Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T00:20:02.643Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Urban Development and Death: Bombay City, 1870–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Ira Klein
Affiliation:
The American University, Washington, D.C.

Extract

Historians, statesmen, administrators, nationalists and others have disagreed sharply about the impact of modernization in the era of Western domination. Did Western rule provide the tools for Indian progress but did economically medieval, ‘other-worldly’ Indians fail to maximize the benefits of modernization and even thwart advances? Conversely, did Western imperialism systematically impoverish India by making it a ‘satellite,’ freezing the subcontinent into a neo-feudal social pattern while sucking up its wealth? Finally, is a ‘new revisionist’ interpretation correct that India experienced real if undramatic economic growth during the Western era and that notions of exploitation or Indian suffering induced by development were myths? Interpretations expressing either the great success and benign innovations of Western rule, or its exploitiveness both appear flawed, according to Bombay's modernizing experience. Bombay underwent a great expansion of wealth and became the source of India's new factory textile production, the hub of a great newwork of trasport and trade, and the cosmopolitan abode of wealth Indian merchants, industrialist and professionals, whose affluence, modernity, industrializing activies and eventual nationalist orientation distinguished them from a supine or neo-feudal comprador class, cooperating with Western masters in exploiting ‘natives’ for a myrmidon's share of the profits. Alternatively, Bombay's prosperity did not flow down to the masses; its modernization was complex, dynamically helping to produce progress and wealth, but for some decades impoverishing and destroying many lives. In the half-century of rapid development preceding the first world war, the great majority of Bombay's populace, its ordinary working classes, experienced significant declines in living standards, worsening environmental conditions and escalating death-rates. Diminished real income and increased mortality among Bombay's ordinary inhabitants warn against extrapolating from rising indices of material production an optimistic conclusion about the general human condition in the city or in British India.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

The author appreciates fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford-Rockefeller Program on Population and Development Policy, which facilitated work on this essay.

1 See, for example, Knowles, L. C. A., Economic Development of the British Overseas Empire (3 vols, London, 19241936), I, 351–2Google Scholar and passim; Coupland, Reginald, India: A Restatement (London, 1945), 52, 62 and passim.Google Scholar

2 For a synthesizing or ‘world’ view of the deleterious effects of ‘development,’ see particularly Frank, André Gunder, ‘The Development of Underdevelopment,’ Monthly Review, XVIII, 4 (09 1966), 1731CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weisskopf, Thomas E., ‘Imperialism and the Economic Development of The Third World,’ The Capitalist System (Englewood Cliffs, 1978), 500–14.Google Scholar For a moderate, sophisticated version of the idea that Western domination thwarted Indian development, see Chandra, Bipin, ‘Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History,’ Indian Economic and Social History Review, V (1968), 3577.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See, for example, McAlpin, Michelle, Subject to Famine (Princeton, 1983), 211–18 and passim.Google Scholar

4 Edwards, S. M., Gazetteer of Bombay City and Presidency (2 vols, Bombay, 1909) (hereafter Gazetteer), I, 120–1, 126–7.Google Scholar

5 Gazetteer, I, 514–20; II, 1011, 161–2.Google Scholar

6 Census of India (hereafter CI), 1901, X, P 4, 135Google Scholar; Gazetteer, I, 126–7.Google Scholar

7 CI, X, P 4, 130, 135; Gazetteer, II, 173.Google Scholar

8 CI, 1901, X, P 4, 135.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., 32, 134.

13 Ibid., 133.

14 Ibid., 133–5.

15 Ibid., 133.

17 Dobbin, Christine, Urban Leadership and Western India (Oxford, 1972), 913, 44–7, 5769, 98150Google Scholar; Karaka, D. F., History of the Parsees, 2 vols (London, 1881), 215–37, passimGoogle Scholar; Gazetteer, I, 238;Google ScholarCI, 1881, VI, 40.Google Scholar

18 CI, 1881, VI, 40.Google Scholar

19 Gazetteer, I, 213–14.Google Scholar

20 CI, 1901, X, P 4, 134.Google Scholar

21 Bombay Municipal Reports (Bombay) (hereafter BMR), 1885, 245.Google Scholar

22 CI, 1901, X. P 4, 134.Google Scholar

23 BMR, 1875, 148–9.Google Scholar

24 CI, 1901, X. P 4, 133.Google Scholar

25 BMR, 1874, 120Google Scholar; CI, 1901, X, P 4, 133.Google Scholar

26 BMR, 1874, 60, 121.Google Scholar

27 BMR, 1875, 143.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., 145.

30 India Office Library and Records, ‘The Water Supply of Bombay,’ 19Google Scholar; BMR, 1879, 255.Google Scholar

31 BMR, 1879, 256.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 276.

33 Gazetteer, II, 183.Google Scholar

35 BMR, 1892, 383.Google Scholar

36 BMR, 1874, 126.Google Scholar

37 BMR, 1877, 175Google Scholar; BMR, 1879, 278.Google Scholar

38 BMR, 1877, 176Google Scholar; India Office Library and Records, ‘Report on the Drainage and Sewerage of Bombay,’ 12–16 and passim.

39 BMR, 1874, 129.Google Scholar

40 Report of the Special Committee on The Drainage of Bombay (Bombay, 1878), 8.Google Scholar

41 BMR, 1882, 275.Google Scholar

42 BMR, 1892, 383.Google Scholar

43 BMR, 1888, 340–1.Google Scholar

44 BMR, 1888, 340.Google Scholar

45 Ibid., 355.

46 BMR, 1894, 525.Google Scholar

47 BMR, 1895, 579–80.Google Scholar

48 BMR, 1896, 629.Google Scholar

49 Hirst, L. F., The Conquest of Plague (London, 1953), 300.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 352; Calcutta Municipal Reports, 1896–1910, passim.

51 Balthazard, M. and Bahmanyar, M., ‘Recherches Sur La Peste en Inde,’ Bulletin of the World Health Organization, XXIII (1960), 214 and passim.Google Scholar

52 Gazetteer, I, 323Google Scholar; Prices and Wages in India, (Calcutta), 1901, 277, 279, 281.Google Scholar

53 CI, 1911, VIII, 12.Google Scholar

54 Prices and Wages, 1922, 7, 211 and passim.Google Scholar

55 BMR, 1897, 651–2Google Scholar; BMR, 1899, 407.Google Scholar