[Reader-list] Geographies of Space Time and Economies of Nature

[vandana swami]

GEOGRAPHIES OF SPACE-TIME AND ECONOMIES OF NATURE
An Allegorical, Historical Journey into the Archives
of the Great India Peninsula Railway (GIP Railway)

Research Problem 
	“……..The science and steadiness of the north would
galvanize the capabilities of the east……the
introduction of Western technology, particularly
through railway construction has made it inevitable
that the British would become the greatest benefactors
that the Hindoo race had known……..”
	This confident assertion in an editorial in the early
1840’s in The Times of London points to the
significantly altered nature of relationships that
were developing between Britain, western science and
India from the early 19th century onwards. Indeed,
with the establishment of a railway network in India
since 1853, India gained new visibility as a remapped
and reconstructed geographical space in Britain’s
imperial cartography. 
	Examining the impact of the arrival of the railways
in colonial India, my proposal seeks to historicize
the institution of the GIP Railway  and its effects on
forests of the Deccan region. I would do this by
foregrounding a new and productive theoretical
combination of the categories of space- time and 
nature , using the GIP Railway as a terrain upon which
to investigate the manner in which the introduction of
railway technology altered the domain of space-time
and the domain of nature in colonial India. I would
also like to argue that the theoretical integration of
these categories in the manner that I will elucidate
further in the research questions, would allow me to
creatively nuance some aspects of the history of
colonial India that are variously un-researched or
under-researched until now. Very importantly, this
research would also enable me to rescue the history of
railways in India  from the throes of economism  and
to then place it within the orbit of a truly engaging
and dynamic interdisciplinarity. 

Research Questions
My research will focus on the following interconnected
questions: 

* How does an investigation of the precisely mapped
route networks of the GIP Railway in and around the
forests of the Deccan region press the importance of
opening up questions relating to a integrated
geographical reading of the transformation of colonial
space-time? 

The GIP Railway was established through some of the
most thickly forested areas of the country – the
Western Ghats and the forests of the Deccan. A choice
of routing the railway in this fashion needed more
than an incidental overlap, meaning that by routing
the railway in a way that begins with the excellent
natural port of Bombay (erstwhile), then cuts through
thick and highly malarial vegetation, surmounts the
Western Ghats and then weaves itself through the rich
cotton tracts of India and taps important towns along
its way points strongly to the presence of an
extremely well-organised imperial cartography.
In this proposal, I would like to analyse precisely
and carefully the route maps  of the GIP Railway
together with the topographical maps of the forested
and cotton-rich regions, in order to test the
plausibility of my thesis that the GIP Railway, as a
pre-eminent wheel of colonialism, made fundamentally
significant geographical alterations of space-time in
India that led to different kinds of conflicts in the
regions it traversed. 
While I certainly do not believe, nor want to propose
that the imperial cartography of GIP routes was merely
monolithic, geared solely to extractive ends, I would
like to state that the historical archive is replete
with commentaries  of dislocation of various
communities, for instance the Chenchu, Kadar and Baiga
tribes of central and southern India. I think that
there is no adequate explanation of these dislocations
and evictions at hand, least of all one originating in
the archive. The archive also talks about the
uprooting of fishermen, villagers, small merchants and
traders in and around the Bombay region during and
consequent to the construction of the GIPR. These
archival documents need to be culled out to create an
alternative history of railways in colonial India,
while showing how the railways turned hitherto open or
communally owned territory into privately owned and/or
accessed Railway Land . 

* How does the massive and large-scale deforestation
and plunder of the forests of the Deccan for timber
and the sourcing up of natural products such as resin,
coal and copper, to name just a few of the materials
needed  to make and set up the railway tracks of the
GIP Railway point to the urgent necessity of talking
about the economy of a highly commodified (and abused)
nature in colonial India?      

The archive is prolific with materials that describe
in detail the timber requirements for railway
construction, the regions from where they would be
obtained, the exact markets they would be sent to once
logging is complete and the prices that these timber
logs would fetch in the market. However, the archive
is silent on how this alarming level of deforestation
led to the forest dwelling tribes losing their
habitats and ways of life and being. Attempts made by
these forest dwellers to regain access to what was now
‘state property’ savagely implicated them in colonial
discourses of criminalization, even as the
social-ecological relationships of these dispossessed
publics were being severed by the colonial
construction of the GIP Railway. 
In this proposal therefore, I would like to use the
available archival materials from the Government of
India, Department of Forests, and incorporate their
silent and partial rendition to establish that while
in many ways it was inevitable that railways would
only seek to control, dominate and plunder from
nature, this story cannot end by highlighting only
deforestation and dispossession of the colonized, as
the available archival resources can permit more
sophisticated and theoretically unique critiques of
colonial modernity. By researching this proposal, I
would thus like to demonstrate not only the sheer
inadequacy of the dominant theoretical canon regarding
the issue of ‘nature’ but to show that we need to
urgently theorize economies of  nature in the context
of railway construction especially in view of the fact
that the natural resources in question were frequently
transported across vast distances, this then conjoined
these otherwise disconnected places , from where these
natural resources were harvested, into the singular
spatial orbit of the railway economy and its route
network. 
My overarching goal in this proposal is thus to prove
that in colonial India, the geography of space-time
was intimately, and often violently, connected to the
economies of nature. The GIP Railway, being one of the
most magnificent and vivid symbols of all the fulsome
romance, anguish and catharsis of the ‘Raj’ and
modernity in the late 19th century, though ironically
the most under-researched, stands as an excellent
illustration of these propositions. 





		
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