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Hygienic Modernities: Science and the City in Colonial South Asia
Organizer & Chair: Ishita Pande, Queens University
Discussant: Rachel Berger, University of Cambridge
Was sanitation an unambiguous sign of a modern cityscape, or was the colonial city a space where concepts of cleanliness clashed? To what extent did the sciences of hygiene and sanitation reflect and shape the home, the nation, the empire, and modernity in colonial India? Delving into these questions, the four papers in the panel consider how scientific and medical discourses sought to shape Indian cities through the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. These papers assess the divergent ideologies and visions of colonialism, urbanism, and modernity that were engendered in these sciences, and how such ideas reflected tensions between traditional and modern, high and low culture, and of race, gender and class in colonial India.
Denault highlights the resonance between vaastu vidya and Hindu revivalism in late nineteenth century north India. Pande looks at the liberal racialist and Free Trade underpinnings of the sanitary city imagined in Calcutta in the 1830s. Datta explores the idea of “waste” by juxtaposing evidence about the management of water, sewage and slums. Sobti looks at the “selective surgery” that connects the histories of the British capital New Delhi and Mughal Shahjahanabad.
Calcutta: Engineering Remedies, Sanitation and State Ideology
Partho Datta, Teen Murti Museum
Calcutta in the second half of the nineteenth century became a crucible for urban reform setting important precedents for colonial India. By its sheer technical virtuosity, engineering feats like piped underground water supply and drainage [as also the railways] were deemed miraculous. The consensus on achieving salubrity in the city had a long history and was intertwined with other currents which included contemporary medical opinion, Chadwickian models of sanitation, the evolving concept of public health, mercantile pressures and the colonial state’s own notion of urban order. The discursive terrain around these issues traversed debates on laissez faire, town planning, the recalcitrant Indian body and paternalistic reform.
Functionally the effects of engineering remedies were less spectacular. Despite the prevalence of the humoural paradigm there was an inadequate understanding of the connection of atmospheric conditions with epidemic disease. The disposal of human ordure and a water supply system had not happened in tandem in Calcutta, leading to the resurgence of disease. Elsewhere embankments for railways led to the widespread recurrence of malaria. In the city itself the reforming zeal of the state focussed on busti i.e. slum dwellers. With no title to land the labouring poor became vulnerable targets of eviction drives. In this way an important precedent was set for town planning where residential land became amenable to state intervention on sanitary grounds. As the state shed its official support of laissez faire, it became determinedly interventionist adding colour to its imperial ideology.
Sewers and Sensibility: The Culture of Sanitation in Nineteenth Century Calcutta
Ishita Pande, Queens University
This paper explores how doctors and administrators sought to shape the colonial capital city of Calcutta into a “sanitary city” by invoking theories of hygiene and sanitation on the one hand, and of civilization and improvement, on the other. Until the 1830s, Calcutta’s streetscape had reflected the late eighteenth century ideas about governance and health, based on the segregation of ‘filthy’ natives and ‘vulnerable’ white populations, and the confinement of disease. The sanitary city embodied liberal theories of governance, and the medical doctrines and ethnological diagnoses that came with it. Unlike the “dual city” that separated people and proscribed movement, the liberal cityscape prescribed a free flow of goods and people, ventilation and exchange.
Why was mobility and exchange encouraged precisely at the time when cholera broke out from its “home” in the plains of Bengal and into the world? This paper seeks to understand this by turning to a wider colonial context: the Liberal doctrine of free trade, the idea of predisposition in mid-nineteenth century fever theory, and mid century discussions of the “sanitary city” in Britain and the Empire. In Calcutta, the plans for the sanitary city did not translate into built spaces. The racial undertones of the discussions of the planning committee, and the ideologies of liberating through despotism, contained the germs of this failure.
Domesticating Urban Space: Vernacular Architecture and Hindu Revivalism in North Indian Cities 1870-1910
Leigh Denault, University of Cambridge
Efforts to redesign and reform urban space in the cities of the North-Western Provinces/United Provinces in the late 19th century resulted in a multitude of new theories about the "ideal" Indian household and family. In this paper I will explore the ways in which ideas about urban planning, vernacular architecture, domestic practices and hygiene are reflected in the material culture of the household and in the composition of local communities in North Indian cities.
Changes in domestic architecture which replaced carved wooden balconies, verandahs and screens with blank walls and iron doors, for example, coincided with efforts by local elites to distinguish between "high culture" and "bazaar culture." Sanitary engineers modelled designs for new urban housing projects on prevailing trends in elite domestic architecture while incorporating wider streets, covered sewers and drainage, and larger house plots to prevent the “crowding” which British observers deplored in Indian cities.
Additionally, the resulting plans combined new ideas about sanitation and hygiene with Hindu revivalist ideas about the ideal Indian home. Works on vastu-vidya or architectural science began to appear in the early 20th century. Arya Samaji domestic manuals from the late 19th-early 20th century also demonstrate efforts to reinterpret domestic space and practice through revisionary readings of Hindu scriptures. Efforts were made to distinguish between “Hindu” and “Muslim” architectural and domestic traditions. Changes in urban planning, vernacular architecture and domestic practice therefore modeled new ideals of ritual purity and new class markers as well as innovative arrangements of community space.
Cleansing the Oriental City: The Destruction of Old Delhi and the Creation of a New Capital
Manu P. Sobti, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
King-Emperor George V made a spectacular announcement at the conclusion of the Imperial Durbar of December 1911; he announced that the capital of British India would be transferred from Calcutta to Delhi. In light of the revelation of this “best kept secret in India” and the sensation that it understandably created, few realized that it would take the next two decades for this new capital to be completed, creating a complex dwarfing the neighbouring Mughal city of Shahjahanabad in terms of its sheer size, prestige and security. As an urban structure that ‘attached’ to the body of the older, existing city, the new creation would diminish and finally negate the existence of the historical artifact.
So thoroughly did the British tear the city’s monuments from their historic connections, that they never considered preserving intact entire districts of neighborhoods. Indeed, large chunks of Shahjahanabad had been demolished for reasons of security after the 1857 revolt, in a Haussmann-like action aimed to ‘cleanse’ the city of its undesirable elements. While Haussmann’s ‘modernization’ of Paris, initiated just four years before the 1857 Mutiny, had pushed towards making the city ‘revolution-proof’ by making it harder to build barricades, at Shahjahanabad no such ‘selective surgery’ was conceived. Here urban tracts were torn out to drive the railway lines through the city, a process exaggerated by the relentless subdivision of city’s mohallas and mansions, into petty and impoverished dwellings. This paper looks at what precisely happened within and outside the old city of Delhi, while the construction and planning of New Delhi occupied political centre-stage.