A pan-Indian work on colonial history

Rosie Llewellyn-Jones is one of the most celebrated names in research on colonial history. Much of her work has had to do with Lucknow and she is in fact commemorated in Allan Sealy’s fictional Trotternama, the magnum opus set in that city, with her name being bestowed on a character – Rosie Llewellyn Bibi. A couple of months ago I was sent her latest book. Unlike her earlier oeuvre, this is a pan-Indian work. Titled Empire Building, The Construction of British India, 1690-1860, it deals with how the British got on with their major ‘construction’ projects, many of which we take for granted in present day India.

Exploring early colonial infrastructure

It is a wonderfully researched book, starting with how a mercantile enterprise became martial and then made engineers into architects and builders. This combined with revolutionary developments in aviation, orientalism, language, science, surveying, and a whole lot of other subjects, led to massive changes in India. Observatories, hospitals, hill stations, railways, schools and colleges, cantonment towns and communication facilities were the end results. Much of this was of course undertaken keeping East India Company interests in mind but the transformation of India was set in motion as a consequence. As Llewellyn-Jones concludes, the East India Company often got things wrong; but it got some things right too.

Commerce, Calcutta and more

Madras appears frequently in the book, though the bulk of it is written with Calcutta as the mise en scene. The time that the work covers, 1690 -1860, was roughly when Madras was more or less forgotten, with the cotton boom yet to push Bombay forward as the commercial capital. Calcutta emerges therefore as the place where many things happen. But Madras gets its fair share – the Madras Bank, the Observatory, the Trigonometrical Survey, and Madras Time all being covered. I wished though that there had been something about our General Hospital and the Institute of Mental Health, these being older than their Calcutta counterparts.

Abundant scope for further research

My greatest takeaway from the book however was how much more there could be done on Madras by way of serious research work, such being the scope that Llewellyn Jones throws open. Take for instance one of the best sections of the book which deals with the establishment of the East Indian Railway. In half a chapter the author surveys in masterly fashion the nitty gritty of the project. How land was surveyed and acquired for the tracks is fascinating. It was not just a takeover of countryside; each plot was measured, valued and compensation given, with enormous corruption on the side. A similar study on the Madras Railway Company would be invaluable. Llewellyn-Jones writes of how freight as opposed to passenger traffic was the principal consideration in Howrah and not Calcutta becoming the terminus. This was precisely why Royapuram was chosen as the equivalent here . The Madras Chamber of Commerce, whose members were all on Rajaji Salai wanted it that way.

Education in Madras is another topic that merits a serious study, with the College of Fort St George being a probable starting point.

The Making of Colonial Lucknow – an allied masterpiece

While reading Llewellyn-Jones, I could not help reflecting on another great Lucknow scholar, Veena Talwar-Oldenburg, and her path-breaking work titled The Making of Colonial Lucknow. The division of chapters in that study into planning, safety, taxation, and sanitation, among others, make it unique. Chennai could be a topic for a similar work. And for all this, the Tamil Nadu Archives, said to be the oldest in the world, is ideal as a resource. It is just that penetrating it, and getting anything out of it, is an experience by itself.

This appeared in The Hindu on March 5th 2024.

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