[Reader-list] posting from kalyan

Fri Feb 6 17:32:14 IST 2004

Internet is playing its wonderful part to confront
oneself with the traffic of ideas around the world.
And I am also trying to gain the historians
perspective from it. Sarai-CSDS Independent Fellowship
has given me the opportunity and here I am writing to
a host of intelligent minds that can offer comments on
my area of interest and with whom I can interact with.
My name is Kalyan and I am pursuing my M. Phil. in
Modern Indian History from Jawaharlal Nehru
University.
My area of research from the tutorial writing days has
revolved around city and its different manifestations.
And I am greatly interested in looking at the dynamics
that shapes the city and gives it a particular nature.
No doubt with recent onslaught of technology, the city
has started taking a new shape. It is equally
contributing in making and sustaining a mindset. But
being a historian I would beg to present a historical
bent to it and in my regular postings I would be
discussing things from that very perspective. 
Jamshedpur (at present I am working on the history of
Jamshedpur titled; The Idea of Jamshedpur: Evolution
of an Industrial Landscape 1907-1990) is the city of
sweat equity if I may borrow Peter Halls phrase. At
the same time it is a city of enterprise. How does
this city promote the potentialities of both? I would
be writing about these and specifically about
interaction of the labour and the capital that has
given a peculiar face to the city and thereby
providing us an interesting case study on the
capitalisms benevolence being sustained by the sweat
of the labour. 
But readers are requested to bear with a fairly
lengthy synoptical overview that is been attempted
that would serve as a background.   

Central idea of the study would be the city as
described in the economic sense of the term. Broadly
the processes through which a city is born, would
decide its contours and the exploratory theme. It is
been observed that cities are invaded by industries
and sometimes the opposite happens. In case of
Jamshedpur, which came into existence in 1907 with the
establishment of Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO)
the latter was true. It was one of the exceptional
experiments been made and its gradual evolution into a
successful industrial town witnesses the typicality of
that experiment.
The town has grown in an isolated and self-contained
area and has become a property of a single big
company.  The other smaller companies run on a much
smaller scale. TISCO acquired about 25 square miles of
land and established there on, one of the largest iron
and steel plants in the world and a modern town of
about 1,00,000 inhabitants. 
In this way it exhibited all those features of urban
experience that reflected the sense of the city
living, with special kind of spatial boundaries, and a
creation of a space where local society materially and
culturally reproduced itself.
What gave the city this kind of graduating
experience? First it was a conglomeration of people
being gathered around steel industry as a focal point.
Second migration played a significant role in the
building of this skilled and    unskilled labour force
in the city. Both of these aspects defied the
immemorial existence of the city, contrary to the
antiquated notions attached to the evolution of the
colonial city in general. Third the company was the
landlord and the administrator of the city. Fourth the
company itself was doing the spatial division of the
city based on residential differentiation. 
TISCO provided accommodation to 95 percent of the
higher staff, but facilities for working people were
hopelessly inadequate. The companys attempt to
provide help in the form of house loans had not proved
much of a success due to absence of proper initiative
by the company. 
As the reports of the time suggests that sanitary
arrangements in the town were not adequate. Royal
commission reported that in busties it is a positive
menace to develop well being of residence there,
leaving aside the northern town or European quarters
where a complete scientific system is provided. It was
also noticed that, curiously enough in areas like
Sakchi and Kasidih common sanitation arrangements were
biggest abhorrence for the people.  Gradually all
open spaces went into occupation with the pressure of
population and created new problems of space
management.
Town did not have any municipal government for a long
time. The committee of companies which was to be the
governing body of the town formed a board of works and
consisted of six representatives of the TISCO, three
of other companies and two from the general public. To
invest this committee with some powers, Government of
India in 1924 made Jamshedpur a notified area under
the municipal act and appointed a Notified Area
Committee.
However Jamshedpur came as a unique example of a town
with the most modern and efficient services in India
where the inhabitants paid no rates. It was hardly
surprising that no objection was raised to the
arrangement and to the undemocratic character of the
local administration.

Three Issues.

Part I: Spatial evolution of the city in general. Who
are the people that inhabit the city? Nature and
quantum of the labour force that had its repercussion
on the social and cultural built up of the city. How
the worker is accommodating within the city space.  
Part II: Discourse of planning.
Part III: Shaping of the modern worker through
architecture and urban planning.
Part IV: The factor of Paternalism being practiced by
the Tatas an enjoyed by the workers. And this factor
is exhibited through city most effectively which is
managed and governed by the Tatas. 
Initially I would explore the origins of the city and
its confining boundaries that have been developed
around it. It would include the composition of the
labour force and gradual evolution of the town area. 
Initial survey of the town struck me that it was a
planners paradise. No less than five plans had been
instituted to regulate the spatial and built
environment of the city. My idea is to explore the
discourse of the idea of planning that was giving
shape to this industrial center and its varying
impressions on other industrial centers in India. In
fact the idea of the town planning can be
emancipatory, carrying the possibility of people
fashioning their own living environment with will and
consciousness. As Jamshedpur represents itself, this
seldom happened. The struggle remained to free the
discourse from the shackles of economic, technological
and ideological domination, to rediscover the ethical
and moral questions in the creation of environments.
Moreover it should be added at this juncture that
planning is not inherently correct nor planners. They
are the temporary manifestations of historical social
processes, constrained by the interests that are
dominant in the society at the time.
I also wish to cross the boundary of 1947, which
usually suggest a demarcation line for modern Indian
history, and analyze the changes that occurred with
the coming of the new state structure and governing
policies. The second issue can be stretched to this
aspect as well. 
Any decent perusal of the historiography on Jamshedpur
would give an idea to a historian that it is an area,
which is invoked ceremoniously in examining various
trends in social sciences. City provided an easy froth
for readymade explorations. But quite clearly it was
not the city that drew attention of historians and
anthropologists but the voluminous industrial
population that was working there. And not
surprisingly the profusion of writing that exists
revolves around this industrial workforce. 
 I am trying to locate the town in the center of
investigations and then attempt to weave a story
around it. In this way the city becomes the entry
point for exploring issues that were hitherto been
looked from the perspective of labour or the
company. In the case of Jamshedpur Company was
definitely the prime mover in the city.
This approach has three justifications to be
mentioned. First, this would be the history of the
town that has not been given its due attention.
Second, this allows us to explore the issue of
urbanism and its relation with industrial capitalistic
development in the Indian perspective more clearly and
elaborately. Third, this will also allow me to present
an untapped vein of data regarding town planning, its
management and the efforts applied by a company to
manage the city on its own.

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hi received your mail.thank you for calling me.i will reply you soon.sorry for the tantrum.bye

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