book on his Banaras research: R. Barrett, Aghor Medicine: Pol­ lution, Death, and Healing in Northern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008). 8 I follow here on Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe.

5

Creating the modern from the traditional

By 1881 the provincial government had determined that municipal boards in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh would bear ultimate financial responsibility for their major infrastructure programs of sanitary improve­ ment.1 The Lieutenant Governor indicated that he would help the boards to secure appropriate loans, given that none had sufficient funds on hand, and in some limited cases the government might also help with small grants-in-aid. Consistent with the policy of financial decentralization promoted by Lord Mayo in 1870, the larger municipalities would need to work closely with their provincial overseers, with whom ultimate authority for budgeting and finances lay. Yet it was the individual municipal board that was charged with creating these budgets, including appropriate forecasts for expenditure and expected revenues, and it was the municipalities that would have to live with the con­ sequences of these decisions. In the early and middle part of the 1880s, however, it had become increas­ ingly clear to all involved that Banaras would struggle to afford or manage any large-scale infrastructure project. In 1885, for example, the Municipal Board faced a budget deficit of more than Rs 20,000. This was blamed on octroi rev­ enue shortfalls and a road-building project that went over budget (negotiations over land appropriations routinely ended up in civil court, which the Board had not expected). The deficit would be made up by cashing the Board’s sav­ ings in government bonds. The Board had also failed to pay the year’s policing charge on the pretense that they had not received a bill. Such events brought the Board sustained criticism from both the Commissioner and the Lieutenant Governor’s office for its “want of ordinary foresight” in budgeting as well as its apparent “neglect of ordinary rules regarding expenditure.”2 Yet the following year, in January 1886, J. J. F. Lumsden, the Commis­ sioner of Banaras, highlighted for the Municipal Board his own priorities for the city’s infrastructure in a pointed letter. He emphasized the administrative importance of Banaras within his division, but also, in contrast, its reputation for poorly maintained roads, shoddy municipal oversight, and the “irregular and dilatory” submission of municipal reports. What was most needed in the city, he said, was a “proper conservancy scheme” – a “crying want” that had often been pointed out to the municipal counsellors by colonial government.

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This would cost a lot of money, undoubtedly, and would require additional forms of taxation to be imposed. It was, he directed, a necessity that the Board should start planning for immediately.3 *** Banaras’s Municipal Board was, towards the end of the 19th century, made up of a mix of between 20 and 25 appointed and elected members overseen by a chairman, who was very often the city’s European magistrate.4 Board members appointed by the local government included a number of British officials (for example, the city’s civil surgeon, Dr. Hooper) as well as prominent local men such as educator and zamindar Raja Shiva Prasad5 and publisher E. J. Lazarus (who also acted as agent to the Maharaja of Vizianagaram). Other key members included men such as Raja Shambhu Narayan Singh (a zamindar, amateur agriculturalist scientist, and a relative of the Maharaja of Banaras), Pramada Das Mittra (a vedanta scholar, former Anglo-Sanskrit Professor at Benares College, and friend to Swami Vivekananda),6 as well as Mirza Rahmat-ullah Beg (most notable for his part on Syed Ahmed Khan’s educational reform committee).7 Members of the Board were also elected from the city’s six princi­ pal wards8 by residents (men only) who possessed sufficient personal income or wealth to be deemed responsible voters.9 Voter turnout tended to be about a third to a half of eligible voters. While British administrators sometimes believed that some municipal board members were apathetic, seeking the office only for the “social status” it conferred,10 others recognized it as an important step towards enhanced forms of self-governance for India.11 The member of Banaras’s Municipal Board who engaged most thoughtfully with Lumsden’s directive was Babu Bireshwar Mittra. The latter made a career for himself as a teacher and lawyer, becoming in time a pleader at the High Court of the North-Western Provinces in Allahabad, as well as professor of law at the Banaras Queen’s College. A prominent member of Banaras’s Bengali community, Mittra’s career in law and public service culminated with his appointment to the Lieutenant Governor’s Legislative Council, shortly before his death in 1891 (and just months after the waterworks riot of January in that year).12 Mittra was in decided agreement with the Commissioner about the need to do something about Banaras’s sanitation infrastructure, and he worked tirelessly for the promotion of sanitary improvement throughout his time on the Municipal Board. But equally he held well-developed views on the nature of colonial governance in India that meant that his approach to the city’s problems did not always correspond to those held by provincial gov­ ernment overseers, or indeed many of his peers on the Board. Mittra was undoubtedly a loyalist to the Crown, but not an unreflective one. His views on government in India were expressed most clearly through a critique of the Indian National Congress (INC), published in pamphlet form in Banaras in 1889.13 It is fair to say, I venture, that he forged these ideas at least partly through his experiences in working with the colonial government on the Banaras Board’s plans for sanitary (and other city) improvements. The

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hallmarks of his work there were an emphasis on the self-evident truth of western ideas of good government and the need for modern improvements to the city, but always combined with a strong sense of the necessity of cleaving close to established Indian practices, traditions, and sensibilities. So let us begin with a close reading of the pamphlet itself, in order to better frame Mittra’s ideas about Banaras’s infrastructural improvement within his broader views on responsible government in India. Babu Bireshwar Mittra viewed the INC as an elitist (that is, a non-repre­ sentative) institution, and believed that its leadership was too much a product of Western influence to effectively lead the Indian populace, which remained mired in relative ignorance of political ideals. India, as a whole, he argued, did not yet constitute a nation. Instead, he believed, it was the long-established social and religious orders of particular Indian regions that held far more influence over people’s minds, hearts, and actions than the abstract national identity that the INC was promoting. He also expressed skepticism about the Congress’s brand of populist politics, claiming that mass rallies were likely only to inflame the pas­ sions of the ignorant and illiterate without bringing about any development in political sensibilities. “I hate enthusiasm finding expression in frenzied utter­ ances,” he wrote, “both in Politics and Theology; but the former is certainly the more mischievous in its tendency, and far more harmful in its results.”14 These results might include, Mittra believed, a disturbance in the relations that gov­ erned the “mutual conduct of the different orders of the people.” He feared, in essence, a situation in which the educated would be pushed from the sphere of political leadership and from the ability to help to determine India’s future form of governance – who could anticipate, then, the results of such an outcome?15 Equally, Mittra was skeptical about the British Parliament’s ability to make life better for Indians. The nature of British rule in India was the “legitimate outcome” of the history of British interaction with India and would likely remain unchanged until the “exigencies of the Empire” brought about change. On occasion, he noted, conditions in India could be made a political “play­ thing” for the British opposition party and be “made causes for party warfare in and out of Parliament.” But despite such short-term political disturbances, Mittra could not imagine that much would change in the way that India was governed by Britain, at least for another generation or so, barring any sort of unforeseen calamity. Drawing a kind of perverse inspiration from Edmund Burke, no doubt, Mittra argued that Britain was still a conservative country under the sway of its older religious and civil institutions, and largely untou­ ched by the revolutionary politics of its European neighbors. There was still much in European polities (except of course in France, he noted) hostile to “the ideal freedom of human thought and speech” – a conservatism, in other words, that had only recently allowed for measures of wider political enfranchisement in Britain and which certainly could not be made to come to terms with the civilizational differences of a place like India.16 Moreover, Mittra believed that ultimately it was not British politicians, or even the London-based Secretary of State for India, who guided the overall

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substance of policy and decision-making for Indians, but rather the great bureaucratic institutions of the British government in India.17 These institu­ tions were dominated by an Anglo-Indian class hostile to, and unforgiving of, Indian civilizational norms, he believed, and which would not be driven to adopt a more sympathetic outlook through “inconsequential bustle.”18 The very structure of that great bureaucracy was also prone to potential abuses of power and a distancing of ruler from ruled. District officers, such as the Col­ lector or even the Commissioner, held positions that concentrated both judi­ cial and executive power into their own hands. Such unchecked power recreated, in essence, the worst elements of a long-past “Oriental despot­ ism.”19 In short, there existed a great gulf of understanding between Indians and Britons, made worse by the structure and history of the British empire in India. “A foreigner cannot see things as we see them,” he said.20 So what was the path forward for India and the cause of better, more repre­ sentative government, given that neither the INC, nor Parliament, nor the Gov­ ernment of India could be relied upon to push that agenda forward in a responsible fashion? Political progress is never conferred by some great power, Mittra argued, but instead such rights are “taken by the people in the natural evolution of things.” “Political liberty cannot be acquired by begging” he con­ tinued, “it will not be granted as an act of grace. It will lose its value in the very act of conferment, it will be deprived of its strength on being received as a favour.”21 What he called for instead was the development of refined political sensibilities among the entire population, broader education, and most importantly the align­ ing of interests between India’s masses and its traditional leadership classes. The right to political representation was the product of preparatory and developmental work, in other words. His approach to solving the problem was two-fold: On the one hand, Mittra advocated for a more robust role in policymaking for Indians qualified by means of their experience, education, and their con­ tinued connection to indigenous institutions. Interestingly, Mittra argued that the granting of local powers to municipal counsellors in India was beginning “the work of political ‘regeneration,’ education, or advancement at the wrong end,” as the path of political advancement inevitably started in a central Parliament with the presence of those few men with sufficient education and experience to make responsible decisions on behalf of the nation. While the British policy of devolving forms of governance to the local level was not ideal in his view, it had already gone ahead, and so he advocated utilizing that fact to rejuvenate a kind of political trickle-down effect. He wished to see the creation of a series of councils to assist the government in making law and administering it, with such councils populated by representatives from all classes of the native community. These would be men of “tried ability” from the municipalities and provincial legislative councils (and most certainly not the old rajas) who could advise the government and see beyond their own narrow interests to the interests of the country as a whole.22 On the other hand, Mittra wanted to see a sort of corresponding “trickle­ up” effect, in which a series of practical measures would be undertaken in

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order to broaden the basis of mutual interdependence and mutual under­ standing for India’s masses; a broad “union,” of sorts, which would serve as the basis of a revitalized national identity. These included a revitalization of traditional industry, further economic development, and a series of social reforms that would address problems such as infant marriage, polygamy, and widow chastity.23 Mittra’s ideas here are complicated, to be certain. He clearly believed that neither British officials nor a wholly Anglicized class of Indians (such as one found in the INC) were capable of understanding, or representing, the inter­ ests of most Indians. He believed that current municipal governance in India was putting the cart before the horse, but (I suppose) now that the cart was moving down the road, with municipal counsellors aboard it, the experience of many of those men should be put to use in promoting better government at a central, quasi-Parliamentary level. British education and a connection to British institutions clearly had left its mark on Mittra’s own life, and these experiences remained important in his vision of India’s emerging political leadership: India’s future leadership class must understand due process, for example, as well as the rule of law, the lessons of history, and the principles of good, responsible government. But equally he was insistent that such leader­ ship maintain a “mutual sympathy” with the Indian people and the values they held. In his view neither the INC (too European) nor the Indian rajas (too traditional) could fit that bill. (Indeed, Mittra referred several times to the lessons of 1688 and the common cause made by English aristocrats and the broader populace). Mittra was also not a bleary-eyed pastoralist, and he understood that most of Indian society needed a series of renewals and reforms that would promote not only economic well-being and greater social justice but a shared sense of purpose and identity; this was the fundamental basis for the development of a national self. Mittra understood that there was no going back from British rule and the institutions and ideas that it had implanted into India. The question was how to adapt these institutions to serve Indians in future so that such “mutual sympathy” remained intact and conducive to the development of representative political norms. *** In the months that followed Commissioner Lumsden’s directive to the Banaras Municipal Board – that they get started on their “proper con­ servancy scheme” – there was much deliberation among Board members, but seemingly little progress towards a decision of any kind. Babu Bireshwar Mittra wrote two important memorandum in the Fall of 1886 that argued that, while the various levels of local government were considering the pros and cons of various ambitious (and expensive) sanitation schemes for the city, the Board should move ahead with regularizing, or perhaps modernizing, traditional modes of drain cleaning in the short term so as to alleviate the “immediate and pressing want” of sewers becoming stagnant and the soil absorbing yet more “excremental filth and foul water.” His argument, in

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essence, was that new initiatives were best introduced as revised forms of established collective social action at the neighborhood level. In these mem­ oranda, Mittra also used the related issues of taxation and city infrastructure to elaborate for his peers on the council his views on the nature of civil gov­ ernment in India and the values that he thought it could ideally cultivate within Indian sociopolitical life. He valorized the essential rationality of tra­ ditional ways of living and governing in the city, but equally recognized the necessity of increasingly adapting these to suit more modern times.24 The problem of Banaras’s sanitation and drainage system was a difficult one, Mittra began, given that the drains were several centuries old and apparently built on “no scientific principle” – much like the ancient city itself. Yet during the course of these same centuries Banarsis had cleaned their drains and kept their neighborhoods relatively free from environmental disease through a system of subscription known as “behri.” The residents of a particular neigh­ borhood, often working through the leadership of a muhalla mukhtar (a neighborhood spokesman or leader), each paid a small fee – the behri – and the sum total was then given to a group of workers who removed the drain cover­ ings and cleaned the drains for them. This was a customary system that oper­ ated on the basis of collective neighborhood initiative. What Mittra proposed was that this system, which had always been highly localized and remained essentially outside the purview of city government, be brought directly under the control of the municipality. In this way, behri could become regularized and “uniform” under government, rather than an ad hoc practice. Mittra acknowl­ edged that the traditional form of behri no longer worked as well as it once did, as was evident by the state of the city’s sanitation. He attributed this “decline” to physical and social causes alike: the city itself was becoming larger and denser, while neighborhoods themselves had become more socially complex during the period of British rule, making collective action more difficult. Mittra proposed that the Municipal Board create this traditional-cum­ modern infrastructure of filth removal through the hiring of a single drainage inspector, with authority for the whole of the old city, as well as some 30 gangs of ten sweepers (mehtars), each gang equipped with a “filth cart.” These gangs would be assigned to certain neighborhoods to regularly open out the drains in order to clean them thoroughly and then make any necessary repairs. Tradi­ tional drain coverings, which were principally composed by large stones, would also gradually be improved to include cement fixings and the provision of reg­ ular access points. Mittra emphasized that the estimated annual cost of the scheme – Rs 40,000 – would not be funded through general municipal revenue, but, by converting the ad hoc behri fee into a drainage fee, which would be paid by those whose houses were connected to the drains. This was not an innovation, he insisted, but simply the bringing of “the custom of ‘behri’ pay­ ments under a regularized system, so as to enable the Board, as representing the interests of the townspeople, to do them a service …”25 Mittra’s memorandum was met with opposition from several quarters, including, most prominently, his fellow Board members. Some complained

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that because behri was not practiced in all parts of the city it was at least partly an innovation. Others did not see the necessity of this initiative, at all, if the city was going to get a new sanitation system in the next few years. Mittra chose, however, to principally address a third objection raised in a further lengthy memorandum: that the levy was too expensive and, because it was applied equally to rich and poor, it was inequitable and unfair. It was here that Mittra turned the question of who pays, and how much, to a state­ ment about good and reasonable governance in a city such as Banaras, which had a long history of local practices that had advanced forms of collective interest, but now existed in the changed circumstances of modern nation states and the global capitalist system. Mittra had proposed that residents with houses attached to the city’s drains pay Rs 2 per year, but not more than a maximum of 7.5% of the house’s rental value. This, he admitted, might be too high for some of the city’s poorer residents. But he believed strongly that a fee for a service should be relatively uniform across all income ranges. Mittra’s arguments here are clearly drawn from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Mittra highlighted the distinction between taxes imposed for the general administration of a region, and those that are essentially fees for a particular service. The former are intended to benefit everyone in a particular region, and thus should be pegged to income because the ability to accumulate wealth is related to good gov­ ernment. That is, when government can provide effective services and a guarantee that protects capital accumulation and investment, then the rich usually benefit more than the poor, on average. The rich should, therefore, pay more for these government services. In contrast, when a fee is collected for a specific service, then it should be uniform among all income levels. The rich do, and should, pay the same for a postage stamp as the poor. This is the core of the argument for a revised behri of Rs 2: moving to a “graduated standard of assessment” broke all the “known and accepted rules of political economy;” it was instead simply a fee for a specific service, namely the removal of waste from a drain attached to a resident’s house. He was pre­ pared, however, to make create some flexibility within the behri fee scheme to address the concerns raised by his fellow counsellors. He did, for example, seek to lessen the overall financial burden on the poor. But equally he emphasized that the structure of this new behri conformed to an established and authoritative practice in the city, as he had chosen to link the fee itself not to number of people in a household, nor to the size of a house, but to the number of chauks (courtyards) that a building possessed (thus, Rs 2 per courtyard). Muhalla mukhtars had long raised money for joint neighborhood projects on this basis, he argued, not least because this practice was also a good indicator of the size and wealth of a particular household.26 In Mittra’s broader writing about political representation, as in his prac­ tical proposals for the city, he emphasized the continuing importance of his­ tory and tradition in advancing the cause of social betterment. One needed to conform to people’s time-honored traditions and expectations in order to

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facilitate improved forms of governance, especially in an ancient city such as Banaras. Yet Mittra recognized that India was now a part of a much larger colonial, capitalist system, and thus the historical trajectory of Europe had become an integral part of India’s own path forward. He worked from the idea that nations advanced along a single path of progress, and often invoked historical precedent from Europe (such as England’s Civil War), as well as the principles of European political economy. But as we shall see, although Mittra had expressed skepticism about the role of the old rajas in India’s political future, he was not shy in drawing upon Banaras’s reputation as a sacred city in asking those same rajas for financial help in the Board’s sani­ tary initiatives. In Mittra’s view, then, religion and tradition could be mobi­ lized, in the right hands, for the promotion of modern technology and city improvement. It might also be worth noting here, as a last point, that in his writings on the cause of the 1891 riot, Mittra was ultimately respectful of the Gujarati view that the temple of Ramji was sacred to their community, even if he did not agree with their view that the temple could not be relocated (that is was consecrated in an achal manner, in other words). But he also asserted quite forcefully that there was absolutely no justification for them to claim that the brick out-buildings associated with the temple could not be acquired and demolished. Brick buildings need constant repair, and they cannot be com­ pared to the more solid and permanent temples made of stone found throughout the city. To argue that such temporary buildings also possessed a “sacred status,” as the Gujaratis did, was sheer “preposterousness” in Mittra’s view, and could not be considered as a valid religious objection. As a result, Mittra believed that the Municipal Board had taken the only course open to it – allowing the core elements of the temple to stay in place while pushing forward with a public work of great utility by building the pumping station in the space adjacent.27 In this case, Mittra believed, religious tradition had to be held within reasonable bounds and not interfere with works that promoted a collective public good. *** There is no evidence in the records to suggest that Mittra’s scheme for neighborhood-based sanitation was ever instituted in the city as he had envi­ sioned. Instead, plans were gradually pushed forward, principally by the pro­ vincial government, to create the comprehensive and expensive sewerage and water distribution infrastructure first imagined for Banaras two decades before. In this, the Lieutenant Governor was impelled, no doubt, by a formal resolution of the Imperial Government, dated 20 July 1888, which empha­ sized the importance of improving systems of sanitation disposal and the supply of safe drinking water for India’s riverine cities, in particular. For their part, the Municipal Board continued to express caution and the need for more information. At a special meeting in January 1889, the Board considered a new scheme drawn up by the province’s chief engineer, A. J.

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Hughes, which came with an unprecedented price tag of Rs 32 lakh (a sub­ stantial rise on the amount that the previous engineer, Frank FitzJames had suggested in 1880). One member of the Board wanted more time to study Hughes’ report; another wished it be done away with altogether because the cost had unduly scared the city’s residents; one threatened to quit, or rather, retire; Bireshwar Mittra wanted to refer Hughes’ report to a new municipal subcommittee for consideration, but then withdrew his motion when the Chairman opposed it; and Pramada Das Mittra asked that a general meeting of the city’s citizens be called and that a subcommittee of ten counsellors be created to facilitate forms of consultation. Several motions were duly voted on: Chairman J. White lost his motion to immediately vote to go ahead with the recommendations contained in Hughes’ report, while Pramada Das Mit­ tra’s motion to bring the issue to the city’s citizens for a further consideration was successful (in a 14–3 vote), despite White’s opposition.28 It is still somewhat unclear to me what public consultations the Board might have held that year, but in a meeting that March they resolved to go ahead with the combined scheme of drainage and water supply. By the end of 1889, their engineer, A. J. Hughes, together with another provincial engineer, Colonel Forbes, reported back to government that they had spoken with the Board’s members, surveyed key sites in the city, and settled on a budget of Rs 40 lakh in total (40,00,000): 15 lakh to create a new sewage and drainage infrastructure for the city, and 25 lakh for the provision of a source of fresh water for drinking and flushing the system. Water would be drawn into the system near the con­ fluence of the Ganga and the Assi nala (a small river), in the far southern sec­ tion of the city (and upriver from the city), while sewage and waste water were to be discharged, downriver, near the Varuna nala, in the north. (The Assi and Varuna rivers, together with the Ganga, traditionally determine the limits of the sacred city.) The exact locations for both would soon be finalized. As designed, the system would serve 86% of the city’s population.29 With the increasing realization, in the waning years of the 1880s, that the city was about to commit to an elaborate and expensive infrastructure project, several neighborhood groups were formed (or newly mobilized) to lobby the government and promote their local interests. The Benares Association, for example, argued against the imposition of new taxes in the city, as did the Bengali Tola Association, while the Kashi Sujan Samaj (an association of the “good people” of Banaras) wanted the gradual introduction of new pipes. Other local “agitators” asked for a direct plebiscite of the city’s population before going ahead.30 The most prominent of these associations, however, was the Kashi Ganga Prasadhini Sabha (the Banaras Ganges Purity Society, also known sometimes as the Ganges Anti-Pollution Society). Formed in November 1886, the Sabha included among its members the city’s royal families and other wealthy men, as well as many of the city’s municipal commissioners (including Babu Bireshwar Mittra, Raja Shiva Prasad, and others). Its president was the Majaraja of Benares, and its original patron was the Viceroy, the Marquis of Dufferin. The Sabha was established to raise money to contribute to Banaras’s

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waterworks scheme – perhaps, even, to fund “a complete and satisfactory drainage system as a free gift to the citizens of Benares” – and was borne from two principal concerns among its members. The first of these was economic: the escalating cost of the project prompted the desire to see that the cost was not an undue burden to the poor and ordinary citizens of the city. The second was more religious in nature and included the wish to divert sewage runoff from entering the river because of its sacred stature in Hinduism; to restore “to the holy Ganges its purity … as a sacred obligation.”31 (Indeed, the very name of the Sabha indicates an origin with primarily religious concerns – quite apart from the use of “Kashi,” the original Sanskrit name for the city, in the title, prasadhini is a Sanskrit word composed of the prefix “pra” and the root “sad,” from which we get “prasada,” as an abstract noun, meaning “purity,” “brightness,” “kindness,” and, of course, less abstractly, a gift received back from God during the process of worship). The Sabha began its work by asking for contributions from among its own most wealthy members. The Maharaja of Darbhanga, for example, promised Rs 100,000, while the Maharaja of Banaras another Rs 50,000. The Sabha then undertook, through the office of the Viceroy, to solicit donations from other princely families across India (men whose families had, in decades past, contributed to the city’s infrastructure through the building of royal palaces and riverfront ghats). Yet in the first few years of its existence, very little money was in fact collected (just under Rs 1,20,000 by 1893) for the purpose that the Sabha promoted; the Maharaja of Darbhanga never made good on his promised donation, for example!32 This lack of success in fund-raising reflected, in part, the fact that the Board itself had moved forward at the end of the 1880s with creating new forms of taxation in the city, as well as the securing of government loans, which would help it both to place its finances on a sound footing and pay for the waterworks without charitable help. Equally, despite reservations being articulated in several forums about the advisability of allowing sewage to drain into the river, there was increasingly little practical prospect that it could be diverted in any case.33 In a memorandum dated April 1889 – his last major piece of policy writing before the waterworks project began in earnest – Bireshwar Mittra attempted a last-ditch effort to minimize new tax burdens on citizens, and did so through a recognition that the city’s new infrastructure would not only be of benefit to Banarsis’ health, but also had real value for those whose concerns were pri­ marily religious in nature. The sacred sites of Banaras, and the status of the river itself as a sacred body, required practical intervention and care. This double benefit – the ability to positively impact health and safeguard religious practice – he thought, placed Banaras in a unique position among its peer cities along north India’s rivers, and justified the Board in claiming special treatment for the city at the hands of government and India’s traditional ruling families. The waterworks at Agra or Allahabad, while important, were nevertheless still less important than what was happening in Banaras, in his view.

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Mittra opened his argument, however, with a familiar invocation: Banaras, as a city dominated by religion, was ill equipped to deal with extensive new taxation to fund any large infrastructure project. Banarsis “are not a com­ mercial people,” he wrote, and “have no idea of that circulating wealth which contributes to the prosperity of Calcutta, Bombay, and other large towns.”34 The city’s otherworldliness handicapped it for dealing with worldly matters. This meant that increasing taxation or duties in the city beyond a very low limit would bring “intolerable hardship” to most people. It was, also, perhaps, a subtle reference to Scottish Enlightenment ideas of civilizational progress, and an admission that Banarsi society had not yet progressed to such a state that it could fully support such a complex and expensive communal under­ taking.35 The religious character of the city also meant for Mittra that certain types of taxation would be perceived by the people as inappropriate. A pil­ grim’s tax, he argued, was objectionable to the Board’s Hindu members and would be regarded as “an unmerited reflection on the character of Hindu liberality and beneficence.”36 As such, the city was dependent on government and other sources of wealth for financial help. On the one hand, therefore, Banaras’s status as the preeminent pilgrimage site for Hindus, and the fact that the majority of the Raj’s subjects across India were Hindu, meant that the government owed Banaras something extra in terms of financial help. But Mittra also understood that the provincial gov­ ernment was likely to be of little practical help in this endeavor. It had already made clear its reluctance to fund sanitation infrastructure outright, and Mittra noted that loans recently given to Agra and Allahabad, totaling Rs 28 lakh, meant that it would be difficult to secure a further loan for Banaras for at least a year or two. On the other hand, the Ganga Prasadhini Sabha and the rajas and maharajas of India (all of whom were Hindu as well) were in a position to help the Municipal Board, and they should do so from what he called “the peculiar claims [Banaras possessed] on the liberality of the Hindu princes.” He thus called on the Sabha to continue its fundraising work and to hand over to the Board any monies it had collected, once they were satisfied, of course, that the Board’s plans coincided with the Sabha’s desire to “prevent the pollution of the Ganges within the limits of Kashi.” He also asserted that the Board should ensure that monies collected from the Sabha be kept separate from general revenue and spent only on sanitation infrastructure, as an assurance to the rajas that their wishes were being carried out.37 There are two important points to recognize in Mittra’s note: his practicality, certainly, but also his political theory and views on how to adapt traditional norms to serve modern ends. The first is almost a sleight of hand: Mittra in his writing makes an important move from the Sabha’s stated purpose of ending the pollution the Ganga, as a whole, and as an ideal, to safeguarding the cleanliness of the river within the confines of the sacred zone between the Assi and Varuna rivers. This is a move that will allow him to claim a common purpose between the Sabha and the Board and provide a resolution of the Sabha’s broader reli­ gious ideals with the practical financial constraints the Board faced. The second,

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and more important in my view, is Mittra’s ability to claim common cause for cultural-political forces that the colonial state most often saw as in opposition to one another. Mittra was something of a traditionalist, as we have seen, but equally he was skeptical about the rajas’ abilities to promote political advance­ ment. There is no mention in any of his writings that I have seen on religious belief as an important component for governing. Quite the opposite, in fact: political theory was in his view clearly based on considered experience and the application of rationality. His calling on the financial help of the Sabha must have been calculated as an appeal to historical precedent, then, as an invocation of principles and practices that the rajas understood as a part of their traditional inheritance. I do not think Mittra necessarily subscribed to the notion of Kashi as tirtha (an intrinsically sacred site), or that the city’s management should be handed back to those who built their palaces along the riverfront. But he knew that there was a role to play for those who believed such things in the promotion of sanitation and human health. They need not be in opposition.

Notes 1 BL, IOR, P/1606, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1881–82, February 1881, No 4, circular letter from Sec. to Govt to all Commissioners, 27 January 1881. 2 BL, IOR, P/2451, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1885, November, No. 5, letter of G. Adams to Commissioner, Benares Division, 25 June 1885; November, No. 8, J. J. F. Lumsden, Commissioner, Benares Division, to Chairman, Municipal Board, 22 July 1885; November, No. 14, Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 21 August 1885. 3 BL, IOR, P/2678, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1886, March, No. 5, J. J. F. Lums­ den, Commissioner, Benares Division, to Chairman, Municipal Board, 5 January 1886. 4 From 1883 the chairman was elected by the Board itself, but the election had to be confirmed by the Commissioner. 5 See U. Stark, “Knowledge in Context: Raja Shivaprasad as hybrid intellectual and people’s educator,” in M. S. Dodson and B. A. Hatcher, eds., Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia (New York: Routledge, 2012). 6 See my discussion of Mittra’s scholarship on the Vedas in M. S. Dodson, “Con­ testing Translations: Orientalism and the Interpretation of the Vedas,” Modern Intellectual History, 4, 1, (2007): 43–59. 7 See Syed Ahmed Khan, Translation of the Report of the Members of the Select Committee for the Better Diffusion and Advancement of Learning Among Muham­ madans of India (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1872). 8 These were: Secrole/Chetganj; Adampura/Jaitpura; Kotwali; Kalbhairo; Bhelu­ pura; Dasashwamedh. Bankers were said to be one prominent group on the Board. During much of the 1880s, however, the Board had an over-representation of Bengalis, and by 1890 the relative under-representation of Muslims, in particular, had been largely rectified. See BL, IOR, P/3598, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1890, November, No. 9, J. White, Chairman, Municipal Board, to Commissioner, Benares Division, dated 10 May 1889. 9 That is, men who paid more than Rs 4 per month for their residence, or owned a similarly valued house, or who owned a business that produced a profit of at least Rs 200 per year. See BL, IOR, P/1606, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1881–82, September 1881, No. 40, “Rules for regulating the appointment of the Municipal Committee of Benares Division under section 6 of Act VI of 1868.”

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10 Ibid., September 1881, No. 41, letter J. Sladen, Offg. Commissioner, Benares Division, to Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, 6 September 1881. Similarly, Premchand pil­ loried the municipal counsellors by portraying them as venal and petty. See Pre­ mchand, Sevasadan, translated by S. Shingavi, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005): esp. chap. 43. 11 BL, IOR, P/1606, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1881–82, September 1881, No. 39, Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, to Govt of India, Home Dept, 7 September 1881. This is a sentiment canonized in Lord Ripon’s 1882 resolution on local selfgovernment. 12 His death is noted as being sudden and premature in his obituary. See The Tribune (Lahore), 25 July 1891. 13 B. Mittra, A View of the Indian National Congress (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1889). 14 Ibid.: 16. 15 Ibid.: 14–17. 16 Mittra was clearly conversant with the history of political enfranchisement in England, the inherent conservatism of the Reform Acts, and the very slow progress made towards any sort of universal suffrage for men, let alone women. 17 Mittra, Indian National Congress: 18–19. 18 Ibid.: 21, 30. 19 Ibid.: 35–6. 20 Ibid.: 21. 21 Ibid.: 23, 27. 22 Ibid.: 37. 23 Ibid.: 39–47. 24 BL, IOR, P/3142, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1888, July, No. 4, “Memor­ andum by Babu Biseshwar Mitter,” 30 September 1886; July No. 5, “Supplemen­ tary Memorandum,” 25 November 1886. 25 These two paragraphs are based on the 30 September 1886 memorandum. 26 These two paragraphs are based on the 25 November 1886 memorandum. 27 BL, IOR, P/3828, NWP&O General & Educational Proceedings, 1891, September, No. 74, Memorandum on the Ram Chandraji Temple at Badhaini, by Babu Bire­ shwar Mittra, 28 April 1891. 28 BL, IOR, P/3374, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1889, February, No. 13, report of a meeting of the Benares Municipal Board, 4 January 1889. 29 BL, IOR, P/3598, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1890, June, No. 4, Note by Col Forbes, Chief Engineer, Irrigation Branch, n.d. [November/December 1889]. 30 For example, ibid., November, No. 9, J. White, Chairman Benares Municipal Board, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 10 May 1889. 31 BL, IOR, P/4297, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1893, May, No. 7, J. J. D. LaTouche, Commissioner, Benares Division, to Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, 3 May 1893. 32 Ibid. 33 Early petitioners for better sanitation in the city clearly saw the improvement of human health and the protection of sacred space as intertwined. 34 BL, IOR, P/3598, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1890, February, No. 4, “Memorandum by Babu Bireshwar Mittra, Member, Municipal Board, Benares,” 13 April 1889. 35 See, for example, John Millar’s The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks: or, an inquiry into the circumstances which give rise to influence and authority, in the dif­ ferent members of society, 3rd edition, (London: J. Murray, 1781 [1771 orig.]). This is a conception of civilizational progress that Adam Smith also shared. 36 BL, IOR, P/3598, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1890, February, No. 4, “Memorandum by Babu Bireshwar Mittra.” 37 Ibid.

6

Do you think the river is dirty?

Banaras has a major problem with pollution, and it has long struggled with a reputation for being, at best, dirty, and at worst, dangerous and disgusting. Quite apart from the ubiquitous rubbish that today lines the city’s streets and other detritus produced by the sheer crush of the city’s (human and animal) population, it is the polluted state of the Ganga here that has consistently been a major source of concern for residents and environmentalists alike.1 At the point where the river skirts the northern reaches of Banaras it is besmir­ ched with fecal coliform counts that defy credulity (one recent study has measured it at a count of 4,000,000 parts per 100ml).2 There is also endemic chromium and heavy metal pollution from Kanpur’s factories upstream, as well as the presence of human remains from the city’s cremation industry. This is not to even mention hazardous levels of pesticides from agricultural run-off.3 Cancer rates among populations who live alongside the river are the highest in India, with Banaras being a particular cancer “hot spot.”4 The Ganga at Banaras is, to all intents and purposes, a sewer and a dumping ground, and has been since the 19th century.5 When young Prince Albert Victor set the foundation stone for the Banaras waterworks in January of 1890, the newspaper stories on the following day informed the rest of India of the city’s plans to dump its waterborne sewage wholesale into the Ganga. The Sanitary Commissioner of Bengal read one such story in the Englishman, apparently, and wrote a scathing letter to his superiors in response: If the proposed scheme … is permitted to be carried out it will seriously affect the health of the people living in the towns situated on the banks of that river below Benares who obtain their supply of drinking water from the Ganges … There can be no harm from surface drainage being dis­ charged into the Ganges, but if that river is to be made a general sewer for towns on its bank, the ill effects of such a scheme on the health of the towns lower down the river cannot be exaggerated.6 A. J. Hughes, Banaras’ engineer in charge of the waterworks, replied to these concerns by saying that he recognized that his plan was “intensifying [an] evil” by dumping even more sewage into the river than at present, but he saw little

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choice: “no other course is open to us, or possible under any reasonable con­ ditions.” But in any case, it was all going to be fine, he assured his superiors and critics: sanitary science in Britain had now proven that rivers possessed significant “self-purifying properties,” not only through oxidation, but also dilution and absorption by plant and animal life. There was therefore “abso­ lutely no risk” to the public of the North-Western Provinces or Bengal from Banaras’ plans, he asserted.7 The Sanitary Commissioner of the North-Wes­ tern Provinces, Surgeon-Major George Hutcheson, was less confident. He was concerned that even though the Ganga represented an enormous volume of water, there was still the possibility that cholera and other diseases could be transported in the river wholly preserved, as “living disease.” No sanitation specialist would admit that drawing drinking water from a river polluted by sewage was a good idea; it was, he said, a “dangerous procedure” being fol­ lowed.8 Even A. J. Hughes would later admit that the practice of dumping sewage into the river “cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely.”9 The imperial Government of India would not be drawn into the issue, however, and refused to apply English law to India (in some form of the Rivers Pollution Prevention Act of 1876) or even to “lay any down general principles as to the discharge of the sewage of riparian towns into Indian rivers.”10 The provincial Lieutenants Governor were themselves to decide how best to move forward. Today nearly 120 Indian cities and towns, across five states, discharge their sewage – mostly untreated – into the Ganga. It was estimated in 2015 that this meant approximately 3.6 billion liters of sewage every single day. The biggest offenders are Kolkata, Banaras, and Kanpur, which, together with Patna, Allahabad, and Moradabad, account for half of the daily total.11 The Ganga supplies more than 500 million people with their drinking water. *** I can remember a few years ago, sitting high on the steps at Assi Ghat, watching the Indian coast guard wrangle several of their small boats below, the Ganga in such high flood that it had inundated shops and restaurants on the streets behind. It was a hot and humid July afternoon, and the sun had just emerged from behind the monsoon clouds. Sweat coated the back of my shirt, but still I sat there and drank chai, listening to some of the local men chat about the high water. I admired the utterly changed landscape that I saw before me: the river was everywhere, mud-brown and moving quickly with such force that humans and boats alike stayed close to shore. An elderly man came by to take his afternoon bath, standing in the river where a few weeks before there had been a stone platform crowded with pilgrims, tourists, sellers of religious trinkets, and the old beggar and his monkey companion who have for many years spent their days and nights there along a wall. After some time, a man of about 50 years of age came and sat down next to me and quite pointedly asked, before he had even introduced himself: “Kya tumko lagta hai ki Gangaji polluted hai? Sochta hai ki gandi hai?”12 He wore cheap brown trousers and a pale yellow shirt, buttoned to within an inch of

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his neck and left untucked. I figured that he must have been bloody hot and feeling a bit confrontational. And I knew exactly why he was asking this, so I tried to be polite, wishing to avoid a debate about the sacredness of the river and its woeful physical condition. It was, frankly, too hot outside to argue. I pointed out to him that I thought the Ganga was a “sundari nadi”13 and a “powerful” one at that, for which I had great respect. But he would not be so easily placated, and so he added in nearly perfectly fluent English: “You Westerners think the Ganga is polluted. But it is not possible. The Ganga is the most holy river in India. Did you know that scientists have proven that the river has special powers that automatically clean it?” I demurred from any further discussion, agreeing that it was undoubtedly so and that we were all lucky to be in its presence. It is an interaction I have had several times before, and several time since. It is precisely the point, and exactly beside it. *** Since taking office as the Prime Minister of India in 2014, Narendra Modi has made cleaning the Ganga, most especially at Banaras, one of his highprofile priorities. The National Mission for Clean Ganga, part of the Ministry for Water Resources, was established in 2016 and seeks to build on the work first initiated by Rajiv Gandhi’s government in the mid-1980s. In Banaras itself, the late Mahant Veer Bhadra Mishra, of the Samkat Mochan temple, led a grassroots effort to measure pollution and clean the Ganga under the auspices of the Swaccha Ganga Program (“clean Ganges”). I met Mishra once, a few years before he died. He had been a professor of hydraulic engi­ neering at Banaras Hindu University, as well as a temple mahant (priest). He was passionate about Banaras and the Ganga, hopeful for progress, and incredibly generous with his time and knowledge. A few years ago, however, after Mishra’s death, when I was spending a fortnight in the city, I stopped by the Swaccha Ganga office at Tulsi Ghat a few times, only to find it pad­ locked. On my last try I was surprised to find a man there, performing some measurements with test tubes full of yellowy-brown water. Is it not amazing, he said to me, that even with all the pollution that flows into the Ganga that it is still full of oxygen and life-nourishing properties. It is simply beyond our understanding, he concluded. It was a lesson for me that Babu Bireshwar Mittra’s advocacy for the practical care of sacred sites – a worldly interven­ tion to maintain the otherworldly – was now for many a lesson lost. I have often read in the Indian media that many of Banaras’s religious leaders openly oppose any changes to ritual that would result in less organic waste being put into the river (whether that be human bodies, flowers, idols, oils, or soaps). It is certainly true, for example, that the electric crematorium at Harishchandra Ghat, which opened in the late 1980s, operates on a very limited basis, and is met with open scorn by traditional caretakers of riverside cremation, despite the fact that this “modern” innovation significantly limits funeral costs to a family and is decidedly eco-friendly. Kelly Alley has also

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shown that there has existed, even very recently, a well-established discourse among some Indian governmental scientists that reaffirms the “mystical” properties of the Ganga through the application of a scientific method. The reduction of high bacterial loads through a high rate of “aeration” is claimed for the river, for example, and thus it is argued that the Ganga has unique “self­ cleansing” properties that transcend the understanding of secular Western sci­ entists.14 The linking of technology and science with the belief that the river is sacred and holy (not a river per se, but the physical manifestation of the divine, with the ability to purify itself and others and to bring about salvation) is a powerful and commonly utilized discursive strategy in India. It renders the Ganga a river that sits outside the realm of worldly pollution, in which what you see is not real. That science is sometimes used to reaffirm this notion only soli­ difies its authority, rather bewilderingly.15 Efforts to render the Ganga a cleaner river, however they move forward, must clearly address not only the structural components of riverine pollution (whether drainage systems that cannot treat sewage before dumping it into the river or poorly enforced laws that regulate industrial effluents) but also core elements of popular belief. I think that this is what social scientists call the attitudinal aspects of consumer behavior. *** A friend of mine who runs an art gallery in the city once wanted to com­ mission a sculpture of garbage drawn from the river, on essentially the same model as Washed Ashore’s eco-sculptures of marine life made from ocean plastic, or those of Yodogawa Technique, based in Japan.16 The point, of course, was to educate Banarsis about the rubbish that sits just below the surface of the river, polluting it and endangering wildlife and human health. Imagine what you might find in the Ganga, we joked uneasily – it would make for a most grotesque, macabre sculpture: all human bones and plastic bags. I do not know if there is any point to even trying something like this, though. Banaras often seems to me to be immune to such lessons.

Notes 1 Although recent reports have also pointed to the city’s high levels of air pollution: “Air quality in holy city of Varanasi ‘most toxic in India,’” The Guardian, 12 December 2016. 2 S. Kumar et al, “Pollution of Ganga River due to Urbanization of Varanasi: Adverse Conditions Faced by the Slum Population,” Environment and Urbaniza­ tion ASIA, 3, 2, (2012): 343–52. 3 Ibid., also, J. Chaudhari, “Why the Ganga is an Unholy Mess at Kanpur,” The Wire, 26 January 2017. 4 See “Ganga is now a deadly source of cancer, study says,” Times of India, 17 October 2012. Since the mid-1980s, with the launching of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s “Ganga Action Plan,” the Indian government has sought to limit the amount of pollution that flows untreated into the river, improve overall water quality through sewage treatment schemes, and promote biodiversity along the Ganga river system. The election of Narendra Modi in 2014 brought with it a renewed governmental focus on the polluted state of the Ganga, especially at

Do you think the river is dirty?

5

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

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Modi’s constituency in Banaras. These programs have unfortunately met with limited, if any, success. See the narrative of the development of sewer technology in India in J. Wilhelm, Environment and Pollution in Colonial India: Sewerage Technologies Along the Sacred Ganges (London: Routledge, 2016). Wilhelm makes the point that it was the colonial government that initiated schemes to redirect household waste into the river. BL, IOR, P/3598, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1890, June, No. 13, SurgeonMajor W. H. Gregg to Sec. to Govt of Bengal, 27 January 1890. Ibid., No. 14, A. J. Hughes, “Note on the disposal of sewage at Benares into the Ganges,” n.d. Ibid., No. 18, Surgeon-Major G. Hutcheson to Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, 22 March 1890. Ibid., No. 16, A. J. Hughes to Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, 12 March 1890. A report authored c. 1892 similarly claimed that the size and volume of India’s rivers ensured that their “sewage saturation point” would not be met for many decades, and by then the municipalities will have arranged for some other method of sewage disposal. See BL, IOR, P/4062, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1892, September, No. 26b, “Report on the effect of sewage contamination on Indian rivers.” BL, IOR, P/3598, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1890, July, No. 8, C. J. Lyall, to Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, 27 June 1890. “Half the sewage in Ganga is from six cities along it,” The Times of India, 29 April 2015. “Do you think the sacred Ganges is polluted? Do you think it’s dirty?” “A beautiful river.” K. D. Alley, On the Banks of the Ganga: When Wastewater Meets a Sacred River (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002). On this point I often think of Guru Datta Vidyarthi, who so thoroughly “scien­ tized” the Rg Veda by translating it. See my discussion of him in Dodson, “Con­ testing Translations: Orientalism and the Interpretation of the Vedas.” See http://yukari-art.jp/en/artists/yodogawa-technique

7

Administrative infrastructures

A number of imperial policies and provincial legislative acts framed nearly all practical aspects of infrastructure projects in Banaras. Several of these have been discussed in an earlier chapter: Lord Mayo’s scheme of 1870 for finan­ cial and administrative decentralization, for example, from which a legaladministrative infrastructure was gradually created that increasingly shifted responsibility for taxation and urban development from an imperial level to that of the provincial and, then by extension, to the municipal. Equally important were the Municipal Acts of 1873 and 1883, which formalized the processes for constituting municipal boards, defined their ability to raise funds through taxation, and demarcated the sorts of works of local public utility that a board could undertake. The activities of the municipal boards of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (NWP&O) during the 1880s and ‘90s were conducted under the terms of these policies and legislative acts, and many more besides. Some of these additional acts allowed greater freedom of decision-making for these boards, as well as their increased access to resour­ ces and professional expertise; other acts required local officials to have to refer back more often to provincial authorities for consultation, official sanc­ tion, and sometimes inspection. The overall result was a complex picture of multiple levels of interaction between local and provincial officials. This was a sphere of local action in which restrictions were most certainly placed on a municipal board’s initiatives, but also one that opened a space for their con­ ducting of creative governance work. Thus in Banaras, on the one hand, in addition to the close supervision con­ ducted by the Commissioner’s office, the Municipal Board had to navigate a variety of existing provincial and even imperial laws that determined how, and when, they could proceed with new projects. In undertaking to build new roads or other structures, for example, the Board would often need to have the Commissioner’s office initiate a process of land expropriation and compensa­ tion on their behalf within the terms of the Land Acquisition Act of 1870. In explaining the process of acquiring a stretch of land in 1883 to construct a new road from Kamala Tola to Assi Ghat, the secretary of the Municipal Board noted that any actions undertaken under that Act were handled solely by the tahsildar (a local tax and revenue official) of Banaras: the tahsildar hired a

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special clerk (muharrir), the salary for whom the Board paid in its entirety, and who prepared all the necessary legal paperwork for land expropriation. The tahsildar negotiated the amount of settlement to be paid to landowners (which had to be approved by the Collector, only), and the tahsildar also managed the process of civil court proceedings, should he not be able to successfully negoti­ ate with landowners. The secretary concluded that “the municipal office had no hand in [it],” as the costs of land expropriation, how they were handled, and at what pace, were entirely out of the control of the Board itself.1 And as it turned out, the tahsildar ended up giving a bill of some Rs 6,000 to the Board to remove part of one of the houses of the Maharaja of Banaras for this road – far more than they had ever anticipated.2 On the other hand, changes to the decentralization scheme undertaken in 1881–82 significantly strengthened the Municipal Board’s ability to act rela­ tively independently in the creation of public works in the city, and also lent it substantial control over the provincial government’s district engineering staff, although always within certain predetermined limits. Before 1882, municipal boards had little influence or control over the PWD and its activities, as their role was purely consultative. As such, local public works for a municipality were carried out by the district engineer essentially independently of that municipality’s board. The Viceroy directed in the early 1880s that the district engineer was instead to be formally made “subordinate” to the local municipal board, working under its guidance, with the exception of certain projects of extra-local importance. The maintenance and building of class 1 roads, for example (trunk lines, roads that traverse several districts, or that connect important provincial centers) would remain under provincial control, while roads of classes 2, 3, and 4 (essentially local roads of varying kinds) would be made over to the control of the local board. The district engineer, therefore, would work for two sets of superiors, depending on the nature of the project at hand. Local boards would also gain full control over what was called “mis­ cellaneous public improvements” (such as embankments or water tanks) and other inexpensive public works costing less than Rs 500 (not a grand sum, obviously). For projects costing between Rs 500 and Rs 2,500 the board was to gain approval of the Commissioner; for projects between Rs 2,500 and Rs 5,000 the additional approval of the PWD’s executive engineer was required; while for those costing over Rs 5,000 the sanction of the provincial government was also to be sought. Importantly, it was directed that any project which involved “spe­ cial grants” from provincial or imperial funds would remain wholly under the control of the provincial Public Works Department.3 This was to be the case with the construction of Banaras’s sewage and waterworks projects. *** In 1890 the Municipal Boards of Banaras, Agra, Cawnpore, and Allahabad were all proceeding apace with the initial construction of ambitious, and expensive, schemes for the management of urban sewage and the provision of fresh water.4 Thus at the close of that year, the NWP&O government drafted

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a Waterworks Act that should be understood in two ways: first, as the formal articulation of the importance that colonial officials laid upon the provision of a “copious supply of pure and wholesome water” for the “health and comfort” of urban residents, but also, more centrally, as a recognition that the scale and cost of such infrastructure projects required a renewed definition of the responsibilities of the various levels of government, over and above those articulated in the 1883 Municipal Act.5 That is, the new Act was intended to better define the powers and duties that would fall to municipal boards in managing (and paying for) such infrastructure. The Act dealt only with water provision, however, and not drainage, and would include, when finalized in 1891, stipulations on what constituted a specifically “domestic” water supply, for example, as well as the physical nature of water connections to be pro­ vided. It also provided overt authority to a municipality to impose a charge for water supply on home-owners and tenants.6 In the early phases of writing the Act, however, the provincial government recognized that, while modelled on Acts passed for a similar purpose in Calcutta and Rangoon, this one would need to take account of a variety of circumstances in urban north India, and be able to not only address the contexts of NWP&O’s main cities, but also those smaller cities that had not yet embarked upon such projects. As a result, the draft Act was circulated to the province’s commissioners in early 1891 for comment, as well as to the several municipal boards that would come immediately under its purview. The Banaras Municipal Board, in a series of letters, articulated its view to the government that the draft Act was probably not sufficiently tailored to the peculiar urban conditions of their city. In parti­ cular, the Board noted that a lack of qualified plumbers in Banaras, combined with the city’s variable housing stock, meant that there would necessarily be differences in how people were provided with water. As a result, the rates of tax to be paid by homeowners should vary, depending on whether they had a direct connection or made use of a communal facility. Moreover, there were concerns about the fate of renters in the city and whether they possessed similar rights to have a direct water supply if so desired, and how a landlord might be impelled to provide a connection.7 Speaking at a meeting of the Legislative Council for NWP&O in early 1891, Babu Bireshwar Mittra, who had recently left the Banaras Municipal Board for the Lieutenant Governor’s committee, added his own concerns about the local applicability of the Act, drawing on what he referred to as his “long acquaintance” with the conditions of Banaras. Mittra put forth his argument in a fashion that was similar to his time on the Board: he asserted that legislative innovations had not only to be couched in terms that local people were familiar with, but had to align generally with analogous practices of governance and taxation that would make innovation possible in the first place. Addressing the proposal to cap any water-rate to just 7.5% on the annual rental value of houses, Mittra noted that this could not possibly pro­ vide a sufficient income to pay for the works being contemplated in Banaras, at least. He said that this was because rental rates were much lower there than

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in other large cities, such as Cawnpore or Allahabad. (Interestingly, Sayyid Ahmed Khan doubted Mittra’s account of low rental rates!) Moreover, there were few other sources of income available to the municipality – octroi rates were already at their “maximum limit,” so much so that the smuggling of goods into Banaras was now commonplace. The solution to the problem, Mittra thought, was to tie the charge for water not to house value but to the cost of more traditional methods of water provision. That is, in a large city such as Benares, many people would have paid a servant or a dedicated water-carrier in order to have a ready supply of water. Such households should pay a similar amount to the city for this new service. In cases where people paid for water by the mashak (a leather water bag), the local cost of that supply should be replicated. Equally, the “very poor,” who had always fetched water themselves, should be able to access communal water supplies for free, and would thus not be unduly burdened by water rates that they could not reasonably afford.8 In the early 1890s a series of other legislative measures relevant to these infrastructure programs were enacted, including an Act that similarly empowered municipalities to raise funds for works related to urban drai­ nage,9 and the creation of sanitary boards that provided provincial govern­ ment authorities with broad oversight of wells, sanitation and local cleanliness. But it was the Waterworks Act (Act I of 1891), when signed by the Lieutenant Governor on 21 March, that broadly empowered munici­ palities to act in their own financial interest and create a more systematic mode of assessing and collecting taxation. The Act did this through a power provided to municipal boards, such as that in Banaras, to make its own rules regarding the provision of water supplies. This is one of the subjects of the next chapter. Perhaps fittingly, however, Mittra’s exhortation to peg taxation to the costs of traditional modes of collecting water was ignored by the government, and the Act simply noted that any charge for water levied be determined by the municipality and set by reference to a house’s rental value, to a maximum level of 7.5%. Mittra died just a few months after Act I was passed, and with him also passed an important voice for locally inflected forms of governance.

Notes 1 UPRAV, Varanasi Collectorate, List 3, Box 7, File 2, Sec., Municipal Board, Benares, to Collector, Benares, 24 August 1888. 2 BL, IOR, P/2451, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1885, November, No. 5, G. Adams, President, Municipal Board, Benares, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 25 June 1885. 3 BL, IOR, P/2206, NWP&O Local Self-Government Proceedings, 1881, No. 60, Resolution, Financial Department, 31 March 1882. 4 Banaras’s project was clearly the most ambitious of these, however, costing Rs 40,00,000. Agra’s was pegged at Rs 11,25,000; Allahabad’s totalled Rs 15,40,000; and Cawnpore’s was still being finalized in early 1890. See Report on the

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5 6 7 8

9

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City Administration of the N.-W. Provinces and Oudh, for the year ending 31st March 1890, (Allahabad: Government Press, 1891): xxii–xxiii. BL, IOR, P/3828, NWP&O General & Educational Proceedings, 1891, August, No. 84, Abstract of the Proceedings of the Legislative Council for NWP&O, 16 Feb­ ruary 1891. The official version of the Act can be found in N.-W. Provinces and Oudh Code, 728–42. BL, IOR, P/3828, NWP&O General & Educational Proceedings, 1891, August, Nos 77, 78, 85, and 86, correspondence re: draft NWP&O Water Works Act. Ibid., No. 98, Abstract of the Proceedings of the Legislative Council, n.d. This is an apparent reversal of Mittra’s earlier insistence on maintaining a consistent price for a service (here, the provision of water) across all income levels. Perhaps he had come to think of it as less of a service and more as a product (i.e. a certain amount of water). A NWP&O Drainage Act was passed in late 1893, with similar provisions to the Waterworks Act.

8

Taxation and the transactional state

“The necessity for increasing the income of the Board is clear.” Thus wrote George Adams, Banaras’s Magistrate and Municipal Board Chair­ man at the end of 1885.1 By 1890, when the city was moving forward with the waterworks and drainage scheme, that need had only become greater, as well as more immediate. In 1892 the Municipal Board’s expenditure on infrastructure had left it with a yearly budget deficit of at least Rs 80,000, and this would rise to an estimated Rs 90,000 by 1894. Expenses could be cut in some areas (for example, by extending the Board’s loan from the provincial government from a 30-year to 60-year repayment schedule, and reducing the rate of interest, as well as by making cuts to the sewage and drainage scheme), and income expanded modestly without trouble in some other areas: the municipal boundaries were extended in 1896, for example, and other minor, specialized taxes were introduced. But if Banaras was to solve its infrastructure-related budget problems, then it would need to enhance revenue in the amount of at least Rs 1 lakh per year – a sub­ stantial sum indeed.2 A municipal board in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh was limited by law in the kinds of taxation revenue that it could raise, however, as has been noted already. This included octroi, a house tax (of up to 7.5%), animal taxes and a vehicle tax, while Act I of 1891 allowed for the addi­ tional raising of a charge for water. Of the 108 municipalities in existence in the NWP&O in 1890, most levied some sort of octroi, although only 26 taxed houses and land, 20 taxed professions, and just 11 taxed vehicles.3 In Banaras, the Board had been reluctant in the earlier 1880s to impose what it called forms of “direct taxation” and had demurred, for example, from imposing taxes upon horses or wheeled vehicles when the possibility was discussed in 1885. This meant that the city had the lowest per capita taxa­ tion rate among all of north India’s major cities at just Rs 0.63 per person (in comparison, Lucknow raised taxation at the rate of Rs 1.03/person and Cawnpore at Rs 0.81/person.).4 The necessity of increasing the taxation rate in Banaras, as Adams noted, was indeed obvious, if the Board was to suc­ cessfully carry out its infrastructure schemes into the 20th century.

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The actual process for raising tax, however, often embodied potentially contradictory impulses at the level of the lived city. On the one hand, discus­ sions of tax rises tended to elicit popular resistance, sometimes in the form of violence, sometimes as the mass articulation of anti-Municipal Board senti­ ment, and at other times as claims to older forms of cultural and economic allegiance. That is, taxation tended to cause an increase in the number and types of interactions between (and among) representatives of government and the local populace. On the other hand, the extension of new forms of taxation in Banaras eventually formalized, even institutionalized, what had been more or less ad hoc modes of information gathering and debt collec­ tion by the city government, and in this way it may have tended to routine­ ize such interactions. Babu Bireshwar Mittra had always recognized that some regularization of traditional taxation practices was going to be needed: in his reckoning, the behri tax, for example, was to be taken from the hands of neighborhood leadership and placed under the Municipal Board’s control, while informal labor practices were to be replaced with a standing clean-up crew on the Board’s payroll. But he always understood these practices as having their roots in Banarsi tradition. The measures that the Banaras Board eventually pursued in increasing its revenue, however, often looked far more like a formalization of practices modelled by the colonial state: they were legalistic, comprehensive in their aim, highly bureaucratic, and, principally, sought to define residents’ character and their respective tax burden according to a set of relatively inflexible, pre-estab­ lished criteria – at least until the 1920s or ‘30s, when the issue of taxation became far more closely linked to a Hindu identity for the city.5 But what story about taxes would be complete without at least some shit talking (no pun intended) about the government? As we know, the Banaras Municipal Board had been ever so indelicately pushed into undertaking this expensive infrastructure project by the colonial provincial government, the leadership of which also knew all too well the precarious state of the city’s finances. However, as the Board moved ahead with raising funds through taxation, its attempts were consistently frustrated by its provincial overlords. On multiple occasions the Commissioner’s office turned down proposals to impose new taxes or raise old ones. This left the Board members scratching their collective head – the Chairman, in fact, claimed in rather strong lan­ guage in a letter to the Commissioner that “the Board had not received the generous treatment it expected”6 – prompting yet more rounds of intra- and inter-governmental negotiation. *** On the evening of Saturday 27 April 1889, a general meeting of Banaras citizens was held in the grounds of the town hall building in Kotwali. The meeting was chaired by Maulvi Muhammad Kutb-ud-din Hasan, a pleader in the district court, and had as its ostensible object a demand for the reconsideration of going ahead with the municipality’s drainage and

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waterworks schemes. The people assembled made a variety of motions, including calling on the Board to delay the start of any construction work and undertake a more meaningful set of consultations with local people. But an equally real concern seems to have been with the prospect of increased taxation, then under consideration by the Municipal Board: taxes should remain unchanged, Babu Jogendro Nath Ghose argued, while Lala Vishva Nath Sahay demanded that representatives from the meeting should have unfettered access to the city’s trade statistics (in an effort, one would ima­ gine, to make the argument that taxation was at an already-too-high rate for Banaras’s population who, it must be remembered, are supposed to be not very commercially minded). The meeting was a forceful show of inter-com­ munity strength of sentiment (nobody, apparently, likes taxes), one result being the formation of a sort of “people’s committee,” composed of babus, maulvis, and pandits to lobby the Board, and the provincial government, on behalf of those present.7 In reply to these demands, the Lieutenant Gover­ nor assured Hasan and his “fellow petitioners” that there was little reason why they might not receive further information on the Board’s “financial proposals,” but equally he was uninterested in undermining the Board’s authority or reversing the course they had now set out upon. “[I will] not permit the whole Province to be exposed to infection from Benares,” he wrote, “solely from consideration to Benares rate-payers.”8 A month before this “monster meeting” (as it was called) was held, the Municipal Board had indeed begun deliberating a range of tax proposals that had been developed by Babu Bireshwar Mittra. In a reversal of earlier policy, the Board now wished to impose a direct tax upon horses and conveyances for use in the city: horses at Rs 3, ponies at Rs 2, phaetons, landaus, and broughams at Rs 3, and the more modest dog-carts at Rs 2. As well, octroi rates were to be raised on a variety of items, including many luxury goods. Mittra made a further proposal to convert octroi collection, overall, from a weight-based tax to one that was value-based (ad valorem), although this does not seem to have met with wider approval.9 The proposed tax rises elicited objections from many quarters in the city. Quite apart from the “monster meeting” led by Maulvi Kutb-ud-din Hasan (which the Municipal Board chairman later described as having no legit­ imate claim to any importance), the Board received a series of petitions complaining about high tax rates from the city’s residents. These often articulated a sense of the city’s non-commercial character and the pre­ cariousness of livelihoods there. For example, 51 sugar dealers petitioned the Board against raising octroi duties on sugar any further, worried that it would in effect ruin their trade. Some 1,900 people signed a petition accusing the Board of pursuing policies that would only enhance their own riches and glory. Another 1,450 people signed a petition bemoaning the “general depression of trade and commerce” in Banaras and also worried that new octroi taxes on soap, furniture, glass, and leather goods would simply drive more people into poverty. Nobody needed a fancy new water supply, the petitioners added, when

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“water can be had in abundance everywhere in this city.” The Board unan­ imously declared the petitions to be “insufficient” to warrant any alteration of their proposals, not least because they were “all set to one tune: the extreme poverty of the people of Benares, and their inability to bear the necessary burden of taxation.”10 The Commissioner of Banaras, however, had rather different ideas: the rate on sugars was indeed too high in his view, at ten annas per maund (a weight of about 80 lb) and should be reduced to eight; the rate on shaker (sweet potato) and shira (fruit juice), however, was too low and needed to be raised by half an anna; while the rate on mahua flower (from which country liquor can be made) was woefully insufficient and needed to be eight times higher: instead of three pies (one-quarter of an anna), it should be raised to two annas per maund. Of course, the Commissioner had a boss too, the Lieutenant Governor, who later weighed in to state that such an increase on mahua would be disadvantageous to the “poorer classes,” and could be raised in Banaras only to one anna per maund, not two.11 It might be worth reminding ourselves here, while considering this level of micro-management of Banaras’s octroi duties by the office of province’s Lieutenant Governor, Antony Patrick MacDonnell, the 1st Baron MacDon­ nell, that 1 anna is 1/16th of a rupee. Again, in 1892, the Board attempted to pass modest increases in octroi rates, this time for tobacco and machine-made cotton and linen fabric, as well as a substantial rise in the rate on silk fabric, and again the Lieutenant Gov­ ernor’s office revised down several of the proposed increases.12 So why this back-and-forth about such small amounts of money? One might argue that the amounts, when added together, became rather substantial – hundreds or thousands of rupees, even, and the government was rightly concerned about the potential for the over-taxation of an urban population. A more compel­ ling explanation, I think, is that the provincial government cared about local rates of octroi because it wished to ensure a relative consistency of goods taxation across northern India’s larger cities. Such consistency would, one might argue, help to maintain a relatively even supply of consumable goods across the province and discourage the maintenance of large, localized, inventories. This was certainly in conformity with Lord Ripon’s 1882 resolu­ tion on the promotion of local self-government, which sought, among other things, to equalize taxation across the empire.13 In short, discussions between the Municipal Board, the Commissioner, and the Lieutenant Governor’s office about taxation were forms of hierarchical negotiation, in which the local financial concerns of Banaras had to be reconciled with a broader set of provincial and imperial priorities. The Board could push back, of course – as it did on the issue of how to categorize wheeled vehicles for taxation – but the impact of such counter proposals was often limited.14 The dynamics of this hierarchical negotiation also promoted, in many cases, increased disagreement and negotiation among Banaras’s own Muni­ cipal Board members, many of whom were dependent on local voters for their position. In 1892–93, for example, when the responsibility for

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Figure 8.1 Banaras old town hall, 2009 Image supplied by author

managing octroi had passed from Babu Bireshwar Mittra’s able hands into those of a specialized sub-committee, the possibility of constructing a bonded warehouse for receiving dutiable goods arriving into Banaras by train was hotly debated. The Board’s financial sub-committee was perceived by the chairman, James White, as lacking “energy and uniformity of super­ vision” in the collection of octroi, as well as being “extremely jealous of all interference or advice, and extremely obstinate in resisting any official pres­ sure.” White also considered the Octroi Superintendent to be “incompetent and untrustworthy.”15 White, and the Commissioner, saw the addition of a bonded warehouse as one way of enhancing octroi collection through a process of regularization, and professionalization, which would also cir­ cumvent the Board’s unpredictable subcommittee. The bonding warehouse would include, for example, a regular staff that oversaw payments and the

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movement of goods into the city. This was a deeply unpopular proposition within the city’s merchant community, however, and the subcommittee therefore refused to condone it. The Board itself, in a special meeting, rejected the proposal on the now-routine rationale that Banaras was “not a large center of general trade.”16 *** The Water Works Act of 1891, as noted earlier, gave municipal boards the power to levy a water rate of up to 7.5% on a property’s annual rental value, in order to help to pay for the service, and to write a set of rules and regula­ tions to locally govern the terms under which water would be provided to residents. These rules covered such things as the minimum water pressure, pipe size, the nature of house connections, and punitive measures for pre­ venting the misuse of water. Most importantly, when written, such rules would govern a municipal board’s methods for assessing and collecting the water rate,17 allowing each board to create a new bureaucratic establishment of information collection, rate assessment, and bill collection. Towards the end of 1891 A. J. Hughes, the engineer in charge of the Banaras waterworks, urged the Banaras Municipal Board to write up its set of rules in short order as residents had told him that they were eager to install house connections to the water supply.18 The Board chose to levy a full 7.5% water rate based on rental value early in 1892, at which time it also provided itself with the authority to enter any house with 24 hours’ notice and visually assess its condition, in order to ensure that claimed rental values were appropriate.19 The creation of rules that followed was the first attempt by the Board to comprehensively surveil the city’s populace, record house and occupant details, and formalize a direct taxation based on house values.20 First, the Banaras Municipal Board created an accounts establishment under its own control, staffed by a special head accountant, assistant accountants, vernacular clerks, bill collectors, and peons. Bill collectors were, in essence, the front line of the establishment, charged with entering neighborhoods and houses to collect the water rate. Bill collectors recorded relevant information and generated the primary paperwork which the accountants later compiled and assessed. And even though a bill collector was required to provide a security deposit to ensure that he did not abscond with the water rate that he had collected, as a group they were simultaneously entrusted by the Board to act as collectors of new information: they were required to report to their superiors any improvements or additions to the houses they visited, as well as the reoccupation of any formerly vacant house, each of which would have resulted in a reassessment of the property’s tax burden.21 Second, the rules created forms. Lots of forms, most of them for the bill collector to wield, but also for the vernacular clerks to translate, and the special accountant to transcribe and amalgamate into his own forms. Form “A” was a simple bill – the first piece of paper that would serve as the point of contact for an interaction between a house resident and the bill collector

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that the Board clearly hoped to make routine. The form is dated, specifies the house location and the person who lives there, the house value, and the tax required to be paid each quarter. It is signed by the special accountant and the secretary of the Municipal Board. Form “B” is a notice of demand, the next step in the attempt to collect tax when it is overdue. The form is the negation of negotiation. It informs the recipient that he has seven days to pay up or there will be a Form “C.” It is signed by the secretary of the Municipal Board. Form “C,” the distress warrant, is ostensibly not directed towards the non-tax-paying resident, but renders him the object of the form, which is now directed to the law-enforcement establishment of the city’s magistrate. Form “C” authorizes the seizure of movable goods from the house and their sale, after a period of time, to the value of outstanding tax demanded. This form is signed by the city magistrate. In each case, the form is a mix of blank space and standardized text. The blank space is to be filled in with information, in effect taking the particulars of a house, its occupant, and its value, and rendering these details into a regular schematic. The forms, as we move from “A,” which might be con­ sidered the most routine, to “B,” which is less routine, and then to “C,” which represents the extraordinary, contain more and more in the way of blank spaces to be filled. Additional information is required in case of non-pay­ ment – dates of demanded payment and periods of time to wait before action is taken – and these need to be entered into the standardized format of tax collection.22 Form “C” also encapsulates, in an outwardly modest form, the complex legal relationship between the Municipal Board and the colonial state: the coercive apparatus of that state is, with the completion of this form, brought to buttress the authority of the Board to extract money from the subject population. In addition, Banaras’s municipal collection establishment was required to compile 14 different registers – these were higher-level forms that tracked the distribution of the lower-order forms, the objections created when someone received such a form, and the money directed to the treasury through the com­ pletion of these forms. Instructions for filling out each register were also pub­ lished in the Board’s rules. For example, the bills generated were listed in a “bill register,” the bills issued to bill collectors were listed in a “register of bills issued to bill collectors,” and the monies collected were to be recorded in a “bill col­ lector’s register.” The first of these, for example, contained spaces to enter infor­ mation about the bill number and date, details on the who was receiving the bill, the amount of the bill, when the bill was paid or returned unpaid, and further cross-references to other registers. The register of objections, most importantly, was a space for recording the grounds on which non-payment (in whole or part) was claimed by a resident as valid and the steps taken by the accounting estab­ lishment to address the grievance. This register included the usual information plus a description of the house, the number of chauks (courtyards), whether the house was pukka (of finished materials, such as brick) or not, as well as further data on the objection, original assessment value, relevant dates, and the final

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amount decided upon by a court hearing. The register’s categories and blank spaces, in essence, worked as a means to contain the messiness of legal disputa­ tion within its own terms, culminating in a final resolution and a declaration of the amount of water rate to be paid to the Board.23 Yet despite the Board’s attempts to render tax collection a routine under­ taking, and to contain objections within formulaic categories, controversy over the application of the water rate was still liable to transcend the arenas of the municipal register and the civil court house. When framing its rules in 1893, the Municipal Board had decided to exclude any building from the water rate if it was used “exclusively for religious purposes.” The Board granted such exemptions to the city’s churches and mosques, but in the case of two temples – the Ganesh and Annapurna mandirs – they denied the exemption on the basis that these were partly residential structures. In a dra­ matic escalation of what might otherwise pass for an ordinary taxation dis­ pute, the Maharaja of Darbhanga (one of Banaras’s most influential noblemen) in response to the Board’s action posed a question to the Viceroy’s Legislative Council, in a rather inflated manner, asking why the Banaras Board had decided to assess water rates for Hindu temples but not for chur­ ches or mosques. Sir Antony MacDonnell (who at that time was a member of the Council and Lieutenant Governor of Bengal), in reply, rejected the notion that the Board was in any way anti-Hindu, given that the majority of the Board’s members were in fact Hindu themselves. The issue, he stated, was that the two temples in question were, quite simply, partly residential struc­ tures – the Ganesh mandir had 12 full-time residents, while the Annapurna mandir included a lodging house for brahmans. As a result, it was proper that the Board levy the water-rate in such a fashion.24 But the controversy did not stop there. Within a month William Sproston Caine, the Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) for Bradford East, raised the issue in Britain’s House of Commons. Caine was most famous in Britain as an ardent temperance movement campaigner, and he also took a keen interest in Indian affairs following a tour there in 1889.25 Caine was, for example, a fre­ quent critic of the Government of India’s permissive cannabis policies.26 In this instance, Caine’s question (phrased almost exactly as the Maharaja of Darb­ hanga had posed it to the Viceroy) seemed to suggest that the Banaras Muni­ cipal Board had levied taxes without the authority of the imperial government (when the Board did not in fact require it) and that, in so doing, it was acting against the interests of the British Government of India by promoting the dif­ ferent treatment of Hindu religious institutions when compared to Christian or Muslim.27 Taxation, again, was posed here by Caine as a religiously motivated form of discrimination. To make matters worse, Caine followed up by asking whether the Secretary of State for India was aware that the Banaras Municipal Board had allowed the interior of the new water pipes to be greased with “hog lard and bovine fat” and that the city’s population was in an uproar over it? And was not the Secretary aware – as though anyone in the Commons would miss the clear implication of a repeat of 1857 – that such a state of affairs was

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not only conducive to “great mischief” but that it rendered the water supply unusable for the entire city’s population?28 Caine clearly did not understand the nature of the Banaras Municipal Board’s authority to levy taxation under law, and the hyperbole of his questions clearly indicated that he had been misled in a variety of ways. The Lieutenant Governor of NWP&O certainly made his displeasure understood. In a letter to the Government of India, he remarked that the rumor about animal fat was in fact circulated by the agent to the two temples in question – a Mr. A. W. Hearsey – in an effort to coerce the Muni­ cipal Board into providing a tax exemption. “It is perhaps useless,” he noted, “to express a hope that before taking the most effectual means to give publicity to a story calculated to excite the feelings of a fanatical population and to interfere with the utility of a great public work, some little care may be taken to ascertain its source if not to make sure of its truth.”29 This was, by all means, an unusual set of objections to the Municipal Board’s practices – ones made by an elite member of Banarsi society and an apparently unwitting MP, in privileged settings about several quite unique structures – and thus it might be considered as the exception rather than the rule when it came to the Board’s collection of the water rate. However, as it turns out, the Board experienced significant trouble in collecting the taxes due in 1893; so much so that it was forced to make significant changes to its accounting and collection establishment. The Board’s chairman noted in the Fall of that year that it had employed just 17 bill collectors, and all of them were “of the general stamp of muharrirs not accustomed to exertions of the kind demanded by house-to-house visitation.” This was a key reason why, he felt, so many of the bills (form “A”) were returned by the bill collectors without any money: the house-owners had simply refused to pay. When the same men returned to these houses with form “B,” the notice of demand, the Municipal Board was then inundated with “various objections” or other rea­ sons for non-payment. This necessitated that the Board undertake multiple civil court actions, which had turned out to be not only expensive but timeconsuming. In order to make the whole process more efficient, the Board decided to omit the option to dispute in writing the water rate assessment in form “B,” and reorganized its collection establishment into a series of wards, each with a bill collector, assistant bill collector, and a series of peons for each who did the actual, physical collection of monies owed.30 In a parallel development, the Board at about this time also moved to streamline and “professionalize” its own growing establishment and its day­ to-day functioning, transforming itself from a part-time, largely consultative body. It moved, for example, to hire “executive officers,” or potentially a paid third party, to oversee conservancy and public health, public works, the col­ lection of octroi, education, and other responsibilities normally carried out by Board members themselves. A conservancy officer, for example, would “combine in himself not only a capacity to perform the arduous and manifold duties necessary for the proper supervision and control of the subordinate staff, … but also [have] a knowledge of the rules of sanitation and … experience to direct

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properly the application of those rules.” A “hard-working and thorough[ly] practical man” was needed, in other words.31 While some members worried about the costs involved, it was agreed that a health officer should be hired and that other important functions (such as tax collection) be assigned directly to individual people on the Board, rather than to subcommittees. But of course, this being Banaras, a series of petitions and public meetings were held to object to, and support, the change. A meeting chaired by Rai Sham Krishna at the Carmichael Library, for example, decried the subversion of the Board to pro­ fessional outsiders, demanded that any health officer for the city be a Hindu, and asked that no additional money be spent except in an emergency.32 But back to the forms: I have not seen in the archive any copies of these forms as they were filled out by bill collectors – only the pristine samples sent back to London – but I imagine, in light of the extensive refusal to pay by Banarsis in 1893, that the act of writing in the blank spaces might be inter­ preted rather differently than as an act of making information collection and surveillance routine. In other words, the difference between the unfilled form and the filled one need not be read as an act of capitulation to the state’s demands, but as an artefact that obscures the potentially contestatory nature of the inter-personal interaction necessitated by tax collection. Indeed, we see this pattern repeated in other elements of the Board’s attempts to regulate its water supply. In the second half of 1893, for example, the Board also moved to limit domestic consumption under the standardized water rate to 2,000 gallons per household per rupee in tax paid. In response, the Kashi Sujan Samaj, in a petition that was unusually sarcastic even for them, noted that the policy was as defective as everything else that the Board attempted to do. The Samaj noted that ordinary people had no idea how much volume a gallon contained – only drunkards and liquor dealers knew such things! Hindus were also used to bathing several times a day and using water freely, as it is a “gift of nature,” and so the notion of limiting water to a set amount would be a difficult adjustment in traditional behavior. Moreover, given that water is supplied only during certain hours of the day and is transmitted through pipes of a certain size, they asked: what is the point of such a restriction?33 The Board clearly intended the rules and related bureaucratic forms for assessing and collecting taxation to create standardized, relatively negotia­ tion-free transactions with the population of water-rate payers; to create a subject population of direct tax-payers, in fact. We can read these forms, then, as examples of intention on the part of the Board, but, I think, of little else. In the blank spaces of these forms there exists substantial potential for the eliciting of other ways of thinking about governance, personal identity, and the nature of urban citizenship. We can gain just glimpses of this potential, though, in the absence of a deeper archive. In the next, and last, section on taxation, we will see, however, that even the Board’s last resort of revenue enhancement, undertaken in a time of significant financial stress, was simi­ larly subject to negotiation and disputation that carried with them the potential for identity creation.

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*** As a further part of its drive to enhance municipal income, the Banaras Board proposed in 1889 to levy a new tax that they had earlier deemed highly unsuitable for the city, and even offensive to the religious sensibilities of the Board’s Hindu members. This was a visitor’s tax (or as it was commonly, and unpopularly, referred to, a pilgrim’s tax), the rationale being that visitors to Banaras should also pay for some small portion of the water and sewage ser­ vices that they would enjoy while there.34 Such a tax would undoubtedly have recalled for many of the city’s Hindu residents ideas of the cultural and reli­ gious bigotry of the emperor Aurangzeb’s rule, and in particular his imposition of the jizya tax on non-Muslims, or thwarted attempts in 1725 under local rulers to raise an additional pilgrimage tax in the city.35 The city’s temples and shrines had, in fact, not been subjected to a pilgrimage tax since 1781 when it was abolished by Warren Hastings (undoubtedly in an attempt to curry favor with local residents in a context of political vulnerability).36 The proposed visitor’s tax was, in fact, perceived by many as explicitly a pilgrimage tax – as late as 1919 one petitioner to the Board wrote: “however the name may be disguised, the visitor’s tax is essentially and most generally a tax on Hindu pil­ grims and as such it cannot fail to have the effect [of a] tax on religion.”37 The Lieutenant Governor vetoed the visitors’ tax when it was first proposed by the Board in 1889, however, claiming that it would be unpopular with rail­ way authorities – rather than Hindu visitors – on the grounds that they would fear decreased business, and further because the municipality already received indirect taxation income from visitors in the form of octroi on goods that they purchased while in the city.38 The Board did not give up on the proposal, however, and revisited it consistently in later years, especially after the com­ pletion of the waterworks in 1892 when construction on the new sewage and drainage system began. It was at that point that the provincial government understood that without the additional income the Board would, in all like­ lihood, go bankrupt.39 Thus in the summer of 1893, for example, the Board announced (by the beat of a tom-tom in the city) that it would start to levy a small fee on arriving passengers in Banaras of between 2 and 4 annas apiece. But the Board was unclear about how exactly to collect it: would the Oudh and Rohilkhand Railway (O&RR) Company collect it as a part of the ticket price? Or would the Board need to erect barricades around the train stations and collect the tax physically?40 Lieutenant Colonel Brackenbury, the manager of the O&RR, pushed back against the idea that the tax might be added to tick­ ets: it could be easily evaded by passengers booking themselves to nearby Mughalsarai, and even so, it would probably just drive traffic off the railway and onto other modes of transportation. If the tax, he wrote, “discourages numbers from flocking to Benares, [it] might possibly aggravate the financial difficulties which it is designed to alleviate.”41 Similarly, Babu Priya Lal Bose, a medical practitioner from the neighborhood of Bengali Tola, complained to the Board that in his view it was visitors who were the main source of cholera and other contagious diseases in the city, and that it was Banarsi residents who

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were, therefore, the ones that suffered because of their presence. (This was his “medical opinion,” moreover). As a result, he was concerned that the Munici­ pal Board find some way to exempt those who live in the city from having to pay the tax when using the railway.42 Enlisting the help of private enterprise to alleviate Banaras’s financial woes once again proved difficult, however, as the Government of India sided with the railway company, stating that the proposal to levy the tax within the price of a railway ticket was “open to serious, if not fatal, objections” and so suggested instead that the Board simply collect the tax at the doorway to the railway station. Henry Lyle, the Board’s chairman replied that this was impossible and would cause extraordinary chaos among passengers and probably end in a riot.43 The Board eventually prevailed, however, in the summer of 1895, when the railway agreed to begin collecting the fee as a part of their ticket sale. Yet the O&RR complained nearly immediately that its worst fears had been realized: sales were down, and passengers to Banaras were alighting at Mughalsarai and walking the remaining ten kilometers, over the Dufferin bridge, into the city in order to avoid paying. The O&RR’s manager estimated that they would likely lose Rs 36,000 per year in revenue from the tax,44 with a coin­ cident result being that the amount of revenue the Board received was also rather less than was expected. In 1899, however, – for a reason that I cannot quite discern – the visitor’s tax could no longer be levied as a small additional charge to a railway ticket. It was, therefore, proposed by the Board to convert it into a kind of road toll, levied only on visitors wealthy enough to approach or leave the railway station by vehicle.45 But the Municipal Board’s chairman made the proposal, and the members themselves accepted it, “without enthusiasm,” for all were of the view that “the people of Benares could be taxed no further.”46 The solution to Banaras’s ongoing revenue shortfalls, they believed, was “improved administration:” the presence of a “hard-work­ ing Octroi Superintendent” had already paid dividends in this respect, with octroi income way up over the previous year. Something similar now needed to be done with the horse and carriage tax registers.47 The question for the provincial government, then, was whether this would be enough. In subsequent decades the Banaras Municipal Board would occasionally revert to the visitors’ tax as an emergency means of fund raising, but by the 1920s had clearly abandoned any pretense that it was anything other than a pilgrimage tax. In these years the tax was to be utilized at least partly for pilgrimage-related improvements to the city, and was thus a form of levy that specifically signalled that the city was a predominantly “Hindu” one. In 1929, for example, the tax was to be doubled in an attempt to raise funds to con­ struct a new drainage system along the ghats, to prevent further pollution and city run-off from entering the river. This was pointedly characterized by the Board as a measure that would benefit Hindu pilgrims themselves.48 In the mid-1930s a public meeting was held at Town Hall, under the chairmanship of the Commissioner, to consider doubling the visitor’s tax yet again on and around special pilgrimage days.49 This was an addition intended to enhance

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the Board’s recent practice of keeping some money from the visitors’ tax aside for the repair of the pilgrimage infrastructure. In this case, the infrastructure in question was Tulsi Ghat, in the south of the city, then in desperate need of repair after a collapse. The religious and historical importance of the ghat – as the location of the composition of the Ramcharitmanas by the medieval Hindu poetsage Tulsidas – was a consistent feature of discussions about how the Municipal Board could contribute to a local organization’s efforts to rebuild it.50 (It might be worth noting that the Kashi Tirtha Sudhar Trust,51 the organization leading the campaign to rebuild the ghat, included several members who also served in the municipal government, such as the Raja Moti Chand). By this time tax had become not simply a matter of revenue enhancement, or just one part of a pro­ fessionalization of the municipal establishment. In this case, especially, it had evolved into a statement of urban identity that the Board itself could potentially wield in its negotiations with higher levels of government and use to make common cause with the city’s predominantly Hindu population. *** At the end of the 19th century there was clearly an ambiguity of sorts, or, per­ haps, a set of conflicting ideas, regarding the virtues of introducing large-scale sanitary infrastructure into Banaras. On the one hand, many people in the city welcomed the provision of water, especially, and the better arrangements for dis­ posing of human waste. It was said by one engineer, for example, that people were clamoring for water connections in the early days of establishing the waterworks. But on the other hand, many of those same people were uncomfortable with the increased taxation that this infrastructure necessitated, and perhaps at least as importantly, the expanding bureaucratization and legal-administrative powers that the Municipal Board was accruing. Consistent refusals to meet demands for the water-rate, for example, or the petitions bemoaning Banaras’s non-commer­ cial character and inability to manage increased octroi duties, can attest to this fact. One can also imagine that the Municipal Board’s members must often have felt that they were working essentially on their own, without the support of either the city’s populace, its neighborhood associations, or the provincial government. The Board’s few attempts to enlist the help of private enterprise in revenue aug­ mentation, moreover, proved that the colonial capitalist could often prove to be a very unreliable partner (as we will also see in the next, and final, chapter of this section). Despite the early show of solidarity between government, municipal counsellors, and elite Banarsi residents at the ground-breaking ceremony for the water-works project in 1890, the truth was that the Board’s members needed to constantly advocate, negotiate, and indeed argue with colonial overseers and with what Babu Bireshwar Mittra called the “old guard” of the city’s noble classes when acting in what they viewed as the best interests of their Banaras. The bureaucratic and financial struggles over the city’s sanitation infra­ structure projects were undoubtedly productive in creating new ideas about the inhabitants’ relationship to the city, its neighborhood-based traditions, and the role of local, quasi-representational government in the development of Banaras’s

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particular brand of urbanism. But as I have hinted throughout this book, these projects also held long-term financial consequences for the city. The Banaras Municipal Board continued to struggle with budget shortfalls for several decades after the decision was made to commit Rs 40 lakh to water and sewerage. In 1917–18 the Board overspent its income by Rs 66,000. In 1919–20 that amount was Rs 57,000. Only in the intervening year did the shortfall come down to Rs 20,000, but in that year “expenditure was starved in every direction.”52 At the end of the 19th century the Commissioner wrote that “it seems to me a most serious matter that in a city like Benares practically the whole surplus income should be pledged in repayment of loans, and that no balance should be avail­ able to meet the many imperative calls which may at any time be made on the municipal purse.”53 He was right.

Notes 1 BL, IOR, P/2678, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1886, March, No. 3, G. Adams, Magistrate, Benares, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 21 December 1885. 2 BL, IOR, P/4062, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1892, September, No. 37(a), R. H. Breton, Chairman, Benares Municipal Board, to Commissioner, Benares Divi­ sion, 29 August 1892. Also, BL, IOR, P/4702, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1895, January, No. 34(a), R. H. Breton, Chairman, Benares Municipal Board, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 7 December 1894. 3 Report on the Administration of the N.-W. Provinces and Oudh, for the year ending 31st March 1890: xxi–xxii. 4 BL, IOR, P/3142, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1888, July, No. 3, J. White, Magistrate, Benares, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 7 June 1888. 5 For example, see below for a discussion of the re-introduction of a pilgrimage tax to fund the repair of Tulsi Ghat following the intervention of the Kashi Tirtha Sudhar Trust. 6 BL, IOR, P/4702, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1895, January, No. 34(a), R. H. Breton, Chairman, Municipal Board, Benares, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 7 December 1894. 7 BL, IOR, P/3598, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1890, June, No. 1, Maulvi Muhammad Kutb-ud-din Hasan, to Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, 2 May 1889. 8 Ibid., No. 3, Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 20 May 1889. 9 BL, IOR, P/3598, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1890, November, No. 6 and No. 8, extracts from special meeting of the Municipal Board, Benares, dated 27 March 1889. 10 Ibid., No. 9, J. White, Chairman, Municipal Board, Benares, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 10 May 1889; No. 10, extract from proceedings of a special meeting of the Municipal Board, Benares, held 30 April 1889. 11 Ibid., No. 12, Commissioner’s note on proposed revision of octroi schedule, [n.d.]; No. 14, R. Smeaton, Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 8 August 1889. 12 BL, IOR, P/4062, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1892, September, No. 5a, pro­ ceedings of a special meeting of the Municipal Board, Benares, held 25 February 1892; No. 8, Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 17 May 1892. 13 Resolution of the Government of India, 18 May 1882, in Palit, ed., Speeches of Lord Ripon, Part II: 35–51. 14 BL, IOR, P/3598, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1890, November, No. 17, note on proceedings of the Benares Municipal Board, special meeting of 15 November 1889.

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15 BL, IOR, P/4062, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1892, June, No. 7(a), J. White, Chairman, Municipal Board, Benares, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 25 January 1892; No. 16(a), J. White, memorandum on a bonding warehouse for Benares, 28 April 1892. 16 BL, IOR, P/4297, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1893, May, No. 6(a), Benares Municipal Board, financial subcommittee report of 31 March 1893. 17 Act I of 1891, section 37, in N.-W. Provinces and Oudh Code: 739–40. 18 BL, IOR, P/4062, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1892, October, No. 25(a), A. J. Hughes, Supervising Engineer, Municipal Water Works, NWP&O, to Chairman, Municipal Board, Benares, 22 December 1891. 19 Ibid., No. 52, Notification, Benares Municipal Board, n.d. 20 Earlier attempts were made to compile information about the city’s inhabitants, their houses, occupations, and so forth. James Prinsep, of course, mapped and created a census for the city in the 1820s. The imperial and provincial governments also first conducted a census in 1872. The board’s requirements, however, would have been rather different as they were interested in compiling data on rental values and, unlike the colonial state, were essentially disinterested in fixing data into caste- and religion-based categories. This was undoubtedly rather novel for the 19th century. I have also seen a (privately held) highly detailed Survey of India map prepared for the Assi / Bhadaini area of the city c. 1883/84 that distinguishes each house in the neighborhood, although it is not linked so far as I can tell to any personal information. See J. Prinsep, “Census of the Population of the City of Benares,” Asiatic Researches, 17, (1832): 470–98; and W. C. Plowden, Census of the N.-W. Provinces, 1872, Vol I: General Report, and Statements and Tables, showing details of area and population, exhibiting population according to age and education, and with reference to land, land revenue, nationalities, castes, tribes, and occupations, (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces’ Government Press, 1873). 21 BL, IOR, P/4297, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1893, April, No. 6, Notifica­ tion, Benares Municipal Board, 3 March 1893. 22 Ibid., No 6(a), Forms A to C for water rate collection. 23 Ibid., No 9, Notification, Benares Municipal Board, 3 March 1893; No. 9(a), reg­ isters I–XIV. 24 Proceedings of Council, 29 March 1894, in Abstract of the Proceedings of the Council of the Governor General of India, assembled for the purpose of making Laws and Regulations, 1894, vol. 33, (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1895), 322–3. See also BL, IOR, P/4297, NWP&O Municipal Proceed­ ings, 1893, January, No. 8, Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 14 January 1893. 25 W. S. Caine, India as Seen by Mr W. S. Caine, M.P., (Lucknow: G. P. Varma and Brothers Press, 1889). 26 See J. H. Mills, Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800–1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 97–9. 27 Question of Mr Caine, 25 April 1893, Hansard, HC Deb 25 April 1893, vol. 11: 1126–7. 28 Ibid. 29 BL, IOR, P/4297, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1893, August, No. 41, Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, to Sec. to Govt of India, Home Dept, 20 July 1893. 30 BL, IOR, P/4507, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1894, July, No. 3(a), R. H. Breton, Chairman, Benares Municipal Board, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 12 October 1893. 31 BL, IOR, P/5127, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1897, April, No. 91(c), Mem­ bers of the Municipal Board, Benares, to Chairman, Municipal Board, Benares, 17 January 1896. 32 Ibid., No. 91(e), Proceedings of a special meeting of the Benares Municipal Board, 25 January 1896; No. 91(g), Proceedings of a Public Meeting held 26 January 1896.

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33 BL, IOR, P/4507, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1894, July, No. 6(h), copies of Benares Municipal Board resolutions; No. 6(i), Secretary, Kashi Sujan Samaj, to Chairman, Municipal Board, Benares, 4 September 1893. 34 BL, IOR, P/3598, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1890, January, No. 8, J. H. Twigg, Commissioner, Benares Division, to Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, 24 October 1889; No. 9, Raja Shiva Prasad, Vice-President, Municipal Board, to Commis­ sioner, Benares Division, 11 October 1889. 35 Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: 183. 36 K. Ingham, “The English Evangelicals and the Pilgrim Tax in India, 1800–1862,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 1/2 (April 1953): 13–22. 37 BL, IOR, P/10944, UP Municipal Proceedings, 1920, December, No. 72(a), attachment, Secretary, Bengali Tola Association, Benares, to Executive Officer, Municipal Board, Benares, 28 October 1919. 38 BL, IOR, P/3598, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1890, January, No. 10, Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 7 December 1889. 39 BL, IOR, P/4297, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1893, December, No. 5, W. H. L. Impey, Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, to Sec. to Govt of India, Home Dept, 13 December 1893. 40 Ibid., No. 2(i), R. H. Breton, Chairman, Municipal Board, Benares, to Commis­ sioner, Benares Division, 15 August 1893. 41 Ibid., No. 4, A. W. Brackenbury, Manager, Oudh & Rohilkhand Railway, to Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, 28 September 1893. 42 Ibid., No. 1(a), Babu Priya Lal Bose to Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, 12 May 1893. 43 Bl, IOR, P/4507, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1894, November, No. 13, C. J. Lyall, Sec. to Govt of India, Home Dept, to Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, 20 March 1894; No. 15(a) H. W. Lyle, Chairman, Municipal Board, Benares, to Commis­ sioner, Benares Division, 19 June 1894. 44 BL, IOR, P/4908, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1896, December, No. 2(b), M. C. Brackenbury, Manager, Oudh & Rohilkhand Railway, to Director-General of Railways, Calcutta, 4 February 1896. 45 BL, IOR, P/5587, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1899, June, No. 40(b), H. V. Lovett, Chairman, Municipal Board, Benares, Memorandum of 28 January 1899. 46 Ibid., No. 42(a), H. V. Lovett, Chairman, Municipal Board, Benares, to Commis­ sioner, Benares Division, 6 March 1899. 47 Ibid. 48 UPRAV, Varanasi Division, Different Departments, 1901–29, Box 145, File 353, Resolution No 449, Municipal Board, Benares, 21 December 1929. 49 Awaza-i-Khalk, September 11, 1935: 3. 50 See, for example, UPRAV, Varanasi Division, Different Departments, 1901–29, Box 145, File 353, Tulsi Tirtha Sudhar Samiti to Commissioner, Benares Division, n.d. [mid-1935]. 51 See the publication of the Kashi Tirtha Sudar Trust: Benares and its Ghats (Benares: 1931). Also, M. Desai, “City of Negotiations: Urban Space and Narra­ tive in Banaras,” in M. S. Dodson, ed., Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural His­ tories (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011), and M. Desai, Banaras Reconstructed: Architecture and Sacred Space in a Hindu Holy City (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2017). 52 BL, IOR, P/10944, UP Municipal Proceedings, 1920, December, No. 72, R. Burn, Commissioner, Benares Division, to Sec. to Govt, UP, 15 April 1920. 53 BL, IOR, P/5587, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1899, June, No. 44, L. A. S. Porter, Commissioner, Benares Division, to Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, 16 May 1899.

9

To contemplate what was and what might have been

One of the options for sewage disposal that the Banaras Municipal Board considered in the early years of the 1880s was a dry earth conservancy scheme, complemented by the building of an electric tram system. This would have involved the removal of human waste on a nightly basis in a series of carts – essentially hoppers or open mine carts – on the tramway, pulled out of the city and into the surrounding countryside by steam-powered locomotive. There, it would be buried: dry earth conservancy was essentially a process of rendering waste innocuous and useful by mixing it with soil. This was a system that British sanitary engineers in India often considered in the mid-to­ late 19th century to be most effective in “preventing putrid decomposition, enabling the excreta to be removed in the least offensive and most harmless manner, and leaving unimpaired its fertilizing properties.” The system’s use in military cantonments, jails, and hospitals in India was praised as being both simple and easy to understand (even for “ignorant natives”!) and thus more likely to be employed with success.1 Yet its introduction into larger urban contexts was often considered problematic as a practice (rather than in prin­ ciple): the sheer quantity of earth required, the difficulty of effectively super­ vising safe waste removal from the city, and so forth, were all problems that needed to be solved.2 Moreover, some medical practitioners had doubts about the effectiveness of dry earth as a disinfectant, noting that it may only work as a “deodorizer” and do little to render harmless certain diseases, such as cholera, that are transmitted by fecal matter.3 The Municipal Board’s plan for a tramway system had been conceived in the aftermath of their subversion of the 20 lakh FitzJames scheme, and in its view had several important advantages over the elaborate, combined system of water supply and waterborne drainage that the provincial engineers so favored. First of all, it was an answer to the most pressing need of the city – its sewage problem – and left to another day the question of providing a fresh water supply. It was also a quick fix to the problem, for it was thought that the tram’s tracks could be laid in their entirety within just 18 months. Second, the tramway itself would have been an asset to the people of the city by acting during the daytime as an easy and cheap mode of transportation for the city’s inhabitants. A set of passenger cars would run the same routes to allow Banarsis to travel between points in the

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old city, and also out into the cantonment where most parts of the civil service (the judiciary, the revenue board, etc.) and the railway stations were located. Third, it was an economically sound project. The full cost of construction and maintenance of the tram lines would fall to the tramway company’s agents and not to the municipality. This would mean that no immediate rises in taxation in the city would be required, and the Board would not incur a large debt. Every­ thing could be done through current general expenditure. Moreover, the muni­ cipality would benefit financially from the sale of the fertilizer produced through the dry earth conservancy scheme. Fourth, and finally, the largest benefit of the plan was quite simply that it would end the pollution of the Ganga by sewage in an effective way. Once the system was in place and operating, the Board intended to empty the old sewer lines and then fill them up with concrete or other mate­ rials as a part of this project.4 The Banaras Municipal Board resolved on 7 June 1884 to go ahead, noting that it had come to the “unanimous conclusion that the proposed project would be highly advantageous to the city both as regards health and con­ venience.”5 The Board signed an agreement with Lionel Decle, of Calcutta, who together with the contracting firm Messrs Robinson, Morrison, and Co., would construct the tramway, with a line stretching from Rajghat in the far north of the city, through Raja Bazaar and the northern suburbs, over the Varuna river, and then into Orderly Bazaar, near the Collectorate in the Civil Cantonment. A branch line would run southwards to Assi Ghat, eventually extending even further up river to the octroi station in Lanka.6 The board had decided on using the Decauville Patent Portable Railway – a narrowgauge system pioneered for industrial and military use in France. The con­ struction of the tramway was, in October 1884, approved in principle by the Lieutenant Governor’s office, although there was some concern about “cer­ tain ambiguities of expression” found in the draft contract between the Municipal Board and Mr Decle. This ambiguity would, in a few short months, I am afraid to say, help to derail the entire deal. It is a story entirely fitting of this particular hierarchical bureaucracy, but also one with profound consequences for human health in the Gangetic plain, and the health of the Ganga itself. *** Paragraph 12 of the draft agreement between Lionel Decle and the Muni­ cipal Board of Banaras reads, in part: “The said Board shall have the right of purchasing the said tramway with the plant and stores, rolling stock, and everything connected therewith after the expiration of twenty one years from the seventh day of June 1884 … the amount to be paid … shall be the actual bona fide value (exclusive of any compensation for good will premium …) in case the parties do not agree [the amount is] to be decided by arbitration as hereinafter provided and for the good will premium and compulsory sale or other consideration whatsoever of the business of the grantee [Mr Decle] an amount equal to twenty one years’ purchase calculated on the average profits

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of the previous three years, four per cent per annum on the above value as paid being first deducted from such profits.”7 The offending words, in the view of the provincial government, were “the above value.” The arrangement made between the Banaras Municipal Board and Lione Decle provided him with an exclusive right to operate a tramway in the city and to charge fares for passengers and goods within certain limits agreed upon with the Board. In return, the Board provided the land on which to lay the tracks and establish any other infrastructure needed. After 21 years, the Board then had the right to purchase the tramway and all of its associated infrastructure at a cost to be calculated by the terms of the agreement.8 And herein lay the trouble. What exactly did “the above value” refer to in the calculation of this cost? In an undated note, the Legal Remembrancer to the provincial government wrote that, in his view, the problematic phrase was, for practical purposes, quite clear in its meaning, but that it could, potentially, be interpreted to quite different effect, with radically different financial outcomes for the Board. He thus recommended that it be re-written to remove the potential ambiguity.9 The Banaras Commissioner, however, noted that the exact same wording had been used in an earlier agreement to bring a tramway system to Bombay. Offi­ cials in Bombay had been contacted by the provincial government and they had replied that they similarly understood the phrase to be straightforward; that is, that “the above value” referred to “the actual bona fide value (exclusive of any compensation for good will premium …)”10 And in a letter from Messrs Robinson, Morrison & Co., dated 25 October, they similarly agreed to the generally accepted understanding.11 In late December the Banaras Municipal Board had agreed with Decle a revision of phrasing, that would be executed as a supplement to the original agreement: gone were the ambiguous words to be replaced by, yes indeed, “… the actual bona vide value (exclusive of any com­ pensation for goodwill premium …)”12 So all seemed to be well. Problem of ambiguous phrasing solved. And yet the tramway system was never built. There are two batches of files in the Uttar Pradesh Regional Archive in Varanasi that contain documentation on the tramway scheme, and both are silent about the exact reason for the project’s demise. The first batch of files details the problem of the original contract’s phrasing and its solution, as I have just recounted. The second details further correspondence between Decle, the Board, and the provincial government in the summer of 1885. At that time the imperial Government of India also got itself involved in the building of Banaras’s tramway. This second round of trouble seems to have originated with a declaration by the Viceroy in May of that year that forbade the signing of any new agreements with tramway companies without his express consent; his worry being that such concessions “may possibly conflict with future general legislation.”13 The final execution of the agreement for Banaras’s tramway had been further delayed a few months at the beginning of 1885 by the realization that a related document – a deed of concession – had not been signed by an exofficio member of the Municipal Board, as was required by law. This had, of

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course, required a further round of correspondence and signatures. And then, when the Viceroy’s directive had appeared, the provincial government needed clarification: could this contract go ahead as planned?14 But again, it turned out that all was fine. The Viceroy wrote on 20 June to say that he was “pleased to approve the actions already taken … in sanc­ tioning the construction of a tramway in Benares.”15 But Messrs Robinson and Morrison seemed to still be nervous, and in September they asked the Banaras Municipal Board whether some legislative act or further action from the Viceroy would be needed to ensure that they would be allowed to carry out their work.16 And here the correspondence ends. There is no evidence to explain what happened next, for it would appear that the contracts were all agreed; that they were mostly, if not all, signed; and that the entire project been approved by the Viceroy to go ahead. Perhaps, I would venture, the tramway scheme collapsed from financial disagreements between Decle and Messrs Robinson, Morrison & Co. There is some indication in the files that Robinson wanted to sideline Decle somehow and that Decle wanted a further guarantee that he would receive half the profits for the tramway. But that is only speculation on my part. What must have been clear to the British entrepreneurs involved was that working within the bureaucratic structure of an increasingly decentralized, yet simultaneously authoritarian, state was no easy task. In fact, the bureaucratic headaches could be substantial. Banaras still has no functioning public transportation system, apart from the cycle (and, increasingly, auto) rickshaws that ply their trade along the city’s congested roads, and, of course, we know that human waste has con­ tinued to be dumped into the river unabated. The old drains of the 18th and early 19th century, far from being closed up, continue to leak untreated sewage into the river, while the pumping stations of the 1890s push sewage out in huge volumes towards Rajghat. I did notice a while ago that one of Prinsep’s old drains near Shivala Ghat had been covered and the surrounding area (which is frequented by water buffalo) cleaned, I assume by a new upscale hotel that has opened nearby. It would be but a small consolation to those, among the Municipal Board’s counsellors of old, who touted the vir­ tues of private capital investment in Banaras and its ability to improve the city’s sanitary condition. *** Yesterday I was speaking to the director of a well-known scholarly institute in the south of Banaras. Since being appointed a year or two ago he has overseen a complete renovation of the old building in which the institute is housed, and as a part of this renovation he has had to have a new water well drilled. He told me the story over a drink on one of Banaras’s many quasiclandestine rooftop bars. The original well for the property was only about 70 feet deep, he said, and the water that came out of it was yellow. Even after boiling it, it had a

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decided propensity to make one very unwell. Switching to the municipal water supply was simply not an option. It is horrible, he told me, it smells terrible. You can use it only for watering the plants and flushing the toilets. And so he began on a great adventure – the drilling of a new bore well in the garden. A bore well is, in essence, a very deep hole of a relatively small diameter, usually less than a foot wide, which is drilled through the earth’s crust into an underground aquifer. The sides of the well are held fast with PVC piping and concrete, and an electric pump is used to bring water to the surface. The proliferation of bore (and tube) wells has led to the rapid deterioration of ground water supplies in many parts of India – especially in agricultural regions such as the Punjab, where the water table is recognized to have drop­ ped precipitously in recent years.17 But in many parts of the country there is little option except to drill these wells. Increasingly, however, state govern­ ments are recognizing that bore well digging needs to be monitored and regulated; Kerala recently imposed restrictions on their digging, invoking the state’s Disaster Management Act.18 But back to the story. At 12 feet down, the drill broke. It had hit rock. And so the crew of laborers dug out a large hole by hand to clear the obstacle. They had hit some large stone slabs – foundation stones from an earlier building perhaps – or even stones from an earlier version of the ghat. Nobody knew. Once that stone had been broken up (and this took many weeks of hard labor) they drilled down to 80 feet, but then the river began to flood (it was already late summer), and the well was inundated. Work stopped again, this time for several months. After the waters receded, and the well dried out, they began to drill again. To 100 feet. Then 200 feet. And then 300 feet. There they stopped. This is the average depth of a bore well in Banaras these days. The aquifer under the city yields good, clean water at that depth. But there is no guarantee that the water will last – the water table could go down. And once a well has been drilled and secured with concrete, it cannot be drilled any deeper. And so the decision was made to go to 350 feet, and there they stopped, and the well was fixed. The institute now draws clean drinking water from 350 feet below the sur­ face of the city, and still, just a few steps from the holy Ganga. —October 2017

Notes 1 T. Blaney, “The Drainage and Conservancy of Indian Towns and Cities,” Trans­ actions of the Medical and Physical Society of Bombay, X, (1870): 167–8. 2 Ibid.: 169–74. 3 W. J. Moore, “Remarks on the Dry-Earth System of Conservancy,” Indian Medical Gazette, 3, 4, (1 April 1868): 77–8. This is not reading for the faint of heart, or stomach, for that matter. 4 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Misc 1881–1923, Box 76, File 429: undated note; H. Fraser, Offg President, Banaras Municipal Board, to J. J. F. Lumsden, Commissioner, Benares Division, 6 September 1884.

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5 Ibid., resolution of the Benares Municipal Board, 7 June 1884. 6 BL, IOR, P/2451, NWP&O Municipal Proceedings, 1885, Jan, No. 1, J. J. F. Lumsden, Commissioner, Benares Division, to Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, 11 Sep­ tember 1881; No. 6, extract from the proceedings of a special meeting of the municipal commissioners, 7 June 1884. 7 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Misc 1881–1923, Box 76, File 429, draft articles of agreement, dated 7 June 1884. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., note of the Legal Remembrancer to Government, [n.d.]. 10 Ibid., Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 4 December 1884. 11 Ibid., Messrs Robinson & Morrison, to President, Municipal Board, Benares, 25 October 1884. 12 Ibid., President, Benares Municipal Board, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 22 December 1884. 13 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Misc 1881–1923, Box 105, File 11, A. Mackenzie, Sec. to Govt of India, to Sec. to Govt NWP&O, 18 May 1885. 14 Ibid., Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, to Sec. to Govt of India, Home Dept, 1 June 1885. 15 Ibid., Sec. to Govt of India, to Sec. to Govt NWP&O, 20 June 1885. 16 Ibid., President, Municipal Board, Benares, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 29 September 1885. 17 See “Rapid fall in groundwater level in Punjab, Haryana,” The Hindustan Times, May 25, 2018. 18 “Drought: Kerala govt to regulate borewells,” Outlook, February 25, 2017.

Part II

The crafting of historical space

Freud’s short 1915 essay, “On Transience,” is a reflection on the meaning of impermanence and loss in the context of European total war. Freud tells us that as he walks with two friends – one a melancholic, the other a famous poet – he is led to ruminate on how beauty need not be diminished in an object by its transitory nature. He writes: The proneness to decay of all that is beautiful and perfect can, as we know, give rise to two different impulses in the mind. The one leads to the aching despondency felt by the young poet, while the other leads to rebellion against the fact asserted. No! it is impossible that all this love­ liness of Nature and Art, of the world of our sensations and of the world outside, will really fade away into nothing. It would be too senseless and too presumptuous to believe it. Somehow or other this loveliness must be able to persist and to escape all the powers of destruction.1 Does a flower become less beautiful because it blooms and then perishes? No, Freud says, and in fact, quite the opposite might be true: our enjoyment of beauty may be heightened because it fades over time. But loss is a painful experience. We mourn when something we love disappears, and the anticipa­ tion of that pain is something that may keep us from enjoying the transient products of nature and humanity. And a great deal had been lost by 1915: the natural world destroyed, works of art vanished, and our optimism for a better future, and faith in humanity and civilization, dashed. Freud ends his essay, however, on an optimistic note. The pain caused by the war’s devastation of human and natural beauty should not stop us from rebuilding them again. Indeed, the recognition of the fragility of our own works of civilization might lead us to better safeguard them in the future. Freud’s ideas in this essay made me think of the colonial impulse to savor the natural and long-past civilizational beauties of India, so prominent in the imaginaries and writings of orientalists and administrators alike, but also their impulse to tame that landscape, make it a productive utopia, and, perhaps above all, to stop the processes of decay and loss as an emblem of a forwardlooking, constructive, and absolute colonial power. To make beauty “persist” into eternity, as Freud says. What Freud describes is also just the colonial

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desire to control the landscape – expressed in words more akin to poetry than rule – and to bend it to the directed will not just of productivity and profit, but of immortality as well. In the second part of this book, I examine how such immortality might come by way of the curation and conservation of the architectural vestiges of the past. The creation of a historical landscape was an important counterpart to the colonial state’s creation of a meaningful landscape based in technology and the spectacle of innovation in northern India. Both ultimately spoke to the ways that the state envisioned, and then attempted to realize, a colonial future for India. The historical landscape was a cultivated landscape, therefore – one chosen and curated by the colonial state to elicit an intended meaning, and brought into being through the establishment of practices of selection, conservation, and his­ torical scholarship. Such a landscape was not just about creating a juxtaposition of past and present, however, or the creation of a vision of colonial modernity as opposed to Indian political feudalism. Instead it was a means to elicit a colonial future that embedded the past into it through the enlightened act of custodian­ ship. What I mean to say here is that the colonial state sought to communicate not just what history India might have had, but to demonstrate its own expertise, goodwill, and enlightened character through acts of conservation that selected and preserved the meaningful buildings of the past for future generations. The landscape, in this way, became a way for Indians and Europeans to read a par­ ticular vision of the past, but in so doing, also infer something important about the colonial state’s values and its likely future. But even a landscape that is carefully curated can also be one of con­ tingency and unexpectedness, of choices made and roads not taken. We will encounter moments in the rendering of this landscape when money was una­ vailable for much-needed repairs to a building before the monsoon caused it to crumble, as well as times when the state did not recognize a building as sufficiently worthy to maintain. Equally, the notion of curatorship might imply little dialogue or negotiation, but I will examine how Indians them­ selves engaged with the processes of architectural conservation, including how individuals might have used the criteria of conservation for their own projects, or perhaps to stand up to the colonial state in order to claim the role of conservator and curator for themselves. This section begins with a story about Lord Curzon, India’s preeminent authoritarian Viceroy, and his desire to craft an Indian landscape dotted with the preserved relics of the past. His visit to Jaunpur in 1903 to inspect the great mosques of the 15th-century Sharqi dynasty is our starting point. This visit sets into motion not just the colonial machinery dedicated to fulfilling his vision of a restored and placid historical Islamic landscape for the city, but also insti­ tutes an advisory committee of local notables with quite different views of how these mosques function in Jaunpuris’ everyday lives. We then also trace the implementation of Curzon’s landmark historical conservation legislation, the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904. Often viewed as a centralizing measure to extend control over the historical structures of the past, I argue that

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it is instead a preeminent example of a bureaucratic form that is, at heart, highly transactional and thus productive of local meaning. I pose many questions in this chapter. For example, I ask what exactly constituted an urban space with historical valence, and how that landscape and its meaning changed over time? When considering an old city, what stayed, what went, what was repaired, and under what criteria were such decisions made? What political, administrative, and legal conditions were relevant to understand how these landscapes evolved? And most importantly, how exactly did the past speak to, and help to create, the future? What I do think, for certain, is that the substance of the “historical” that was invested in buildings by the colonial state was fundamentally different from earlier visions of the antique or the picturesque, even if they shared a genealogy, in that the historical played not on emotion so much as on rationality and readability. In the colonial state’s hands, northern India was to be a landscape of past structures that were intended to be pedagogical in important ways, but not inhabited. Indians, we will see, had rather different ideas.

Note 1 S. Freud, “On Transience,” translated by. J. Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, (London: Vintage, 2001): 305–7.

10 Lord Curzon tours Jaunpur, James Fergusson in hand

On 11 January 1903 the Viceroy of British India, Lord Curzon, made a daylong visit to the north Indian city of Jaunpur where he toured the great mos­ ques of the 15th-century Indo-Muslim Sharqi dynasty. These were unique buildings, he would later note, historical structures of great importance posses­ sing “a character, dignity, and beauty of their own.”1 Curzon was accompanied on his excursion through the city by Jaunpur’s Collector, F. J. Pert; Frederick Oertel, the Banaras District Engineer (and himself an amateur archaeologist and budding architect);2 and Maulvi Abdul Majid, an Allahabad-based bar­ rister, prominent local landlord and member of one of Jaunpur’s oldest and most distinguished families, a notable supporter of British rule, and also ostensible custodian of Jaunpur’s Sharqi mosques.3 This was no simple pleasure trip for Curzon, however. It was, instead, a pointed intervention aimed at renewing the city’s historical landscape to serve colonial ends. These days Jaunpur is often considered something of a backwater. A mofussil town of about 200,000 people, it traverses the river Gomti approximately 40 miles north-west of Banaras. Jaunpur bears few signs of the economic upsurge that can be seen in other, larger north Indian cities (it is quite unlike Banaras in this respect), and it suffers acutely from the effects of a long-term under­ investment in its urban infrastructure (not so unlike Banaras).4 Electricity is inconsistent while water supplies and drainage remain rudimentary. Air-condi­ tioned malls are still rare in this part of the country; farming dominates the region surrounding the city, and there is little large- or even medium-scale industry to support the growth of a wider middle class. The district has also received long-term support from the central government’s Backward Regions Grant Fund aimed at upgrading educational, water, electric, transportation, and sanitation infrastructure to standards considered more appropriate to an emerging world economic power.5 In 1903 the city was in many ways quite similar. Its population of about 42,000 had been almost exactly the same for a generation (it was consistent from the census of 1881 through to that of 1901), and its population subsisted on small manufacturing (in perfumes and papier­ mâché) and agriculture-related trade. A local paper-manufacturing industry had died out some time before. It was not known, in other words, to be an “important commercial center.”6

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Jaunpur had flourished, however, for much of the 15th century. The city was at that time the epicenter of India’s Islamic civilization (it was often called “Shiraz-i-Hind”)7 and the seat of a dynasty without rival in terms of its mili­ tary and political power. Jaunpur, the city, was founded by the Delhi-based Sultan Firuz Shah Tughluq in c. 1359, but its real growth came with the establishment of the Sharqi Sultanate by Malik-as-Sharq (the “peer of the East”), who rose from the position of governor within the ailing Tughluq Sul­ tanate to forge, in the aftermath of Timur’s 1398 sacking of Delhi, an inde­ pendent state that ruled over much of the Gangetic plain until its disintegration in approximately 1480. A large number of scholars and noblemen were attrac­ ted to the Sharqi state’s relative stability and prosperity during a time of poli­ tical uncertainty at Delhi, transforming Jaunpur into India’s center of Islamic arts, literature, and religious activity. The generous patronage of the Sharqi dynasty also played a key role in this regional cultural upsurge, supporting a range of scholars and Sufis, as well as underwriting the cost of mosque con­ struction and the establishment of endowments for their upkeep.8 Curzon’s first stop on his day tour was at the massive Jama Masjid, begun in 1438 and completed by about the 1450s (or perhaps as late as the 1470s). Here Curzon remarked on the use of “Gothic vaulting” (barrel vaulting) on the sec­ tions to either side of the central domed enclosure – a highly unusual building technique for the subcontinent, he noted, with very few parallels that he could think of, except perhaps the Govind Devji temple in Vrindaban (built c. 1590).9 He also wondered at the correspondence of the inner vault to the outer roof, noting that the height of the external vaulting produced a “curious” visual effect overall for the mosque. He then moved on to examine the Atala Masjid, the earliest of the large Sharqi mosques, completed in 1408 under the rule of Ibra­ ham Shah (r. 1402–40). Here again Curzon was “puzzled” by the architectural features that he saw. This time it was the massive central façade of the Atala Masjid that obscured the dome behind it. The façade was accentuated with two corner towers that acted in effect as minarets for the call to prayer. Curzon remarked to his companions that this was a unique feature that distinguished it from all the other Sharqi-era mosques in the city. He wondered, therefore, whe­ ther this façade was not an “incorrect analogy from Egyptian precedent” rather than “a true feature of a Mussalman design.”10 Perhaps he was thinking here of the Temple of Edfu, which he visited as a young man on his “oriental tour.”11 Curzon made further stops at the smaller Lal Darwaza Masjid (completed, like the Jama Masjid, in about the 1450s or ‘60s) in the north of the city, and to the Sharqi dynasty’s hilltop fortress in the city center. Both were in relatively poor shape, he said, and most especially the fort, which had largely been destroyed by the British after the revolt of 1857. His last stop on the tour was at a later, Mughal-era bridge over the river Gomti, although here Curzon was rather less enthused by what he saw. While the bridge itself was “unique and striking,” he said that the “vagaries of local taste” had defaced the overall effect of the struc­ ture with the addition of haphazardly constructed shops and garishly colored friezes, as well as “grotesque” reproductions of original stone carvings.12

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That evening, probably after a suitably lavish dinner at the Collector's or Magistrate’s residence, Curzon retired to his room, sat at a desk, and wrote a report for his subordinates at the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), in which he recorded these speculations about the buildings’ stylistic origins. Although Curzon’s musings on Sharqi architecture may have been rather less than useful for expanding the knowledge of the ASI’s architectural specialists who were impelled to read them, the report was intended first and foremost as a practical directive to the ASI and local government officials to initiate a more robust regime of superintendence in Jaunpur and to take a greater measure of physical (and, ultimately, financial) control over the upkeep of these structures. Curzon was principally concerned about the apparent lack of any compre­ hensive and rational policy for the conservation and maintenance of the city’s key buildings. In other words, it was Indians, not the British colonial state, who took care of the structures. He complained, for example, that any such oversight seemed exclusively to be exercised by Abdul Majid, whom Curzon characterized as not being “bound by any stipulations.” Similarly, the Shi’a custodian of the Sharqi dynastic graveyard adjoining the Jama Masjid claimed an “uncontrolled license” to do with the enclosure as he pleased. Indeed, Curzon noted that the Shi’a gentleman was pulling down columns from one end of his area and selling them, through a middle man, to Abdul Majid, who was using them to build student accommodations in the adjacent eastern flank of the great mosque. Both men, of course, denied the arrange­ ment to Curzon, not least as they seemed to hold a great deal of animosity towards one another. Curzon noted that these were acts of vandalism, plain and simple, but unfortunately they were acts that little could be done to reverse now. Further changes should not be permitted, he remarked, and those parts of the mosque that were still intact in their historical form should be guarded from further change and properly conserved. Curzon also decried the fact that the city’s Sharqi mosques were currently defaced by whitewash, frayed carpets, “vulgar pictures,” paper rosettes, and a “horrible clock.” He ordered these offending items removed immediately. “Incorrect” or dubious restorations of the past were also to be investigated by the ASI and redone to bring important buildings back to their original state.13 But Curzon’s most important recommendation that evening was to call for the creation of a committee of experts – Oertel and Pert among them – that was to advise Abdul Majid on any future upkeep of the Sharqi mosques. The committee and Abdul Majid were also to seek the approval of the ASI and other gov­ ernment officials for any major works of restoration.14 At this point, it might be asked why Curzon was so interested in these few buildings, located as they were in a rather remote section of the United Provinces and originating with a short-lived medieval dynasty that few had ever heard about. Curzon was of course a perennial tourist in India and a well-known enthusiast of its architectural heritage. He is best remembered in this respect for the personal attention that he devoted to overseeing the repair and restoration of

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important Mughal structures at Delhi, Lahore, and Agra, including the Taj Mahal.15 Yet such efforts embodied not simply a public-spirited gesture on his part, but also a desire to tie British governing legitimacy to the symbols of India’s imperial royal past and, moreover, to supersede the Mughal imperium through forms of aesthetic appropriation. This was a practice that met its cul­ mination in the visual politic of the 1911 coronation darbar – an event that included, for example, the seating of King George V on a jarokha (balcony) of Delhi’s recently restored Red Fort, where he gazed down over his subjects, assembled below on the banks of the Yamuna, in the manner of the great Mughal emperor Shah Jahan.16 Curzon’s interests in architectural history, therefore, may be understood to be – at least partly, if not wholly – based in the links that he perceived between the production and maintenance of built space, on the one hand, and the production of political authority in India, on the other. Curzon’s enthusiasm extended beyond the Mughal imperium, however, to also include regional traditions of building. During his time as Viceroy, Curzon visited a wide array of architectural sites including the Buddhist stupas at Sanchi, the temples of Madurai, and the imambaras of Lucknow. Jaunpur, I venture, was especially important to him, however, because it pre­ sented him with important evidence of a stable, powerful, and culturally syn­ cretic pre-Mughal dynasty; a dynasty, moreover, that might have been seen to share many key characteristics with the British Raj. That is, the Sharqis’ architecture encapsulated for Curzon the successful practices of political rule by “foreigners” that nevertheless grew deep local roots. No English monarch would visit Jaunpur in the remaining decades of British rule, and so the ideologically charged symbolism of a new king (or prince) standing within the grounds of that city’s Jama Masjid, for example, would never come to pass. Curzon’s visit did, however, set into motion a series of government-led mea­ sures that he clearly intended would inextricably link the care and guardian­ ship of Jaunpur’s Sharqi structures to the benevolence, rationality, and local “embeddedness” of British rule. These measures pre-dated Curzon’s landmark legislation on historic architectural conservation in India – Act VII of 1904 – by just a few months, but they nevertheless had a lasting impact on the ways that local officials thought about, and acted on, issues of the city’s built heri­ tage. That Curzon’s visit also prompted a wider, critical engagement by Jaunpur’s inhabitants with the contemporary meaning of these buildings and how they should be cared for (not to mention by whom) was, in all like­ lihood, beyond Curzon’s particular expectations. *** Curzon’s understanding of Jaunpur’s architectural heritage reveals, I believe, a deep engagement with the writings of James Fergusson (1808–86), a celebrated amateur architectural historian of the mid-19th century, and, as a result, an embrace of a more ideological, and interpretative, way of officially engaging with India’s architectural past after a period dominated by what I shall call the “enumerative” practices of the colonial state. This is so in two

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Figure 10.1 Jama Masjid, main façade, Jaunpur, 2010 Image supplied by author

significant respects: first, in Curzon’s focused attention on just a few of Jaun­ pur’s structures, rendering these buildings “representative” above all others as the essential core of Sharqi architecture, and second, in how Curzon under­ stood the role of architecture (and its upkeep) to embody specific civiliza­ tional traits; that is, as structures that “stand in” to represent the ideological foundations of the state. These views had important practical implications for British imperial policy regarding architectural conservation in the city, but also, more generally, in how historical architecture was conceptualized as a part of a meaningful, modern urban landscape. Fergusson had spent about a decade in India as a private businessman (mostly as an indigo planter) following his graduation from school in Brit­ ain,17 but his life’s work was aimed at producing a comprehensive under­ standing of world architecture, art, and mythology in the manner of earlier universal historical narratives (think of the work of William Jones or Thomas Maurice).18 That is, Fergusson was interested in adding to the 18th-century work of civilizational comparison and the elucidation of relative national trajectories, but equally he wanted to rehabilitate the study of architecture, more generally, as an interpretive, historical tool rather than a descriptive pastime.19 Over the course of several decades, Fergusson’s texts laid out what he considered to be a set of “general principles” of architectural development

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across civilizations, and he argued that architecture was as good, if not better, at elucidating national characteristics than more conventional historical sources. This was especially true, he thought, in the case of India, which did not seem to possess recognizably “historical” texts before the advent of Turkic rule at the beginning of the 13th century.20 Fergusson’s work first gained widespread notice with the 1855 publication of his two-volume Illustrated Handbook of Architecture.21 He then spent several decades, from his armchair in London, revising and expanding his earlier writings with the help of newly available photographic evidence.22 The sections on Indian architecture from the Handbook were, in this way, released in their final form with his renowned 1876 History of Indian and Eastern Archi­ tecture.23 Despite Fergusson’s distance from India, his texts were foundational for producing a general understanding among British administrators of the basic components of regional pre- (and post-) Mughal architectural styles. Fergusson identified about a dozen of these, ranging from Jaunpur and Gujarat in the north to Bijapur and Golconda in the south, and classified each by reference to the extent it deviated from that “purer” Islamic style first imported into India by its Ghaznavid conquerors. The architecture of Ghazni, in other words, formed the foundation for localized, Indian adaptations to an imported Islamic architecture; forms of architecture that expressed “their local peculiarities”24 together with the imperial stylings of Islamic lands to the west. Fergusson clearly understood the character of an architecture to be reflective of the character of the people who commissioned it. Fergusson’s assertion, from his 1876 History, that India inhabited a “lower step of the ladder” than either Greece or Rome, is often quoted as evidence of his dominant view on Indian civilizational attainment.25 Yet Fergusson was also crafting an argu­ ment about the local innovation of standardized architectural forms in India, and by extension was making a critique of the Western tradition of the imita­ tion of classical forms in the works of Pugin and others; this is what Fergusson called “servile imitation” and the abandonment of reason and creativity in architecture.26 Fergusson believed that there was no single architectural form that was better than another, to be certain, but also argued explicitly that the best architecture was that which was most appropriate to the purposes for which it was intended.27 In this respect, Fergusson was actually mounting a robust defense of certain forms of Indian architecture, claiming that, through the adaptation of form, Indian architecture reflected the necessities of the sub­ continent’s own historical cultural syncretism. India was a crucible of civiliza­ tional mixing, adaptation, and change, in other words, and the architecture that best captured that vitality should be recognized as such.28 With respect to the regional architectural tradition of Sharqi-era Jaunpur, Fergusson thought that the style, and specifically the mode of construction, embodied in the city’s mosques made them of unique importance in Indian architectural history. They were, he noted, “hardly surpassed by those of any city and district in India for magnificence, and by none for a well-marked individuality of treatment.”29 This “individuality of treatment” was for

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Fergusson a physical rendering of an early form of cultural syncretism in this region; a distinctive syncretism that brought together important elements of the traditions of Central Asian Islam with north Indian Hindu civilization, which, together, formed a unique ruling ethos and set of cultural norms. The mosques’ main façades and gateways, for example, made use of distinctly Islamic structural elements imported from western Asia including pointed (or true) arches and large domes, as well as the use of pendentives and squinches to carry the circular dome above the rectangular prayer hall. The colonnades surrounding Jaunpur’s mosque courtyards, in contrast, were constructed in a “post and lintel” style, carrying flat roofs, as was common to Hindu and Jain architecture. In their ornamentation, Jaunpur’s mosques also made use of lux­ uriant flower motifs perhaps more appropriate to the setting of a Hindu temple complex than a mosque.30 This was a local syncretism, in other words, repre­ senting a moment in which Hindu and Muslim modes of building, and their attendant aesthetic and potentially even religious sensibilities, were initially fused together to produce something new – something that embodied the political sensibilities of the Sharqi state and stood as a sort of testament to an early Indo-Muslim syncretic culture.31 Fergusson understood this new form, as architecture, to stand distinct from the earlier, “solemn gloom and nakedness” (and ostensibly purely Muslim style)32 of the Tughluq Sultanate and the later imperial stylings of the Mughals that was imported more directly from Persia. As importantly, Jaunpur’s key Sharqi-era buildings were not distinguished by the use of spolia from Hindu temples (as was evident in early Delhi Sultanate structures, such as the Quwwat-al-Islam mosque, which Fergusson saw as simply a “juxtaposition” of Hindu and Muslim components),33 but were instead a real, original amalgamation of building styles, even if they occasion­ ally made use of recycled materials and were imperfect in their execution. In this respect, Fergusson’s account of Jaunpur’s strategic cultural syncret­ ism lay at odds with that of Alexander Cunningham, India’s first Archae­ ological Surveyor during the early 1860s, who wrote an account of Jaunpur that accentuated the Hindu origins of the city and its key architectural sites, and portrayed, moreover, the Sharqi state as a principally “destructive” force.34 Indeed, Cunningham had taken pains to describe whatever evidence he could find of the “bigoted intolerance” of Islam presented by the apparent re-use of structural members from earlier, “Hindu,” buildings in the city’s great mosques.35 Similarly, the Reverend Matthew Sherring, writing as an archaeological amateur in 1865, understood the Sharqi-era tombs located in Bakaria Kund, in nearby Banaras, not as an Indo-Muslim form of building but rather as a Muslim occupation of an older Buddhist structure.36 For Sherring, this notion was a crucial element of his imagining of a future Christian India, for if Banaras had already experienced one major change in religious identity – from Buddhist to Hindu – there was no reason, in his thinking, that a further might still be brought to the city.37 For his part, Fer­ gusson dismissed all such architectural interpretations, noting, for example, that it was inconceivable that anybody looking at the Bakaria Kund buildings

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could recognize them as anything but “the usual tomb of a Mahomedan noble of the 15th century.”38 There were of course important stakes here, for how one understood the character of the past was an important piece of evi­ dence for the crafting of contemporary policy and the imaginings of potential futures. *** We have no direct evidence that Curzon ever read Fergusson in depth, or indeed carried Fergusson’s tomes along with him on his travels as a sort of guide, as I have clearly implied in the title of this chapter (although Curzon, and other writers, often closely paraphrase Fergusson in their prose). This is not the point, however. Curzon’s views on architecture and the role of the colonial state in building and maintaining such architecture clearly embody many of Fergusson’s most important insights. And this is something of a change from the main currents of “official” state architectural scholarship in the preceding several decades. Curzon represented an echo of Fergusson, I think, as he similarly understood architecture as an expression of human vitality, as a corpus that functions as a civilizational emblem and symbol, and an expression of collective genius and of ascendant sociocultural and political values. These are the central ideas that Curzon applied in a new era of colonial architectural “conservatorship.” Curzon, like Fergusson, recognized Sharqi architecture as a circumscribed corpus. Indeed, Curzon engaged with Jaunpur’s historical heritage by visit­ ing and commenting on the buildings that Fergusson himself understood to be the core of the Sharqi architectural style. Fergusson had identified just three of the city’s mosques as fundamental to the character of Sharqi-era Jaunpur – what he called the “great mosques:” the Atala Masjid, the Jama Masjid, and the Lal Darwaza Masjid – and he spent the bulk of his analysis of Jaunpur describing just these three structures. The other buildings, he noted, “hardly require particular mention.”39 Fergusson clearly favored the Atala Masjid, lavishing praise on it in his History, calling it “the most ornate and the most beautiful” among Jaunpur’s mosques, and describing its interior spaces as “superior” to any other early Islamic structures in the subcontinent in terms of its artistic qualities.40 He also understood the Atala Masjid as serving the stylistic basis for the other two main mosques of the city, although with minor deviations, including most notably the addition of barrel vaults on the flanks of the Jama Masjid. The only other mosque that Fergusson mentioned was the oldest in the city, located in the hilltop fort (completed in 1398). But Fergusson gave this structure only cursory atten­ tion: it was small, not particularly unusual, and seemed to make extensive use of Hindu temple pillars. Indeed, the use of temple spolia in Sharqi architecture is a practice that Fergusson claimed was not to be seen again, and thus he must have understood the fort’s mosque as a sort of stylistic and even ideological “dead end.”

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Similarly, Curzon described his visit to Jaunpur as a tour of the city’s “principal Muhammadan buildings.”41 His itinerary included (in addition to the Mughal-era bridge) the Atala, Jama, and Lal Darwaza mosques, to the exclusion of other Sharqi structures in Jaunpur, whether these were the smal­ ler mosques of the era (such as the Khalis Mukhlis Masjid and the Jhanjhri Masjid, both remarkable structures in their own right) and the numerous monumental tombs that dot the city and surrounding countryside. The one exception was the early Sharqi mosque within the hilltop fort, which Curzon – like Fergusson – dismissed in his report as simply unremarkable. Curzon’s restricted focus was a change from the practices of the ASI (and its various predecessors) during the later 19th century, which tended towards compiling comprehensive data on historical structures. The archaeological surveys of the 1860s began this trend, particularly with respect to Mughal architecture,42 but the enumerative impulse is perhaps best seen in publica­ tions such as the Second Report of the Curator of Ancient Monuments of 1883, which consisted principally of lists of buildings and archaeological remains across India; James Burgess’s 1885 Lists of Antiquarian Remains in the Bombay Presidency; and Anton Fuhrer’s 1891 Monumental Antiquities and Inscriptions in the North-Western Provinces.43 Indeed, Fuhrer’s lavishly illustrated The Sharqi Architecture of Jaunpur, published in 1889, was inten­ ded not only to eschew “profitless speculation” about the religious composi­ tion of the historical structures of Jaunpur, but to replace such interpretive approaches in favor of a comprehensive and accurate44 recordation of form, according to the ASI’s superintendent, James Burgess.45 It was, in this respect, the ASI’s official “last word” on Jaunpur. The official iteration of a circumscribed, monumental corpus for the city had specific ramifications for the creation of Jaunpur’s 20th-century historical landscape. Fergusson’s limited vision was itself reflected in Curzon’s later directions for the city’s historical conservation and restoration: only repairs to “principal buildings” were normally ordered or approved, for example, while his charge to the advisory committee and Maulvi Abdul Majid was, first and foremost, dedicated to conserving the three main mosques. I will elaborate on these points in further chapters. But for now this leads us to a second point of confluence between Fergusson and Curzon: that this circumscribed corpus of monumental structures in Jaunpur also lent itself to a return, of sorts, to the practices of civilizational interpretation. Specifically, that forms of interpreta­ tion were accorded a practical implementation through conservation measures. Curzon asked his contemporaries, I believe, to contemplate what sorts of his­ tory were worthy of remembering, and which buildings were worthy of repair­ ing. He asked that they ascertain the true historical character of India’s past, and in Jaunpur, at least, what structures best embodied those civilizational traits. He also explicitly called for an interpretation of what it meant when one civilization asked such questions, and then acted to preserve the ruins of another on the basis of its answers. Curzon pursued, in other words, the prac­ tical extension of Fergusson into the realm of colonial conservation policy.

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Figure 10.2 Architectural detail, Atala Masjid, Jaunpur, 2010 Image supplied by author

Let me rephrase this idea in one further way. I have noted already that the Sharqi state’s hybrid Indo-Muslim character may have lent it peculiar mean­ ingfulness for Curzon as it corresponded to his desire that the British colonial state become naturalized as a part of the Indian landscape. The Sharqi sultans were a diverse (although Muslim) group who managed to create political stability through a cultural eclecticism. But to the extent that the architectural forms of the Sharqi dynasty communicated something important about the cultural and political values of that civilization, the allocation of resources by the British state to render them a more permanent part of the contemporary landscape was equally a claiming of a sort of allegiance. This does not mean that Curzon intended to model his governance on the characteristics of the Sharqi state in some way, but that his goal was to create a value within colo­ nial practice through historical curation on the broad scale of the Indian landscape. Curzon’s ASI chose what buildings were worthy of conservation through historical interpretation, and in so doing claimed a benevolent and

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forward-thinking character for the colonial state itself. This is what I call the practice of “un-ruination.”

Notes 1 BL, IOR, P/6600, Archaeology Proceedings, 1903, February, No. 28, File 11, “Ancient Buildings at Jaunpur” by Curzon. 2 More details on Oertel’s life and work are found on his remarkably good Wikipe­ dia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._O._Oertel 3 For a discussion of Abdul Majid and the endowment he managed in Jaunpur, see below. Also, H. R. Nevill, Jaunpur: A Gazeteer, being Vol XXVIII of the District Gazeteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, (Allahabad: Superintendent, Government Press, 1908: 99–100). A very good short biography of Abdul Majid can also be found in Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: 409–10. 4 There are an increasing number of people now interested in “small town” or “mufussil town” studies. See, for example, T. O. Ali, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ versity Press, 2018): chapter 3. 5 Government of India, Ministry of MSME, “Brief Industrial Profile of Jaunpur District,” (no publication data). http://dcmsme.gov.in/dips/Jaunpur.pdf 6 Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. 14: 82–4. 7 An appellation first reported to British audiences by Banaras’s Resident, Jonathan Duncan. See A. Fuhrer, The Sharqi Architecture of Jaunpur (Calcutta: Super­ intendent of Government Printing, 1889): 21. 8 See, for example, R. Nath, Studies in Medieval Indian Architecture (Delhi: M.D. Publications Pvt. Ltd., 1995): 33–4; The Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. XIV, 74– 5. See also A. Sloan, “The Atala Mosque: Between polity and culture in medieval Jaunpur” unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2001. 9 The other building in India to use barrel vaulting is the Adina Masjid, constructed c. 1370s in Bengal. 10 BL, IOR, P/6600, Archaeology Proceedings, 1903, February, No. 28, File 11, “Ancient Buildings at Jaunpur” by Curzon. The link to “Egyptian precedent” is also mentioned by architectural historian James Fergusson in respect to Jaunpur. In Stanley Lane-Poole’s discussion of the Atala Masjid there is also a reference to the propylon of “Egyptian temples.” See S. Lane-Poole, Medieval India under Mohammedan Rule, 712–1764 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903). 11 D. Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994): 35–6. 12 BL, IOR, P/6600, Archaeology Proceedings, 1903, February, No. 28, File 11, “Ancient Buildings at Jaunpur” by Curzon. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 S. Kavuri-Bauer, Monumental Matters: The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011): chapter 2. The use of concrete to preserve these buildings during the British era is now understood to have been detrimental. The Aga Khan Trust, for example, has removed many tons of concrete from Humayun’s tomb in Delhi. See “At Humayun’s tomb, weight is off,” The Times of India, 9 July 2009. 16 On the broader point of the British-Indian royal “cult,” see D. Cannadine, Orna­ mentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and T. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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17 See the entry for Fergusson in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: http s://doi-org.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/10.1093/ref:odnb/9336 18 See M. S. Dodson, “Thomas Maurice and Domestic Orientalism, ca. 1790–1820” in C. Talbot, ed., Changing Conceptions of South Asia’s Past (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2011). 19 See J. Fergusson, A History of Architecture in All Countries, from the earliest times to the present day, vol. 1, 2nd edition (London: John Murray, 1874 [1865]), preface to the 1st edition. 20 Fergusson is clearest about his method and his goals in ibid. and also J. Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (London: John Murray, 1876): introduction. 21 J. Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture: being a concise and popular account of the different styles of architecture prevailing in all ages and countries (London: John Murray, 1855). 22 See R. Elwall, “James Fergusson (1808–1886): A Pioneering Architectural Histor­ ian,” RSA Journal, v 139, n 5418 (May 1991): 393–404. 23 Fergusson’s description of Jaunpur’s mosques first appears in The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture: 422–4. This discussion is expanded somewhat for later publications. 24 Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture: 491.

25 Ibid., 4. See, for example, P. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of Eur­ opean Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992): 263. 26 Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture: xiv. 27 Fergusson, History of Architecture in all Countries, 1st edition preface: esp. xiv–xv. 28 I do not think that Fergusson is simply reiterating and strengthening broad socio­ logical categories for India, as Tom Metcalf has claimed, but is instead using such existing categories to trace forms of local adaptation and innovation as evidence of Indian architectural creativity. Even though an important aspect of Metcalf ’s charge against Fergusson – that he prioritized religious categories for architecture and thus contributed to an orientalist understanding of Indian society – rings true, it is also apparent that he was arguing against any sense of India’s timelessness or stagnancy. Quite the opposite, for Fergusson clearly understood Indian creativity to be dynamic and adaptive, unlike many of the orientalists. See Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: chapter 2. 29 Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture: 491. 30 See Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture: 521, 524. In much the same way, Fergusson saw some early Delhi Sultanate architecture (the Ala-i-dar­ waza, for example) as representing the application of Hindu art to Muslim pur­ pose. See History of Indian and Eastern Architecture: 509–10. This is not to say however, as Nath recently has, that the Islamic elements of the Jaunpur mosques were rendered into “a subservient position” to the Hindu elements by its Hindu craftsmen. See Nath, Studies in Medieval Indian Architecture: 36–7. 31 Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture: 521.

32 Ibid.: 510.

33 Ibid.: 501.

34 See, for example, A. Cunningham, Report of Tours in the Gangetic Provinces.

From Badaon to Bihar, in 1875–76 and 1877–78 (Calcutta: Office of the Super­ intendent of Government Printing, 1880): 102–25. Cunningham here also draws upon the work of Markham Kittoe, who published an early series of sketches and short narratives about “Hindustani” architecture of the period 1200 onwards. See M. Kittoe, Illustrations of Indian Architecture, from the Muhamadan Conquest Downwards (Calcutta: Thacker & Co., 1838). 35 Cunningham, Report of Tours, 107. One can see the Hindutva “afterlife” of Cun­ ningham’s approach in questionable forums such the “Hindu Masjids” blog, which

Lord Curzon tours Jaunpur

36 37

38 39

40 41 42 43

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calls, for example, the Atala Masjid the “Atladevi” Masjid. See: https//hindu­ masjids.wordpress.com/category/jaunpur See M. A. Sherring, “Description of the Buddhist Ruin at Bakariya Kund, Benares,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 34, 1, (1865): 1–13. This is an idea earlier articulated by Alexander Cunningham in his 1842 essay “An Account of the Discovery of the Ruins of the Buddhist City of Samkassa,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 7, (1843): 246–7. See also S. Guha “Material Truths and Religious Identities: The Archaeological and Pho­ tographic Making of Banaras” in M. S. Dodson, ed., Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011). Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture: 515n. Fergusson, Illustrated Handbook of Architecture: 424. A claim reiterated in the History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, p. 524, although Fergusson does add a short description of another early mosque in the city and makes a further claim about the picturesqueness of other, smaller ruined structures in the city. This may very well be because Fergusson did not visit them when he toured Jaunpur, or could not speak about them from available photographic evidence in London. Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture: 524. BL, IOR, P/6600, Archaeology Proceedings, 1903, February, No. 28, File 11, “Ancient Buildings at Jaunpur” by Curzon. See, for example, Archaeological Survey of India – Lieutenant H. H. Cole’s Report for Year 1869–70 (no publication information): 3. Second Report of the Curator of Ancient Monuments in India, for the year 1882–83 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1883); J. Burgess, Lists of the Antiquarian Remains in the Bombay Presidency … compiled from information sup­ plied by the Revenue, Educational, and Other Government Officers (Bombay: Gov­ ernment Central Press, 1885); A. Fuhrer, The Monumental Antiquities and Inscriptions in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, described and arranged (Allahabad: Superintendent Government Press, 1891). This is decidedly ironic, given that Fuhrer was dismissed from the ASI’s employ for perpetrating numerous falsehoods in his reports to government. See the appendix (file 13 of 1899, Archaeology and Epigraphy, Dept of Revenue Proceedings) to M. Willis, “Dhar, Bhoja and Sarasvati: from Indology to Political Mythology and Back,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, series 3, 22, 1 (2012): 129–53. See J. Burgess’ preface, in Fuhrer, Sharqi Architecture of Jaunpur: iii.

11 Ruination and un-ruination

Long before Lord Curzon’s visit to Jaunpur there existed a European artistic tradition that valued, as a form of aesthetic and moral good, the disintegra­ tion and abandonment of that city’s unique medieval architecture. In the late 18th and early 19th century, the partially ruinous state of Jaunpur’s mosques and its hill-top fort vividly captured the British imagination. Renowned artists such as William Hodges and Thomas and William Daniell, as well as some less well-known amateurs, including Samuel Davis, the district judge of Banaras, routinely portrayed them in paint and pencil.1 These images were celebrations of architectural decay – a form of the European tradition of “ruin-gazing” – and thus intrinsically a lamentation and reflection on the cultural meanings of the passing of human achievement into oblivion.2 Yet they were also, ultimately, ideologically charged portrayals, capable of nar­ rating the decline of Indian civilization and the “salvaging” operation of European empire and its attendant modernity.3 The ruins that populate these early images of India take a multitude of forms, from a building overgrown with foliage to near-total structural disintegration. They all, however, com­ municate an abandonment of maintenance, a failure of upkeep, and also a lack of human interest, of energy, or of knowledge. They attempt to portray, in essence, the demise of the state, the last remnants of a collapsed civiliza­ tion, and, importantly, the dawn of a new era. Ruins do exist in the world. Buildings fall down. Vines and small trees grow into the spaces between brick and push them apart. Rain stains concrete and washes away plaster. Bullets create holes, and bombs knock down walls. But ruins are principally a cultural product; they gain their meaning through human acts, in our interpretation of them, representation of them, and our discourses about them. This is what I call “ruination.” Ruination is not just the physical process of disintegration, whether natural or human-made, but the creation of a meaningful narrative about a disintegrating and abandoned structure, and the attribution of perceived moral values relating to that abandonment – the recognition of others’ human shortcomings, perhaps, and the need for them to be overcome. In Georg Simmel’s words, ruination is the recognition that human beings “let it decay.”4 In this way, ruins can be made to say as much about potential futures as they do about a lamented, near­

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forgotten past. To portray a ruined structure, in other words, to describe it in text or in paint, is to begin to make it a part of a new civilization’s landscape; to begin the process of converting abandonment into a form of reclamation. Ruination’s counterpart, its near-constant companion, is un-ruination. This I understand as the act of taking custodianship over ruined structures and reclaiming them to serve a new civilization’s future. Un-ruination may take the form of physical conservation or restoration: the removal of whitewash, the tucking of bricks, the replacement of a lost decorative feature with a reproduction, perhaps. Un-ruination may also entail, paradoxically, the allowing of a structure to collapse completely; for it to lose entirely its standing as a ruin. To reduce the ruined pillar to a meaningless stub, in other words, this time to paraphrase Simmel.5 A structure of un-ruination may not, in fact, look all that different from one that is actively falling apart. Un­ ruined structures may be maintained in a partly fallen-down state; preserved, like the bullet-holes in Lucknow’s Residency or Leopold’s Cafe, as a witness to acts of unforeseen violence. Un-ruination may be done well, or poorly (say, bathroom tiles in a Sufi shrine, or the ubiquitous use of concrete filler as structural stabilizer and water-proofing), depending on one’s point of view. Un-ruination is, however, first and foremost also an act of representation; to present one’s self as engaged in recognizing, and thus overcoming, another’s inaction and moral lassitude. To engage in un-ruination is to render the space of disintegrating buildings a space of modernity, an anchor for historical and civilizational narratives, and an emblem (in our example) of British colonial rationality and benevolence. It is to “stake a claim” on a historical structure, in the terms of both its physical custody and what it means.6 Ruination is something that tells us about others. Un-ruination tells us something about ourselves. Ruination is about ruminating on the past from the present, while un-ruination is principally about taking the past and craft­ ing the future from it. In 1805 the British Magistrate of Jaunpur looked upon that city with what he called a sense of simultaneous “admiration and regret.”7 His admiration, I am sure, was directed towards the city’s beautiful and unique medieval architectural heritage. Jaunpur’s Sharqi buildings are magnificent. From where, however, did his regret spring? From the passing of the Sharqi dynasty itself ? That seems unlikely. From the recognition of the inexorable disin­ tegration of Sharqi architecture? From knowing that there was little that he could do about the buildings that were falling down around him? The endowments of villages and other funds that once maintained these buildings and their use in the community were quickly disappearing with the establish­ ment of the Company’s state, and the Company itself appeared to have little interest in the upkeep of India’s architectural past, at least at this time. The Magistrate’s regret, I think, stemmed from this disjuncture: from a recogni­ tion of ruination that cannot actively be reclaimed and un-ruined. A full century later, Lord Curzon wished to overcome this “regret” of past inaction regarding such structures and to stem the tide of architectural decay through

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good British governance, bureaucratic oversight, and conservation work. He sought, in this way, to make these buildings a part of Britain’s story; to adopt them, moving forward, in the name of new forms of human achievement. *** Ruination. As the first artist commissioned by the East India Company to pro­ duce large-scale painted views of India, Hodges visited Jaunpur on the final leg of his tour through the Gangetic plain in 1783.8 He produced aquatints of the façade of the Jama Masjid, the city’s Mughal-era arched bridge, and a view of the fort, later published in Britain in his 1786 collection Select Views in India.9 These struc­ tures were all depicted by Hodges as partly ruined and in a state of near abandon­ ment. The mosque itself is largely intact, but the courtyard is seen to be overgrown with lush vegetation, while grass and shrubbery appears within the mosque’s brickwork. The few figures in the foreground are loiterers, not engaged in the reli­ gious activity appropriate to the setting. Similarly, Jaunpur’s fort is shown to be unrepaired and in a near-deserted setting. Large trees have grown within the fort’s central compound, and in the foreground the river Gomti and the bridge to the city are bereft of people and commercial activity. Two human figures sit by idly, apparently serving only to provide the landscape with a referent for scale. The images of Jaunpur by Thomas and William Daniell are more numer­ ous and include not only published aquatints of the Jama Masjid and bridge, but also a number of sketches of the city and surrounding countryside. These images were mostly produced in the period from the late 1780s to early ‘90s while the Daniells traveled the Indian countryside, but also appear in pub­ lished versions through to the early 19th century. The Daniells were more careful than Hodges to include architectural detail in their paintings of Sharqi structures, particularly in their mosque view,10 but they nevertheless repro­ duced the same sense of physical and emotional abandonment. Foliage sprouts from the mosque’s brickwork in the foreground, while an overgrown tree dominates the nearly empty mosque courtyard.11 In other images, including particularly a sketch of the Jaunpur cityscape, the Daniells depicted a land bereft of people, energy, and newness, to focus instead upon pictur­ esque vistas populated only by tombs, trees, and architectural decay.12 Ruined structures – partial architectural remnants – held an important place not only in early British images of Jaunpur but in many of the images produced of northern India in the late 18th century. Hodges’ more famous depictions of nearby Banaras, its waterfront and temples, are similar in spirit to those he produced of Jaunpur. A few human figures inhabit a built landscape marked by overgrown shrubbery, stained and decomposing brickwork, and a lack of energetic activity. It is as though Hodges and the Daniells had captured what Rose Macaulay called in her 1953 book, Pleasure of Ruins, a “new ruin” – architectural remains that have “not yet acquired the weathered patina of age … blackened and torn, they smell of fire and mortality.”13 But Hodges produced numerous other images of northern India as a part of his wider oeuvre that featured the “pillar crumbled” more centrally. His “View of

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Shekoabad,” for example, depicts the partial remains of Mughal prince Dara Shukoh’s hunting lodge, then just a single wall with brickwork arches in imminent danger of collapse.14 Similarly, the Daniells produced a wide range of images that made use of architectural ruins, and these too in a variety of states of disintegration and disarray. Thus their view of Shikohabad places at center an imposing water well, the plaster crumbling from its still-intact brick­ work.15 Kannauj’s Sharqi-era Jama Masjid is also portrayed as essentially structurally intact but surrounded by debris.16 Thomas Daniell’s sketch of a mosque near Agra, in contrast, features little but a half-collapsed brick wall,17 while a sketch made at Banaras of a partial Mughal-era bridge features that structure’s stonework debris strewn across the foreground.18 These British images portray the disintegration of the built landscape of north India as an ongoing and long-standing process, presented as evidence of the passing into oblivion of multiple regimes and multiple ways of living, from the Sharqi to the Mughal imperium to post-Mughal political chaos. Hodges and the Daniells produced their images within the 18th-century aes­ thetic of the “picturesque.” It could be argued, therefore, that they depicted the Indian landscape in a highly formalized and artificial style; one intended, more­ over, simply to produce a pleasure in the viewer through a perfecting of the natural landscape, and a specific placement of the human within it.19 William Gilpin the­ orized that what distinguished a picturesque view in painting was the presence of features that were rough and worn, with a sense of ruggedness, a favoring of asymmetry over symmetry, and natural variety (in shading, color, etc.), all brought together into a single whole.20 Gilpin especially favored the inclusion in a view of a rough and tumbled-down ruin, as opposed to a smooth and formal architectural structure, for purely aesthetic reasons. He would achieve the picturesque through the use of the mallet, in other words, rather than the chisel: “we must beat down one half of it [the building], deface the other, and throw the mutilated members around in heaps.”21 The architectural ruins depicted by Hodges and the Daniells as central to the north Indian landscape can, then, be interpreted strictly in terms of the visual picturesque, as simply providing a variety of shape, shading, and color to the image’s composition. Equally, the portrayals of northern India that circu­ lated through these artists’ publications can be seen as entirely visually consistent with a wide range of other European paintings that celebrated the imaginative indulgence of the ruin. One might point simply to the contemporary landscapes of Hubert Robert, which included, for example, the ruined Louvre (1796), or Paul Sandby’s earlier watercolor “Gate of Coverham Abbey” which depicted a partly ruined gateway in Yorkshire at center, overgrown with vegetation (1752), or indeed Joseph Michael Gandy’s view of the ruined Bank of England (1832) – an apoc­ alyptic vision of the present in future devastation. Yet visual, aesthetic conventions such as these were intended to provoke not just pleasure in the viewer through a visual arrangement, but also a kind of pleasure drawn from a sense of melancholy and the existential. There is always the potential to read a narrative structure into the presence of ruins, for although the picturesque in some sense communicates a timeless scene, or at least a scene

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removed from a specific time, it must also be understood as providing a sense that some time has passed; that nature has worked its effects through rain and wind upon the worldly creations of humankind. One is then left to contemplate the now-forgotten reason for a civilization’s disappearance: war, disease, despotism, natural calamity? The picturesque, then, is a meditation on the impermanence of human construction and, indeed, the impermanence of the human condition. Constantine de Volney’s imaginative journey into the ancient debris of Syria and the Levant, first published in French in 1791 as Les Ruines, similarly uti­ lized ruins as a meditative space for the “high contemplations” of Europeans. Floating high above the ground, our narrator wonders at the remains below of so many past civilizations and asks “how has so much glory been eclipsed? How have so many labours been annihilated? Thus perish the works of men, and thus do empires and nations disappear!” before turning to his own Europe, and remarking, mournfully, “who knows, said I, but such may one day be the abandonment of our countries?”22 Volney’s narrator comes to the realization, however, that civilizational demise is not necessarily a certainty, but that it can be overcome through the establishment of radical forms of personal equality and liberty. This entails the inalienable attribution of rights to people within participatory government, the application of scientific reason, a deep con­ templation of the nature of human society, and decided action, based in “wisdom and felicity,” to improve our ways of living and interacting with one another. Human progress is also, in Volney’s view, based on an inalienable separation of religion from politics, as a secularization of governance. In these ways, Volney ultimately utilized ruins not just to provide a lament about the past, but to work out a plan for the future of humankind. But one should not look to Asia for leadership in such endeavors, Volney also seemed to say, for he believed Asia to be shackled by the strictures of caste, authoritarianism, and tribalism. The book is a call for peace and the underlying unity of humankind, but it is also, ultimately, a valorization of the ability of Europe to lead us to it. When transferred to a nascent colonial setting, the aesthetic of the pictur­ esque, and most especially, the representation of architectural ruination, invokes a specific historicity. It juxtaposes the building activity of the past and the inac­ tivity, or the passivity, of the few Indian observers of the present. It is a histori­ city that invokes not simply the insufficiency of human activity in the face of time and nature, but specifically, through the presentation of this strange and new context to a European audience, of Indian insufficiency. The ruination of archi­ tecture and the apparent inability or unwillingness of local Indian inhabitants to repair the important structures of the past, is utilized in the paintings of Hodges and the Daniells to construct a narrative of de-civilization – a backwards narra­ tive of non-progress and the death in India of the human drive to discipline the natural world through architecture. There are elements here of culture and reli­ gion, but principally these are narratives about governance. The question that each of these paintings poses to the European observer is “what to do next?” ***

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A middle time and a space in-between. The picturesque was an ideological aesthetic, then, and we should not, of course, accept such presentations of the Indian sociopolitical context at the end of the 18th century at face value. But what actually happened to India’s historical buildings following their depic­ tion as ruins? How did they became iconic of decline in the imaginations of some during the 19th century, but not others? Or is it the case that these buildings may simply have receded into the background for a time, shorn of their usefulness for the Company’s political and military ascendency, until revived with new ideological purpose? The question posed by the picturesque, therefore, of what to do next with India’s ruined structures was, I venture, answered for the European observer with a resounding silence by the East India Company – unless, of course, the structure was of Mughal origin (owing, unquestioningly, to the long-standing desire of the Company’s state to appropriate, and displace, the political legitimacy of the Mughals).23 Un-ruination did not, therefore, follow ruina­ tion in short order in “provincial” places such as Jaunpur. As a result, the story of local, or regional, ruins in India, as opposed to those of “imperial interest,” is also at least partly a story of their temporary retreat into obscurity for the colonial state, with only the murmurings of a few local people to keep them company. This is an interregnum of sorts, as other aspects of the built environment were prioritized by the colonial state, such as road building and creating an infrastructure of governance (in the form of courthouses, police stations, and so forth).24 This is not to say, however, that these middle years were not crucial to the elaboration of an institutional infrastructure for archaeology, historical scholarship, and conservation man­ agement, most notably at the imperial level.25 The creation of the Archae­ ological Survey of India in 1861 is sufficient evidence for that. But I simply wish to point out here that the practices of un-ruination came to places such as Jaunpur only after a long period during which local people, including local administrators, cared for these buildings, thought about their history, worried about their future, and developed a sense of how they fit into the city’s iden­ tity. The practices of colonial un-ruination, therefore, when they finally made their way to places such as Jaunpur, and even Banaras, were not imposed into the “abandoned” landscape that Hodges had once imagined. The notion of decline, married to a sort of helplessness of the observer, was central to early colonial perceptions of Jaunpur at the beginning of the 19th century. In an 1815 report, Jaunpur’s Magistrate, R. O. Wynne, linked the degradation of Jaunpuri society to the degeneration of its urban infrastructure and community institutions. Jaunpur’s bridges, for example, were now in a “very precarious state,” while city roads were plagued by encroachments. Wynne noted that the “religious endowments and public seminaries [of Jaunpur] are fast decaying,” and that many had already disappeared entirely. Despite the city being an “ancient seat of learning,” the land-grants that had provided the financial means for the upkeep of educational and religious space had disappeared with the reversal of Jaunpur’s political fortunes, with

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the result that “erudition” was now observed to be “on the decline.” Wynne felt that it was necessary for the Company to intervene directly in regenerat­ ing Jaunpur’s urban and educational infrastructure because Indians appeared “ignorant” of “embracing such opportunities” for improvement as may pre­ sent themselves, and were, moreover, entirely “void of public virtue.”26 Similarly, Khair-ud-din Muhammad Ilahabadi, a prominent Islamic scholar and historian who, working for the Company, spent much of his life living in the old cities of northern India,27 also saw decline as the defining characteristic of Jaunpur, and much like Wynne felt that the Company held a special responsibility for the physical upkeep of the city’s infrastructure. But unlike Wynne, Khair-ud-din argued that Jaunpur’s decline reflected nothing more than political shifts in traditional patterns of Islamic cultural patronage, and was not somehow intrinsic to the character of Islam or Jaunpuris themselves. He traced the region’s physical and economic decline to the Nawabs of Awadh, who had controlled Jaunpur in the early 18th century, and who had out of “vanity” suspended the land grants which supported the city’s seminaries and religious institutions.28 Khair-ud-din thus appealed to the Company’s servants to reinstate Jaunpur’s former glory through the renewed extension of patron­ age, and thereby act in accordance with the Company’s status as sovereign. To aid in this endeavor, Khair-ud-din published broadly on the history of northern Indian cities, and in his History of Jounpoor (originally written in Persian in 1802 as Jaunpur-namah, and published in English in 1814) he extensively documented the state of Jaunpur’s architectural disintegration and specified the measures required to repair the bridges, mosques, and madrassas of the city.29 He stated, for example, that the Jama Masjid was benighted by grass and trees growing from every wall and ceiling, while the principal east­ ern gate was now in an incomplete state. The Khalis Mukhlis Masjid, a small mosque constructed c. 1430 during the reign of Ibrahim Sharqi, has suffered from the wanton destruction of subsequent rulers and from the plows of local cultivators, such that “the square brick wall enclosure does not remain to protect the place from the coming and going of dogs and asses.” There were numerous cracks evident in the main dome of the Atala Masjid, which Khair­ ud-din estimated would cost some Rs 500 to repair. But for Rs 5,000, Khair­ ud-din noted, it would be possible for the Company’s government to put the entire mosque in a pristine state and thereby bring renewed fame not only to the city’s former rulers, but also to the English themselves.30 Yet Khair-ud-din was not interested in simply preserving the city’s landmarks as symbols to past greatness, but in reinvigorating Jaunpur culturally and intellectually through architectural rebuilding. The physical character of the city was valu­ able for Khair-ud-din because the buildings in the city were conducive to accumulating and communicating an excellence of knowledge, and, therefore, a knowledge of God.31 Despite the recognition by Wynne, Khair-ud-din Muhammad, and others, of the necessity for making repairs to Jaunpur’s mosques and other historicalreligious infrastructure, for much of the 19th century the city’s architectural

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heritage was largely unregulated and unprotected by the colonial government, with few state-coordinated mechanisms to oversee repairs. In small-town Jaunpur, Magistrate Wynne’s pleadings to his superiors for some sort of intervention went essentially unheeded, and he could do little but note in his 1815 report the fast-decaying infrastructure of this medieval city and wonder aloud whether a certain Captain MacPherson of the 24th Native Infantry, stationed nearby at Banaras, might be convinced to bring his rumored archi­ tectural training to bear on the myriad structural problems Jaunpur labored under.32 In fact, the Company’s state concerned itself instead with addressing structural issues in Jaunpur that it deemed crucial for military responsiveness, transportation, and the pursuit of commerce, rather than the preservation of its history; this included efforts at road widening, the removal of encroach­ ments, and the structural repair of bridges.33 The impetus to such public works was also ideological, in that it was widely understood by Company servants as an emblem of European initiative and engineering skill.34 But even in the case of such practical local improvements in Jaunpur, Wynne recognized that no initiative intended for the common good of the city’s resi­ dents could be contemplated unless it had the support and assistance of those residents themselves.35 Indeed, it was these local residents who most often undertook repairs to Jaunpur’s mosques, sometimes with the unofficial assistance of local Com­ pany servants, and sometimes not, during the earlier parts of the 19th century. In the first years of the 1830s, for example, the city’s inhabitants worked together to clean and make repairs to the Atala Masjid in order to institute a free school within its grounds. Jaunpur’s Magistrate, George Brown, reported that before this time the mosque had fallen into significant disrepair, “being defiled with dirt and by unclean beasts,” and that it had not been used as a place of worship for many years. But with this initiative, which was “sug­ gested and approved of by the most respectable Musselmans of this place,” the Atala Masjid was again now being used for worship. In a set of testimo­ nials from Jaunpur’s qazi (judge) and kotwal (police chief) intended for the imperial government, these Indian gentlemen also emphasized the formerly ruinous state of the Atala Masjid – it had become “the resort of animals instead of men” – and praised the government for its part in the recent renovation, which they characterized as having been the product of a coop­ eration between the Magistrate and the “principal inhabitants of the city” (although, in this case, the kotwal generously gave the credit for initiating the repairs to George Brown.)36 The Atala Masjid was also completely restored in 1860, this time by Maulvi Muhammad Haider Husain, a prominent land­ holder in the region (and the father of Nawab Abdul Majid).37 In the post-Company period, little seems to have changed when it came to relying on local initiative for the upkeep of most historical structures, even as government took on a more fundamental role in promoting policies of archi­ tectural conservation. This was helped in part by the administrative and financial decentralization measures undertaken in the 1870s and ‘80s. The

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Government of India had, for example, issued an order in February of 1873 directing local governments to assume the responsibility, through the offices of its Public Works Department (PWD) executive engineers, to report on and execute measures for the protection of buildings of “architectural or historical interest,” and in cases where such structures were in private hands, to influ­ ence their owners to preserve them from falling into ruin.38 This policy was reiterated in 1880 when the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (NWP&O) government reminded its divisional Commissioners that while the province’s finances may be rather “reduced” at present, their responsibility to conduct “small but timely repairs” (such as the removal of pipal shoots and “rank vegetation”) to historical structures remained intact, and that they could still accomplish much good in the absence of central (and, one assumes, pro­ vincial) government funding.39 Moreover, during the early 1880s local PWD engineers were often placed under the supervision of municipal and local district boards, who themselves were gaining further influence over local finances from the province, with the result that local boards exercised more control over the execution and budgeting of public works within their jur­ isdiction than before.40 The imperial Government of India’s creation of the position of Curator of Ancient Monuments in 1881 is often interpreted as a moment when the sys­ tematization, and centralization, of monument conservation in India was finally realized under the leadership of H. H. Cole.41 Tapati Guha-Thakurta has argued that India was conceptualized at this time as “an open-air museum … a landscape of ancient sites, each identified, described, classified, and con­ served.”42 Cole traveled the length and breadth of India during the four years in which he acted as Curator, creating lists of major historical structures and undertaking multiple site surveys for the purpose of recommending conserva­ tion measures to the imperial government.43 Yet in truth, the upkeep of the vast majority of structures in the subcontinent continued to remain in the hands of local government and private owners. Cole conceived early on in his tenure that district level officials would be charged with the arduous task of continually removing vegetation from structures, and that these same officials would des­ ignate and oversee Indian custodians for particular sites. It would also be local officials, Cole thought, who could best encourage what he called (Indian) “local interest” in architectural preservation, which he deemed essential to the longer-term success of measures of protection. Moreover, Cole understood the financial basis for such conservation efforts to be forthcoming from the central government only in cases in which a structure was “of imperial interest and importance.” In all other cases, it was local government and “native rulers” who were expected to bear the expense.44 Local municipal and district boards, as well as the divisional PWD, had little in the way of spare money to spend on expensive and time-consuming repairs to ancient structures, however. Inevitably, new construction and the maintenance of key infrastructure (road, water, sanitation, etc.) nearly always took precedence when these boards constructed their budgets (as we have seen

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in Part I). Even still, in Jaunpur, the PWD routinely managed to spend small sums on the mosques through special grants from the province (amounts over Rs 500 needed to be approved by the province in any case). In 1884, for example, Rs 878 was allocated for repairs to the Jhanjhri Masjid, and a fur­ ther Rs 3,391 for the Atala (this is about the same amount that is needed to construct a third-class police station, which one would normally find in a small town).45 Shortfalls in funding for the upkeep of Islamic monuments, in particular, were exacerbated by the Crown’s policy of non-interference in religious institutions and the stated desire to maintain a hands-off approach to intact and functioning awqaf (plural of waqf, Islamic religious endow­ ments).46 In 1887 the provincial government expressed its understanding that the important religious buildings of Jaunpur were in fact all governed by awqaf and that Indians would thus be able to undertake most elements of their management through the practices of Islamic charity and its trusts. By 1903, however, the Commissioner of Banaras had come to the conclusion that the mosques were now in a “neglected state,” not least from the considerable financial hardship under which the wakifs (trustees) labored – without the benefit of property holdings, they depended principally on donations for the upkeep of their entrusted institutions.47 This was the immediate context for the visit of Lord Curzon to the city in December of that year. *** The ruins of the pleasure gardens of the Maharaja of Banaras are perfect ruins. They tick all the boxes for the impossibly picturesque. I have never seen anything quite like them. Recognizably late Mughal-like structures, now hopelessly overgrown with an explosion of greenery of all descriptions; their plaster cracking, brick, and stone exposed; in places there is graffiti and the remains of old camp fires. Snakes hide in the long grass, chipmunks scuttle past your feet (in the process scaring the wits out of you), and then, suddenly, a vulture appears from nowhere to spread its wings wide and fly, just twenty feet or so away from where I sit, writing this. The gardens were built, I would guess, near the end of the 18th century, perhaps begun by Raja Balwant Singh or by Raja Chait Singh, or even one of their near successors. They are in the form of a charbagh, or a walled garden split into four main sections, like a square sectioned off into four more identical squares. At the center lies a white marble pavilion on a wide plinth, and at each cardinal direction is a large ornamental gateway that includes a sitting plat­ form. These structures are magnificent examples of regional, late Mughal architecture. The central pavilion contains five tall archways on each side, with low, intricately carved screens (jali) at the foot of each, and sits on two stepped plinths, the first of which expands more than a dozen feet in each direction. The gateway pavilions are each large and of multiple stories. White plastered sections are interspersed with intricately carved Chunar sandstone. Pillars, arches, and ornamental jarokhas (windows) abound here. It is all an approx­ imation of the great royal Mughal gardens in its formality and pretense. There

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is a picture of these gardens – identified as “Rambagh” – in the British Library’s collection. Taken in 1905 by Madho Prasad, it depicts a meticulously cared for space. Intricately curving pathways are free from weeds, there is a variety of plants in terracotta pots, standing along step ways and other borders, in the manner that is common in India even today, as well as pruned shrubs and a number of columnar fir trees that have been strategically planted.48 These days the gardens are wholly untended and used only as the setting for Ram’s teachings on a final night of the Ramlila – a month-long performance of scenes from the Ramcharitmanas staged every September.49 One gateway pavilion is marked by graffiti, including depictions of skulls, skeletons, esoteric symbols, and the words “jay maa kali” (“Long Live Kali!”) scrawled in red devanagari script. To get to Rambagh requires some measure of hardship and a journey into the unknown: from Banaras, a shared auto rickshaw over the pontoon bridge to Ramnagar, itself at least a half hour of back-breaking potholes and shuf­ fling of one’s ass for a better seat-hold; a cycle rickshaw through the city to the Maharaja’s agent, to ask for ostensible permission; another to traverse the broken roads to the city’s outskirts. And then by foot, when the rickshawwallah will go no further than a temple popular with pilgrims nearby. I am by myself here, with only a reluctant watchman at the disintegrating door for company. He is making his lunch of dal and chapatti over an open fire, and after a short argument he stands aside, yielding to the inevitable, yielding to the white man 20 years his junior convinced of his right to look. I am surprised at my own imperiousness with him. I suspect he is not. —Banaras, June 2008 *** Un-ruination. Early in his tenure as Viceroy, in a 1900 speech to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, Lord Curzon articulated his sense that the conservation of “ancient monuments” was among the highest of the government’s obligations; an obligation that he felt to be incurred by Britons both by virtue of their general duty to one’s ancestors and descendants, but also by the peculiar con­ ditions that they found in India. These conditions included, naturally, India’s inhospitable climate and its “exuberant flora” but also its “ignorant popula­ tion” who were apparently liable to look upon an ancient structure as nothing more than a ready supply of bricks. Curzon, moreover, felt that the conserva­ tion of structures was to be determined solely upon their historical and artistic merit, and not strictly upon their theological or political origins. In particular, Curzon viewed the British government’s own status as “foreign” to the sub­ continent to render it peculiarly suited to the preservation of a range of his­ torical structures similarly “foreign,” whether those be Greek or Turkic in origin. It was the British, in other words, whom he believed were best able to look beyond the “dogmas of a combative theology” and adjudge the artistic and historical merits of structures on the basis of a common humanity and our shared creative and religious impulses. Such a stance also served to distinguish,

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in Curzon’s view, the current British government of India from such earlier conquerors through its attempts to protect the physical remains of earlier dynasties, rather than razing them to the ground. Although Curzon recognized that many of his predecessors had been less than scrupulous in this regard, he sought to do better.50 (Mostly famously, Curzon’s predecessor William Ben­ tinck had purportedly wished to demolish the Taj Mahal for its marble.51 Equally, Markham Kittoe had infamously looted the important Buddhist site of Sarnath for bricks to build the neo-Gothic Sanskrit College in Banaras in the early 1850s, and there are repeated reports that the North-Western Pro­ vinces’ PWD was using stone from Jaunpur’s mosque gateways in other con­ struction projects as late as the 1870s and ‘80s). In any case, all of this led Curzon to ask if his government did not preserve India’s historical structures, “how can we expect at the hands of futurity any consideration for the produc­ tions of our own time?”52 Curzon was, at least, thinking ahead. Curzon’s principal legislative accomplishment – the principal act that defined the new era of un-ruination in India – empowered the central imperial government to determine those historical monuments it recognized as worthy of legal “protection” and regularized a bureaucracy of architectural con­ servation, from the central to the state and then to the local governmental levels.53 This was Act VII of 1904, the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act. The Act was to “provide for the preservation of ancient monuments, for the exercise of control over traffic in antiquities and over excavation, and for the protection and acquisition of ancient monuments and of objects of archae­ ological, historical, or artistic interest.”54 In particular, the Act outlined the ways that government could take effective control over a historical structure, whether through forms of ownership, lease, or trusteeship, and set out rules that would help to prevent the destruction, alteration, defacement, or imper­ ilment of a recognized historical structure; that is, a structure that had gained a “protected” status through the Act. In Curzon’s view, one of the other key benefits of Act VII was that it served to reunite two important colonial activities, this time under the purview of the bureaucracy of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), that he viewed as having drifted apart during the 19th century: on the one hand, historical scholarship (or what one might call the ability to “recognize” a structure of intrinsic interest), and on the other, engineering and conservation expertise (or, the ability the fix a structure consistent with its historical status). In his speech of 1904 to the Legislative Council, Curzon had lamented the disjuncture, saying that “conservation, or the task of preserving the memorable relics that we still possess, had been forgotten in the task of research for those that no longer exist, or of writing about objects that were fast falling into decay.”55 In this respect, under Act VII the Archaeological Survey was sup­ posed to determine and then communicate to all levels of government the historical importance of ancient structures, through research and scholarship, and then also to direct local authorities to repair and preserve them with the

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appropriate practices of architectural conservation. Act VII linked these two activities once again, in essence, through a formalized bureaucracy. Central control over the recognition of a worthy ancient monument was accomplished through the office of the Superintendent within the Archae­ ological Survey of India. Working under the authority of the Director-General of Archaeology (a post held by John Marshall from 1902 to 1928), there were multiple superintendents, each of whom was responsible for different areas across the country, and whose responsibilities were divided among the heritage objects of different religious groupings (Muslim and British on the one hand, Hindu and Buddhist on the other). The superintendents traveled widely during the winter months to inspect and record the condition of notable buildings and other archaeological sites in their respective territory. A superintendent would also write site reports and prescribe the type of repairs to be made to structures, as well as the manner of repair. In this way the central government sought to establish oversight and control over the standard of techniques used for pre­ servation and repair through the expertise of the Archaeological Survey. A good example of how Curzon might have imagined this arrangement operating is reflected in a 1922 “inspection note” written by J. F. Blakiston, the Superintendent of the Archaeological Survey’s Northern Circle for Muhammadan and British Monuments, on the tomb of Iftikhar Khan in

Figure 11.1 Rambagh gateway pavilion, near Ramnagar, 2008 Image supplied by author

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Chunar (located about 20 miles to the south of Banaras). The ASI took over this structure in about 1920 after it had been in the possession of the Opium Department for some time (used as a storehouse, perhaps, for the raw opium that is grown in the region).56 Iftikhar Khan had been a nobleman and mili­ tary officer during the late reign of Akbar and that of Jahangir, and his tomb dates to the early 17th century (c. 1614). The tomb itself is a wonderful example of regional Mughal architecture that would become more or less standard in eastern India in later years. Composed of local Chunar sandstone, the square tomb sits on a high plinth, capped with a single large dome, and with four large chattri pavilions sitting atop, each marking a corner of the structure.57 Blakiston first forwarded his “inspection note” to the provincial government’s PWD, which in turn discussed it with the divisional Commis­ sioner. Corrective action was then directed through a local officer – in this case, the Collector of Mirzapur – and he, in turn, tasked the district engineer with undertaking whatever listed repairs that he and his staff could perform on the structure in question, given the state of their budget.58 In this note of 1922, Blakiston was adamant that not only should local officials pay “more attention” to this structure, but that the attention that they had paid was of a distinctly inferior quality: “the past District Engineers do not appear to have taken much interest in the place and the sub-overseer in charge of works seems to have been allowed to carry on much as he liked,” he wrote.59 Bla­ kiston thus directed that a range of remedial measures be taken, and he was specific about the techniques and materials to be used and care that he expected to be taken: the new pointing in the compound’s wall needed to be raked out and redone properly (no smearing of mortar over stones was per­ mitted); stone jambs in the crypts’ passageways needed to be renewed, but stones should be replaced only one at a time, with proper support to ensure that arches do not collapse; and the lintels that supported the four chattris needed to be renewed, but this time properly – “incorrect mouldings and measurements will not be accepted again,” he noted.60 In this case, the ASI had taken some overall responsibility for Iftikhar Khan’s tomb, having identified it as a historical structure worthy of conserva­ tion, and also provided some measure of oversight and direction for its con­ servation. Yet it seems, at this juncture at least, to have been the local PWD that was principally responsible for its repair and upkeep. Moreover, the fund­ ing of such conservation measures seems to have come (at least in 1922) from the provincial government’s budget, although it is certainly probable that the ASI would have devoted some of the Rs 50,000–60,000 that it spent annually in the United Provinces on the building when they first took possession of it.61 This brings us to Curzon’s other lament that he hoped Act VII would address in the arena of architectural conservation: the long and uneven pro­ cess of devolution (or rather, administrative and financial decentralization) in which provincial (and indeed municipal) governments, rather than the central government, were accumulating added responsibilities for conceptualizing, enacting, and enforcing legislation as well as other key duties of the state.

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Again in 1904, Curzon condemned this form of devolution as it specifically pertained to the preservation of the past: central government, in his view, had abdicated its responsibility for the maintenance of historic structures to local governments, which were in turn very often unable to finance any needed repairs. Moreover, there was no discernible standard of conservation practice at the level of local government – “neither coordination, nor system, nor con­ trol” – so that the implementation of conservation measures, and their sub­ sequent success or failure as such, was left to chance – to the local administrator’s enthusiasm (or lack thereof) and knowledge of archaeology (if any).62 Thus Act VII was significant because it attempted a partial reversal of decades’ worth of official imperial government policy. (Indeed, in later years, the ASI outlined specific procedures for provincial governments to follow in cases when a monument was proposed, by a local administrator, for Act VII protection, thus taking control of any attempted reversal of the new policy. This included a history, photographs, technical specifications, and a description of current uses that would allow the ASI itself to decide whether or not to consider the building for further investigation.)63 Several of Act VII’s stipulations sought specifically to define what con­ stituted local government officials’ responsibilities for architectural conserva­ tion and determined the ways in which local knowledge and expertise would be brought to bear on the priorities set centrally by the ASI. This was the case particularly in those parts of the Act that outlined the procedures that various levels of government would undertake for the acquisition of ownership or guardianship of a historic structure. The Act defined a number of ways that a monument could be brought under the purview of the central government. The first of these was through ownership or lease. In short, the central gov­ ernment could arrange to take possession of a monument (through the office of the local Collector) from a recognized owner and maintain it as protected. Of course, if the government deemed a structure to be without a recognized owner or if it were on land that it understood to already belong to the gov­ ernment (such as nazul land), then no additional legal means were necessary in order to declare it “protected.” Yet the central government could also declare monuments as “protected” through an agreement with the owner in which the colonial state stepped in to accept the status of a kind of guardian of the structure without any change in its ostensible ownership status. Such an agreement might have been attractive to a private owner because it allowed the government to take financial responsibility for a structure’s upkeep (although the government also took a free hand, in most cases, in deciding how to maintain the structure or to provide public access to it). The terms under which an “agreement” of conservation operated (including who was empowered to maintain physical custody of the structure, what sort of upkeep expenditures were reimbursable by government, and what measures might be taken in case of a dispute between the owner and the government) were often based in a standardized form circulated by the imperial government, although the Act also charged the district Collector with conducting the practicalities

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of acquiring the rights of guardianship of an ancient monument on behalf of the divisional Commissioner.64 The Act also empowered the central govern­ ment to seize private property in cases where it was determined that a his­ torical structure was in danger of destruction, whether through a willful act or through neglect. In these cases as well, it was the provincial, rather than the central, government that was charged under the Act with responsibility for purchasing a tract of land. This was because the province already possessed certain legal rights under the authority vested in it by the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, which would allow it to take possession of an ancient monument protected under Act VII, but located on private land.65 Furthermore, it was the divisional Commissioner, and often the district Collector, who accepted official responsibility on behalf of the central imperial government for sites protected under Act VII to ensure that they were not misused or desecrated.66 The apparent impetus behind Act VII was, therefore, to rationalize and essentially centralize the mechanisms of oversight for ancient monuments. Yet even so, it is clear that Curzon saw this center-out, or top-down, approach as having regenerative effects on local administrators on the one hand, and Indians themselves on the other. The Act would be a form of consciousnessraising for both Europeans and Indians, in other words. Curzon noted that the implementation of Act VII required an evenhandedness when it came to property acquisition and an attentiveness to the protection of Indian religious sensibilities, yet he felt confident that this part of the Act would go smoothly, as once the mission of historical preservation was better understood, it would become a mission shared by both groups.67 The Act was one that promoted a kind of bureaucratic and civilizational regeneration, in other words. *** In the terminology of John Stuart Mill, Act VII was a kind of “bureau­ cratic despotism” over India’s architectural and cultural heritage. It was intended to regularize the flows of information between local and national levels of government while attempting to retain within the confines of central government the prerogative for the making of meaning and the definition of conservation technique. Localized administrative hierarchies and local forms of knowledge were to be subsumed within this centralized structure. In prac­ tice, however, Curzon overstated the Act’s central control and its ability to empower the ASI over the local dynamics of historical conservation. Act VII put into place a form of transactional bureaucracy; it was, therefore, an ela­ borate balancing act of the centralization of control over historical meaning and conservation technique, with the elaboration of a bureaucratic structure that reached into the local level for authorization, implementation, and feed­ back. This is not to mention that Indians themselves had their own ideas about what conservation might look like and which buildings held particular historical salience for them. It is within these local transactions that the epis­ temic despotism of Act VII is ruptured.

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Such disruptions are everywhere in the archive, even as forms of disputa­ tion within the higher levels of government itself. During the process of con­ sultation after Act VII’s first framing in late 1901, local government had a chance to reply to Curzon’s vision of centralized control over the historical landscape of India. The Lieutenant Governor of the NWP&O, James Digges La Touche, wrote in early 1902 of his concerns (and these were really the concerns of his high-ranking legal and administrative officials) that the bill unduly interfered with the rights of private property, could too easily entail criminal prosecution in the case an agreement of protection was breached, and was overly drastic in that government could summarily charge for the costs of upkeep to a local endowment without any recourse from the property owner. In his experience, the government’s engagement – however well inten­ tioned – with a historical structure was not always welcomed by a local populace who often feared interference in their rites of worship or their ability to do as they liked with structures of which they in fact had ownership. In other words, the Act was a blunt instrument that could not always be applied productively in different contexts and might instead raise suspicion and even serious opposition in some instances.68 Furthermore, if we return to Curzon’s notion of the overseeing functions of the Archaeological Surveyor, the fact was that these men could not be every­ where at all times, and so much of the initiative in upholding the Act’s stipula­ tions was left in practice to the local Collector and his staff. In official guidance provided after the Act passed the Collector was directed to keep watch over protected monuments, and in cases where he perceived a contravention to the agreement of protection he was reminded that he could issue certain kinds of orders to protect the monument. In cases where a monument was protected but not subject to a conservation agreement, and the Collector perceived a threat to it, he was empowered to enter into negotiations with the building’s owner to immediately safeguard the structure.69 An agreement of custodianship was, therefore, always the product of a highly localized negotiation between the owner/trustee and the Collector, even if a standardized form was the basis for the agreement. Watching over a historical landscape was never simply a case of the Archaeological Surveyor telling local officials what to do, how to act, and how to think, but rather something much more akin to a dynamic. *** At the conclusion of his speech to the Legislative Assembly to introduce Act VII into law, Curzon said: All know that there is beauty in India in abundance. I like to think that there is reverence also, and that amid our struggles over the present we can join hands in pious respect for the past. I like to think too that this spirit will survive, and that the efforts of which I have been speaking will not slacken in the hands of our successors, until India can boast that her memorials are as

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tenderly prized as they are precious, and as carefully guarded as they are already, and will in the future be even more, widely known.70 It is an interesting and optimistic note on which to end. It encompasses a sentiment that links the present to the past, and through the care of that past, to the future. A set of questions that animates much of the remainder of this section of the book is, however, simply this: what happens if others do not share Curzon’s view of the primacy of the past? What if, instead, people view the older structures that dot their cityscape not as a sort of “afterlife” waiting to be reclaimed for the creation of a specific future, but instead as present to the lived every-day in a way that is unrecognizable to the colonial state? What happens then to the colonial conception of the ruin and the drive to un-ruination?71

Notes 1 Davis is more famous for fighting off Wazir Ali during the 1799 revolt in Banaras than for his painting skills. See Davis’s watercolor “The Fort of Juvinpore, India” reproduced in the Spink catalogue A Journey Through India: Pictures of India by British Artists (London: Spink & Son Ltd., 1996): 17. 2 J. Hell & A. Schonle, eds., Ruins of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010): 1. 3 A. L. Stoler, Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ versity Press, 2013): 15; Ruins of Modernity: 2, 5. 4 G. Simmel, “The Ruin,” The Hudson Review, 11, 3 (Autumn, 1958): 380. 5 Ibid.: 384. 6 To paraphrase Tapati Guha-Thakurta. See her Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia Uni­ versity Press, 2004): 268. 7 BL, IOR, H.Misc/775, Home Miscellaneous, Jaunpur district report of 1815, R. O. Wynne, Magistrate, to C. M. Ricketts, dated 15 August 1815, p. 703 (quoting 1805 report of Mr. Deane, former Magistrate of Jaunpur). 8 On Hodges, see N. Eaton, “Hodges’s Visual Genealogy for Colonial India, 1780– 95” in G. Quilley & J. Bonehill, eds., William Hodges, 1744–1797: The Art of Exploration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). Also, an interesting essay by P. Nayar, “The Rhetoric of Ruin: William Hodges’ India,” in 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 15 (2008): 75–106. 9 W. Hodges, Select Views in India, Drawn on the Spot in the Years 1780, 1781, 1782 and 1783 (London: 1786). BL, IOR, X307(13), X307(34), and X307(33). Note the incorrect identification of Plate 13 as the Atala Masjid in the online gallery. The book itself identifies the structure only as “A View of a Musjid, i.e. Tomb at Jionpoor.” 10 M. Archer, Early Views of India: The Picturesque Journeys of Thomas and William Daniell, 1786–1794 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980): 226. 11 T. & W. Daniell, Oriental Scenery: Twenty-four Views in Hindoostan, Part 3 (London: 1801). BL, IOR, X432/3(9). The Daniells identify this structure only as “a mosque in Jaunpur”. Archer has labeled it the Atala Masjid, but this is incor­ rect. See Archer, Early Views of India, 98–9, note to Plate 73. The aquatint is clearly of the courtyard and western propylon of the Jama Masjid, distinguished from other large mosques in the city by its double-story flanks and barrel-vaulted

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roof. On the basis of this error, Archer and the BL have also identified Hodges’ painting (see note 55) as depicting the Atala, rather than the Jama Masjid. See BL, IOR, WD193, “Near Khuludgeabad - on the Goomty”; WD194, “Above the bridge Jaunpur on the Goomty”; WD195, “Near the Fort, Jaunpore”; and WD363, “In the Town, Jaunpore”. R. Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Walker & Company, 1966 [1953]): 453. This is contemporary Shikohabad, UP. BL, IOR, X307(43), W. Hodges, Plate 43. BL, IOR, WD244, Thomas Daniell, “Shekoabad,” 1789. BL, IOR, X432/3(7), “Ruins at Cannouge” (dated 1802). BL, IOR, WD178, T. Daniell, “Ruined mosque at Chumau on the road from Agra to Delhi” dated 10 February 1789. BL, IOR, WD166, T. & W. Daniell, “A Ruined Bridge near Benares” (1789). Tillotson, Artificial Empire, esp. chap. 1; A. Byerly, “The Uses of Landscape: The Picturesque Aesthetic and the National Park System” in C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, (Atlanta, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996); D. Townsend, “The Picturesque” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55, 4, (Autumn 1997): 365–76. See “Essay 1” in W. Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape (London: 1792). Gilpin, “Essay 1”: 7. I have used this English version: Volney’s Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires (Paris: 1820): esp. 8, 10, 15. Including, for example, repairs to the Taj Mahal in 1808; at Fatehpur Sikri and Akbar’s tomb in 1815; and the Kutb Minar in 1826. See H. H. Cole, First Report of the Curator of Ancient Monuments in India, for the year 1881–82 (Simla: Gov­ ernment Central Branch Press, 1882): 4–5. For an explicit statement about colonial building priorities, see, for example, Annual Narrative Progress Report of Public Works, in the Province of Oudh, for the year 1874–75 (Lucknow: Oudh Government Press, 1875): 1. See, in particular, Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories. Also, S. Guha, Artefacts of History: Archaeology, Historiography and Indian Pasts (New Delhi: Sage, 2015). BL, IOR, H.Misc/775, Home Miscellaneous, 1815 Jaunpur district report: 708, 717. N. Hadi, Dictionary of Indo-Persian Literature, (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts / Abhinav Publications, 1995): 301. Also, B. S. Cohn, “The Initial British Impact on India: A Case Study of the Benares Region,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 19, 4 (August 1960): 421. Khair-ud-din Muhammad Ilahabadi, Tazkirat ul Ulama, or A Memoir of the Learned Men (of Jaunpur), translated by Muhammad Sana Ullah, (Calcutta: Abul Faiz & Co., 1934): 8–10. Khair-ud-din Muhammad Ilahabadi, A Translation of the History of Jaunpoor; from the Persian of Fuqeer Khyr ood deen Moohummud, by an officer of the Bengal army (Calcutta: Scott & Co., 1814). This was translated into English by W. R. Pogson. Ilahabadi, History of Jaunpoor: 48–9, 53–5. Ilahabadi, Tazkirat ul Ulama: 1, 7. BL, IOR, H.Misc/775, Home Miscellaneous, 1815 Jaunpur district report: 697. See, for example, BL, IOR, F/4/1345/53448, Board’s Collections, extract of poli­ tical letter from Bengal, 14 October 1830; extract of Bengal political consultation, 29 January 1830. See also, A. Cotton, Public Works in India, their importance; with suggestions for their Extension and Improvement, 2nd ed. (London: 1854): esp. 10–12. BL, IOR, H.Misc/775, Home Miscellaneous, 1815 Jaunpur district report: 708.

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36 BL, IOR, F/4/1357/54098, Board’s Collections, extract of public general letter, Fort William, 25 October 1831; G. Brown, Magistrate of Jaunpur, to H. H. Wilson, General Committee of Public Instruction, 14 December 1830; translation of an arzee (testimonial) from the Qazee of the Zillah court of Jaunpur; translation of an arzee of the Kotwal of the City of Jaunpur. 37 See UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 64, File 5, “Jaunpur Note;” also, Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: 409. 38 PWD circular of 13 February 1773, in J. Burgess, Archaeological Survey of Wes­ tern India, Provisional Lists of Architectural and Other Archaeological Remains in Western India (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1875): 3–4. 39 BL, IOR, P/1607, NWP&O PWD Proceedings, 1881, February, No. 56, Sec. to Govt, NWP&O, PWD, to all Commissioners, 16 January 1880. 40 Administration of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, April 1882–November 1887 (Allahabad: Government Press, 1887): 2–3. 41 Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: 56–8. 42 Ibid.: 61. 43 There were three reports published under the auspices of the Curator of Ancient Monuments, the first being for the years 1881–2 and the last being for 1883–4. 44 Cole, First Report of the Curator of Ancient Monuments in India: 12–13. 45 BL, IOR, P/2199, NWP&O PWD Proceedings, 1884, January, “B” No. 109–103; Feb “B” No. 317–22. 46 I have learned much about the functioning of the waqf under British rule from M. Z. Abbasi, “Shari‘a under the English Legal System in British India: Awqaf (Endowments) in the Making of Anglo-Muhammadan Law,” unpublished D.Phil dissertation, Oxford University, 2013. 47 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Different Departments List 1, Box 64, File 5, copy of letter 445/58, Superintendent of Muhammadan and British Monuments, Northern Circle, to Sec. to Govt, UP PWD, 16 April 1912; also, Varanasi Division Different Departments List 1, Box 25, File 31, W. G. Wood, Under-Sec. to Govt, UP PWD to Commissioner, Benares Division, 22 September 1903. 48 BL, IOR, Photo 17/3(31), no. 31, “Rambag [Ramnagar],” Madho Prasad. 49 R. Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology, (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985): 154. 50 Curzon, “Speech to the Asiatic Society of Bengal,” 7 February 1900, in Curzon, Lord Curzon in India, being a selection from his speeches as Viceroy and Governor General of India, 1898–1905 (London: Macmillan & Co., 1906): 182–94. 51 See P. Spear, “Bentinck and the Taj,” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 2 (October 1949): 180–7. 52 Curzon, “Speech to the Asiatic Society”: 183. 53 See Summary of the Work of the Legislative Department during the Viceroyalty of Lord Curzon of Kedleston (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1905): 9. 54 Quoted in Curzon, “Speech to the Legislative Council,” 18 March 1904, in Curzon, Lord Curzon in India: 195. Act VII built upon two earlier pieces of legislation: Sec­ tion 23 of Act XX of 1863, The Religious Endowments Act, which in theory allowed the Government to reserve the right to repair and preserve buildings of historic and architectural value, despite divesting itself from any explicit financial relationship to them; and Act VI of 1878, the Treasure Trove Act, which preserved items of archaeological interest and intrinsic value as government property. 55 Curzon, “Speech to the Legislative Council”: 197. 56 J. Marshall, Annual Report of the Director-General of Archaeology in India, 1919– 20 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing): 2. 57 See C. B. Asher, Architecture of Mughal India (New Cambridge History of India I­ 4), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 150–3.

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58 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 64, File 5, H. M. Willmott, Sec. to Govt, UP, PWD, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 15 May 1922, with handwritten notations. 59 Ibid., “Inspection Note on Iftikhar Khan’s Tomb at Chunar, Mirzapur District, United Provinces.” 60 Ibid.: 3. 61 Marshall, Annual Report, 1919–20: 1. 62 Curzon, “Speech to the Legislative Council”: 196–7. 63 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 105, File 19, John Marshall, Director-General of Archaeology, to Sec. to Govt of UP, 11 April 1922. 64 Act VII of 1904: sections 4 and 2. 65 Act VII of 1904: section 10. 66 Act VII of 1904: section 13. 67 Curzon, “Speech to the Legislative Council”: 195. 68 BL, IOR, P/6600, Archaeology Proceedings, 1903, June, No. 5, W. H. L. Impey, Chief Sec. to Government of NWP&O to Sec. to the Govt of India, 23 January 1902. 69 UPRAV, Varanasi Collectorate Records, List 7, Box 8B, File 109, PWD, UP, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 27 April 1926. Reference is made here to sections 5, 7, and 15 of Act VII of 1904. 70 Curzon, “Speech to the Legislative Council”: 203. 71 Here I am particularly interested in the work of G. R. Gordillo, Ruins: The Afterlife of Destruction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), who asks what if different people do not view ruins in the same way? What if some people’s notions of the past cannot be reconciled with others’ view of ruins as part of their present and their future?

12 Files and archives

As with most books of history, the arguments set forth here are based in archival evidence. Archives, we know, are partial, curated, and require nearly as much interpretation as the documents themselves do.1 In eastern Uttar Pradesh, archives are also often empty or now simply non-existent. There may once have been a pretty substantial municipal archive in Banaras (I have heard stories about it, and the things that people got out of it many years ago), but now the records room of the Nagar Nigam holds only documenta­ tion on residential property, and nothing much older than about 1935. People have told me that this is related to ongoing initiatives to move everything into e-records. Or that the old gentleman who knew the municipality’s archive inside and out has long-since retired and those who now work there do not know what the archive actually holds. Or that the Banaras climate is not kind to paper. In any case, the result is the same for the researcher. Similarly, in Jaunpur I was told that the municipal archive that once existed there has now been destroyed. Local records were also destroyed by a fire that took place in Jaunpur’s Town Hall in 1899,2 and a catastrophic flood of the Gomti river in 1871 washed much away also. The main waterworks building in Banaras has no records room at all. Not surprisingly, given the tendencies to recordation that marked the British Raj, much of the information that we can now access about how a city like Banaras or Jaunpur functioned at the end of the 19th century comes from documentation held in London (or Delhi). This book (especially in Part II) also makes use of another source of records – those stored in the Uttar Pradesh Regional Archive in Varanasi (UPRAV). This archive is located in a long, nondescript concrete building (which could date from the 1940s or the 1970s, it is impossible to tell) on the main road through the suburb of Sigra. To get there you have to ask the rick­ shaw-wallahs for the Sajan Cinema, the landmark that they know, which is just across the street. For several weeks a year, over the course of many years, I would make the journey to the archive from my room in Assi Ghat, through the congested streets of the central city – past the new construction at the A/C Vijaya Mall and the Spencer’s grocery store in Bhelupur; the slowly collapsing (and now entirely collapsed) wooden-framed haveli (a traditional house) oppo­ site the water treatment facility (the Jal Samsthan), onto the Kamachha Road,

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with its fruit and vegetable markets and its old Theosophical Society and stu­ dent hostel buildings; into Sigra, past the petrol station on the busy intersec­ tion, to the cinema. From there it is a short scramble across a congested road, divided by a series of concrete barriers that have been broken to allow pedes­ trians to pass through. The ground floor of the archive building is filled with mobile phone retailers, chemists, and sundry goods sellers, their advertising hoardings routinely spilling out onto the pavement where they jostle for space with the parked scooters, bicycles, and motorcycles. The archive itself, which consists of a set of small, adjoining rooms, is housed in a part of the upstairs. The furniture in the archive is sparse, only a few wooden tables and chairs are dotted around the main reading room. There is rarely any electricity, and the sole barred window to the main street provides the only light for reading. The old-school water-based air cooler sits idle in one corner. There used to be a large metal sign out front of this building, announcing the archive’s presence and the proper stairway to access it, but this was removed by the staff on the second day that I began working there in 2006. I have tried not to view these two events as related. Occasionally now I head up the wrong staircase, inevi­ tably surprising someone who is not expecting me. The UPRAV is one of a series of subsidiary archival sites spread through­ out Uttar Pradesh that primarily hold the files and correspondence of the local administration; that is, material relating to the Collectors of the various districts within the Benares Division, and those of the Division’s Commis­ sioner. The principal UP State Archive has been located in the state capital, Lucknow, since 1973 and houses material deemed to be of state-wide impor­ tance. This includes matters of general policy and correspondence conducted through the provincial Secretariat, for example, as well as files related to the unrest of 1857 and other significant historical events.3 Benares Division came under the authority of the newly created government of the North-Western Provinces in 1834, containing the districts of Benares, Jaunpur, and Mirzapur. The Commissioner acted as the administrative head of the Division and oversaw the work of a number of district and city officials through a regime of written correspondence. Divisional files contain a wealth of detailed corre­ spondence, informal notes, and memoranda relating to the day-to-day opera­ tions of the administration of the rural areas and cities within the Division. This includes not only files relating to municipal self-government in places like Banaras and Jaunpur, but also revenue collection, law and order, public works, archaeology, agriculture, and Agency records (relating to the Banaras Raja’s familial domains, principally). Few files in the UPRAV date to before the 1870s, however, and overall, the holdings appear decidedly incomplete (whole decades seem to be missing here and there). The records themselves are organized into thematic files, with vaguely descriptive titles such as “repairs to civil buildings,” “tramway scheme in Benares,” or “Sanskrit endowment fund.” The contents of the files some­ times bear only a limited relationship to their descriptor, and sometimes there are bundles of unrelated things put together in a single file. For some reason,

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everything in each file is in reverse chronological order (and so it is often useful to read them back to front, unless you like detective work). I have been told by several archivists now that the files were “rationalized” in the 1950s and ‘60s, when it was decided what was to be “retained permanently,” and they orga­ nized the materials for government and researcher access. Thus the process of ordering up files is one of optimism and faith. Some files contain two or three pages of correspondence while others contain many hundreds. Sometimes you find what you are looking for, sometimes not, and sometimes you run across something utterly surprising. In the Varanasi Collectorate records, for example, Box 8B contains a large file described as “Georgian Tomb regarding Asfar Ali Faqir.” I had ordered it up because I figured it related somehow to Lord Cornwallis’s monumental tomb in Ghazipur (it does not – the wrong kind of Georgian tomb), but in fact among its hundreds of pages of English, Hindi, and Urdu papers there is correspondence about bringing Aurangzeb’s (Dhar­ ahara) mosque under Act VII protection, the ownership status of several old fortresses in the Banaras area, as well as archaeological mounds found in sev­ eral villages, and much else besides. This is not necessarily an easy archive to work in. And this statement is not intended to draw attention to some particular expertise, or indefatigability, that I hold that others do not. It is true that the physical conditions of the building do not lend themselves to wanting to spend a lot of time there, and the staff are sometimes helpful and sometimes quite the opposite. The main problem, however, is the lack of investment in the archive itself. The disin­ tegration of the building is a reflection of the disintegration of the archive itself. I deeply regret not having been able to use the archives of Banaras’s or Jaunpur’s Municipal Boards before their apparent demise, and I cannot help but wonder at how access to those documents might have changed what I am doing here. Equally, I wonder what fate will befall the documents in the UPRAV that I have now read and wonder whether others who come after me will have the same opportunity. In any case, what follows is most surely a partial history, born of any number of contingencies.

Notes 1 For example, A. L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 2 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 73, File 244, Draft letter to the District Magistrate, c. 1922. 3 See M. Sundararaj, A Manual of Archival Systems and the World of Archives (Chennai: Siva Publications, 1999): 492–506.

13 Three mosques and a committee

When Lord Curzon visited Jaunpur in January of 1903 he was concerned, among other things, to motivate local officials to take greater care over the repair and maintenance of the city’s principal Sharqi monuments. To this end, he called for the formation of an advisory committee made up of local Sunni notables, the Collector, and the District Engineer. Together they would consult on needed repairs and also act as a liaison to the government’s Archaeological Survey (ASI). Curzon’s directive was vague, however, in defining relative responsibilities: who was to identify and initiate elements of restoration? Who was ultimately responsible for ensuring that the principal Sharqi mosques, in particular, were properly looked after? Who determined the nature of their upkeep (that is, what constituted a proper “looking after”)? And, perhaps most importantly, who was going to pay for all of this? Curzon provided few answers in his directive. Over the next two decades the advisory committee operated more or less consistently, communicating with different levels of government, monitoring the mosques’ upkeep and repair and handling minor details of the mosques’ operations as they related to conservation measures. In practice, it was members of the local government who sought to control the effective workings of the committee. But equally, the Indian “notables” played an active role in the committee’s deliberations, and Curzon’s visit also spurred several members of Jaunpuri society to engage more directly with the un-ruination that he wished to see imposed in the city. There is one thing that I do not quite understand about Curzon’s inter­ vention in Jaunpur, however. This is that it comes just exactly at the time that his government is crafting the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act and debating internally the mechanisms for, and legality of, taking control of his­ torical buildings that it did not directly own. So why did he suggest the crea­ tion of this committee, rather than just leaving the buildings to be taken care of through the provisions of the Act and his own vision of centralized control through the ASI over local government practice? Did he imagine that the committee might serve as a sort of consultative structure (and perhaps even a model consultative structure?) to operate alongside the legal and adminis­ trative framework of the Act, in essence providing a local instrument to fulfil the Act’s requirements? This makes sense to me, and interestingly, this does

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sometimes seem to be the case, in practice at least, when, for example, Jaun­ pur’s advisory committee helped to select mutavallis (managers) who would sign the required paperwork that brought the Atala, Jama, and Lal Darwaza mosques under Act VII protection after World War I. But equally, the com­ mittee’s activities in Jaunpur ensured that its principal historical buildings stayed outside the purview of the Act for more than a decade after its pas­ sing – considerably longer than might otherwise have been the case. These are difficult questions to answer. Ultimately it is unclear what Curzon’s motivations were in creating the committee just months before the passing of Act VII. But what is evident now, in hindsight, is that the functioning of the advisory committee within the broader purview of Curzon’s conservation bureaucracy reveals how the Act continually impelled forms of local negotiation over owner­ ship, custodianship, and the definition of what constituted effective conservation, even as ASI officials attempted to wrest control of historical structures from custodial arrangements that they believed to be “unstandardized.” Indeed, if Curzon believed that Abdul Majid and his Sunni friends would serve simply as a form of local facilitation to his vision of monumentalized Sharqi historicity, then he was wildly naïve. In fact, Jaunpur’s advisory committee engaged with Cur­ zon’s vision of historical conservation principally by accentuating the present­ ness that these buildings held for Jaunpur’s Sunni community, and the buildings’ role in defining the values and social characteristics of most Jaunpuri Muslims. These were not just historical structures, in other words. I do not think that this sort of thing happened only in Jaunpur – the extension of Act VII to aspects of Banaras’s historical landscape in many respects functioned similarly – but Jaun­ pur is a particularly good example of the local generation of a historically inflected colonial urban landscape. *** A few weeks after Curzon’s visit to Jaunpur in January 1903, John Mar­ shall, the Director-General of Archaeology for the imperial government, tra­ veled there together with Frederick Oertel, Banaras’s Executive Engineer, to follow up on Curzon’s notes and decide what, if anything, needed to be done with Jaunpur’s historical monuments. The two men found the city’s Sharqi­ era architecture to be, in fact, in quite good condition. The Atala Masjid was “in a very fair state of repair,” Marshall wrote, as was the Jama Masjid. Both required the extensive removal of whitewash and some basic structural repairs, but principally what was needed was the removal of the detritus of those who made daily use of these buildings: clocks, wall hangings, cooking utensils, etc., were all to be taken away. A proper conservation, in their view, should render these structures as historical, rather than principally as living, monuments. Similarly, the Lal Darwaza Masjid, the mosque perceived to be built in the most “pronounced Hindu character” in the city, had been recently repaired by Abdul Majid and thus required little else but the removal of remaining whitewash. Jaunpur’s medieval tombs had fared less well, however, they found. The tomb of Sher Zaman Khan required fencing and a proper

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approach path and could be prevented from further ruin by renewing some of the brickwork. The tomb of Kalich Khan (known as the Baradari) was “too ruined for any attempt at restoration or even effective preservation,” although again, an approach path might be constructed so that visitors may see “the most picturesque” ruin of the neighborhood.1 Meanwhile, the United Provinces’ Public Works Department (PWD) began to investigate the legal status of the Sharqi monuments in the city, including the nature of their ownership and whether they had any extant trusts attached to them. The principle mosques, they found, had no landed property and no sources of regular income except for occasional subscriptions from local inha­ bitants. As a result, they determined that there were no legal grounds for the province to file a civil suit under Act XIV of 1882 alleging a breach in the administration of a charitable trust.2 The formation of a committee, as stipu­ lated by Curzon, was deemed by the PWD and the Commissioner sufficient to move ahead in taking control over the mosques’ upkeep.3 Similarly, no trust, endowment, or land was discovered that could provide financially for the upkeep of the Sharqi kings’ necropolis adjacent to the Jama Masjid. In this case, however, the United Provinces’ PWD decided to simply enter into an agreement of custodianship (although not ownership) with the tombs’ “osten­ sible owner,” Syed Imdad Ali Shah and his descendants (as Curzon had noted, the necropolis was in the “hands of the Shi’a”). This agreement, written in the form of a narrative undertaking by Shah, began with an attribution of geneal­ ogy and rightful ownership, in which he declared that he was the descendent of the kings, and that the graveyard was adjacent to his ancestral dwelling house. Shah then officially transferred responsibility for the graveyard’s upkeep to the British government, claiming, as would become the norm for acts of colonial un-ruination, a personal financial inability to continue to look after it himself: “I have now no means to repair the said tombs,” he said, “and at my request and with my consent the British Government have begun to repair and main­ tain [them] … [and] of my own free will and accord, [I] authorize and empower our Government and their officers to maintain the said tombs and walls …” Shah’s undertaking concluded with a pledge that neither he nor his descendants would do anything to harm or deface the structures in their possession.4 This agreement, then, was one signed under a pretense of self-actualization and an active “cooperation” with the government. Shah claimed to be handing over responsibility for his ancestors’ tombs to the British government of his own free will, but it is hard to imagine that this was the case, given his financial capacity and the limits newly imposed on his ability to actively manage the dynastic graveyard site after Curzon’s visit (including, as we saw, no longer being able to sell structural elements to Nawab Abdul Majid for his school). By the end of 1903 Curzon’s proposed Sunni advisory committee was finally taking shape. Members included Jaunpur’s Collector and the Divi­ sional Engineer, as well as Abdul Majid, Maulvi Abdul Kadir (the senior representative of the city’s maulvis), and Kazi Muhammad Jamiullah (the chief kazi of Jaunpur). Rules were also being drafted for the committee’s

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operation by Jaunpur’s Collector, F. J. Pert, and the Commissioner: meetings would be held, at minimum, in March of each year, minutes taken and cir­ culated to government, and the committee empowered to replace members as needed. Finally, the government set out the exact nature of the committee’s responsibilities for conservation work in Jaunpur: it stipulated that no repairs or restorations to Jaunpur’s mosques could be carried out without the over­ sight and approval of the committee, but equally, the committee was unable to sanction any “work of importance” without the prior approval of the pro­ vince’s PWD as well as the Archaeological Department of the Government of India.5 In this respect, especially, the committee’s powers were limited by the oversight of government. The advisory committee’s first meeting was held on the 17 March 1904, just over a year after Curzon’s tour of the city, and its second on 15 December.6 The committee reviewed reports and conservation notes written by Oertel and Mar­ shall from the previous winter and approved the repairs and restorations they recommended be made. But the problem, they soon realized, was money, and more specifically, that nobody had any. The committee understood that Nawab Abdul Majid administered a small independent trust, but it was limited to just Rs 1,000 expenditure on the mosques’ upkeep each year (the remainder went to fund education for Muslim boys in the city, as well as the maintenance of the original donor’s tomb in Mecca). In 1904 that money had already been spent on creating residences for the Arabic/Koranic school housed in the grounds of the Jama Masjid, and in any case, Rs 1,000 was insufficient except for the most basic of repairs. In addition, the district PWD’s budget was extremely limited, and priority was normally given to the building and maintenance of more everyday infrastructure, such as roads. The committee quickly realized, then, that the provincial government’s PWD would have to provide the funds. In the Fall of 1905 Jaunpur’s historical monuments did in fact receive such a special grant for upkeep from the provincial government in the amount of Rs 10,337. Requests for a further Rs 64,869 for repairs, however, remained outstanding.7 *** From a reading of the minutes of the advisory committee’s meetings and related documentation for the two decades following the committee’s creation in 1904, two main points can be discerned.8 On the one hand, the imperial government – and specifically its Archaeological Surveyors – routinely char­ acterized the advisory committee as an impediment to effective conservation measures, even while the ASI clearly relied upon the social standing of the committee’s Indian members to help to facilitate certain types of initiatives. In short, the surveyors believed that committee members did not act with initiative to supervise the mosques and the activities taking place in them, and, in later years, that they actively undermined the centralized control that Act VII was intended to impose. While I have tried to show that Act VII never was as centralized as it was purported to be, clearly ASI surveyors

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believed that it broadly empowered them over the conduct and responsibilities of local officials. On the other hand, while the government relied upon the committee to provide advice and help to facilitate conservation work, it is also evident that its Indian members were more deeply involved in the management of these structures than the government would, or could, acknowledge. The commit­ tee’s functioning was often marked by a continual negotiation between its own priorities, government prerogative, financial constraints, Jaunpur’s Municipal Board, and the wishes of the city’s populace. Moreover, poor communication between the government and the committee (as well as the government’s own lack of clarity in allocating funding and responsibility) allowed for an “offset” in time that opened a space for the committee to deal with developments very often on its own terms, and at its own pace. To elaborate the first point: in April 1912 Gordon Sanderson (the ASI Superintendent) wrote to the United Provinces government expressing his extreme displeasure at the way that the Jaunpur advisory committee was functioning. He had just been to the city on his annual inspection tour and found that “the buildings were hardly in a condition which pointed out to effective control by such a strong local committee.” In the courtyard of the Atala Masjid he found that a new tank for ablutions was being built, and that this was in contravention of several rules: the committee had not notified the Collector and had not consulted with the PWD, and, indeed, had not even discussed among themselves this particular “improvement.” The mosque was also in a “very dirty condition,” and occupants were regularly disfiguring the stone and lighting fires in the courtyard. Further outside the city center, the Jhanjhri mosque (completed very early in the 15th century) was found to be inaccessible because it was entirely surrounded by stacks of corn. So far as Sanderson knew, the last meeting of the committee had been held over a year before, and even then, there was no quorum, as the only participants were himself, the Collector, and Abdul Majid.9 This did not inspire his confidence in the committee’s effectiveness. In later years, the local government often noted, with irritation, its inability to bring the committee together. V. A. Stowell, Jaunpur’s District Officer in 1920, complained that he had twice tried to obtain a quorum of the committee with no success, and on one occasion he had believed it necessary to discuss an ASI inspection note (from four years earlier!) with the District Surveyor alone, in order to move ahead with mosque repairs, without the involvement of the committee at all. Even following the extension of Act VII protection to the Atala, Jama, and Lal Darwaza Masjids in 1919, members of the Archaeological Survey con­ tinued their offensive against the committee, portraying it as not only ineffec­ tive, but also, crucially, as an institution that undermined the perceived centralized control that the Act was intended to impose. The three principal mosques were accorded this legal protection at the insistence of Sanderson, who believed that the arrangements put in place by Curzon no longer con­ formed to “usual practice.”10 In 1922 one of Sanderson’s successors, John F.

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Blakiston, circulated an account of the committee’s annual meeting that was highly unfavorable. (In this instance, the regular minutes of the meeting com­ posed a part of Blakiston’s annual “inspection note” for Jaunpur, and so they read rather differently from those composed by the committee itself. The voice of official ASI disapproval here reigns supreme). The meeting’s minutes begin with a provocation: “what were really the functions of the advisory commit­ tee?” Blakiston suggested, in response to his own question, that the committee was to take a “real interest” in the upkeep of the city’s Sharqi monuments, and that they should assist the ASI “rather than criticize” it. Moreover, committee members should occasionally visit monuments, assess their condition, educate the public about cleanliness, stop unauthorized additions to buildings, and help to bring about compliance with the ASI’s recommendations. That this was not being done to Blakiston’s satisfaction was evident from his exasperation at the perceived poor state in which he found Jaunpur’s three mosques. Local weavers were regularly using the Atala Masjid to stretch yarn, he noted, while munici­ pal gardeners were living in the Fort’s bathhouse (hammam). He had also found the Jama Masjid’s eastern gate to have collapsed and lying in ruins. As his parting shot, Blakiston directed local members of the committee to raise substantial funds from “the local Mohammedan public” so that they could underwrite much of the cost of these monuments’ upkeep themselves.11 (This last was a suggestion that few local administrators thought feasible, although they did not tell Blakiston this!) But in those cases when Jaunpuris did expend their own financial resources on historical structures, the ASI’s superintendent just as often condemned their activities as inappropriate. Sanderson, for example, complained in the early 1910s that the mosque of Shaikh Barha, located in Zafrabad just outside Jaunpur, was being actively defaced by whitewash and new construction, and was even being used on occasion as a lime storehouse. He acknowledged that the mosque was not under Act VII protection, but the city’s advisory commit­ tee also did not seem to take any interest it in. He wrote in a letter of 1912 that “the committee cannot perhaps be judged directly responsible” for Shaikh Barha Masjid, but its current condition “is not creditable to a body who have the good management of the old buildings at heart.”12 A man by the name of Maji Gosan was, in fact, spending money on the mosque to improve it (including building what Sanderson called “a hideous modern entrance”), but it was the opinion of the surveyor that this gentleman should, ultimately, be spending such money “under the direction of local authorities.”13 A clear case of the old colonial “damned if you don’t, damned if you do.” It is certainly true, from the evidence in the archive, at least, that the advi­ sory committee was not a model of functionality and efficiency, at least as it operated within the bureaucratic structures of local government and the ASI (and that is the functioning for which we have the best evidence). Part of the problem that the committee labored under was poor communication with the government. In the committee’s meeting of 20 April 1912, for example, the first item considered was an inspection note authored by Sanderson a full two

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years earlier, and this sort of delay in providing the report to the committee was pretty much par for the course. These inspection notes were written by the ASI Superintendent, then – so far as I can tell – circulated within the ASI to secure appropriate funding in the ASI budget and then communicated to the provincial government’s PWD, from where it traveled to the divisional Commissioner and then to the local officer in Jaunpur (the Magistrate or Collector), before finally making its way to Jaunpur’s advisory committee for its consideration and approval. This never took less than a year to complete. At other times it is clear that representatives of the provincial government’s leadership (the Commissioner, for example, as well as high-ranking members of the PWD) were having conversations about Jaunpur’s mosques parallel to those taking place within the committee itself, but that neither group under­ stood, or was aware of, what the other was contemplating. New civil service officers posted to Jaunpur also seem to have had little information about how repairs to the city’s monuments were actually funded and the recent efforts undertaken in this respect. Mohamed Fasihuddin, Jaunpur’s new Collector and District Officer in 1921 thought that there were a number of “large charitable wakfs” in the city, and that if even 10 per cent of their revenue was devoted to historical conservation there would be no need for further gov­ ernment grants.14 This was a notion that had been routinely debunked for more than two decades in official correspondence. Moreover, it reflected a poor understanding of how awqaf functioned – endowments could not so easily be reassigned for new purposes. And to add to all of this confusion, local officials poorly understood their respective responsibilities for the upkeep of historical structures. In 1924 Jaunpur’s District Officer thought that the District Engineer was responsible for the maintenance of protected monuments, but the Engineer had told him that he had no funds at his dis­ posal to do so.15 In this midst of this muddle was the advisory committee – without funds of its own to spend on the buildings, but keenly attuned to the importance these buildings held for local residents. To the second point: much of the committee’s deliberations, apart from routinely approving the ASI’s suggestions for measures of physical upkeep and repair of structure (pointing, waterproofing, and so forth), indicated an under­ standing that the buildings under consideration were not just historical monu­ ments per se, but living entities that served specific needs of Jaunpur’s Muslim community. This was made particularly clear in 1918 when the committee was asked for their opinion on finally bringing the city’s three principal mosques under the purview of Act VII. The Indian members of the committee were generally supportive of the proposal, but at Nawab Abdul Majid’s insistence they added a caveat to the agreement to ensure that “there is no interference in the internal administration of the mosques, students’ quarters, performance of religious rites, etc.”16 One of the committee’s principal concerns here appears to have been the desire to continue operating several Arabic / Koranic schools in the city’s main historic mosques. Abdul Majid, for example, had for many years been a principal sponsor of a boys Arabic-medium school located within

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Figure 13.1 Jhanjhri Masjid, Jaunpur, 2008 Image supplied by author

the eastern flank of the Jama Masjid. In 1914, however, and again in 1916, the ASI had recommended removing the students’ quarters from the mosque and relocating them to a site nearby. This would have allowed for the demolition of certain “modern additions” to the mosque and the restoration of the original open colonnades. Indeed, for several years the ASI’s inspectors had been com­ plaining about the conduct of the boys living in the Jama Masjid, namely their propensity to leave their belongings and rubbish strewn about, their habit of urinating on the mosque’s back wall, and much besides. This plan was resisted by the committee throughout this period, with Abdul Majid suggesting a renovation of student quarters to better “fit in” with the historical character of the building (a suggestion met with curt dismissal by the ASI).17 The advisory committee made a final declaration in 1921 that any attempt to relocate the school’s living quarters from the Jama Masjid “cannot be carried out,”18 and in 1923 complained to the government that “they wish that their advice would be taken” when it was offered.19 On other matters, as well, the Jaunpur committee resisted ASI directives to render the city’s Sharqi-era monuments as essentially sanitized spaces, invok­ ing historical precedent very often, as well as the specter of “strong local feeling.” On one occasion the ASI wished to eject poor people who made a temporary home in the Atala Masjid, for example. The committee resisted

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this, as it saw the mosque as serving a historically valid charitable function in this respect (and the District Surveyor also recognized that the state possessed no legal power of eviction in such circumstances).20 Similarly, in 1924 the Commissioner visited Jaunpur and complained about the generally poor condition of the historical buildings that he found there. He noted that there were a good number of small rooms located on the perimeters of the Atala and Jama Masjids that appeared to be occupied principally by squatters.21 Yet the committee was already well aware of this problem and had decided to rent some of these rooms out to local businesses (to raise funds for con­ servation work), while leaving others for the use of travelers’ accommodation, a time-honored practice.22 All that the committee required was government sanction, which was refused by the Collector on account of the scheme being impractical.23 On another occasion, in 1925, the Collector of Jaunpur expressed his misgivings over a central government proposal that would have required him to charge rent to two long-established Arabic-medium schools located in the Atala Masjid. The cost of Rs 750 per year, he noted, while perhaps reasonable in a commercial context, seemed unlikely to be collected in this particular instance, given that the students depended on the sale of hides (from animals sacrificed during Bakr Id) for their maintenance. More­ over, he was concerned because local Muslims already distrusted the govern­ ment over the extension of Act VII protection to the city’s main mosques, and charging rent in these mosques would surely cause unrest. The advisory committee had also expressed its “strong disapproval” of the scheme.24 In the cases where Jaunpur’s Municipal Board had direct financial interests in the management of these structures, however, negotiations between the committee and government over how they were to be maintained were often complicated even further. In Jaunpur’s old hilltop fort the municipality seems to have kept some sort of a garden for many years and allowed their malis (gardeners) to live freely in the fort’s historic hammam (bath house) where they routinely lit dung fires to cook their food (thus damaging the ceiling and plaster work). The municipality also had plans in the 1920s to lease the land out for cultivation as a fund-raising measure. The committee suggested to the Com­ missioner that, as the fort was actually central government property (it was, in fact, nazul land), as well as a protected monument under Act VII, it once again step forward to maintain the structure through the ASI.25 This was in effect accomplished by Jaunpur’s Collector within a few short months when he ejec­ ted the municipality from any oversight or maintenance of the fort’s grounds. In other instances, however, Jaunpur’s Municipal Board had stronger legal claims to proprietary rights, and this extended negotiations significantly. Jaun­ pur’s early Mughal-era bridge (known as the Akbari bridge) was also a pro­ tected monument, but had been in effect under the management of the Municipal Board since the early 1870s, when a catastrophic flood of the river Gomti had destroyed most of the bridge’s top-side structures (these had been used as shops and resting spaces for travelers). At that time Jaunpur’s Collector had transferred control of the bridge to the Municipal Board on the condition

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that it repair the kiosks, which it in effect did by enlisting the sponsorship of members of the local gentry (including Nawab Abdul Majid himself, as well as Rais Dharam Raj Kumar of Rajabazar and others).26 The municipality then took rent from the shop-keepers occupying the kiosks and promised its sponsors full recompense for their investment when they required it. (In this manner, by the 1920s the municipality in effect owned 20 of the kiosks/shops, with a further six being held in private ownership). In 1914 the ASI first recommended that the government acquire the bridge’s pavilions in order to “properly preserve” the bridge structure. This was a recommendation that the Jaunpur advisory com­ mittee flatly rejected, and asked instead that the ASI advise them “how improvements can be made without impairing the usefulness of these shops.”27 In 1921 the Municipal Board rejected a further recommendation of the ASI Superintendent, J. A. Paige, to abolish any commercial activity from the bridge and return its kiosks to the function of “resting places for travelers” on the basis that this would result in “considerable financial loss” to the Board.28 But at this time the advisory committee rejected the claims of the municipality to control the structure, and instead backed the ASI on the basis that the bridge constituted nazul land (arguing, in essence, that the bridge structure was government prop­ erty) and that shop-keepers had been “thoroughly repaid” for their investment over the years.29 In the end, after much negotiation, in 1927 the central govern­ ment agreed to pay Jaunpur’s Municipal Board more than Rs 20,000 for control over their 20 kiosks. Several others had been acquired from their private owners, and only three remained in private hands after negotiations with the Board were complete. One of these belonged to Nawab Mohammad Yusuf, Abdul Majid’s son and heir. Jaunpur’s District Officer was confident that negotiations could be held with Yusuf privately, although in the other two cases it was likely that the Land Acquisitions Act would need to be employed to wrest control from sets of multiple claimants.30 Of course, by its very nature (as a Sunni body), the advisory committee did not, and could not, speak to the interests of all Jaunpuris, in particular those of the city’s small Shi’a community. This, in itself, could have prompted the Shi’a to act on their own when it came to questions of mosque conservation. In 1924, for example, Syed Mansoor Hasan wrote to Jaunpur’s Collector, asking that an order of protection be extended to the Khalis Mukhlis Masjid, a small Sharqi­ era mosque near the outskirts of the city. (Also known as the Char Ungli Masjid, or “four finger” mosque, this structure dates to the early Sharqi period – about 1417 – and is typical of Sharqi architecture with its large central propylon, except for the extensive use of brick in both flanks).31 While the mosque had recently come to the attention of the ASI as eminently worthy of being protected under Act VII,32 Hasan (whose family had served as mutavallis, or caretakers, of the mosque for four generations) made his request with a particular caveat: he sought to enshrine within that order of protection an undertaking from the gov­ ernment that the mosque be reserved for the sole use of Jaunpur’s Shi’a com­ munity, which it had principally serviced for many years.33 This was undoubtedly an unusual request, as it prompted the writing of an extensive

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opinion by the government’s Legal Remembrancer on the nature of mosque ownership and mosque access in cases of sectarian difference. In short, the Remembrancer argued that any mosque dedicated to public worship was con­ sidered to be divinely owned (rather than in private hands), according to Islamic law, and that every Muslim, regardless of sect, had the right to enter such a public mosque and perform worship there. In this respect he quoted at length Ameer Ali’s influential compendium Mohammadan Law. But as to the question of whether the colonial government had the right to limit access to a mosque protected under Act VII on the basis of sect, the Legal Remembrancer was doubtful, for even if the mosque had originally been dedicated for the exclusive use of the Shi’a in the 15th century, such an exclusion now contradicted accepted law and actual practice. As a result, he recommended that the mutavalli be con­ vinced to drop the stipulation, or else the government might consider “compul­ sorily acquiring” the mosque under section 10 of Act VII (which covered instances of historical monuments that were in danger of being destroyed or injured in some way).34 When confronted with this possibility, Syed Mansoon Hasan quickly backed away from his request, wishing only to be recognized as mutavalli under Act VII’s protection.35 And this leads us to a final point, namely, that during his lifetime Nawab Abdul Majid could very well have been marshalling the resources of the colonial state not only to secure a “living” identity for Jaunpur’s principal mosques, but also to reinforce a contemporary Sunni identity for some of the principal spaces of Jaunpur’s Sharqi architecture. While the imperial government had recognized the Atala, Jama, and Lal Darwaza mosques to be “in possession of the Sunnis” in 1887, and again in 1903 during Curzon’s visit to the city, as a rule Jaunpur’s architectural heritage was also continually lionized because it represented the hybrid nature of the Sharqi state and its rulers (who were, in fact, sometimes Hindu converts, eunuchs, habshis, or Shi’a, and apparently positively disposed towards their non-Muslim subjects). It is worth recalling here that Nawab Abdul Majid was the largest single landlord in the eastern United Provinces, and he controlled all of the agricultural land around Jaunpur. He was a founding member of the Muslim League, a successful high court lawyer, and was con­ sidered by the British to be a loyalist, as he argued in favor of separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims introduced in the Indian Councils Act of 1909 (the Morley-Minto reforms).36 But he was also a Sunni partisan, and in view of this fact we might understand his insistence upon maintaining the Arabic-medium schools in the Jama and Atala mosques rather differently.

Notes 1 BL, IOR, P/6834, Archaeology Proceedings, 1904, August, No. 9, Notes by the Director General of Archaeology in India, dated 16 February 1904. 2 See section 539, “Suits relating to Public Charities” under the Act, in J. O’Kinealy, ed., The Code of Civil Procedure, Act XIV of 1882 (Government of India) (Cal­ cutta: Brown & Co., 1883): 405–6.

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3 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 25, File 31, W. G. Wood, Under-Sec. to Govt, UP, PWD, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 22 September 1903. 4 Ibid., draft agreement between the United Provinces Government and Syed Imdad Ali Shah, n.d. [c. September 1903]. 5 Ibid., Commissioner’s draft rules for Committee overseeing Repairs to Jaunpur mos­ ques [n.d.]; Commissioner, Benares Division, to Sec. to Govt, UP, 1 December 1903. 6 Ibid., Minutes of the Jaunpur advisory committee, 17 March 1904; Minutes of the Jaunpur advisory committee, 15 December 1904. 7 Ibid., “Works and Estimates in Connection with the Conservation of Archae­ ological Buildings at Jaunpur,” dated 19 October 1905. 8 The committee’s principal Indian member, Nawab Abdul Majid, died in 1924, and while there are records of some activity by the committee for a few years following that, (including the appointment of his son, Mohammad Yusuf, in his place), I have not been able to located anything later than about 1926. The committee may have continued to function in some ways beyond this date, but it is not clear to me whether this was the case or not. 9 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 64, File 5, Superintendent of Muhammadan and British Monuments, Northern Circle, to Sec. to Govt, UP, PWD, 16 April 1912. 10 Ibid., Gordon Sanderson, Superintendent of Muhammadan and British Monu­ ments, Northern Circle, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 13 March 1917. 11 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 73, File 244, Proceedings of a Meeting of the Advisory Committee, held 9 December 1922, in “Conservation Note” dated 23 January 1923. 12 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 64, File 5, Superintendent of Muhammadan and British Monuments to Sec. to Govt, UP PWD, 16 April 1912. 13 Ibid., Proceedings of the Advisory Committee, 20 April 1912. 14 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 73, File 244, Maulvi Mohamad Fasihuddin, District Officer, Jaunpur, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 3 December 1921. 15 Ibid., Commissioner, Benares Division, to Sec. to Govt, UP, PWD, 23 January 1924. 16 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 64, File 5, Pro­ ceedings of the Committee, 4 October 1918. 17 This seems to be what Abdul Majid had been attempting in 1903–04 when he was buying architectural elements of the Sharqi graveyard for the mosque school. See ibid., J. A. Page, Inspection Note, Jaunpur, 24 December 1916. 18 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 73, File 244, Maulvi Mohamad Fasihuddin, District Officer, Jaunpur, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 3 December 1921. 19 Ibid., Advisory Committee, Minutes, 18 December 1923. 20 Ibid., Memo of V. A. Stowell, 4 November 1920. 21 Ibid., Commissioner, Benares Division, to Sec. to Govt, UP, PWD, 23 January 1924. 22 Ibid., Minutes of the Advisory Committee, Jaunpur, 18 December 1923. 23 Ibid., A. C. Turner, Collector, Jaunpur, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 4 June 1925. 24 Ibid., A. C. Verrieres, Sec. to Govt, UP, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 6 March 1925; A. C. Turner, Collector, Jaunpur, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 22 May 1925. 25 Ibid., Minutes of the Advisory Committee, Jaunpur, 18 December 1923.

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26 Ibid., draft letter to the Magistrate (no date); District Officer, Jaunpur, to Com­ missioner, Benares Division, 25 January 1923; Commissioner, Benares Division, to Sec. to Govt, UP, PWD, 23 January 1924. 27 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 64, File 5, Advisory Committee, Jaunpur, Proceedings, 17 October 1914. 28 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 73, File 244, Resolution #5 of the Jaunpur Municipal Board, 21 February 1921. 29 Ibid., extract of the minutes of a meeting of the Jaunpur Advisory Committee, 22 July 1922. 30 Ibid. District Officer, Jaunpur, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 20 January 1927; Collector, Jaunpur, to Superintendent, Muhammadan and British Monu­ ments, Northern Circle, ASI, 18 November 1927. 31 See Fuhrer, Sharqi Architecture of Jaunpur: 41. The mosque is named after two governors of Jaunpur – Malik Khalis and Malik Mukhlis – and was built to honor the Sufi saint Sayyid Usman. “Char Ungli,” or “four fingers,” comes from a par­ ticular stone that is said to contain a line which corresponds to the length of four fingers on anyone’s hand (it worked for my hand!). This, in itself, speaks of an alternative, local identity for this structure more closely linked to Sufi and mystical traditions than a Sharqi historicity. 32 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 73, File 244, "Conservation Note,” 23 January 1923. 33 Ibid., S. Mansoor Hasan to Collector, Jaunpur, 1 September 1924. 34 Ibid., Note of the Legal Remembrancer to Government, 6 November 1924. 35 Ibid., Syed Mansoor Hasan to Collector, Jaunpur, 11 April 1925. 36 Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: 409–10.

14 Not all tombs are created equal

A few months after Lord Curzon’s visit to Jaunpur, a resident of Mauza Kat­ ghara (an outlying portion of the city) wrote directly to the Viceroy to enlist his help. Muzaffar Husain Mirza, the head clerk and translator for the Azamgarh Judge’s Court, asked the Viceroy to make him (or his father) the official guar­ dian of the tombs of Nawab Ghazi and Sher Zaman Khan, located in their neighborhood, and requested that the imperial government regularly repair the buildings (or, alternatively, provide him with an annual allowance to do so on their behalf). The tombs, he wrote, honored two men – distant relatives of his – for their meritorious service to the Mughal Empire and had, at one time, both been supported by large grants of land. In recent years, however, the grants had disappeared, and Mirza’s family had become impoverished, and so they now struggled to maintain the two buildings that honored their ancestors. When these tombs eventually fall down, he noted, there will be nothing left “which bears testimony that [our] family was once great.”1 Jaunpur’s Collector, F. J. Pert, was familiar with the two tombs from his rounds of the city’s architectural heritage with John Marshall, and when questioned about them in March 1904, he wrote that Sher Zaman Khan’s tomb was worth making some investment in,2 but that the tomb of Nawab Ghazi was “of no particular interest and is practically in ruins.” As such, he did not recommend any action be taken on the latter.3 Muzaffar Husain Mirza must have been told as much by Pert, for in the same month he wrote directly to D. C. Baillie, the Banaras Commissioner, with the hope that he might overturn Pert’s decision. The colonial government was very often specific in its selection of the nature of Jaun­ pur’s monumental landscape, seeking to preserve only those structures that it deemed worthy of conservation. These decisions were usually made by reference to two principal criteria: the first was a structure’s intrinsic architectural merit, whether in its stylistic features or the technique of its construction, while the second was a structure’s historical value. In his petition to Baillie, Muzaffar Husain Mirza argued for the provision of government funding to maintain Nawab Ghazi’s tomb on the basis of both of the government’s own criteria for conservation. The building, Mirza argued, had unique historical value, for Ghazi Khan was a “man of consequence” who came to India from Persia with the Mughal emperor Humayun, and was brought to Jaunpur by Bairam Khan,

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popularly known as “Khan-i-Khanan” (who was an important Mughal military commander and trusted adviser to Akbar). Ghazi Khan had enjoyed a high rank in the Mughal nobility (that of haft-hazari, or a “7,000er”), had been killed in battle honorably serving his government, and his name could be found in the important historical chronicle, the Tarikh-i-Farishta. The Mughal emperors had long recognized Nawab Ghazi’s status, he continued, pledging gifts of villages and large tracts of land for the tomb’s upkeep even long after his death. The Emperor Shah Jahan, for example, had contributed 7,700 bighas of land for the maintenance of the tomb. In addition, Mirza argued that despite the tomb’s poor condition at present, it still possessed significant architectural merit: it had a large dome, interesting floral designs, and unique arched doorways. Overall, he noted that the structure had a “commanding and imposing appearance” that “catches the eyes of those having an architectural taste.” Mirza finished his plea to Baillie on an emotional note. Nawab Ghazi had had the privilege of serving his govern­ ment and giving his life for it, but the present era did not provide the same opportunity for him to show his own loyalty. Nawab Ghazi was a truly great man, but he was unable to “come out of his grave to plead his cause.” It was up to his much-reduced descendant, Muzaffar Husain Mirza, to now do so on his behalf, and he earnestly hoped that the present government “would be generous enough to spend a petty few hundreds to spare the building from falling down.”4 In his petition, then, Muzaffar Husain Mirza utilized the exact criteria of British conservation discourse in his attempt to save his familial architectural heritage, as well as invoking the historical norms of government in India, and in particular its responsibilities to the loyal and remarkable men of the past. But it was all for naught. Baillie remained unmoved, and within a few days Mirza received a letter with the mixed news: the tomb of Sher Zaman Khan would be repaired henceforth by government, as previously decided, but that of Nawab Ghazi was “of insufficient importance for government to undertake its maintenance.”5 Despite Baillie’s refusal, others who were more directly invested in the preservation of Jaunpur’s historical architecture appeared to disagree with his assessment. Frederick Oertel, the engineer, believed that it would take very little effort indeed (and only a few hundred rupees’ expense) to shore up the tomb and preserve it for future generations, and that it was worth trying, given the historical importance of the tomb’s occupant. More­ over, the Jaunpur advisory committee considered it as the near-equal of the city’s other two important Mughal-era tombs, those of Sher Zaman Khan and Kalich Khan, and recommended that the three be cared for all together, as a set.6 These views, however, were never officially considered by govern­ ment, which instead accepted the assessment of Jaunpur’s Collector. This is not the end of the story, however. In late 1911 the tomb of Nawab Ghazi again came to the government’s attention, this time for being a real and present danger to Jaunpur’s residents. The tomb’s collapse was described as imminent by Jaunpur’s Deputy Collector, as the supporting wall on the south side of the structure had fallen down during the rains of the previous monsoon season. Upon inspection, Jaunpur’s administrators believed that, if

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the tomb collapsed entirely, the large dome would undoubtedly cause significant damage to the nearby houses and would also present a mortal danger to any unfortunate passersby.7 What followed this realization was three years of confusing and contradictory correspondence about what to do next. The Commissioner recommended that the tomb either be fenced in or entirely demolished – whatever was easiest and cheapest. A. C. Walker, Jaunpur’s District Officer, decided to consult the city’s advisory committee and, like them, recommended that the government take control of the tomb and repair it. The Commissioner, however, demurred from taking ownership, based on earlier correspondence about the tomb’s relative lack of importance. Meanwhile, Gordon Sanderson, the Archaeological Surveyor, visited the city in March 1912 and recommended the tomb for preservation under Act VII of 1904, stating that the building was in “sound structural condition.” It turned out, however, that he had made a mistake and not visited the tomb of Ghazi Khan at all, but had instead inspected the tomb of Muzaffar Husain Mirza’s other distant relative, Sher Zaman Khan!8 In any case, and perhaps because nobody realized Sander­ son’s mistake until much later, the tomb of Ghazi Khan was eventually recom­ mended, and accepted, for Act VII protection by the government in June 1913. Indeed, one can imagine the surprise of the PWD workmen who arrived on site at Ghazi Khan’s tomb and instead of conducting the minor cosmetic repairs that had been recommended by Sanderson discovered a tomb nearly in ruin, with much need for structural reinforcement (worth, they later estimated, more than Rs 1,800). Such repairs were simply not in the local PWD budget, and thus the tomb was left to rot, with its final collapse coming during the rains of 1915. As a final indignity, the tomb was removed from the list of “protected” monuments by the Commissioner, and Muzaffar Husain Mirza was ordered to remove the debris from the site or face a fine for the public nuisance.9 The story of Ghazi Khan’s tomb is a reminder that conservatorship, regardless of the extent to which Indians engaged with it, produced in Jaun­ pur (and elsewhere) a sometimes rather arbitrary, even accidental, landscape of monumentality, one that was (not unlike the picturesque) both an artificial aesthetic and largely reflective of the whims of British imperial governance. If the historical landscape is a “curated” one, as I have argued, then there is always inherent within that notion of curation an element of disputation, chance, and accident. This need not, however, diminish its meaningfulness for those who lived among its structures.

Notes 1 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 25, File 31, Peti­ tion of A. F. Muzaffar Husain Mirza, Azamgarh, UP, to Viceroy of India, 26 December 1903. 2 Oertel noted in 1904 that the tomb possessed “beautiful decoration” and thus deserved more sustained attention from the government. See ibid., F. O. Oertel, Executive Engineer, Benares Division, to Commissioner, Benares Divi­ sion, 5 April 1904.

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3 Ibid., F. J. Pert, Collector, Jaunpur, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 4 March 1904. 4 Ibid., A. J. Muzaffar Husain Mirza, to D. C. Baillie, Commissioner, Benares Divi­ sion, n.d. [March 1904]. 5 Ibid. W. P. Housden, Under Sec. to Govt, UP, PWD, to Muzaffar Husain Mirza, n. d. [March 1904]. 6 Ibid., F. O. Oertel, Executive Engineer, Benares Division, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 5 April 1904; draft letter dated 15 April 1904 to Sec. to Govt, UP, PWD. 7 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 64, File 5, Deputy Collector, Jaunpur, for A. C. Walker, to Commissioner, Benares Division, n.d. [c. November 1911]. 8 Ibid., Gordon Sanderson, “Conservation Note at Jaunpur, 22 March 1912,” with handwritten notations, and formally dated 18 April 1912. 9 Ibid., Office Note, dated 24 February 1916; District Surveyor, Jaunpur, to District Officer, Jaunpur, 7 April 1916; District Officer, Jaunpur, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 3 August 1916.

15 Act VII and the not-seeing of Banaras

While Jaunpur remained a prominent locale for the colonial state’s conserva­ tion efforts, nearby Banaras was nearly absent from them, both in terms of the city’s visibility as “historical” and in the allocation of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and Public Works Department (PWD) funding. And this is particularly surprising, given that Banaras so often stood as the para­ digmatic marker for Indian (or rather Hindu) antiquity in both the British colonial, and Indian nationalist, imaginations. This is not to say, however, that Banaras as a whole was absent, only that a significant part of it was. The Buddhist ruins at nearby Sarnath, for example, came under the care of the ASI in the early 20th century, and research there played an important part in debates about a Buddhist prehistory for the city.1 But Hindu Banaras was almost nowhere to be found in the reports and spreadsheets of the imperial Archaeological Surveys, or the provincial PWD for that matter, around the turn of the 20th century.2 Perhaps this is because Banaras, despite a reputed antiquity that stretched back to the Vedic age,3 was at the end of the 19th century not really all that old at all, at least in terms of the buildings that then constituted its urban fabric. Indeed, James Fergusson wrote in his History of Indian Architecture that “there is hardly any great city in Hindustan that can show so few evi­ dences of antiquity as Benares.”4 The palaces of Banaras’s waterfront were built largely in the 18th century by Maratha kings, local zamindars, and warrior ascetics as the city became an important symbolic site tied to notions of Hindu kingship, as well as the center of a robust overland trade in textiles and industrial goods.5 The palace-fortress and residential complex at what is now known as Ahilyabai Ghat were constructed by the eponymous Rani of the Holkar-Malwa Maratha dynasty centered at Indore in the late 18th cen­ tury, for example, and the famous brahman’s refectory at Raja Ghat was built in 1807 by Amrit Rao, a Maratha nobleman exiled to Banaras under British rule. Of even later origin, Ganga Mahal, a prominent palace complex and ghat near Aurangzeb’s hilltop mosque, was constructed in the mid-1860s by the Maharaja of Gwalior, Jayajirao Scindia.6 Many of the city’s Hindu tem­ ples date from this era as well, including the famous Vishwanath mandir, which was constructed by Ahilyabai Holkar in 1772, and the Kal Bhairav

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mandir, a culturally important temple in the city built by the last Maratha peshwa, Bajirao II, in 1817.7 Many of the city’s most visible “Hindu” build­ ings were, therefore, barely a century old when Act VII was passed into law. Beyond the question of Sarnath’s ancient Buddhist relics, it was often noted in colonial accounts of Banaras that the oldest intact structures in the city proper at that time were in fact of Islamic origin, including the Bibi Raziyya Masjid (dating from the early Sultanate era) and several tombs and a large mosque that could be dated to the Sharqi dynasty of the 15th century. But it needs to be emphasized here that the relatively recent character of Banaras’s urban fabric was just as often specifically characterized by colonial writers as the result of Muslim iconoclasm during previous centuries. Of particular note, Edwin Greaves, in his 1909 history of Banaras, described several periods of Muslim depredation in which temples were destroyed and brahmans fled to southern India, rendering the city but a shell of its former self.8 Arthur Parker similarly warned visitors not to be too disappointed by the “insignificant appearance” of the city’s temples, for nothing much in Banaras had survived the iconoclastic reign of Aurangzeb.9 For both Greaves and Parker, the two late Mughal-era mosques built by Aurangzeb on the sites of earlier temples (the Gyanvapi and Alamgir Masjids) composed sufficient evidence for the truth of this narrative. Equally, however, the Banarsi habit of repurposing architectural debris into new buildings was at least equally to blame in ren­ dering the city as non-historical (and by this I mean, simply, that the city’s buildings could not be easily fit into a neat historical narrative). For mis­ sionary Matthew Sherring, the city was a patchwork of modern building, ancient pillars, and repurposed stone – all evidence of the wanton destruction of the past (as well, perhaps, of the lack of historical sensibility among the city’s inhabitants): “sculptured stones of many kinds are distributed among the walls and foundations of the modern houses,” he noted.10 Yet the relatively modern character of the substantive part of Banaras’s urban structure does not fully explain its absence from the archive of colonial conservation practice (and here again, I am speaking principally about the “Hindu city” – its temples and the fortress-palaces built by prominent Hindu monarchs and mendicant groups). This absence is instead related to two dis­ tinct phenomena. The first of these relates to colonial conservation discourse and representation; the second, the legal strictures of Act VII. First, Banaras’s range of Hindu structures probably did not fit the criteria for monumentality or historicity that the colonial state, in particular, sought to celebrate, as they were “living” buildings firmly rooted in present religious practice, as well as very recent political-cultural identity: as Maratha-Hindu spaces, perhaps, but most certainly as spaces in which people actively lived and worked and worshipped on an everyday basis. At the beginning of the 20th century the royal cult of local kingship was also actively being co-constructed with Hindu monarchs, making them a part of the political present,11 while the vestiges of the Mughal and Muslim past were increasingly being relegated to, well, the past. Equally, the notion of Banaras’s Hindu architectural decrepitude

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(celebrated in the works of authors such as Edwin Greaves or Clement Scott, as well as in a multitude of visual portrayals) was one valued by colonial obser­ vers for the “picturesque” or “antique” quality that it bestowed upon a city imagined as mystical and ancient and, more than anything, representative of a heathen past. Or perhaps it was just that the sheer density of Banaras’s water­ front infrastructure and its integration into the everyday city simply con­ founded British officials, who were unable to demarcate a historical structure from its surroundings. All of these explanations have merits, even if in some respects they are potentially contradictory – the living space of Hindu practice was also ren­ dered an antiquated space in colonial representation – but I would like to focus here upon the notion that much of Banaras was un-seeable in its full lived complexity, and that many writers and administrators of this period were simply unable to perceive Banaras as a meaningful historical landscape that could be “conserved.” These people instead saw the city’s urban fabric as what Greaves characterized as an “indescribable confusion,”12 which I take to mean something akin to a premodern aesthetic that did not lend itself parti­ cularly well to the vision and procedures of the ASI. After all, how could the borders of a protected structure in this city be demarcated – a key practice in declaring a monument “protected” – when buildings pushed into one another (overlapped even), when building materials were a mélange of the past and the present, and a crush of humanity always seemed to be occupying these spaces? And how could a historical narrative be written, grounded in the evidence provided by built structures, if everything was mixed up and used multiple times? The temples and palaces of Banaras’s waterfront were as unlike Sarnath’s isolated stupas, or Jaunpur’s restored Atala Masjid, as a colonial administrator could imagine. In his first report on the monuments of the North-Western Provinces, India’s Curator of Ancient Monuments, H. H. Cole, lamented that his visit to Banaras was “too short” to have allowed him to gain an appreciation of its built envir­ onment and conservation needs, despite writing at length about Allahabad, Jaunpur, and Sarnath in the same report. It was the riverfront ghats, temples, and palaces, however, that he believed required immediate attention from government, despite them being largely in private hands.13 Elsewhere, in an accounting of the city’s “principal ancient and architectural buildings,” he mentioned specifically only the Vishwanath mandir, the city’s pre-eminent but relatively modern temple, and, for some reason, “ghusla ghat” (probably Bhonsle Ghat which dates to about 1795), privately owned and the site of the relatively unremarkable palace of the raja of Nagpur.14 The wealth of the city’s architectural and historical structures seems to have eluded Cole by reason of their abundance, of the city’s sheer density, and indeed, he never returned to the subject of that city in his official capacity. Cole was not alone in his difficulties. The Director General of Archaeology, John Marshall, in a set of 1904 con­ servation notes on the Banaras region, similarly focused his attention on a small number of structures that might be characterized as “standing apart”

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from the compact urbanism of the city: the Buddhist stupa at Sarnath, the old ruined fort at Rajghat (which had once housed British soldiers but dated to much earlier), and the tomb of Lal Khan (c. 1773), which stands in the midst of a large char-bagh (four-part garden) to the north of the city (in fact all three sites are located on Banaras’s northern border, which ASI officials and other writers often identified as the oldest remaining section of the city).15 Indeed, a conservation note produced by the ASI in 1912 for Banaras included observa­ tions and recommendations for Aurangzeb’s mosque, Lal Khan’s tomb, British military cemeteries, and a few other minor items, but nothing about the city’s temples, ghats, or waterfront buildings.16 The official selection of these sorts of places by Cole and the ASI also reflects, I think, a much older colonial frustration with this city. For Edwin Greaves, this frustration was expressed as the impossibility of enumerating everything – there is simply too much in Banaras, he said.17 For others, it was the inability to “pull back” and see the city in its entirety, to pull apart its density of structure and meaning and examine its constituent parts. The desire to encompass and explain everything in one sweeping, panoptic look, in other words. R. G. Hobbes, the author of the (unpublished) 1852 “Scenes in the Cities and Wilds of Hindostan,” drew an important contrast between what he called the “internal” and the “external” appearances of Banaras; the distinction between the public water­ front, with its ghats and tall buildings – the part that one could see – and the private streets, galis (alleyways), temples, and houses behind – which one could not.18 This a distinction commonly repeated in practice, with many attempts at photographic recordation and other collections of popular “views” of the city being dominated by the perspective from the river. Quite apart from the waterfront images of William Hodges, one might point to the watercolors and sketches of Robert Smith, c. 1815,19 or the 12-page panorama of the Banaras ghats painted in the Company style at about the same time.20 In James Prin­ sep’s famous 1831 Benares Illustrated, for example, it is really only the view of Thatheri Bazaar, “the widest street in Benares,” and that of a brahman teaching, that depart from such views of the waterfront, while the Banaras photographs of Samuel Bourne are consistently taken from a high vantagepoint to look down upon the riverfront ghats (or, in some cases, from the river itself).21 This is a standardization of a way of seeing Banaras, from Hodges to Prinsep to Bourne and onwards to the 20th-century posters, postcards, and etchings that reproduce these self-same views ad infinitum.22 Even the Kashi Tirtha Sudhar Trust – a local body dedicated to the upkeep of the city’s monumental heritage in the 1930s – focused its efforts on the ghats alone.23 It is a seeing and a specific kind of not-seeing that presents the city’s waterfront as its only face, while the rich urban fabric of the muhallas, the streets, and alleyways behind elude recordation, enumeration, and further thinking about. For Cole and Marshall and many others besides, if the waterfront of Banaras was unsuitable to conservation measures, then the remainder of the city – where the mass of its temples lay, many half-hidden from the casual walker of the back alleys – lay simply unconsidered.

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But I promised you a second reason why the temples and palaces of Banaras were largely absent from the archive of colonial conservation. Here the expla­ nation turns from the invisibility of the Hindu city to the relative visibility of Banaras’s built Islamic heritage, and from the realm of culture to that of law and, specifically, differing conceptions of ownership. Act VII of 1904 was principally a legal mechanism deployed by the colonial state in order to gain some measure of physical control over a historical structure, either by bringing it into government ownership (through purchase or appropriation) or creating an agreement of custodianship with a recognized local owner that would allow the colonial state to act in what it considered the building’s best interests. In this respect, Act VII had more in common with legislation such as the Land Acquisition Act (Act I of 1894)24 than it did with colonial initiatives in educa­ tion or cultural reform, both of which were closely linked to advancing specific notions of Indian culture and society. Act VII rendered many of the temples and nearly all of the waterfront palaces of Banaras legally invisible to the colonial state under Act VII, because in many cases they were held in some form of private (or established) ownership, or under the terms of an extant trust, that could not be interfered with in absence of specific evidence of misuse or mistreatment. Such evidence, moreover, was hard to come by when people used these structures as living quarters or for everyday religious purposes. Structures of an Islamic origin, however, were subject to a form of collective ownership (as discussed in chapter 13) and had often been supported by a waqf (charitable trust) or land grant that no longer existed.25 Following the first performance of prayers, mosques were officially relegated to God, with the provision that all Muslims may make free use of the structure for the purpose of worship thereafter. Custodianship of the mosque and the waqf that governed its upkeep was then also transmitted to an appointed mutavalli.26 Regardless of the historical exigencies that may have disrupted the viability of the waqf, this basic legal arrangement, and the notion of custodianship through the muta­ valli, was always intact. As such, the Act could exploit an essential dichotomy between, on the one hand, a person who looks after a space and, on the other, those people who make use of it. This was a dichotomy not normally seen in instances of private ownership. In other words, the Act ignored the question of land ownership altogether in these circumstances and instead focused upon negotiations with an individual the colonial state could recognize as holding some form of responsibility for its operation and maintenance. This process of recognition, moreover, was one defined by the colonial state in such a way that allowed for various forms of trusteeship: the person so recognized could have been appointed at some juncture, or had inherited the job, or could be gen­ erally recognized by a local community to hold that position. There were limits, of course. The colonial state was unlikely to negotiate with a mendicant found occupying an old tomb, for example. Nevertheless, in many cases the procedure for recognizing the trustee was straightforward. It will be useful to examine at least one instance in which Act VII was successfully extended to a structure in the city of Banaras to illustrate this.

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Between 1926 and 1931 the colonial state negotiated the extension of Act VII protection to Banaras’s most visible mosque, the Dharahara (or Alamgiri) Masjid atop Panchaganga Ghat. The mosque dates from 1669 and the reign of Emperor Aurangzeb and is built on the site of the Bindumadhav temple (which is now located across the street in a relatively nondescript building).27 The Brit­ ish government considered the mosque to have been a “badshahi” building (that is, they recognized that it had belonged to the Mughal emperor) and that it had been in the constant use of the city’s Muslim population since that era, even though, at times, it had proven less popular than other mosques in the city, given its location away from the city’s Muslim enclaves. Moreover, the ASI had iden­ tified the structure to be of the highest importance for conservation in Banaras as early as 1912. The reasons given for this included its lofty minarets, which were thought to add significant visual interest to Banaras’s “picturesque” waterfront vista, but also because the mosque was a reminder of the “strict Muhammadan tendencies of the last great Mughal Emperor [and] as such it is an interesting land-mark in history and architecture.”28 In 1916 the British government offi­ cially recognized Shahamat Ali (aka “Achchoo”) as the mutavalli of the Dhar­ hara mosque because he held in his possession an imperial Alamgiri farman (a grant or edict) that appointed his ancestor, Mullah Khan, as the mosque’s first khadim.29 This document’s existence simplified the process of negotiation between the state and Shahamat Ali considerably, and when Wali Muhammad, a rival claimant to the hereditary position of mutavalli, brought a lawsuit against Shahamat Ali, it was quickly dismissed through normal civil procedure, allowing the Act VII negotiation to move forward.30 Indeed, Shahamat Ali was able to produce a “proof of genealogy” that included references to his ancestors as they appeared in various British judicial and municipal documents, with copies of relevant documents in Urdu, Persian, and English. For example, Shahamat Ali’s grandfather, Sheikh Sakhawat Ali, was mentioned in a Sessions Court order of 1846 that names him specifically as mutavalli of the Dharahara Masjid.31 The point here is that this was just the sort of documentary evidence that the ASI needed to claim that an authoritative “owner” (as they defined the term to include a mutavalli) existed for them to negotiate with. Yet the possession of the farman also allowed Shahamat Ali to claim for himself certain traditional privileges when it came time to negotiate the Act VII agreement, as well as to safeguard the mosque as an active part of the city’s Muslim community. Shahamat Ali understood that the farman gave him the right to collect a small fee from visitors who accessed the mosque’s rooftop for a view of the city (this is a practice that is still in place, although the fee now usually borders on the extortionate) and insisted that this right be written into any agreement. He also insisted that his rights of “Imamat” never in future be restricted or modified, and that the rights of Muslims who use the mosque for prayer remain fully intact.32 The government had little option but to agree to these stipulations. And when Shahamat Ali demurred from contributing finan­ cially to the mosque’s upkeep, claiming poverty, the ASI again had little choice but to agree to fund all repairs on his behalf, and only with his prior approval.33

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Figure 15.1 View of Banaras from atop Dharahara Masjid, 2017 Image supplied by author

There were certainly instances in Banaras when the colonial government found that no such documentary evidence of trusteeship existed for buildings in use by Muslims (or in the care of Muslims), such as the monumental Sharqi-era tomb at Bakaria Kund.34 In such cases it became straightforward for the colonial state to claim these structures as “ownerless” and thus gov­ ernment property, thereby obviating any need for negotiation with a local caretaker. Indeed, in Banaras, at least, the vast majority of monuments that the government brought under Act VII’s purview in the first two decades of the Act’s operation were deemed “ownerless” or “government property” at the time of their listing. The late 18th-century tomb of Lal Khan, a highranking official in the government of the Raja of Banaras, was placed under Act VII protection without any form of local negotiation because it was offi­ cially located in the Cantonment, atop a strategic ridge near the Ganga that had been appropriated by the Indian army. It was, thus, already in the pos­ session of the imperial government.35 The colonial state also seems to have considered itself to be the de facto owner of sites associated with the presence of the British dead. Thus the central government already viewed the grave of Colonel Pogson – an orientalist scholar and a church dissenter buried in unconsecrated ground near the Oudh and Rohilkhand Railway line – and the memorial for British officers killed in the 1781 uprising of the Banaras raja,

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Chait Singh, located not far from Shivala Ghat, to be already under British protection, by virtue of a previous act of physically interring a British body, when enquiries were made about protecting these sites.36 Obviously the notion of “ownership,” whether defined in the conventional sense of a land-owner, or as a trustee, was the central aspect of the extension of Act VII to a historical structure. But what if a group held strong claims to a traditional form of custodianship over a historical structure that con­ flicted with the documentary evidence that the ASI so preferred under Act VII? This was the case with Banaras’s Arhai Kangura ki Masjid, the subject of the next section.

Notes 1 In his History of India, J. T. Wheeler sees the destruction of Sarnath as emblematic of the demise of Buddhism, and rise of Brahmanism, on the north Indian plain by the 7th century. See J. T. Wheeler, The History of India from the Earliest Ages, vol. III (London: Trubner & Co., 1874): 359–60. 2 One such report, dating from 1900, enumerated the amounts spent on historical conservation work by the NWP&O PWD from provincial funds for the previous 13 years. It included exactly zero rupees for Banaras, apart from some basic maintenance work done at Sarnath and a special project on the Mughal necropolis at Fatiman Bagh. See Progress Reports of the Epigraphical and Architectural Branches of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh for 1899–1900 (Allahabad: Government Press, n.d.) 3 Sherring begins his history of Banaras in Vedic-era antiquity, for example. See his Sacred City of the Hindus: 1. 4 Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1876): 460. 5 One of the key arguments of Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars. 6 See P. Coute and J. Leger, Benares (Paris: Editions Creaphis, 1989); G. Mitchell and R. P. B. Singh, eds., Banaras: The City Revealed (Mumbai: Marg Foundation, 2006); as well as this useful resource: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/The_Varanasi_ Heritage_Dossier 7 The comprehensive accounting of the city’s temples is N. Gutschow, Benares: The Sacred Landscape of Varanasi (Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2006).

8 Greaves, Kashi: chap. 1.

9 Parker, Hand-book of Benares: 4.

10 Sherring, Sacred City of the Hindus: 26. Indeed, the sheer repetitiveness of these texts, their inter-quotation and partial plagiarism of one another, is remarkable. Nothing published, by Europeans most especially, about Banaras around the turn of the century could really claim the slightest innovation or revision on these triedand-true characterizations. They compose, in essence, a wholly static discourse. 11 See Cannadine, Ornamentalism.

12 Greaves, Kashi: 53.

13 Cole, First Report of the Curator of Ancient Monuments: 17, ccvi.

14 Ibid.: xlv.

15 BL, IOR, P/6834, Archaeology Proceedings, 1904, August, No. 9, Notes by the

Director-General of Archaeology in India, J. H. Marshall, to Sec. to Govt of India. 16 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 73, File 245, “Conservation Notes at Benares” dated 20 March 1912, by Gordon Sanderson. 17 Greaves, Kashi: 60.

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18 BL, IOR, Mss Eur B260, R. G. Hobbes, “Scenes in the Cities and Wilds of Hindostan.” 19 See, for example, his exquisite rendering of Panchaganga Ghat and the Dharahara Masjid, c. 1814, as pictured from the opposite riverbank. BL, IOR, WD2089. 20 BM, acquisition no. 1860,0728,0.675, “panorama of Benares.” 21 Bourne’s most famous photograph of Banaras, depicting Manikarnika Ghat from a high angle, with the five-spired Baba Mashan Nath temple to the left, is clearly captured from atop the nearby Umraogiri fortress at Jalasen Ghat. See BL, IOR, Photo 752/15(46). We see this image reproduced again and again, in a Tuck’s postcard, for example, and in a news service photograph dating to 1922 held by the Library of Congress, to name but a few. See also W. Pinch, “Hiding in Plain Sight,” in Dodson, ed., Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories: 101–6. 22 See also the notion of the “limited gaze” of the “Gangascape” in N. Sinha, Com­ munication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s (London: Anthem, 2012): esp. 41. 23 See Benares and its Ghats. For more information on this organization, see Desai, Banaras Reconstructed. 24 See T. V. S. Row, ed., The Land Acquisitions Act (Act I of 1894), with the case law thereon (Madras: M. E. Press, 1907). 25 This is not to say that Hindu temples were not similarly “owned” in some instan­ ces, having been dedicated to a deity and supported through a trust structure that was often considered as “private.” The difference here is that in the case of the mosques in the city the trusts had somehow dissolved. For a parallel discussion of Act VII and the Hindu temple, see D. Sutton, “Devotion, Antiquity, and Colonial Custody of the Hindu Temple in British India,” Modern Asian Studies, 47, 1, (2013): 135–66. On Hindu religious trusts, see Birla, Stages of Capital: 99–102. 26 The general principles that govern this are discussed in A. Ali, The Law Relating to Gifts, Trusts, and Testamentary Dispositions among the Mahommedans (Cal­ cutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1885): 232–42. 27 K. N. Sukul, Varanasi Down the Ages (Patna: 1974): 157. 28 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 73, File 245, “Conservation Notes at Benares” dated 20 March 1912, by Gordon Sanderson. 29 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 65, File 63, G. B. Lambert, District Officer, Benares, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 26 Feb­ ruary 1916. 30 UPRAV, Varanasi Collectorate Records, List 7, Box 8B, File 109, office note, n.d; Urdu petition of Wali Muhammad, dated 21 November 1930. 31 Ibid., “proof of genealogy” note, 3 January 1926. 32 Ibid., Shahamat Ali to District Magistrate, Benares, 20 January 1926. 33 Ibid., draft agreement, c. 1930; office note 7 March 1931. It is unclear why negotia­ tions took so long – lasting about five years – to bring the mosque under Act VII. Partly it was Shahamat Ali holding out for his demands, but equally it seems that the paperwork was mishandled at the local level, requiring a restart of negotiations. 34 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 65, File 63, G. B. Lambert, District Officer, Benares, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 26 Feb­ ruary 1916; List of monuments noted in appendix of PWD manual of orders [n.d.]. 35 UPRAV, Collectorate Records List 4, Box 22, File 68, office note, 8 January 1910. Although Banaras’s Collector did have to negotiate with the Commander of the Allahabad Brigade who wished to maintain a “clear field of view and fire.” 36 UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 65, File 63, draft list of monuments, [n.d.].; list of monuments noted in appendix of PWD manual of orders [n.d.]. Pogson’s tomb remains near the railroad and is now a minor religious site, with devotees coming to ask Pogson “baba” for favors.

16 A Sharqi mosque in Banaras

The Arhai Kangura ki Masjid is one of two monumental Sharqi-era structures in Banaras that remain largely intact, the other being an open pillared tomb, probably of a prominent Sharqi governor, that can be found in Bakaria Kund, a former reservoir close to the northern limits of the city in Adampura (this site is known as Battis-Khambha). The Arhai Kangura mosque is a large stone struc­ ture, constituted by a central prayer hall of about three storeys in height, as well as an imposing propylon, flanked like other Sharqi mosques with two corner towers that act as minarets for the call to prayer. Unlike the larger mosques in Jaunpur, however, this building contains little ornamentation and the dome is clearly visible above the central façade. There is also a columned hall to either side of the central chamber, and to the right side a much later addition, which also includes the area for ablutions. A large ornamental gateway, which looks rather more Sharqi in its ornamental details, sits opposite the mihrab and is marked by a combination of (“Hindu”) post and lintel construction above the doorway with a proper (“Islamic”) compression arch above. It is unclear whether the walls that would have fully enclosed the mosque were unfinished at the time of building, or whether they disappeared at some point in the past. For the British, at least, the origins of these two structures, two of the oldest in Banaras, were in the late 19th century something of a mystery, owing partly to the apparent re-use of structural material in their construc­ tion. But observers always viewed the tomb and the mosque as linked, owing to their close proximity to one another, as well as their physical similarities. As such, the characterization of one was usually repeated for the other. The pillared tomb at Bakaria Kund was described by the missionary Matthew Sherring as a “Buddhist ruin” on the basis of stylistic affinities between its stonework and that found at nearby Sarnath. Muslims, he noted, only “occupied” the site.1 In 1909 Edwin Greaves, of the London Missionary Society, described the Bakaria Kund tomb as “Mahommedan,” but empha­ sized its evident composition of pillars belonging “to a much earlier period,” with carvings that reminded him of the Dhamek stupa at Sarnath. The dome, he speculated, was probably a late addition to the structure.2 Both men drew similar conclusions about the Arhai Kangura mosque. Sherring noted that while it unquestionably exhibited an Islamic style in the arrangement of its

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structural members, it was also clearly composed mostly of materials belong­ ing “to an epoch far more distant than the Mohammedan invasion.” Sherring thought that this structure had probably originally been a Buddhist mon­ astery, then converted to a Hindu math (school), before its current incarnation as a mosque: “we are inclined to think that both Buddhists and Hindus have made use of the same materials in different eras, and that, in fact, the mosque is a mixture of three styles namely Buddhist, Hindu, and Mohammedan.”3 Greaves simply repeated this characterization, as did Anton Fuhrer, writing for the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in 1891. Indeed, Fuhrer asserted that the mosque’s square columns, found in its upper story, were of “Buddhist workmanship,” and that upon the roof of the second story a long Sanksrit inscription had been found, dated to c. 1190 CE, which recorded the erection of temples, tanks, and religious schools in the city.4 It is curious that this mosque and tomb were so often characterized as con­ stituted principally of spolia,5 given that in nearby Jaunpur the Sharqi-era mos­ ques were widely understood as original compositions of a composite IndoIslamic culture (even the Lal Darwaza Masjid, characterized so often as the most “Hindu” of Jaunpur’s principal monumental structures, was seen by Fer­ gusson and others as something wholly original). But the assignation of nonIslamic origins to these buildings, despite the clear cultural importance and usevalue that these structures had for Banaras’s contemporary Muslim community, served a specific purpose. For missionaries such as Sherring and Greaves, the recovery of a Buddhist architecture in Banaras was at one level just a re-invoca­ tion of architectural histories that conformed to the tired colonial narrative of the Islamic despoilment of Hindu (or Buddhist) places of worship. But these men were also asserting that in these older, northern parts of the city the evidence of Buddhism’s disappearance could be made to conform to a narrative of ongoing religious change, as noted in Part I. That is, if Buddhism was an integral part of Banaras’s ancient history, this fact both undermined the notion of Kashi, or Hindu Banaras, as perpetual, and held out the hope for a further religious change in this central, representative city from Hinduism to Christianity.6 The Arhai Kangura ki Masjid possessed, therefore, potential symbolic value, as an emblem of Banaras’s varied religious histories. Bringing it under a government Act VII conservation order would prove to be particularly problematic for local authorities not just because of this symbolic value, but also because the mosque’s custodianship was dispersed among the local Muslim population in a way that was unrecognizable to the colonial state, and which in turn made the legal requirements for extending Act VII protec­ tion to the structure essentially impossible. This rendered the mosque a space with not just historical significance for Banaras, but revealed its con­ temporary, lived, sociocultural importance. *** The Arhai Kangura ki Masjid first came to the central government’s attention, following the passing of Act VII, in a 1916 ASI “inspection note” on Banaras

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authored by the Archaeological Superintendent, J. A. Page. Page noted that this structure was clearly of the same “time and style” of those Sharqi monuments at Jaunpur, and thus “well worthy of conservation,” and that its unique character in Banaras should be preserved as an emblem of that city’s long and varied history. He thus recommended it for notification under Act VII, although he noted that “agreement with the representatives of the Muhammadan community frequenting the mosque will be necessary in the matter of its appropriate repair.” In this respect, the mosque was in a poor condition, however, having been badly damaged by the repeated heavy application of whitewash and various kinds of paint. These should be care­ fully removed, and he further recommended that the “modern lamps” be replaced with one of “Saracenic pattern,” that the “modern clock” be placed elsewhere, and the infilling between columns placed there for a “zenana” be removed to bring the prayer hall back to its “original” state.7 When Page’s note finally made its way to the office of the Commissioner in Banaras, it was the winter of 1920, and the government took the first steps to have the Arhai Kangura mosque declared a protected monument. The Dis­ trict Magistrate, R. F. Mudie, approached a recognized mutavalli about the prospect of extending Act VII to the mosque under his care, and, apparently, he readily agreed. (This was, it should be noted, right about the same time that the Sharqi mosques of Jaunpur were brought under Act VII protection, and so it is likely that the structures were targeted all together by the ASI’s leadership). It is not exactly clear what happened next. Mudie tells us in a letter of 14 April 1921 that “certain notorious non-cooperators” had taken advantage of the situation, claiming that Christians were attempting to seize control of the mosque. As a result, many of Adampura’s Muslim residents decided to call a hartal (strike), but instead resorted to marching, some 500­ strong, to his courthouse to demonstrate their displeasure with the govern­ ment’s plan. Mudie spoke to them, he wrote, but to no avail. He could not convince the gathered men of his good intentions. As a result, he recom­ mended that the government drop the proposal to protect the mosque, “at least for the present,” and allow the local residents to undertake any needed repairs to the structure on their own.8 Given the dominant characterizations of the Arhai Kangura and its related structures by Sherring and Greaves, one could hardly blame Adampura’s Muslims for their suspicions. The notion in Banaras that a mosque had once been a Hindu (or some other religion’s) structure was a potentially dangerous one, given the city’s long history of strife over disputed religious sites. But there was much more at work here. The following year, in August 1922, Banaras’s District Officer, J. H. Darwin, reported that as nothing had yet been done to conserve the Arhai Kangura he had requested that the mutavallis (now there appear to be three, rather than one!) allow the government to step in to make the necessary repairs. These men agreed, but before repairs could begin they sought to consult the community for objections. Two formal objections were duly received, which Darwin

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dismissed as largely irrelevant: the assertion that Muslims could themselves take care of their mosques, as they had done over many centuries, was clearly contradicted by the current state of things. But Darwin was apparently a cau­ tious man, as he sent the Deputy-Collector, himself a Muslim, to investigate further. Here is what this man (whose name is not given) reported back: On its merits the objection [that Muslims can take care of their own mos­ ques] has no force. On the other hand some leading gentlemen (Mahom­ medans) of the mohalla have met me and they simply pity these bigoted objectors: they positively want the mosque to be brought under Govern­ ment management, as Mahommedans are not able to repair it properly. … I can never believe that the local Mahommedans will undertake the repairs as indicated by Mr Page. The general feelings were certainly very acute when Mr Mudie took up the matter. Now the feelings in general have sobered, as can be seen from the fact that this time hardly 30 persons came round [to the courthouse] as against over 500 in Mr Mudie’s time. When I say this I don’t mean that there is absolutely no feeling on the subject: there is, but it is in a very weakened state.9 These “bigoted objectors,” it appears, were members of the Ansari commu­ nity, or what were then called the “Julaha” – the low-caste, highly impover­ ished community of weavers who made up the vast majority of the northern reaches of the city, and who were often active in Banaras’s emerging sociopolitical protest movements. The Julahas were also, as Gyan Pandey has so persuasively shown, often stereotyped as irrational and prone to violence against the state and its interests.10 The “leading gentlemen,” in contrast, appear to have been landed Muslims, and potentially owners of the looms on which the Ansaris worked, and who often sought government favor. What is key, however, and becomes increasingly clear during the course of this corre­ spondence, is that there were numerous mutavallis – or rather, guardians – of this mosque, some perhaps self-appointed from within the community of the Julahas, and others who took an interest in it from among the wealthier inhabitants of Adampura. For certain, there was no one person for the colo­ nial state to authoritatively negotiate with here. In his response to Darwin’s report, Banaras’s Commissioner seemed to have had little appetite in courting further unrest over the issue of protecting the Arhai Kangura, suggesting to his superiors in the provincial government that “students who wish to study the [Sharqi] period can go to the monuments in Jaunpur.”11 The ASI, however, was not so easily convinced of the Arhai Kan­ gura’s disposability. The ASI Superintendent again visited the mosque in December of 1922 and reported to the United Provinces Public Works Department that it was “an exceedingly good specimen of the Sharqi period and eminently worthy of protection.” This time, though, he spoke to an “old man” by the name of Mir Muhammad Nawab, whom he thought was possibly a mutavalli and probably one of the “bigoted objectors,” as he was “certainly

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not” a “leading gentleman” of the neighborhood. Mir Muhammad felt that it might be possible to move forward with Act VII protection.12 Without overcomplicating the remainder of the story, Banaras’s Deputy-Collector was again dispatched to Adampura, where he found the situation largely unchanged. Popular opinion among the vast majority of those who frequented the mosque remained against allowing the government to intercede in the mosque’s upkeep. But one thing that had changed was that this community had collectively raised a fund for repairs and had already spent some Rs 400 on the structure. This, Darwin believed, was “in itself a strong indication that they do not wish Government to undertake conservation work on their behalf.”13 On hearing this news, the ASI Superintendent expressed his obvious disappointment, but also noted that he would be “pleased to give advice” to the local populace, asking that they do nothing without first asking him.14 Repair work was later reported to include another heavy dose of whitewash. There are other examples of this sort of refusal to allow Act VII protec­ tion to be extended to a mosque in Banaras. The Ganj-i Shahidan Masjid, for example, which many observers thought had been constructed by Mahmud of Ghazni from a selection of “Hindu pillars,” while of limited aesthetic interest, was nevertheless deemed important enough by the ASI for a regime of conservation by the colonial state, owing solely to its apparent age. In this case, however, any measures imposed by government (including the removal of whitewash) would have to be agreed with the private owner, Haluh Khan, who apparently objected to the potential of this site entering into the English tourist circuit following its restoration, thereby destroying its character as a mosque for local people.15 At the heart of Act VII of 1904 (and in the writings and actions of Lord Curzon) there was little recognition that Indians could themselves provide for the maintenance and protection of the historical structures of importance to them. This was, in fact, the very impetus behind this legislation. In the case of the Arhai Kangura ki Masjid, we have, I believe, not just an example of bureaucratic failure; that is, the inability of the ASI or the Collector of Banaras to find a suitable mutavalli with which to negotiate. This story is also a forceful illustration of the use of the transactional nature of Act VII by a local Indian community to assert a form of ownership of a historic site – a claiming for it, in essence, of a different sort of historical narrative than might have been ima­ gined for it through colonial conservation and the workings of the ASI. That is, the regular worshippers at this mosque wished it to remain an everyday Islamic space, even if a whitewashed one with an old clock and an inappropriate set of lamps, rather than, potentially, a symbol of the city’s Buddhist, or Sharqi, past, or indeed of the largess of British governance. Act VII’s consultative mechan­ isms brought such iterations of local meaning to public scrutiny, to be sure, but it was the Julahas of Adampura who committed this small act of defiance; to say for themselves, no, we will do it in our own way. ***

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I have been to the Arhai Kangura mosque once before a few years ago, with my friend Chris. But it is a difficult place to find, nestled away in the back alleys of Adampura. It took us more than an hour to find then, and about the same time this year – just me together with a thoroughly lost and confused rickshaw-wallah in tow. He has no idea where he is as he has come recently from Bihar and has never been to Adampura before. This is the northern part of Banaras. Its poor part. Its predominantly Muslim part. There are no tourists here, just a lot of closely huddled concrete buildings in poor condition. Mud restricts your movement through the street, as does construction debris and piles of other rubbish. But it is in these streets that the oldest of Banaras’s extant buildings survive – several mosques and tombs of the Sultanate era, the remains of a Mughal caravanserai, and some old and thick stone walls. I was once told that if you kicked the dirt of Adampura with your feet you would inevitably expose some shards of northern black polished ware. I have tried once or twice, but never successfully. All I get is dirty feet. The door to the mosque that I eventually happen upon is a different one from last time – it is much smaller and looks almost like a hole in a wall. But when I enquire of the men sitting under the large tree nearby I am told that this is the right place, and so I duck my head and proceed inside. I am welcomed with some enthusiasm, and brought by a retinue of old men straight into the mosque courtyard. I had heard that this place had been recently captured by Wahhabis, and so I was somewhat fearful that I would not receive a welcome at all, but this is most certainly not the case. These men are proud of their mosque, and when I tell them that I am a professor of history from America, and that I would like to look around and take some pictures of this beautiful structure, I am led on the full tour, including up several impossibly narrow staircases to the roof to look at the courtyard from above. I am not great with heights. During our tour they are happy to point to the mosque’s fine compression arches and brightly painted mihrabs. It is Ramadan now, and in a few days it will be Eid. The caretakers are stringing lights in preparation for a night-long recitation of the Quran that is taking place tomorrow. The only restriction to my visit, I am told, is that I must leave before prayers begin in the early afternoon. The mosque gets its name – “arhai kangura” (“two and a half kanguras”) – from the unique decorative detail set above its imposing qibla wall (which contains a niche indicating the direction in which to pray to Mecca), on its dome, and atop its principal gate. It is hard to explain what a “kangura” is. Online Hindi dictionaries will tell you that it is a crenelle or crenature, as though that is of some kind of help. The best I can do is to say that it looks sort of like three spades on an ace of spades playing card all shoved together, although one of them is cut in half top to bottom (the spade, I suppose, is intended to look something like a dome). The mosque dates from the 15th century, to the era of the Sharqi Sultanate based in Jaunpur, and its style is largely, although not entirely, consistent with the mosques and tombs of this time that one finds in that city. It is composed of massive stone blocks, and the ornamentation is muted, although quite beautiful. If there were further

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pillared halls around the courtyard, they no longer exist, and it seems as though the residential buildings have gradually hemmed in the mosque. I need my wide angle camera lens to capture its façade. After the tour, sitting on the floor in front of the minbar (preacher’s pulpit), I am told by a younger member of the group that the people of the neighbor­ hood take good care of the mosque, ensuring that it is painted regularly and swept clean (the mosque is still, even today, not under Act VII protection). Indeed, there is a fresh coat of peach-colored paint on all the walls and pillars that was not here the last time I visited. We talk for a while about the historic nature of the mosque and the large community of Muslims in Banaras. The older men sit nearby and listen. He also tells me that the mosque is inhabited by djinn (ghosts) – not bad djinn, mind you, but good ones. They also take care of the place and pray here. As an illustration, he tells me a story:

Figure 16.1 Main gate, Arhai Kangura ki Masjid, Banaras, 2010 Image supplied by author

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The man we hired to paint the walls last year was a Hindu of the neigh­ borhood. The mosque’s custodian told him that he must come here every day to paint only with good intentions of doing a good job and also with a pure heart because of our religious differences. The painter agreed. But one day he arrived, and he was drunk, and was asked to leave by the custodian. That man died in his sleep the next day – struck down by the djinn as punishment for his indiscretion. I take this as the cautionary tale that it most surely is intended to be, and I let him know that my intentions here are purely good. This I certainly hope they, and the djinn, understand. —Banaras, August 2013

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Sherring, Sacred City of the Hindus: 271–6.

Greaves, Kashi: 74–5.

Sherring, Sacred City of the Hindus: 310–12.

Fuhrer, Monumental Antiquities and Inscriptions: 207. Fuhrer may simply have

been repeating Sherring’s description of the Sanskrit inscription, or perhaps saw it himself. I have been to the mosque several times now but I have never seen it, despite asking. Given the religious sensitivities of the city, it is perhaps little wonder. It must be emphasized here that the re-use of older structures being supposed here was in fact imagined by Sherring and those who came after him. Both the BattisKhamba tomb and the Arhai Kangura mosque are very clearly original structures built during the Sharqi era from local Chunar sandstone. On this point see Guha, “Material Truths and Religious Identities.”

UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 73, File 245, J.

A. Page, “Inspection note on certain monuments in Benares,” 26 December 1916. Ibid., R. F. Mudie, Offg. District Magistrate, Benares, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 14 April 1921. Ibid., J. H. Darwin, District Officer, Benares, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 23 August 1922. Pandey, Construction of Communalism, chapter 3. UPRAV, Varanasi Division Records, Different Depts, List 1, Box 73, File 245, draft, Benares Commissioner to Sec. to Govt, UP, PWD, 30 August 1922. Ibid., Superintendent, Muhammadan and British Monuments, Northern Circle, to Sec. to Govt, UP, PWD, 10 December 1922. Ibid., J. H. Darwin, Collector, Benares, to Commissioner, Benares Division, 11 February 1923. Ibid., Superintendent, Muhammadan and British Monuments, Northern Circle, to Sec. to Govt, UP, PWD, 20 March 1923. UPRAV, Varanasi Collectorate Records, List 4, Box 22, File 68, Lalu Shyam Lal, Assistant Engineer, Benares, to Collector, Benares, 23 November 1911.

17 A further note on whitewash

Whitewash is a low-cost combination of slaked lime (calcium hydroxide) and chalk, applied liberally to buildings throughout India. In colonial accounts of historic structures, the mention of the presence of “whitewash” should be read essentially as synonymous with the building’s owners’ or custodians’ character as “neglectful.” Whitewash is deemed a form of “disfigurement” and “barbarity” of the highest order. In Henry Cole’s first report on India’s architectural heritage, published by government in 1882, there are literally hundreds of references to whitewash, and dozens that characterize its use in this manner. An example, taken more or less at random, from the Sarkhej Roza, a tomb complex dating to the 15th century near Ahmedabad: Tomb and Mosque of [Sufi saint] Ganj Buksh at Sirkhej: … The masonry of the whole of the building is literally smothered with whitewash, and unless the removal of this barbarous disfigurement can be arranged for, the building will never be seen to advantage, or be worthily treated. … Tomb of [Sultan] Mahmud Begurra and his Queen Raj Bai at Sirkhej: … The floor of the building is of black and white marble, but no care is taken to keep the place clean, and the neglect and the whitewash which, as elsewhere, is omnipotent, render the place unattractive in spite of its good design and ornamental details.1 In inspection notes taken by the Archaeological Surveyors tasked with evalu­ ating the condition of historical buildings, the recommendations of action made for conservation to be taken by local Public Works Department per­ sonnel routinely suggested “the removal of whitewash” as a matter of course. And sometimes with a sense of urgent necessity, and even (surprisingly, for the penny-pinching colonial state) “at any cost.”2 It seems that colonial officials objected to whitewash principally because it had the effect of obscuring architectural detail. Their ability to see through, to the structure of things, was being denied. But the removal of whitewash was equally a process fraught with danger. The use of acid to eat through the whitewash might also tear into the porous stone beneath, if not washed off

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quickly enough. And thus the removal of whitewash was a double victory for the British, a display of conservationist skill as well as of architectural connoisseurship. In a partial Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) report dating from 1906–07 that I found in the University of Chicago Library, Archaeological Surveyor W. H. Nichols bragged that Mr. Clarke himself, the Assistant Engineer stationed in Jaunpur, undertook the difficult (and tedious) work of removing whitewash from the intricate stonework of the Atala Masjid. It was, he noted, “the great triumph of the year’s work” and that “those who remember the mosque as it was a year ago would hardly recognise it now.” The mosque’s prayer chamber, in particular, was, he claimed, “completely transformed by the exposure of the delicate carved ornament, and the colour scheme which is admirably carried out by the selection of different shades of stone, varying from yellow to red and dark grey, for the different architectural features.”3 Of course, whitewash was in common usage in contemporary structures built by the British, such as to coat the interior walls of standard-plan office blocks and to seal the model homes for workers in Cawnpore’s factories.4 And thus its utility in certain contexts was certainly recognized. But perhaps more than anything, what the British objected to was the way that white­ wash brought a historical structure into the present day and marked it as a living space inhabited and utilized by India’s population. Integral to Cur­ zon’s view of conservation had been the colonial sense that, in many cases, historical structures under government protection, whether situated in iso­ lated villages or congested urban settings, were to be in essence removed from their everyday use and placed in a sort of stasis, as symbols of parti­ cular historical moments or historical trajectories. This was certainly John Marshall’s view, as the Director General of Archaeology, who once com­ mented that “as a general rule, no mosques or other buildings, which have once been the property of Government [and which have been restored to their original state] should be handed back to the Muhammadans, and that prayer in them should only be permitted subject to strict regulation …”5 And so while the shaded stone work of Jaunpur’s Atala Masjid may have been covered from the colonial eye, the presence of whitewash was perhaps more unsettling because it signalled a more nefarious presence – the pre­ sence of Indian forms of everyday use and, indeed, a form of preservation and caring for the future of a historic structure.

Notes 1 Cole, First Report of the Curator of Ancient: cxlviii.

2 Ibid.: cxxii.

3 Archaeological Survey of India, Annual Report, 1906–7 (Calcutta: Superintendent

Government Printing, 1909): 10–11. 4 BL, IOR, P/2199, NWP&O PWD Proceedings, 1884, May, No. 10, specifications for police station; and BL, IOR, P/7820, UP Municipal Proceedings, 1908, March,

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No. 26, Messrs Cooper, Allen, & Co., Cawnpore, to Sec. to Govt, UP, 29 January 1908. 5 BL, P/6600, Archaeology Proceedings, 1903, August, No. 9, Memorandum on Conservation and other Archaeological Work in the Bombay Presidency, 5 June 1903, J. H. Marshall, Director-General of Archaeology. The current-day stand-off between the ASI and Delhi’s population over the religious use of Firoz Shah Kotlah is the subject of A. V. Taneja, Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

18 The ruins of now

An intrinsic part of Banaras’s contemporary charm, if you will allow me the use of that word, is its ruins. They provide a patina of real age to a city that claims for itself a hoary antiquity and yet was mostly constructed in the 19th and 20th centuries. For me, they also provide the overwhelming sense of a history that is just about to disappear with the city’s push towards infra­ structural modernization and the embodiment of a more western commercial sensibility. The experience of walking the streets, lanes, and ghats, as I have done now for some 20 years, is to recount the rapid changes taking place here, and to track the disappearance of older structures with every passing year (often to be replaced by homogeneous air-conditioned mall architecture,1 as in the case of the recently built Shapuri Mall on Chowk Road, only a few hundred meters from Gyanvapi mosque). Ruins now give me the sense that the past has not yet been entirely left behind, but it is a precarious sense, and so I hold on to these ruins in my imagination, knowing that each visit to them might be my last. Indeed, I feel that each glimpse of unstandardized brick is like a gift these days. Taking a rickshaw along the Assi to Godaulia road I often look out for the collapsed houses and old wooden doors that hang at various angles and crane my neck to see the current condition of Cooch Behar Palace, in Bengali Tola, which every year seems to slide more and more into a kind of glorious disrepair. I realize, as well, that in writing all of this I might be taking a dip in the vast lake of Orientalism; it is potentially a re-invocation of the colonial valorization of ruins that I have spent many years of work trying to deconstruct. I understand my difficult, even contra­ dictory, position here: I do not wish to see Banaras maintained as a sort of urban decrepitude, nor do I wish to see it full of Starbucks and parking lots or, indeed, aspiring to be a second Powai. Ruins here in Banaras are produced by several identifiable processes. The first is legal. Many properties in the old city are subject to multiple, compet­ ing claims of ownership (usually through contested inheritance) and are undergoing some sort of court proceeding. Many are in boundary disputes of one kind or another with their neighbors, and many have also been sub­ divided among multiple branches of a family, who may now be only remotely related to one another. In each case, there is little impetus to invest huge sums

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of money into a building that one might not actually own. Perhaps the best example of this particular problem can be found not in the old city, but out in the civil Cantonment. There the old Church of St Mary was built in 1815, intended for the use of the Company’s administrators and military officials. It was substantially enlarged into its current neo-Palladian splendor in the 1820s by James Prinsep, then resident in the city. Over the past several decades the church has developed significant problems, however: an open roof, buckling floors, crumbling plaster work, and disintegrating wooden features. All of the church’s brass plaques were stolen some years ago as well. Why? Because the church is the subject of a long-running dispute between the Church of North India and the Anglican Church. This, at least, is the explanation that I have been given on multiple occasions by the resident caretaker. And nobody wants to spend money on the church’s upkeep in the absence of clarity about who owns the structure. The second process that contributes to the creation of ruins is a lack of funding and expertise. Few individuals here in the city possess the resources to maintain a large old house, and fewer still are able to access the kinds of specialized artisans required for good-quality repairs and restorations. This is so even for the Maharaja of Banaras, for although he does make some modest investment in the upkeep of the palace at Ramnagar, the works are singularly of a poor quality. And a third element here are weak municipal institutions, poor oversight, and a lack of funding from local conservation bodies such as the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and in general a lack of awareness at a local level about the value of historical structures.2 It need not be repeated here that a great many of Banaras’s waterfront hotels are recent constructions that replaced older structures in contravention of law, and that one in particular violates no less than three levels of law (federal, state, and municipal!) that restrict new con­ struction along the river. These buildings are considered a fait accompli by the city’s managers and other politicians, not least as they are significant sources of legitimate and illegitimate income. The place where conservation and architectural heritage debates are most visible, unsurprisingly, is the riverfront. Here, many of the city’s iconic 18th­ century palaces have partially crumbled. The fortress-palace of Chet Singh, at Shivala Ghat, remains vacant and unrestored. The site of Raja Chet Singh’s short-lived rebellion against Warren Hastings in 1781, this structure was, until the 1920s, a housing complex for the destitute descendants of the Mughal prince Jahandar Shah. Since then it has been home to many cricket matches played by the local boys, and the cards games played by their fathers. Trees have again sprung from among the brickwork (after an exercise in pruning about a decade ago), several more of the ornamental balcony screens have fallen since the last time I was inside, and the domed pavilions marking each corner of the structure have disintegrated further. The building is now back in the possession of the Maharaja of Banaras who, I have heard, hopes to turn it into a hotel. To the north from Chet Singh, one corner of the Ganga Mahal

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palace collapsed entirely during the rains a few years ago, although it has now been partly rebuilt in a more modern fashion and with cut-rate materials (despite assurances made to the contrary). At Balaji Ghat, a series of col­ lapses of the main palace structure in the late 1990s endangered the entire area, and during one such incident nearly a dozen pilgrims on the ghat below were killed by falling debris. Restoration efforts are ongoing, but much of the structure has been repaired in a haphazard and inappropriate fashion (what I call the “hideous white box” sits atop the building, like an extended middle finger to the rest of the city). Further still to the north, near Nandu Ghat, where tourists rarely, if ever, tread, the steps leading to the river have entirely collapsed in on themselves. Several of the waterfront palaces have in recent years been saved from imminent loss through their conversion into luxury hotels. The Hotel Guleria (just north of Panchaganga) is one such example, but the most obvious and important is the palace-fortress of the Raja of Darbhanga, which sits a fiveminute walk to the south of the main ghat at Dasashwamedh. The palace was for many years vacant, its woodwork and plaster details crumbling further with each rainy season. But over the past decade and a half, the Clarks Hotel Group (now 1589 Hotels) has been renovating the structure with a view to converting it into a luxury hotel. Now known as the “Brijrama Palace,” the hotel opened its door to guests just a couple of years ago and offers an extraordinarily high standard of accommodation and services, quite out of the reach of most Banarsis and tourists alike (myself included). What can one say about this process? On the one hand, Darbhanga Palace still exists. It has not fallen down or crumbled into oblivion. During its renovation, I was once led through the building by the construction manager, who pointed out to me the care with which plaster moldings were being repaired (and replaced) on the basis of examples in the palace that remained intact. Local sandstone was being used to replace the original blocks that had been destroyed. He spoke about the paintings on the ceilings in some rooms which he was documenting and wished to save, or recreate, if permitted to do so by his corporate bosses. I came away from that visit with the real sense that he was taking care to pre­ serve what could be preserved and to sympathetically recreate that which could not, all with a view to bringing the palace back to its former glory. It was hard to argue with him. But on the other hand, it is quite clear to me that most people will never see this place. Few could afford to, at more than $300 per night (indeed, I have not been inside the palace since its renovation was completed). There are no plans, as far as I know, to host cultural events open to the public here, or to conduct other such community-minded initiatives. Equally, much of the original palace structure on the higher, rear floors was entirely replaced with a modern concrete frame (though with a stone façade) which includes an additional level in the back that is likely not, strictly speaking, legal. Atop that storey is a line of water tanks and air-conditioning units which, I am sure, make life miserable for those who live in the buildings just behind, their view of the river now lost forever. This was explained to me

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as “the necessity of economics:” the cost of the renovation was spectacularly high, and it would not have been a profitable venture without the additional rooms for paying guests that extra storey permitted. Ultimately, I have to say that the palace renovation, in its entirety, was a victory for the developer over the interests of the community in which the structure is embedded. Elsewhere, the ruins of the British presence in the city crumble further with each passing year. The magnificent old cemetery at Chaukaghat, full of early British monumental tombs, has become incredibly overgrown. Trees have pushed apart many of the sepulchers so that the stone facings have fallen away, exposing the brick and mortar substructure to the elements. The monumental obelisk that serves as a memorial to the four British men killed in the 1799 uprising of Vizier Ali Khan is now difficult to see from the foliage that crowds all around it. On this visit, a large green apple, still attached to the branch of a nearby tree, sits at eye level, obscuring the plaque that mem­ orializes these men’s deaths. Elsewhere, the ornamental elements of the graves have now mostly been lost, and the inscriptions identifying the dead are often missing or are worn and difficult to read. The city has recently built a latrine for truck drivers outside the cemetery’s main gate. But still, despite the latrine, I love to come to this place. It reminds me of a history that I know well and the impermanence of any attempt to memorialize the past. At least once a year I try to clean off the gravestones of those close to James Robert Ballan­ tyne, the principal subject of my first book. His wife Violet is buried here, as is one of his daughters. The grave of Francis Wilford, orientalist and madman, for whom I hold a particular affection, is here too, although I have never found a marking that identifies it. He is now truly as forgotten as his works of Sanskrit scholarship. Perhaps only I even care about these things any longer, and sometimes, I have no idea why I do. In Banaras there is also another kind of ruin, which is rather particular to this place and defies most of our attempts at theorizing and contemplation. It is a kind of composite ruin: part ruin of the past and part ruin of the present, brought together by a series of common legal and economic factors. It is, in fact, a ruin that appears not unlike a particularly poorly constructed layer cake. The best example of this phenomenon stands just to the south of Man­ ikarnika, the main burning ghat, at Jalasen Ghat. At its base, two storeys of imposing sandstone compose the historical layer. Constructed in the late 18th century, the fortress-palace (pushta) of the gosain mendicant-soldier Umrao­ giri was home to a sizable retinue of armed men at one time, and the seat of a trading empire that stretched well into the Deccan. The ghat itself was ori­ ginally considered as an extension of Manikarnika and played an important role in the city’s cremation industry as the point at which the dead were first immersed into the river.3 In a photograph from 1869 held in the British Library,4 the ghat is portrayed as home to a bustle of activity. Pandas (gen­ ealogical priests) and hawkers sit out front awaiting their customers, some on raised platforms under their umbrellas. Additional wood for cremations and a variety of building materials are piled up against the fortress itself, which

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Figure 18.1 Memorial obelisk, Chaukaghat Cemetery, Banaras, 2018 Image supplied by author

appears to be in good upkeep. These days, however, the fortress and the ghat are in significant disrepair, and the ghat itself is rarely used except as a dumping ground for cremation-related rubbish and as a staging ground for the touts who intercept tourists curious about the funeral pyres. Goats also seem to like it here. The front balconies of Umraogiri Pushta are piled high with river silt, while brown and greenish liquid flows slowly out from the main front gateway, staining the sandstone façade and ghat below. The ghat itself is broken in many places. The whole structure is, in short, a mess. Yet crowning this historic building are a further four storeys of low-quality, adhoc, contemporary brick buildings. Some are faced with yellow, blue, or white plaster, while others remain exposed as bare brickwork. Some of these addi­ tions have balconies, and most possess small, barred windows from which cloth curtains often flutter in the wind. Electrical lines are strung across the

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buildings, and waste water pipes emerge here and there before diving incomple­ tely towards the ghat below. Families live in these brick boxes, mostly as renters. Many work in small shops that dot the neighborhood around Manikarnika that service both pilgrims and the families of the dead. Real estate in this central part of the city is enormously expensive, and buildings rarely change hands. Smoke from the burning ghat constantly befouls this place. There is, in fact, very little here, about this sort of ruin, that is charming after all. Jalasen is not the only building like this on the riverfront. Behind the pink sewage-pumping towers nearby at Lalita Ghat, a similar (and in many ways, far more architecturally interesting) 18th-century gosain fortress is slowly being transformed with new brick and concrete to provide the accommoda­ tion for a range of local workers and their families. Questions about who owns what, what is rented, and what is occupied no longer make much sense here. I know the family that claims ownership of the building, but they have no rights here any longer. Once, a few years ago, while looking around the topside of the building, a young man asked me if I wanted my horoscope prepared. He took me into his simple room, a single window looking down onto the ghat below, ancient wooden trusses holding up the stone slab roof, and he told me that my future was surely a bright one. I was, instead, won­ dering about the future of that building.

Figure 18.2 Jalasen Ghat, Banaras, 2012 Image supplied by author

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Jalasen, like Lalita, is the product of a city that has not yet figured out how, or indeed whether, to preserve its historical infrastructures; or rather, a city that has not developed a strong, realizable plan that can safeguard its unique and important architectural heritage while ensuring that the people who make their homes here, in this place, have the opportunity for affordable and secure housing. Jalasen is paradigmatic unplanned urban development, destructive in so many ways to the unique urban fabric of this waterfront, which also so clearly serves a need for lower-cost housing that is not met in other ways. Banaras is, and has always been, I would venture, both a historical landscape and a contemporary one, and Jalasen is the embodiment of the opposing claims that such landscapes can make. To find the proper balance, to safe­ guard “heritage” and create a vibrant, livable city, is a challenge of unim­ aginable difficulty. —Banaras, November 2018 *** Postscript. Re-reading these words above is to recognize a world that has now been hammered into oblivion. It is early July 2019, just nine months since my last visit to Banaras, nine months since I wrote those paragraphs, and everything here has changed. I have glimpsed many unstandardized bricks today, but they are not gifts. They lie scattered on the ground in great heaps, together with all manner of household effects. I have identified the most successful producer of ruin in this city: it is government. In the last weeks of 2018 bulldozers and men armed with hammers and chisels moved in to the neighborhood behind Jalasen Ghat to create a modern Hindu space for future pilgrims to the city. This is a project known as the Vishwanath Corridor. The idea is to open up the congested urban fabric around the city’s most important Hindu temple – the Kashi Vishwanath mandir – to allow for easier access for the thousands of pilgrims who come here every day. An excavation is taking place here: the slow process of removing everything that was inhabited by people – houses, shops, rest homes for the dying – to leave only a landscape of temple and Hindu religious infrastructure. As a result, the corridor has displaced hundreds of people from diverse caste, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. Indeed, the modern struc­ tures atop Jalasen Ghat are being cleared to make way for an open-air “Sanskritik Kendra,” or a center for the study and promotion of the Sanskrit language and its religious culture. The Vishwanath Corridor is an attempt to reorder the relationship between religion and modernity in this city. Varanasi is an old place, as is well known, with plenty of small alleyways, crowds, old buildings, and unplanned devel­ opment. Many accounts of the project in the Indian press equate the corridor with cleanliness, order, administrative transparency, and new forms of tech­ nology and infrastructure. The press also characterizes this investment in specifically Hindu space as something new, or rather, as something not seen in India for hundreds of years. This is supposed to be a rehabilitation of Hindu

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space as paradigmatically modern. It is also a misunderstanding of what makes this city a special place. It is not its temple infrastructure, or its reputed antiquity and sacredness, but rather the ways that people come together to inhabit a composite space – of attachment to neighbors and a sense of home, and relationships to work and family and the local chai stall. I can never look upon ruins in the same way again. The ruminative space of the ruin is an existential luxury that I cannot afford anymore.5 —Banaras, July 2019

Notes 1 On homogeneity and aspiration in architecture, see D. A. Ghertner, Rule by Aes­ thetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 2 Although I was very pleased to see (in the Fall of 2019) the ongoing, high-quality conservation work of the main building at Sampurnand Sanskrit University (i.e. Benares Sanskrit College) overseen by INTACH. 3 See Pinch, “Hiding in Plain Sight.”

4 BL, IOR, Photo 984/(12), B. G. Bromochary.

5 See my essay on the Vishwanath Corridor project on PLATFORM: M. S. Dodson,

“Excavating the Vishwanath Corridor in Varanasi, India,” https://www.platformspa ce.net/home/excavating-the-vishwanath-corridor-in-varanasi-india.

Afterword Infrastructure and the dismantling of the colonial self

In “Building Dwelling Thinking” Heidegger outlined a new sort of ethics for architecture. This was to be the practice of designing and building structures that eschewed the distant, depersonalized forms of industrial capitalism (think “housing” for example) in favor of one deeply rooted in a nurturing and supportive relationship to self, other humans, society, and the earth itself. (In this respect, Heidegger is generally thought to have been a critic of modern­ ism à la Le Corbusier, even though both clearly possessed varying degrees of fascist sympathies).1 For Heidegger, to design and construct a building should ideally have been a form of revealing the self, of telling truths, of cultivating, and of taking care. Heidegger’s ideas here posit an identification of “to build” and “to dwell” (both notions that he finds in the old German verb bauen). To dwell upon the earth, in Heidegger’s sense of that word, is an act intimately linked to the act of being. “To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal,” he writes, “it means to dwell.”2 Dwelling encompasses the acts that compose human life in all their social and cultural complexity, as well as the connection between humanity and the materiality of the earth itself. To dwell is to feel at home, in other words, and to feel a profound connection with the materials and the forms of building that Heidegger found wanting in the consumable “products” of contemporary architecture.3 It seems to me, somewhat in retrospect, that what this book has attempted to do has been to take Heidegger’s basic idea of an ethic of architecture and building, as it relates to the core aspects of inhabitation and life-making, and convert it into a historiographical tool. That is, I have been interested in ana­ lyzing the infrastructure of the historical city by reversing the general direc­ tionality of an ethic (as a form of directing or prescribing) and to ask instead what if one looks at building, and indeed restoring, or re-building, as an embodiment and expression of the selves of the past? To look to see what the practice of designing and building reveals about how Britons, and Indians, who dwelled on the earth in this particular time and this place? Stated another way, what I have sought to do has been to write about infrastructure and buildings in a way that has emphasized less what people in the past claimed for their architectural pursuits – as projections of an ideal and attempts at transforming the colonial subject – and has instead focused on the ways in which building,

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and caring for structures, is intimately expressive of self and community. The mechanism that I have used to point towards that lived, inhabited, sense of what a building means to a community, rather than what is claimed on its behalf by the colonial state, is the transactions that were undertaken between individuals and governments; the bureaucratic transaction being, in essence, productive of meaning at the level of the everyday. This is, I think, a departure from the ways that colonial architecture in India has conventionally been analyzed.4 Much of this architecture, most especially that of the early 20th century, was essentially what I would call “emblematic” or even “performative.” That is, as buildings, or edifices, they were intended first and foremost to enact certain kinds of transformations, to elicit certain kinds of outcomes, and to communicate certain kinds of values supposedly held by the colonial state and thus be representative of the colo­ nial self. In other words, this architecture self-consciously embodied an intentionality at transformation; a transformation of Indian social values, perhaps, or of political sensibilities. And this is what has taken our attention as historians – how the colonial state presented itself and its constructive program through building; how it wished itself to be interpreted, and its buildings to be “read” as texts. For example, the creation of a new capital city in Delhi between 1911 and 1931 under the supervision of Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker has been viewed most often through the rubric of the archi­ tects’ intentionality for their structures. New Delhi was intended to officially express a new sort of imperial ethos that was both forward-looking and combined traditional “coercion” with manufactured forms of “consent.”5 The creation of New Delhi was the British Raj’s answer to an apparently squalid and over-crowded Calcutta, but was also to serve as a “fresh start” on a new phase of specifically 20th-century empire. Leaving behind the sullied reputa­ tion of the Company’s extractive state, the Raj’s new capital would reflect an era of rule by consent, for the benefit of Indians and Britons alike. Indeed, one contemporary British writer optimistically thought New Delhi to be “a great and worthy monument of the cooperation of East and West.”6 I am of course skeptical of such claims. What is clear to me, though, is that advances in decentralized governance in India, coupled with the increasing agitation of nationalist groups, necessitated a capital city that could assert the symbols of an indigenized British power with at least a kind of lip service paid to com­ promise and co-governance. This is what New Delhi was intended to express, and, through its physicality, to bring about. Equally, in this book, I have taken pains to demonstrate the performative aspects of infrastructural improvement in places such as Banaras and Jaun­ pur. I have argued that the riot in Banaras in 1891 provided British colonial officials the further excuse (as if one was needed) to explicitly claim a civili­ zational impetus for their infrastructure projects, and for themselves the role of the colonial patriarch. Sanitation and water infrastructure was, in their telling, something that needed to be demanded and imposed on behalf of an ignorant population and an apathetic municipal board. Like Kipling’s bridge,

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then, the Banaras waterworks would serve in the British imagination as an expression of the energetic, enterprising, and forward-looking colonial self. It was also intended to be pedagogic, to demonstrate not just a form of civili­ zational superiority claimed for Europe but to transform Indian approaches to hygiene and technology; to cajole the non-modern Indian into a qualified form of colonial-modern subjectivity. In this rendering, the water towers of Banaras were intended to act like a teacher, with the residents of the city sit­ ting at their feet as students of modernity. Similarly, I argued that Lord Cur­ zon’s legislation governing the conservation of historical architecture was framed as a civilizational gesture towards an Indian inferior, and one that the British, by virtue of their own history and approach to governance, were uniquely qualified to make. Act VII was intended to help the British to tell a particular story about India’s past and also their own relationship to India’s future. A recounting of the intentions and prejudices behind Act VII has been a key element of this book’s modus operandi. Perhaps all of this is obvious. But it bears repeating that the analysis of such architectural projections need not be historiographical things-in-themselves. That to understand what the British colonial state intended to say for itself and the nature of its rule over India, through the production of architecture, conservation, and city planning, should be just the first step to our dismantling of it; to our understanding it first and foremost as a “performance” for both Indian and domestic consumption. As historians, we can certainly trace the impacts such intentionality had upon the built landscape and the imaginations of those who made their homes in India (whether temporarily or permanently), but I would like to suggest in these last pages that the historiographical challenge lay not just in understanding the limits of British colonial power, or the (in)ability of the colonial state to create meaning through the built environment. Our challenge, as histor­ ians, is, I think, to recognize that what the British said and did in India has pre­ determined, in important respects, the questions that we most commonly ask about the colonial state and its constructive impulses – that the colonial act of creating buildings and infrastructure still produces limits on the kinds of history that is written about such structures and the people who lived among them, through the archive that is left behind, certainly, and also in the physical framing of what we can now conceive as having been possible in the past. In this respect, my intention in this book has not been to simply lay out the colonial state’s constructive impulse as a series of ideological acts, but to point to the myriad different ways that Indians inhabited and cared for structures and engaged with technological/infrastructural change, in places such as Banaras and Jaunpur – places where the ideological stakes for the colonial state were often significant. In doing so I have eschewed the category of “resistance” (in the form of a riot, for example) to focus instead on the more mundane, but no less meaningful, ways that Indians thought about their cities and acted in accordance with their own and their neighbors’ perceived best interests, and to think about how Indians attempted to build a future city that better responded to their economic, social, cultural, and religious values.

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But I often think that such arguments are too fragmentary to matter much; too insignificant to change the way that most people perceive a structure such as the Bhadaini waterworks (that is, as an emblem of an engrafted colonial modernity and not a product of evolving municipal governance and local discourse). As a result, I would like to dwell for just a moment longer, in these last pages, on the notion of the “public work” as an emblematic and perfor­ mative act for the colonial state, to suggest, in another way, that the questions that we ask about it need not be the ones that tend to dominate our histor­ iographical attention. The British colonial state need not dictate what the act of building meant, or even how we might discern meaning at all. If a truly post-colonial history of the north Indian city is going to be written, it must recognize the power of the colonial state for what it was, not what the British thought it to be, and to search out the alternative invocations of self and community and building playing out within the shadows of an ostensibly colonial urban landscape. The “public work” need not just tell us about the hopes that the British held for the Indian future, in other words. Although equally, we should continue to reveal such works for what they most often were – devices that sought to paper over extractive and exploitative relation­ ships in the name of “civilization” and “progress.” *** The very notion of the “public work” implies a duty held by government towards the population that it serves; the responsibility to create works of infrastructure that promote a public good. In Adam Smith’s reckoning, it was a core duty of the sovereign to provide an infrastructure of defense and the administration of justice for the people, but also to facilitate the creation of such works that would prove “advantageous to a great society.” This included the infrastructure of transportation (roads, bridges, and harbors, for example) and of education, in particular. For Smith, an important reason that the “public work” fell to the sovereign was a sort of financial calculation: the cost of these works was such that they could never be made profitable to a small group of investors. Through the office of the sovereign, the costs of the public work could be distributed to the general population, as well as to those who would benefit most from it (in the form of weight-based tolls, for example). The public work was a collective undertaking, in other words, although necessarily facilitated by the administrative apparatus and fiscal power of government. But equally, Smith linked public works to the advancement of a civilization expli­ citly because they promoted the growth of economic activity and, thereby, the wealth and well-being of a country’s population. Public works were invest­ ments in a country’s economic future: roads and bridges for the movement of goods, skills training for a reliable and productive workforce, and so forth.7 In the context of India, Smith’s arguments may have underscored British thinking about the creation of infrastructure, but they also sat uncomfortably with the reality of a colonial context. The creation of Indian public works were in actuality linked principally to economic extraction and the betterment

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of British, rather than Indian, purses. This was a colonial enterprise, after all, and not a charity. And yet the idea of public works as a service to India remained at the forefront of discussions about all kinds of infrastructure pro­ jects. Nevertheless, public works were just as clearly part of the racist and paternalist project of “civilization building” in which notions of physical “development” in India became justifications for the continuance of unrepresentative governance rather than the natural outcome of the sort of good governance that Smith had envisioned. In other words, it took some bending of Smith’s basic logic to claim that public works were necessarily in the interest of Indians. This is just what colonial administrators did, however. The clearest articulation of this sort of British thinking about how public works figured into the economic and civilizational motives of colonial rule is Arthur Cotton’s treatise Public Works in India, which was published in 1853. This was intended to be an examination of “the principles upon which the material improvement of India should be conducted.”8 His assumption, from the outset, was that the East India Company had put little forethought into what sorts of building projects would best suit Britain’s imperial mission in India, and by extension, the improvement of Indian society. He was critical, for example, of the creation of the railways as a form of technology in and of themselves – they were little more than a technological fetish, in essence. Instead, he argued, it should be asked whether a particular infrastructural improvement will “hinder or help forward the welfare of India generally” and whether it was suitable to the conditions of the country.9 Cotton was scornful, moreover, of the way in which public works were currently undertaken in India: infrastructure projects were regularly carried out without sufficient engineering expertise, leading to the creation of expensive follies that may in fact hinder economic development in a region.10 Furthermore, the Company’s government, he argued, prioritized the wrong things. Rather than being focused on the collection of revenue by any means, it might consider instead what sorts of infrastructure would allow agriculture and commerce to flour­ ish. The wealth of India was not to be judged by how much revenue could be extracted from a district, but by the economic development of an area and the relative well-being of its people. Cotton was at ease mixing the language of moral progress with that of liberal expenditure and capital investment. He was, in this respect, a “gentle­ manly capitalist” (of sorts).11 Both India and Britain would benefit, he thought, from such improvements to infrastructure in the subcontinent that would allow the two to become bigger trading partners, opening India to further investment and creating new markets on both continents for goods consumption. India would, in this way, be developed into a world power (giving India “a share of her own advantages,” as Cotton noted),12 while Britain would no longer have to rely on slave-produced cotton from the United States, for example. And thus the moral impulse of Cotton’s treatise becomes all the more clear: the linking of more extensive commerce to Indian moral improvement was an old liberal imperial tactic (see, for example, John

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Bentley or J. S. Mill),13 but here it also served as an act of redemption for the British themselves: India’s progress would undoubtedly bring credit to Great Britain, but, also, no longer would Britons be “forced” to rely on the morally dubious raw cotton produced by a slave-holding society in order to generate their domestic profits.14 But to the languages of commerce and morality we should add that of paternalism. Cotton held little doubt that it was Britons, and not Indians, who would lead the way in the subcontinent’s material and moral progress, and he was clearly annoyed at such current circumstances that allowed for Indians to take the lead in works of construction. “Wherever you go,” he wrote, “it is the Native ideas that are in operation,” and was it not a wonder, he thought, that Britons should be “content to learn from” a people whose religious texts contained little but “drivellings” and “utter nonsense,” rather than stepping forward to teach them the ways of European engineering?15 Elsewhere, Cotton repeated the point and strengthened it: Britain, a country of some 25 million, was rich and able to “supply itself with a thousand things beyond the mere necessities of life,” while some 140 million Indians remained “immersed in ignorance and poverty.” Britain had very little to learn from India, Cotton concluded. And when it came to constructing the country’s infrastructure, the less a British engineer knew about India, or listened to Indians, the better.16 Indeed, in the practical construction manuals of the mid-19th century, intended for the Company’s “surveyors and overseers,” Indian construction techniques were routinely discounted as slapdash. In Notes on Building and Roadmaking, for example, Indian brickmaking and bricklaying is described, rather straightforwardly, as “bad.” Indian bricklayers are not much troubled by the “bond” (that is, how the bricks are positioned) and, given the inconsistent size of the bricks, walls are filled in with too much mortar and often with random rubble. The result, predictably enough, is “very bad work.” As such, British engineers needed to take great care in order to ensure that their Indian subordinates, most especially, undertook their work in the “proper” fashion.17 Cotton’s admonition to the Company’s state did not go unnoticed, and in 1854 the Governor General, Lord Dalhousie, created a dedicated Public Works Department (PWD) at the level of the imperial government. This department was intended to oversee construction projects fitted, Dalhousie noted, to the maintenance and administration of a “great empire,” as well as those intended to “increase the wealth, and promote the prosperity of the country.”18 During the first half of the 19th century, public works projects had been carried out in India by the engineers of the Indian Army, under the superintendence of the Military Board of each of the three Presidencies. For public works of a civil nature, the military would normally lend an engineer to the civil authority to help to oversee construction.19 With the exception of parts of the Yamuna and Ganges canals, the Grand Trunk Road, and some irrigation works around Madras, therefore, most of India’s modern infra­ structure was constructed by local bodies rather than the central, imperial

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government. With his 1854 directive, however, Dalhousie, in addition to creating an imperial PWD, also sought to place a chief engineer at the dis­ posal of each of the provincial governments. Thus public works were taken out of the hands of the military and put under the control of dedicated departments within provincial and imperial governments. Importantly, Dal­ housie made it permissible, for the first time, to build necessary infrastructure by the raising of loans, rather than funding them from current revenue.20 At about the same time, a dedicated college of civil engineering was established at Roorkee, which sits alongside the Ganges Canal, with further colleges sanctioned for establishment in India’s principal cities in the later 1850s.21 Dalhousie was inspired to his broad constructive, imperial vision, no doubt, by the completion of the Ganges Canal in the same year (and certainly not just goaded into it by Cotton, who remained a figure of suspicion to British imperial leadership even after the demise of the Company). The canal was described (rather repetitively) in both official and non-official sources as being without “parallel either in ancient or modern times”22 and as “a work which stands unequalled in its class and character among the efforts of civi­ lized nations.”23 The canal thus stood as a model to be emulated: the scale of the structure, the difficulty of the task, and the engineering and administrative skills used to complete its construction were all key talking points for the Company’s self-presentation, intended no doubt to buttress notions of its enlightened governance and ability to make a positive, material impact on India.24 This is not to say that colonial administrators did not view canals and other related infrastructure works as inherently profit-making endea­ vors – they most certainly did through the charging of water rates to cultiva­ tors and potential increases in agricultural taxation25 – but that their real utility lay in being “works of national distinction and honor” for Great Brit­ ain.26 John Stuart Mill, for example, clearly understood the Company’s initiatives to be both a restoration and improvement of earlier forms of infrastructure in India, and, in the case of metalled roads, an innovation of substantial merit. Most importantly, however, in a parallel with Cotton’s paternalism, Mill argued that in a country “like India,” it was government, not private enterprise, that needed to promote the development of industry, and that despite its reputation for penny-pinching, the Company had invested substantial sums that provided benefits to both Indians themselves and gov­ ernment coffers.27 *** It is November 2009, around midday, and I sit down at a sweets shop in Banaras’s Cantonment, a jarring 45-minute motorcycle ride from Assi Ghat. This motorcycle has seen better days, and it sags under the combined weight of me and a friend. For the past hour or so we have driven through the broken streets that lead north of the Cantonment, searching in vain for what I had thought was an old, small British cemetery dating from the 18th century. This would have been the first of the Company’s burial grounds, older than

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the large site at nearby Chaukaghat. A typical conversation with people on the street, while searching, goes something like this: “Bhai sahib, kya aap jante hai ki kabristan kahan hai?” “Udhar, udhar. Sidha.” “Vo puran kabristan hai?” “Zarur, yahan aspas sab chiz jaragrast hai!”28 When we do eventually happen upon a cemetery out here, what we find is not at all old, but rather a site of internment for the poor Muslims of the area. If this place had ever housed a British occupant, there is now no trace of him or her. The graves here are mostly freshly dug and earthen, humble, without markings. Many are for children. We speak to the caretaker for some time, and later we search the rubble near the cemetery’s walls and under the large banyan trees. The man’s children follow me, and I give him Rs 50 for his trouble before leaving. I noticed later a sign indicating that it cost little more than that to bury someone here. We have come back to Cantonment to refresh ourselves before returning to Assi, but also to have a look at a building I have recently become interested in. Our posteriors are stinging, and my spine aches. Cold drinks have arrived and sweat onto the plastic tabletop. We sit at a booth adjacent the wide entranceway, open to the busy street. We are nearly alone here – people with business in this part of the city prefer instead to escape the warm sun and the noise of the street and sit in the back of the shop. I gaze directly across at Banaras’s civil courthouse, designed and built under the supervision of John Begg, who had been the Consulting Architect to the Government of India a century ago. The courthouse bears the date of 1913, inscribed into a large slab high above the entrance. It is a large red-brick and white plaster struc­ ture, dominated by several tall towers, essentially Byzantine in appearance, and each topped with a dome and decorative arches, balustrades, and orbs. The front façade includes a number of arched windows and is punctuated by classical Doric columns. I bring out my camera and take a few pictures from the shop’s entrance stairs, mindful of the police who ostensibly manage the traffic here and guard this bit of Uttar Pradesh civil infrastructure. But I am disappointed, I tell my friend. The building is underwhelming from this view, and there is no way to photograph it properly. There are the ubiquitous electrical wires, of course, but trees have grown up in front and all but obscure the structure; parts can be glimpsed, but never the whole.29 The contrast with the first time that I saw an image of this building is striking. Several months before this visit to Banaras I had read the lavishly illustrated annual reports of the Consulting Architect to Government in the quiet, cli­ mate-controlled comfort of the India Office reading room on the top floor of the British Library in London. Handsomely bound, these reports were the intended memorials of the colonial state’s constructive impulse. The black­ and-white picture of Begg’s courthouse, in the report of 1912–13, presented

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the building from its front-right corner. Freshly completed, the structure’s pillared flank, front façade, and numerous towers are all clearly portrayed, standing alone against a featureless sky and a cleared, nearly antiseptic land­ scape.30 It was imagined then, I suppose, as a singular symbol of the ascen­ dency of British power and productive of a clear sense of British juridical and socioenvironmental order. The position of Consulting Architect to Government was established in 1902 and filled at first by James Ransome,31 before Begg took over in 1908. Jan Morris has interpreted the creation of this position as indicative of the increasing professionalization of building design in India under British rule, with trained architects from Britain gradually replacing local soldier-designers and PWD engineers in the design of major buildings.32 In the case of the Consulting Architect to the imperial government, his essential role was to design and oversee important architectural projects across British India, while also reviewing (and, if necessary, amending) the plans for smaller, regional buildings that exceeded a certain set amount of expenditure. The Consulting Architect was intended, then, to ensure a measure of excellence in building design across several levels of government.33 But excellence was often fleeting in the Raj’s architecture. Begg had written of his own disappointments at the courthouse building as it neared completion in early 1912. Owing to a “misinterpretation of the drawings,” the Roman “vase­ finials” intended to mark the end of the verandas had been multiplied and now dotted the structure’s entire roofline, surrounding the building and rendering it “more ornate” than Begg had desired. Worse still, the towers, when seen from the ground below, seemed to produce for the viewer an “awkward spreading effect,” rather than the intended “verticality,” with the aesthetic result, in Begg’s words, being “anything but happy.”34 And although Begg would later oversee attempts to correct this last issue, he was never satisfied with the result; one might say that the hoped-for authority communicated by “verticality” remained elusive for Begg’s courthouse. Indeed, in official correspondence that debated the value of employing architects, rather than engineers, say, for the design of government buildings in the early 1930s, the Banaras Civil Court was presented as an example of the sort of expensive folly that such specialists could sometimes produce.35 To be certain, it is a red-brick hodgepodge, even if it is still considered an important, if flawed, landmark of Indo-Saracenic architecture in northern India. Nobody, I imagine, notices the architecture of Begg’s courthouse any longer, even if you could see it clearly through the trees. His fretting over its finials and decorative vases, and the way that its towers appeared from the ground below, were all for naught. It no longer matters to anybody. The building’s red brick signals a government building dating from the British era, and little else. People come here to lodge civil lawsuits, or to defend against them; to find a lawyer or to consult one already found; to check on the courtroom schedule and question whomever they can find about the times of their appointments with court offi­ cials. This is all related to matters of inheritance, land disputes, property rights, business disagreements, broken contracts, and so forth. Many of the clients

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look drawn and worried; others are visibly angry; and a few resigned to the fate of waiting for God knows what. Raised voices are common, as are wags of the head and shrugs of the shoulder. This is a courthouse bustling with activity. On a typical day the area is packed full with people; motorcycles and scooters crowd the parking lot in front, presenting such a disarray of tires and metal and plastic that I seriously doubt whether you could extract your Hero Honda from here at midday. Policemen with their dandas (sticks) watch over all of this chaos with resig­ nation. People walk around the non-functional metal detector into the court­ yard (installed, no doubt, after a bomb blast occurred here in 2007, killing nine people) with impunity. Nobody is checking. Still sitting at my seat, drinking my cold soda, I noticed a metal trishul (trident) that had been hap­ hazardly fastened to the top of the courthouse’s left-front dome. It leans over at an angle, as though it is about to break loose and skewer an unfortunate pedestrian down below. It occurred to me only later that perhaps this building was attempting to hide itself, ashamed not only of its improper execution, but also aware of the fact that its time has now truly passed. As an emblem of the constructive colonial self, this building is not only a flawed one, but one to which few people now pay much attention. Historians might follow suit.

Notes 1 Le Corbusier was not a Nazi sympathizer like Heidegger, but still. See P. Davies, “Martin Heidegger (1889–1976),” The Architectural Review (11 April 2017), http s://www.architectural-review.com/essays/reputations/martin-heidegger-1889-1976/ 10018213.article, and, more provocatively, K. O’Connor, “Le Corbusier’s archi­ tectural fascism” (26 May 2015), https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2010-le-corbu sier-s-architectural-fascism. 2 M. Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971). 3 See in particular A. Sharr, Heidegger for Architects (London: Routledge, 2007). As well, see M. Cadwell, Strange Details (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). A very interesting examination of the notion of dwelling (“dwelling with” and “taking care”) and the archaeological record in relation to human mortuary practices can be found in P. Tonner, Dwelling: Heidegger, Archaeology, Mortality (London: Routledge, 2018). 4 Especially Metcalf, An Imperial Vision. 5 See D. A. Johnson, New Delhi: The Last Imperial City (London: Palgrave Mac­ millan, 2015). 6 “The Indian Masterbuilder,” The Times Literary Supplement, 27 November 1913, 565 [no author]. 7 A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 2 (London: 1776): Book 5.

8 Cotton, Public Works in India: v.

9 Ibid.: 1.

10 Ibid.: 6–7. 11 I am playing here on Cain and Hopkins’ notion of the finance- and investment-led impulse for British imperialism, as well as the implicit irony of it being at all

Afterword

12 13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30

217

gentlemanly. See the latest version of their argument in P. J. Cain and A. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2015, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2016). Cotton, Public Works: viii. Bentley, for example, writes: “Time, commerce, and our superior civilization, are unitedly urging the Hindoo shastras and their observances into the gulf of obliv­ ion.” See J. Bentley, Essays Relative to the Habits, Character and Moral Improve­ ment of the Hindoos (London: Kingsbury, Parbury & Allen, 1823): 341. The link for evangelicals in this time period seems to be a negative one, namely that the lack of free commerce in the Company’s territories would hinder the spread of Christian belief systems. See A. Porter, “‘Commerce and Christianity:’ The Rise and Fall of a Nineteenth-Century Missionary Slogan,” The Historical Journal, 28, 3 (September 1985): 597–621. Cotton, Public Works: iii. Ibid., 11–12. It did not seem to cross Cotton’s mind that Britain might have at least a little to do with India’s impoverishment. See ibid.: 52, 57, and much besides. For more on Arthur Cotton, see J. Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire (London: Simon & Schuster, 2016). Notes on Building and Road-Making, with rules for estimating repairs to tanks and channels; compiled for the use of surveyors and overseers in the Department of Public Works, 2nd ed., (Madras: Athenaeum Press, 1852): 57. Quoted in Great Britain, House of Commons, Reports from Committees, vol. IX, Session 5 December 1878–15 August 1897, “Report of the Select Committee, East India (Public Works),” (London: 1879): iv. This was not strictly the case with the Madras Presidency, though the details here are not relevant. For more information, see S. J. Pillai, Imperial Conversations: IndoBritons and the Architecture of South India (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006): 165. BL, IOR, Z/E/4/25/D44, East India Company General Correspondence, 1854–55, “Dalhousie, Lord, Formation of New Department of Public Works in three Pre­ sidencies minutes and proposals of respecting.” J. S. Mill, Memorandum of the improvements in the administration of India during the last thirty years, and the Petition of the East-India Company to Parliament (London: W. H. Allen, 1858): 66–7. “The Great Ganges Canal,” The Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal, XVII (1854): 329–30. Letter of the Lieutenant Governor, NWP, quoted in Minute of the Governor General of India, 28 February 1856, in Selections of the Records of the Government of India (Home Department), No. XIV, (Calcutta: 1856): 40. This, despite the fact that the canal was built essentially on Indian engineering principles. See Pillai, Imperial Conversations: 166. See, for example, C. H. Dickens, A project for canals of irrigation and navigation from the river Soane in south Behar, with plans and estimates (Calcutta: Public Works Department Press, 1861): 1. Mill also notes the profitability of canal and road con­ struction pretty much throughout the PWD section in his Memorandum: 52–75. Lieutenant Governor of NWP&O, quoted in Mill, Memorandum: 55. Mill, Memorandum: 52. “Sir, do you know where the graveyard is? Over there, go straight. Is it an old one? Of course, everything around here is old/decrepit.” The play here is on the word “jaragrast.” A photo of the courthouse, taken that day, can be found in my Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories: 155. J. Begg, Annual Report on Architectural Work in India, for the Year 1912–1913, by the Consulting Architect to the Government of India (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1913): Plate 20.

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31 See J. Ransome, Government of India Building Designs (no publ. info, c. 1909). 32 J. Morris, Stones of Empire: The Buildings of the Raj (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 [1983]): 24. 33 See the testimony of L. M. Jacob before the Decentralization Commission, 4 April 1908, in Great Britain, House of Commons, Sessional Papers, vol. 46, “East India Decentralization,” (London: 1908), 113/813. Note that in later years a Consulting Architect would also be employed by the various provinces. Frank Lishman was UP’s Consulting Architect c. World War I, for example, at which time he designed the new High Court in Allahabad. See F. Lishman, New High Court, Allahabad: Plans, Photographs and Descriptive Notes of the Building (no publ. info, 1917). Also, BL, IOR, L/F/8/17, No. 1269, Financial Department Records. 34 J. Begg, Annual Report on Architectural Work in India, for the Year 1911–1912, by the Consulting Architect to the Government of India (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1912): 16. 35 UPSA, Lucknow, List 53 (PWD 1921–44), Box 514, File 109E. Notes and Orders, 16 June 1931: 16.

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Index

accommodation 7–10; see also displacement “accretion” 10, 12 Act VII see Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904 Adams, G. see Magistrate of Banaras Agra 6–7, 72, 128, 141; infrastructure projects in 47, 85–6, 95 Akbar (Mughal Emperor) 32–3, 151, 170, 176 Alamgiri Masjid see Dharahara Masjid Allahabad 6, 77, 90, 97, 125, 181; infrastructure projects in 47, 85–6, 95 Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904 19, 32, 122, 128, 161–3, 165–8, 170–2, 177, 209; adoption and objectives 149–54; application in Banaras 179–80, 183–6, 189–90, 192, 194; application in Jaunpur 163, 166–8, 170–2, 177 Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) 149–53; activities in Banaras 179, 181–2, 184, 186, 189–92; activities in Jaunpur 127, 133–4, 162–3, 165–71, 197 architecture 4, 59, 142, 179, 199, 207–9, 215; Buddhist 189; Mughal 133, 147, 151, 176, 184, 189; Sharqi 127–33, 138–9, 163, 171–2 Arhai Kangura ki Masjid (Banaras) 186, 188–93, 194 Atala Masjid (Jaunpur) 126, 132–4, 169–70, 172, 181; restoration and protection efforts 144–5, 147, 163, 166–7, 197 Aurangzeb (Mughal Emperor) 32, 180, 184 Bakaria Kund 131, 185, 188 Banaras Division 2–3, 29, 76, 160

Banaras Eradication of Chaharam Society see Kashi Chaharam Nivarini Sabha Banaras Ganges Purity Society see Kashi Ganga Prasadhini Sabha Banaras riot of 1891 43–4, 47–9, 57, 59–60, 77, 83, 110, 209 and civilizational difference discourse 18–19, 41, 48, 52, 55, 208; scholarly interpretations 47 Banarsis 4, 10, 14, 17, 19, 40–1, 60, 66, 71, 85–6, 92, 100, 107–9, 115, 180, 201; and the 1891 riot 41, 46–9, 52, 60; and colonial stereotypes 52, 56, 71; elites 46, 107, 111; engagement with Banaras sanitation problems 66, 68, 81; resisting taxation 49, 107–8 Bayly, C. A. 7, 47, 73–4 Begg, John (Consulting Architect to Government) 8, 214–15 behri (local tax in Banaras) 81–2, 100 Bendeshri Prasad Kunwar see Rani of Barhar Bengali Tola Association (Banaras) 84 Bentham, Jeremy 26–7, 59 Bentinck, William (Governor General) 29, 149 Bird, W. W. see Magistrate of Banaras Bourke, R. (Lord Mayo, Viceroy) 29–31, 76, 94 Bourne, Samuel (photographer) 64, 182 British Parliament 27–8, 78–80, 106 Broun-Ramsay, J. (Lord Dalhousie, Governor General) 212–13 bureaucracy 3–4, 40; and architectural conservation 149–50, 153, 163; colonial 13, 15, 19, 25–6, 28, 78–79, 116; historiographical assessments 1–2; and governance 26–7 Burke, Edmund 78

232

Index

Caine, William Sproston (British MP) 106–7 Calcutta 7, 28–9, 67, 86, 116, 148, 208; as testing ground for infrastructural improvements 5–6, 96 capitalism 15, 39, 207 Cawnpore see Kanpur Chunar 151 civilizational difference 41, 47, 53, 64 see also civilizational superiority civilizational superiority 39–40, 209 see also civilizational difference Cole, Henry Hardy (Curator of Ancient Monuments) 146, 181–2, 196 colonial rule 2, 7, 14, 27, 211; transformative effects in India 3–4, 39–40; on urban level 41, 53 see also colonial state colonial state 25, 40–1, 47–8, 52–4, 56–7, 59–60, 64, 68, 87, 100, 105; constructive impulses 208–10, 214; and infrastructures of governance 5, 7–9, 11–12, 18–19; interaction with urban residents 1–5, 10, 13–16, 34–5, 49; and historical preservation 19, 122–3, 127–8, 132, 134–5, 143, 152, 155, 172, 179–80, 183–5, 189, 191–2, 196 colonialism 25, 40, 59 Commissioner of Banaras 3, 49, 52, 94, 100, 102–3, 110, 112, 117, 147, 160, 168, 170, 177, 190–1: D.C. Baillie 175–6; J. J. F. Lumsden 45, 76–7, 80; on infrastructural matters 67–8, 76–7; role in colonial administration 29, 31, 40 Cotton, Arthur 211–13 Curator of Ancient Monuments see Cole, Henry Hardy Curzon, G. N. (Viceroy) 31–2, 147; historical preservation efforts 122, 125–9, 134–5, 139–40, 148–50, 152–5. 162–4, 166, 192, 197, 209; and James Fergusson 128–33; visit to Jaunpur 122, 125–9, 132–3, 138, 162–5, 172, 175 Daniell, Thomas and William 138, 140–2 Decle, Lionel 116–18 see also tramway scheme in Banaras Dharahara Masjid (Banaras) 58, 161, 180, 184–5 disease 59, 63–4, 72, 81, 90, 142

displacement 7–10, 27 Dufferin Bridge 39, 58, 110 East India Company 6, 64, 139–40, 182, 200, 208; governing strategies in India 24–9, 32–3, 66, 211–13; rule in Banaras 7–8, 55; rule in Jaunpur 143–5 “engraftment” 12, 18, 48 Fergusson, James 128–33, 179, 189 FitzJames, F. 67, 84, 115 Foucault, Michel 12, 14 Freud, Sigmund 121–22 Fuhrer, Anton 133, 189 Ganga river 6, 39, 57, 116, 119, 185; in art 57; pollution 65–7, 84–6, 89–92; see also Kashi Ganga Prasadhini Sabha ghats 43, 45, 66, 85, 90–1, 94, 159, 179, 184, 186, 199–205, 213; and city infrastructure projects 110–11, 116, 118–19; as part of Banaras image 57–8, 64, 181–2; portrayals by Westerners 57–8, 64, 182, 202 Ghazipur 7, 29, 161 governance 1, 3–4, 7, 14–15, 19, 27–8, 32–5, 41, 48, 53, 65, 77–9, 94, 96–7, 108, 118, 134, 140, 142, 177, 192, 208–9, 213; infrastructure of 8, 10, 143 ; non-representative forms of 25, 27, 45–6, 211; municipal 1, 17, 30–32, 40, 65, 73, 80, 82–3, 210 Greaves, Edwin 47, 180–2, 188–90 Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, F. (Marquess of Dufferin, Viceroy) 84 haq-i-chaharam 9–10 see also Kashi Chaharam Nivarini Sabha; taxation Heidegger, Martin 207 Herzfeld, Michael 1–3 Hodges, William 55, 57–8, 64, 138, 140–3, 182 Hughes, A. J. 63, 84, 89–90, 104 hybrid institutions 7–8 identity 1–2, 15, 40, 108, 180; colonial state’s 18; local 40; national 78, 80; personal 18, 108; religious 100, 131, 172; urban 1, 18, 111, 143 Iftikar Khan, tomb of 150–1 “incipient citizenship” 1, 10, 14 Indian National Congress (INC) 77–80 Indo-Saracenic style 8, 215

Index Industry 6, 26, 59–60, 80, 125, 213; cremation 89, 202; weaving 6, 60 infrastructure 3–4, 6, 8, 17, 24–5, 31, 40, 99–100, 125, 143–6, 165, 181, 205–14; administrative 94; and colonial governance 10–15, 18–19; sanitary 63, 65–7, 76–77, 81, 83–6, 111–112; transportation 46, 117, 125, 210; water distribution 43–49, 83–6, 96–97, 208 Jama Masjid (Jaunpur) 126–9, 132–3, 140–1, 163–7, 170, 172; restoration and protection efforts 144, 163, 166–7, 169 Jaunpur advisory committee 122, 133, 162–71, 176–7 Kanpur 47, 95, 97, 99, 197; as example of urban growth 6; role in Ganga pollution 89–90 Kashi Chaharam Nivarini Sabha 9–10 Kashi Ganga Prasadhini Sabha 84–7 Kashi Sujan Samaj 84, 108 Kashi Tirtha Sudhar Trust 111, 182 Kipling, Rudyard 39, 208 “kutcherry dictionary” 25 Lal Darwaza Masjid (Jaunpur) 126, 132–3, 163, 166, 172, 189 land ownership 9, 183 see also mahalwari; nazul; zamindar localness 15, 35, 40 Lord Curzon (Viceroy) see Curzon, G. N. Lord Dalhousie (Governor General) see Broun-Ramsay, J. Lord Mayo (Viceroy) see Bourke, R. Lord Ripon (Viceroy) see Robinson, G. Lucknow 6–7, 47, 99, 128, 160 Magistrate of Banaras 3, 7, 31, 44–6, 57, 77, 105, 127; George Adams 99; James White 45–6, 48, 52, 63–5; William Wilberforce Bird 56 Magistrate of Jaunpur 127, 139, 143–5, 168 mahalwari 9, 33 Maharaja / Raja of Banaras 45, 77, 95, 160, 200; participation in Kashi Ganga Prasadhini Sabha 84–5; pleasure gardens of 147–8; uprising of Chait Singh in 1781 7, 55, 185–6, 200 Majid, Nawab Abdul 145, 163–5; custodian of Jaunpur mosques 125, 127, 133; relationship with ASI 166, 168–9, 171–2

233

Malaviya Bridge see Dufferin Bridge Marquess of Dufferin (Viceroy) see Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, F. Marshall, John 150, 163, 175, 181–2, 197 Messrs Robinson, Morrison & Co. 116–18 see also tramway scheme in Banaras Mill, John Stuart 26–9, 32, 34, 59, 153, 212–13 Mirza, Husain Muzaffar 175–7 Mirzapur 7, 8, 29, 151, 160 Mittra, Babu Bireshwar 4, 45, 91, 111; on representative governance 77–80; on sanitation in Banaras 81–7, 96–7; on taxation in Banaras 100–1, 103 modernity 2–3, 10, 19, 40, 122, 138–9, 205, 209–10; language of possession 64, 71–2, 74; and resistance 47–9, 55 modernization 1–2, 40; infrastructural 13–15, 47, 49, 199; in policing 56 mofussil 15, 24–5, 125 mosques: in Banaras 58, 106, 147, 179–80, 182–3, 188–95, 199; and historical preservation 161–72, 184, 189–92, 196–7; in Jaunpur 19, 122, 125–7, 130–3, 138, 140–1, 144–5, 147, 149; see also Alamgiri masjid; Arhai Kangura ki Masjid; Atala Masjid; Jama Masjid; Lal Darwaza Masjid Mughal Empire 7, 32, 128, 143, 147, 151, 170, 175–6, 200; architectural legacy in Banaras 141, 180, 184, 193; architectural legacy in Jaunpur 126, 131, 133, 140, 147, 170, 176 mukhtar (neighborhood leader, in Banaras) 8, 81–2 Mumford, Lewis 17–18 municipal boards 4–5, 30–1, 76, 94–7, 99, 104; in Banaras 4, 8, 43–6, 48–9, 63, 65–8, 76–7, 80–1, 83, 86, 94–7, 99–102, 104–12, 115–18, 161, 208; in Jaunpur 161, 166, 170–1 mutavalli (trustee / caretaker) 163, 171–2, 183–4, 190–2 Nawab Ghazi, tomb of 175–7 nazul (state-owned land) 9, 152,170–1 North-Western Provinces (NWP) 29, 32, 160 North-Western Provinces and Oudh (NWP&O) 34, 43, 63, 77, 90, 99, 107, 133, 149, 154, 181; decentralization policies 30–1, 76, 94–6, 146

234

Index

octroi see taxation Oertel, Frederick (engineer/architect) 125, 127, 163, 165 Pandey, Gyan 47, 191 Parker, Arthur 58–9, 180 picturesque 57, 123, 147, 164, 181; as ideological aesthetic 64, 140–3, 177, 181 pilgrimage tax (Banaras) 46, 86, 109–11 policing 7, 29, 48, 56–7, 76 Prasad, Raja Shiva 67, 77, 84 Prinsep, James (orientalist) 118, 182, 200 public works 29–30, 107, 145, 160, 210–12 Public Works Departments (PWDs) 31, 44, 67, 95, 149, 191, 196, 215; and administrative decentralization 95, 146; creation at the imperial level 212–13; and historical preservation 147, 151, 164–6, 168, 177, 179 Pugin, Augustus 59, 130 Raikes, Charles 32–4 Ram Halla Mandir (Banaras) 45, 52–3 see also Banaras Riot of 1891 Rani of Barhar 4, 44 Revolt of 1857 see Uprising of 1857 Robinson, Francis 8, 31 Robinson, G. (Lord Ripon, Viceroy) 31, 66, 102 ruination 57, 138–9, 142–3 see also un-ruination sanitation 13, 30–1, 40, 46, 63, 77, 86–7, 90, 107, 125, 146; legal framework in British India 97; and moderniza­ tion ideology 18–19, 40, 59–60, 208; schemes to improve in Banaras 65–8, 80–3, 111; Sarnath 149, 179–180 Scott, Clement 65, 181 self–government 2, 30–1, 102, 160 sewage 6, 11, 64–8, 95, 99, 109, 115–16, 204; and Ganga river 84–85, 89–90, 92, 116, 118 see also sanitation Sharqi dynasty: architectural legacy in Banaras 180, 185, 188–93; architectural legacy in Jaunpur 122, 125–34, 139–41, 144, 162–4, 167, 169, 171–2 Sher Zaman Khan, tomb of 175–177 Sherring, Reverend Matthew 54, 59, 64; on Banarsi architecture 131, 180, 188–90

Shi’a see also Sunni 127, 164, 171–2 Simmel, Georg 15, 138–9 Smith, Adam 82, 210–11 Sunni see also Shi’a 125, 162–4, 171–2 tahsildar (local tax official) 34, 94–5 Taj Mahal 128, 149 taxation 1, 4–5, 9, 11, 46, 81, 96, 104; and infrastructure projects 19, 77, 81, 85–6, 99–100, 111, 116, 213; local control over 29–31, 94, 97; as source of discontent 48–9, 67, 101–2, 106–8, 111; octroi 30, 46, 76, 97, 99, 101–3, 107, 109–11, 116 see also behri; haq-i-chaharam technoscape 39–40 tramway scheme in Banaras 115–18, 160 see also Decle, L.; Messrs Robinson, Morrison & Co. “transactional space” 10, 15 Tucker, H. C. (author of “Tucker’s Note Book”) 24–6, 35 un–ruination 140, 143, 148–9, 155, 162, 164; definition 134–5, 139 see also ruination Uprising of 1857 6, 106, 126, 160; influence on governance in India 27, 29, 32, 34 urbanism 3–4, 10, 15, 17, 112, 182 Uttar Pradesh 1–3, 17, 71, 214; Uttar Pradesh Regional Archive in Varanasi (UPRAV) 117, 159–61 Viceroy of India 85, 95, 106, 117–18; see also Bourke, R.; Curzon, G. N.; Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, F.; Robinson, G. Vishwanath temple (Banaras) 17, 54, 179–81, 205 waqf (Islamic trust) 147, 168, 183 Waterworks Act of 1891 96–7 White, J. see Magistrate of Banaras whitewash 10; as factor in architectural preservation efforts 127, 139, 163, 167, 190, 192, 196–7 Wynne, R. O. see Magistrate of Jaunpur zamindar (landlord) 9, 24, 32–3, 77, 179