Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s-1880s

摘要

In 1877, Juland Danvers, the government director of the Indian Railway Companies remarked that 'any history of the material progress of India may well be divided into a pre-railway and a post-railway period' (quoted here on p. xx). In many ways, the historiography of communications in the subcontinent has also followed this trajectory. The development of the railway network in India has so frequently been presented as the defining factor in the nineteenth-century history of colonial communications in the region that it has assumed the status of an almost unchallengeable orthodoxy. Of course, there are good reasons why this should be so. Railways were, on some levels at least, important agents of change in India. Furthermore, not only did they bring technological advances that were still novel in Europe at the time, they also provided a stark, modernizing contrast with the colonial narratives being produced by an increasingly interventionist state. The early nineteenth-century world of the Company Raj generated numerous accounts by colonial officials, which emphasized the apparently stagnant and supposedly unchanging nature of Indian society and landscape. In contrast, railways offered speed and with it the chance to exert great influence and control over the vast subcontinent and its huge and diverse population. For all sorts of reasons then, railways played a vital role in consolidating and expanding Britain's Indian empire.