Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

BERSAS Lecture: 09.07.

Writing histories of infrastructure, space and labour in late 18th and 19th century Madras

By Vidhya Raveendranathan

When?***9th July, 12–2pm (c.t.)

Where?***Institute for Asian and African Studies, Invalidenstr. 118, Room 315 (Hybrid)

Organisation & moderation: Dr. Sadia Bajwa

*Abstract*

This talk presents the connected histories of the colonial disciplining of an errant coastline through fortifications, pier building, property-making, and policing, and its constant disruption by the lived social practices and everyday interactions of a range of itinerant and mobile populations. It analyzes the efforts taken to stabilize the boundaries between land and sea, create calm waters, police the beach commons, and provide a safe surf zone for ships and boats to load and unload cargo, and the impact on the quotidian work rhythms of the coastal populations. In the absence of a natural harbour in Madras, the colonial state in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was dependent on the hard labour of a motley group of fishermen to transport essential supplies from the ships to the shore. The fluid boundaries between land and sea and the anomalous juridical status of the beach enabled the coastal communities to pilfer and land the precious cargo at strategic points without being impounded by the port officials. Despite attempts by the EIC to coopt local authorities and to fuse local authority with bureaucratic authority, their goal to fix coastal labour into a spatial and social arrangement suitable for their mode of labour discipline often failed because desertion, absconding, and strikes were common recurring practices. Coastal labour resisted the bureaucratic and jurisdictional logics of a commercial economic space constructed around labour discipline and contractual obligations mediated by legal jurisprudence and jurisdictions. Instead, labour during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries itself remained mobile, crossing spatial boundaries and re-inventing the spatial logics of labour as a consequence. Colonial anxieties regarding the fluid materiality of the shore and the unregulated mobilities of the coastal workforce prompted a shift toward a range of initiatives, such as pier building, propertization of the beach commons, and enhanced coastal policing.

Bio

Vidhya Raveendranathan is a Visiting Research Fellow at the GBZ. Her doctoral dissertation from the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen has explored the experiences of various forms of non-factory labor and service occupations during the early colonial period in India in relation to the emergent urban, legal, and bureaucratic infrastructures that characterized the port city of Madras, in South India. She was a recipient of several writing fellowships from the German Historical Institute, European research council and the New York University Luce Foundation. She has considerable teaching experiences having taught at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as well as the universities of Goettingen, Shanghai and Bangalore. Her work has been published in journals such as the History Compass, Journal of Urban History and several edited volumes.