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City-Hinterland Relations and the Development of a Regional Elite in Nineteenth Century Bombay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Ellen McDonald Gumperz
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Historians of India often write as if India, at the end of the nineteenth century, had only four cities: Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and Poona. Several elements contribute to this perspective: Indian historians' own predominant interest in the development of nationalist politics in late nineteenth century India naturally leads them to concentrate on these four urban centers, the birthplaces of such politics1. But the structure of late nineteenth century politics in India itself mirrored more fundamental aspects of the administrative organization and social structure of the country. Administratively, the country was organized in a hierarchy of authorities of descending prestige and geographical scope, with authorities of greatest power centered in the three port cities, and authorities of least power, at the taluka and village levels in the hinterlands. This structure decisively established the political predominance of the port cities and assured a flow of potential recruits for government service and the white collar professions out of the countryside and into the Presidency headquarters towns. At the same time, India's status as a raw-materials exporting colony of an industrial mother country, and the increasing penetration of the world market economy, required that business and industry be increasingly concentrated in and about the port cities.

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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , August 1974 , pp. 581 - 601
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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1974

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References

1 For example, Broomfield, J. H., Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth Century Bengal (Berkeley, and Angeles, Los; University of California Press, 1968).Google Scholar

2 Travellers' reports which betray this view are Caird, James, “Notes by the Way in India: the Land and the People,” Nineteenth Century 6 (July to October 1879), 119–40,Google Scholar 244–63, 529–50 705–271 Duff, M. E. Grant, “Notes on an Indian Journey,” Contemporary Review 25 (May 1875), 895–917.Google Scholar

3 By Cashman, Richard in his soon-to-be-published Ph.D. dissertation, “The Politics of Mass Recruitment: Attempts to Organize Popular Movements in Maharashtra 1891–1908,” Durham, North Carolina: Duke University, 1969.Google Scholar

4 For convincing support for this proposition, sec the biography of Justice M. G. Ranade by his wife, 'Ramabai, Ranade: His Wife's Reminiscences, tr. Kusumavati Deshpande (Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1963); and the autobiography of D. K. Karve, Looking Back (Hingne: Hingne Stri-Shikshan Samstha, 1936).

5 The theoretical foundation for this analysis may be found in the works of Deutsch, Karl, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge: the MIT Press, 1953)Google Scholar and Hägerstrand, Torsten, Innovation Diffusion as a Spatial Process. Postscript and translation by Pred, Allan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Nationalism (or regionalism, in the Indian environment) requires, according to Deutsch, a “community which permits a common history to be experienced as common.” A large community of this kind is a people; but to perceive itself as a people, such a group must form “a social, economic, and political alignment of individuals from different social classes and occupations, around a center and a leading group. Its members are united by more intensive social communication, and are linked to these centers and leading groups by an unbroken chain of connections in communications, and often also in economic life, with no sharp break in the possibilities of communication and substitution at any link.” (p. 75) Hägerstrand's basic postulate, as formulated by Pred, expresses a similar assumption: “Geographic expressions of human behavior, whether they aggregativcly reflect patterns of movement or spatial distributions, must be viewed in terms of the information available to the individual decision-maker … and thereby analyzed in terms of the ‘social network’ of interpersonal communications through which the information circulates.” Hägerstrand, p. 300.Google Scholar

6 social communication in a region, ot course, arises from social interactions between individuals. In the era of pre-electronic communications, the number and frequency of such interactions strongly affected the speed at which information spread from one point to another in a geographic area. Thus, information did not diffuse at a constant rate from an urban center to all parts of its hinterland, but moved more quickly to those parts of the hinter-land which were in frequent communication with the urban center. Trade, which requires considerable information for its successful completion, also requires social interactions, and it has therefore been possible in societies with relatively open mobility systems to use information on trade flows as indices of social communication. Some difficulties in applying these concepts to nineteenth century India will become clear in the body of this paper.

7 Keatinge, G., Rural Economy in the Bombay Deccan (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912), pp. 147–8.Google Scholar

8 Kumar, Ravinder, Western India in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in the Social History of Maharashtra (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), pp.Google Scholar 103, in; Keatinge, Ibid., pp. 16–7; Choksey, R. D., Economic History of the Bombay Deccan and Karnatak 1818–1868 (Poona: The Author, 1945), P. 89.Google Scholar

9 Rosen, George, “A Case of Aborted Growth: India, 1860–1900,” Economic Weekly 14 (August 11, 1962), pp.Google Scholar 1299, 1301–02; and Neale, Walter C., “A Case of Aborted Growth: India 1860-1900: A Comment,” Economic Weekly 14 (December 1, 1962), p. 1852.Google Scholar

10 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XXII: Dharwar (Bombay: Gov't Central Press, 1884), p. 341. Hereafter referred to as Dharwar Gaz.Google Scholar

11 Ibid.

12 For a description of a schoolboy's annual trek with a cart train, to the nearest district town for his English education, see Sarkar's, J. N. “Govind Sakharam Sardesai,” in Tikekar, S. R., Sardesai Commemoration Volume (Bombay, 1938), pp. 292–3.Google Scholar

13 Harnetty, Peter, “India and British Commercial Enterprise: the Case of the Manchester Cotton Company 1860–64.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 3 (December 1966), p. 396.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Silver, Arthur W., Manchester Men and India Cotton 1847–1872 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), pp. 45–48.Google Scholar

15 Harnetty, Ibid.

16 Dharwar Gaz., pp. 366–74.

17 Silver, Ibid., p. 43.

18 Dharwar Gaz., pp. 350–1.

19 llnd., p. 354.

20 Ibid., pp. 355–6.

21 Ibid., calculated from pp. 677–96.

22 Ibid., calculated from pp. 732–45.

23 The richest traders in the district were Indians. One was the Gujarati trader Venkatidas, at Gadat, the other a firm of two Brahman traders, Gopal and Shrinivas Naik at Ranebennur. Both were rumored to have capital exceeding Rs. 200,000. Both were located in the heart of the cotton growing districts and traded as well in machine spun yarn, agricultural produce, and draft animals. Several European companies in Hubli and Dharwar, such as P. Chrystal and Co., were rumored to hold capital in excess of Rs. 100,000. The latter company ran a large machine ginning factory and had lost considerable sums attempting to perfect steam cotton ginning in the 1870's. Dharwar Gaz., pp. 351, 373.

24 Large all-purpose traders had developed an indigenous system of insuring goods consigned to them for transit, as described in Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XVII (Ahmednagar)(Bombay: Gov't Central Press, 1884), p. 299. But with the coming of the railroads, this system lapsed into disuse in that district.Google Scholar

25 Dharwar Gaz., p. 353.

26 Bombay Native Newspaper Reports, 1878.

27 Bombay Quinquennial Administration Report for 1885–86, Appendix VIIB, p. 227.

28 Bombay Quinquennial Administration Report, 1895–96, Appendix VII B, lists the Hubli Patra, published by the Hubli Printing Works, p. 368.

29 Bombay Native Newspaper Reports, 1897.

30 Chokscy, R. D., Economic Life in the Bombay Karnatak 1818–1939 (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1963), pp. 183–4.Google Scholar

31 McDonald, Ellen E. and Stark, Craig M., English Education, Nationalist Politics and Elite Groups tn Maharashtra 1885–1915. Occasional Paper No. 5, Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies, Berkeley: University of California, 1970, p. 21.Google Scholar

32 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XVU (Ahmednagar) (Bombay: Gov't Central Press, 1884), p. 326.Google Scholar [Hereafter Ahm. Gaz.]; Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XVI (Nasik) (Bombay: Gov't Central Press, 1888), p. 125. [HereafterNas. Gas.]Google Scholar

33 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XVIII, Part 2 (Poona) (Bombay: Gov't Central Press, 1885), p. 144. [Hereafter Poona Gaz. 2]Google Scholar

34 Ahm. Gaz., p. 327.

35 Nas. Gaz., p. 137.

36 Ahm. Gaz., p. 327.

37 Poona Gaz. 2, p. 144.

38 Nas. Gaz., p. 144. Harold Mann gives the cost of a cart in a Poona village as Rs. 60 in 1917 —a sizable investment. Land and Labor in a Dec-can Village, Study No. 2. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1921, p. 59.Google Scholar

39 Nas. Gaz., pp. 137, 498.

40 lbid., p. 527.

41 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol.XVl-B (Nasit(): Statistical Supplement (Bombay: Government Central Press 1905), p. 3.Google Scholar

42 Nas. Gaz., pp. 142–3. A most pressing need in studies of this kind is for statistics of postal and telegraph use, but they are exasperatingly fragmentary and unhelpful. Thus, at Malegaon, the major trade center in the district, 280 private (non-government) telegrams were sent in 1880, and from Nasik, 347. But we know nothing of their destinations. Ibid., p. 156.

43 Ahm. Gaz., pp. 328–9.

44 Even before Ahmednager was put on the railway, its inhabitants used the telegraph more frequently than those in Nasik, a district with railroad transport: 491 private telegraph messages were sent from Ahmednagnr in 1875–76. Ahm. Gaz., p. 335.

45 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XIX (Satara) (Bombay: Gov't Central Press, 1885), p. 194. [Hereafter Sat. Gaz.]Google Scholar

46 £ 2016 in 1870–71, £ 6628 in 1882–3, Sax. Gaz., p. 179.

47 Sat. Gaz., p. 196.

48 Ibid.

49 Satara City itself supported only 500 traders.

50 Sat. Gaz., pp. 472–3.

51 Sat. Gaz., pp. 201–02.

52 Weekly circulation in 1897, 2212; fortnightly circulation 1,000, There were no daily papers. From the mid-1880's, Satara led all the Marathi speaking country districts in circulation figures of vernacular journals. Dharwar is the only other district in Marathi and Kannada speaking Bombay to approach Satara's vernacular newspaper circulation at the end of the century. Bombay Native Newspaper Reports, 1887, 1897.

53 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XX (Sholapur) (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1884), p. 409. [Hereafter Shol. Gaz.]Google Scholar

54 The added economic impetus of the mills appears in the patterns of population growth of the two towns: both had a period of large growth between 1850 and 1872 (Sholapur, 30,819 to 54,7551 Barsi, 11,798 to 18,560). But Sholapur was the only Deccan town to increase its population in the plague decennium 1891–1901. See Tabic I.

56 Sen, Sunil Kumar, Studies in Economic Policy and Development of India (1848–1926) (Calcutta: Progressive Publishers, 1966), Appendix C.Google Scholar

57 Mehta, S. D., The Cotton Mills of India 1854 to 1954 (Bombay: The Textile Association of India, 1954, p. 103.Google Scholar

57 Poona Gaz., pp. 2, 97–8.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., p. 101.

60 Sen., Ibid., pp. 175–6.

61 Ibid., Appendix C, p. 224. These banks were: Deccan Bank (Poona?) 1891; Poona Merchantilc Bank, 1893; Dharwar Bank, 1896; Bombay Banking Company, 1898; Gujrat Bank, 1899; Southern Maratha Banking and Agency Co. (Belgaum?), 1902; Sholapur Bank, 1903; Deccan Banking and Trading (place?), 1905; Sri Venkatesh Bank (Satara), 1907; Union Bank of Bijapur and Sholapur, 1908; Jagadguru Bank (place?), 1908; Ahmednagar Bank 1909; Karachi Bank (1910') and Sind Bank 1910.

62 Thirty-six percent of Fergusson College students between 1885 and 1895 were from the Poona metropolitan area. The high schools probably showed a larger proportion of local boys. McDonald & Stark, Ibid., p. 20.

63 Ibid., p. 67.

64 N. T. Katagade, author of a vernacular autobiography excerpted in Karve's, D. D.The New Brahmans (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1963), p. 216, tells of endangering his school career by repeated reading of Kesari in his high school classes in the town of Miraj. The reason was apparently not that the paper was politically objectionable, but that such reading in class was disrespectful to the teacher.Google Scholar

65 Quoted in Mehrotra, S. R., “The Poona Sarva-janik Sabha: The Early Phase (1870–1880),” Indian Economic and Social History Review VI (September 1969), p. 294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66 Brahmans were almost the only group in late nineteenth century Bombay to consider all elite occupations open to them; a minority of them were important in trade in all the districts south of Poona; and, as we have seen, some of the wealthiest traders in Dharwar were Brahmans. A few wealthy traders from Bania castes also educated their sons, but in the Deccan districts the Brahmans seem to have had more representation in both trade and literacy-requiring occupations. It is probably not justified, however, to consider them the kind of all-purpose elite implied by the term “ruling class.”

67 Parikh, R. D., in his little history of the Gujarati vernacular press, The Press and Society: A Sociological Study (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1965), makes the point that this kind of discrepancy seriously limits the expansion of the vernacular press. He points to the origin of the vernacular press, in India as elsewhere, as a service to commerce: without commercial advertising, newspapers did not long remain in business. The scparatencss of the commercial and nationalistic worlds of thought in the later nineteenth century is clear in the failure of nationalist journals to attract advertising and in their often ali-too-short life spans.Google Scholar