Introduction
The idea of traffic lends itself to a variety of interpretive possibilities, suggestive of both the relative freedom of circulatory movement and interactive engagement, and of the constraints of regulation and control.Footnote 1 In the late nineteenth century the authorities in British India identified several forms of traffic—apart from road traffic, there was the commercially important rail and river traffic, a pilgrim traffic (a cause of regulatory concern on both sanitary and law-and-order grounds), a traffic in narcotics (with revenue, policing, and moral implications), and a ‘white slave traffic’ in prostitutes (which troubled administrators for medical, sexual, and racial reasons). In all of these variants, traffic might serve to designate patterns of commerce and circulation, but it also indicated areas of human activity that were sufficiently challenging or problematic from the perspective of the state to require regulation, even under a laissez-faire regime. Increasingly in the early twentieth century, traffic and ‘the problem of traffic’ came to signify, above all else, road traffic, growing urban congestion, and the mounting difficulty of regulating and policing the great diversity of vehicles and road-users that obstructed city streets and crowded rural highways. Traffic might in one register typify urban modernity—its excitement, dynamism, and brash energy—but it also signalled still more strongly for late-colonial India a fractured, disputed modernity and a looming potential for disorder.
A new conceptualization of traffic was also a formative element in the creation not merely of colonial power but of a new sense of the public. A significant site for the technological articulation of what has increasingly been called the ‘everyday state’, traffic was also a strategic location for its questioning and contestation, the ability to empty the street of traffic being as important a political statement as the state's recurrent attempt to impose regulatory order upon it. But, perhaps most centrally, a consideration of traffic as a highly visible, audible, and composite form of everyday technology enables us, following Foucault, to think about social power in terms of the ‘technology of technology’—the ways in which the processes, skills, and machines that constitute technology in a material and mechanical sense interface with an understanding of technology as the means by which bio-power is exercised from within, as well as over, modern societies.Footnote 2
In many of its essential elements, street-life was hardly a novelty in early twentieth-century South Asia. The evidence of centuries attests to the political significance as well as economic value, the cultural vitality, and the social conspicuousness of what happened in the street or progressed along the highway: the Indian road has long been a location for the exercise of social privilege and ideological control.Footnote 3 Captured through scenes along the Grand Trunk Road or by descriptions of urban streets and bazaars, the road, its occupants, and myriad activities have long been taken to represent the diversity and the distinctiveness of India.Footnote 4 And yet there was something new and perceptively modern about the traffic that came to dominate city streets and rural highways in early twentieth-century India, the ‘revolutionary changes’ wrought by motor transport signalling a wider social as well as technological transformation.Footnote 5 A sense of novelty particularly impressed itself on the consciousness of those who became first-time observers of, and participants in, the modern phenomenon of traffic. To take an elementary example, a children's serial in the Indian Ladies’ Magazine in 1932 included an episode in which Dr Vikram's two young daughters are taken for the first time to visit Madras city. As they travel through Triplicane by tram, noise is everywhere around them—the grinding and squealing of the tramcar on its tracks, the insistent ‘ding-ding-ding’ of its bell, the multitudinous sounds erupting from the street. Although their father has sensibly advised them not to wear their best saris, the girls still find the tram ‘a dirty thing’, and, ‘with all sorts of people huddled together’, vaguely troubling. As they pass through busy streets, their eyes fleetingly catch sight of shops, pavement-sellers, roadside hoardings. With some relief, they leave the tram to buy flowers, whose natural fragrance seems to contrast with the insalubrious, artificial interior of the tram, but there is no escaping the traffic: ‘motor cars were flashing by, almost every minute, in every direction, and other vehicles [were] rumbling along’. On reaching Mount Road, the city's main thoroughfare, they are plunged once more into the ‘rush and roar of business and traffic’.Footnote 6
The increasing ubiquity of urban traffic served to advertise modern technology at its most visible and clamorous. But, more than that, the street and the traffic inhabiting it thus became a discursive site through which notions of self and other, of community, state, and nation were articulated and challenged, and within which the problematic nature of technological modernity came to be experienced and appraised. With its ox-carts, bicycles, trams, and cars, traffic represented both the excitement, bewilderment, and danger of the modern city, and a mixed-up temporality, a heterogeneous time and place in which the modern and pre-modern uneasily coexisted.Footnote 7 Equally, the seeming incongruity of modern traffic, set against the backdrop of rural India, suggested a disjuncture between the slow, orderly pace—even the innocence—of village life and the noise, speed, unpredictability, and indifference of an intruding, mechanized modernity.Footnote 8 Although the Gandhian critique of technological modernity tended to concentrate on rural self-sufficiency and the revival of village crafts, hostility to city life, typified by Prafulla Chandra Ray's structures against the ‘automobile craze’, also formed part of it.Footnote 9 India's technological modernity might be described as muted, both in the sense that it was less evidently pervasive and celebrated than in many contemporary societies around the globe, and in that it was often criticized as undesirable or alien to India's needs and traditions.Footnote 10 Few, even among motoring enthusiasts, found India's traffic to be an unproblematic manifestation of modernity. To some, indeed, it was a demonstration of how India needed to reform itself in order to qualify fully for that modernity. A writer in the Indian Ladies’ Magazine in 1937 deplored the chaos on India's streets, ‘so entirely devoid,’ she complained, ‘of reason and common-sense seem the average pedestrian and bullock-cart driver, the cyclist and Tonga- or Jutka-wallah’. Inveighing against pedestrians who wandered off the pavements and onto the road, and contrasting this unruly behaviour with the disciplined conduct ascribed to the West, she continued, ‘Motoring will never be a success in India unless roads are made separately for motorists.’ Not until ‘our Indian children are trained on lines of such patriotic citizenship [as in the West]’, including education in road-use, could ‘we. . . expect a newer and cleaner India’ to emerge.Footnote 11 The longed-for orderliness of Indian street-life in general, and its traffic in particular, thus became indicative of the regulatory needs of the modern nation.Footnote 12
Traffic's heterogeneity
A modern sense of traffic began to emerge in India in the decade before the First World War, becoming well established in state practice and public awareness by the 1920s and 1930s. The most obvious factor in its emergence was the arrival of new transport technologies—the tram (whose horse-drawn existence preceded the advent of electric-powered cars),Footnote 13 rapidly followed by the bicycle, motorcar, motorcycle, taxi, bus, and lorry. As early as 1908 Bombay city had 276 cars and 1,088 bicycles on its streets, and Madras 250 and 3,146 respectively.Footnote 14 By that date, too, Calcutta had 202 cars, increasing by 1914 to 517 cars, 240 taxis, 152 motorcycles, and 21 trucks.Footnote 15 Motor traffic grew exponentially after the war, with the Indian Road Development Committee remarking in 1928 on ‘the sudden and remarkable development of motor transport services’ in recent years.Footnote 16 By 1936 British India had around 124,315 registered motor vehicles. In the Madras Presidency alone there were 19,552 vehicles, including 13,254 cars, 3,621 buses, 964 trucks, 319 taxis, and 1,364 motorcycles. Bombay Presidency had still more—13,460 cars, 4,500 buses, 3,260 trucks, and 760 motorbikes.Footnote 17 Traffic grew within as well as between cities: indeed, the burgeoning suburbs of cities like Madras, Bombay, and Lahore both required new modes of public and private transport and were themselves made possible by their arrival.Footnote 18 In spite of petrol rationing and a dearth of civilian vehicles, traffic in many Indian cities continued to expand during the Second World War. ‘Thousands of soldiers slouched through its streets,’ Peter Greave recalled of wartime Calcutta, ‘jeeps and huge army lorries driven at breakneck speed forced pedestrians to scamper for safety. . . Everything throbbed with a strange, rather horrifying vitality.’Footnote 19 But it was after the war that the volume of traffic scaled new heights, Madras city alone seeing a dramatic surge from 18,653 motor vehicles in 1946 to 41,128 two years later.Footnote 20
It was not the mere proliferation of machines that turned motor vehicles into everyday denizens of the street: it was also a matter of how, by, and for whom they were used, whose social worlds and work regimes they entered. Cars might be the preserve of the rich and the high-ranking and certainly appeared in contemporary literature and popular rhetoric to designate the privileged few, but from the time of their introduction they were as likely to be owned by Indians as by Europeans. By the time Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, visited the country in 1918 virtually every Indian prince had a motorcar (sometimes several): the Maharajah of Jaipur was considered old-fashioned, even by his peers, for travelling in a horse-carriage.Footnote 21 Princes aside, by the 1920s many Indian civil servants, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and politicians also owned or had use of a motorcar.Footnote 22 Many had Indian (or Eurasian) chauffeurs and had their vehicles serviced and repaired in the hundreds of garages and workshops that had sprung up across India.
However, cars had to share the road with humbler modes of transport. Bicycles moved rapidly from being used by relatively well-to-do Britons and Indians to being, even before 1914, a means by which postmen, telegram boys, government clerks, and municipal servants conducted their business or commuted to and from work. By the 1920s the perceived ‘indignity’ of the bicycle had begun to restrict its use among both white and Indian elites,Footnote 23 though some Europeans (especially poorer ones like police sergeants) continued to ride bicycles right up until the last days of British rule, and wartime shortages forced many white women back onto bicycles. In the main, however, the bicycle became a lower middle class, or even working class, vehicle, an increasingly subaltern mode of transport for those who could not afford a motorbike or car. The falling cost of bicycles (locally assembled or imported from Japan) and the availability of second-hand or stolen machines favoured this development.Footnote 24 Like the trams, the buses which began to fill Indian streets in the 1920s became a vital aspect of urban infrastructure and a common means of mass transportation, and by the 1930s rural bus networks were also very extensive in many parts of the country, bringing modern transportation to within reach of many villagers.Footnote 25
Although conflict over traffic sometimes took on a racial configuration, especially before the First World War at a time when many Europeans openly resented Indian drivers and car-ownership,Footnote 26 in the main the streets and the machines that travelled on them were not a racially exclusive preserve. Traffic represented a more complex social phenomenon than a simple racial divide. Moreover, as Edgerton has reminded us,Footnote 27 modern technologies do not always or immediately supersede older, more established ones. Indeed, it was often the bewildering multiplicity and simultaneity of diverse forms of transport and street-life in a city like Calcutta that struck commentators and which gave traffic its emblematic significance (even if the understanding of that significance varied widely). In an attempt to puncture ‘Orientalist’ fantasies about an unchanging India and to demonstrate the impact industrialization had made on the country, Margaret Read wrote in 1927 of the tumultuous scene at the Calcutta docks:
in the midst of a babel of shouting and noises from humans, engines and motors, panting coolies stagger under great bales, goods-trains shunt on sidings, motor-lorries lumber through the [dock] gates, Ford cars and bullock-carts bump and jerk over the uneven ground. Here is none of the imagined Eastern peace and leisure. Nor is it seen in the streets of the city where fast-driven motors and electric trams and bullock-carts jostle one another and cause tedious traffic blocks.Footnote 28
Twenty years later a senior British army officer, Francis Tuker, writing in a more pejorative vein, described a typical Calcutta street scene as a bizarre mixture of lorries, rickshaws, buses ‘festooned with human beings’, bicycles, bullock carts, cows, copulating dogs, a stray horse, a five-seater car occupied by a family of ten, and handcarts with ‘long bamboo poles hanging over the back’.Footnote 29 In his description the heterogeneity of the street appeared not as a sign of urban vitality and progress but as a signifier of imminent (if not actual) disorder. It was as if Tuker saw Calcutta's dystopian traffic as the epitaph for a once-orderly Raj.
Although in decline, horse-drawn carriages and pony-carts (victorias, tongas, jutkas and other local variants) continued to be visible on Indian streets well into the 1940s, even the 1960s. Certainly, there was a rapid decline in some of the most antiquated modes of transport, such as palanquins. Once common, with 600 for hire in Calcutta in the early 1890s, by 1919 there were only 70 palanquins (and 280 palanquin-bearers) left; by 1928 the number of registered palanquins had sunk to two.Footnote 30 Horse-drawn carriages were better able to survive the coming of the bus and taxi, aided, as in Bombay, by the efforts of their owners to reduce the municipal tax charged on their vehicles.Footnote 31 But motor transport was not the sole beneficiary even of the palanquin's demise. Hand-pulled rickshaws (jinrickshaws), introduced from East Asia in the 1890s and first operated by the Chinese in Calcutta, were the main successors to the palanquin and grew phenomenally as a cheap and convenient mode of urban transport in the early twentieth century, almost keeping pace with the numbers of cars and bicycles. By 1913 Madras had 482 cars and 433 motorcycles, but 4,413 bicycles and 2,090 rickshaws. The number of rickshaws on the city's streets peaked in the mid-1930s, when they there were nearly 7,000 of them.Footnote 32 Calcutta, too, acquired a large number of rickshaws—almost 6,000 by the mid-1930s. Their popularity was sustained by their cheapness (which made their use attractive to women and schoolchildren), the privacy they afforded (lowering a screen from the rickshaw's roof transformed them into purdah carriages), and their manoeuvrability in narrow lanes and congested backstreets. They were also favoured by petrol shortages and the scarcity of civilian motor vehicles during the Second World War. Only after the war did the cycle-rickshaw take over.Footnote 33
Sometimes the replacement of one mode of transport by another had less to do with technological inferiority than with a combination of economic forces and public pressure. One example of this was the use of buffalo-carts in Calcutta to haul heavy loads of raw jute from landing stages on the Hooghly to mills in the northern suburbs. As cheaper motor transport began to impact on older modes of conveyance, the use of buffalo-carts became less remunerative and in order to cut costs the owners increased the loads buffaloes were expected to haul through the crowded streets. This attracted fierce criticism. Describing buffaloes as ‘semi-aquatic’ animals, ‘not suited by their nature and habits to such work’, Calcutta's Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (a largely, but not exclusively, European organization dating back to the 1860s) campaigned against buffalo-carts and their heavy loads.Footnote 34 The Society eventually persuaded the authorities to reduce maximum loads from 60 to 45 maunds a time and to prohibit buffalo-carts from plying during the hottest hours of the day.Footnote 35 But this did little to diminish the heterogeneity of Calcutta traffic. The ox-cart (still more involved in hauling jute than the buffalo-cart and reputedly a prime cause of urban congestion) survived, its cheapness and utility thwarting almost all attempts to ban it from the city's streets in the 1920s.Footnote 36 Symbolically and practically, Indian modernity had to accommodate both the ox-cart and the automobile.
India's problem traffic
In part the ‘problem of traffic’ was conceived of as a problem of urban planning and city governance. Rules and prohibitions governing the use and licensing of motor vehicles were introduced as early as 1903 (the Bengal Motor-Car and Cycle Act), but the phenomenon of modern traffic and the ‘problem’ associated with it reached a new level of formal recognition with a series of reports on urban improvement and town planning in India around the First World War. E. P. Richards wrote a highly critical report on Calcutta in 1914,Footnote 37 H. V. Lanchester lectured on Madras in 1918,Footnote 38 and several official enquiries into the urban ‘traffic problem’ in Indian (as in other South and Southeast Asian) cities were published during the following decade.Footnote 39 Some sympathetic experts, like Patrick Geddes, sought to preserve the organic development, the winding lanes, and village-like structure of many Indian cities.Footnote 40 Other commentators called for urgent measures to regulate traffic flows and redesign city street patterns to better suit the needs of motor vehicles. Lanchester called for the segregation of fast and slow traffic so as to allow cars, buses, and lorries to move more freely, though he admitted that, apart from Calcutta, the ‘traffic question’ had ‘not yet reached an acute stage’ in most Indian cities.Footnote 41 Richards, strident in his denunciation of Calcutta's ‘street-less state’ and obstructive lanes, described in graphic detail (and with accompanying photographs) the congestion that built up daily around Bentinck Street, Canning Street, and Dalhousie Square. The streets became choked, he complained, with near-stationary trams and cars crawling along in first gear, with bullock-carts ‘colliding fore and aft at each convulsive stoppage’, and with gharris and taxis ‘filled with impatient pleaders’—‘the whole sandwiched and inter-penetrated on each side by foot traffic forced off the narrow and obstructed paths’.Footnote 42
A language (now so familiar) of ‘congestion’ and ‘rush hours’ had by the late 1920s entrenched itself in public discourse and official reports.Footnote 43 Although this literature, like much of the legislation that accompanied it, drew upon British and North American precedents,Footnote 44 it acquired a local character of its own through its preoccupation with the logistical difficulties presented by Indian cities and with modes of transport and varieties of street-life seldom glimpsed and rarely tolerated in the West. But the world of urban planning was often far removed from the reality of life on the streets and the fractured modernity it represented. To those who experienced it, or observed it directly, traffic was also a story of the everyday, almost casual, violence of the modern machine, and, though to some extent this was accepted, as elsewhere, with a degree of resignation, one of the principal factors that impelled increased state regulation and public concern was the escalating number of road accidents and fatalities.
The regulation of motor vehicles rapidly became a substantial area of police responsibility. Of course, the problem of traffic was not the only reason for growing police involvement. From the outset cars, lorries, buses, and taxis were used for smuggling arms and drugs, to carry out dacoities (some politically inspired), and to commit acts of terrorism.Footnote 45 Crime control dictated increasing police involvement, but the growing number of traffic accidents and deaths was also a factor. The Calcutta police reported a dozen or more fatal motor accidents a year in the city as early as 1908 and a similar tally soon followed in other major cities.Footnote 46 In 1912 the Inspector-General of Police in the United Provinces remarked that ‘the steady development in vehicular traffic and the greater and daily increasing necessity for the proper regulation of public traffic, not only in large towns and cities, but along the main trunk roads, is proving a severe strain on all police establishments’.Footnote 47 Although by 1927 the Madras Corporation had become sufficiently alarmed, particularly by deaths caused by tram incidents, to set up its own Traffic Committee,Footnote 48 it was mainly police departments that were involved in registering and responding to the mounting death toll on the roads. ‘Motor accidents’ first became a separate entry in the annual reports of the Punjab police in 1922, more than a decade after urban forces in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. By 1926 the escalating importance of the ‘traffic problem’ in Punjab was underscored by the observation that there were many drivers ‘whose regard for the laws of the road and for the safety and convenience of their passengers and other wayfarers’ was ‘practically non-existent’.Footnote 49 In 1931 the Punjab Police Department recorded 731 accidents involving 174 deaths and 557 serious injuries. By 1940 the number of reported accidents in Punjab had risen to 797, with fatalities increasing sharply to 248 and serious injuries to 818.Footnote 50 In 1933 across British India as a whole, there were 954 reported deaths (the actual tally may well have been higher than police reports suggested) due to road accidents, with a further 6,611 serious injuries; by 1935 the figures had jumped to 1,309 and 9,621 respectively. Relative to the number of motor vehicles on Indian roads (around 200,000 in 1933) this was said to be three times the accident rate in England and Wales and twice that in Germany. India, it was claimed, had the highest road accident rate in the world.Footnote 51
Various explanations were offered for this alarming statistic: the poor quality of road surfaces (especially in rural areas), excessive speeding and carelessness by drivers, the overloading of passenger and goods vehicles, the dangers posed by city tram-tracks, the cutthroat competition between bus companies, and the poorly maintained condition of buses and lorries. A general lack of ‘road sense’ among Indians was held to be a major factor,Footnote 52 though the recklessness and culpability of European drivers was also often evident.Footnote 53
Rather than a hierarchy of racial privilege, traffic suggested the superior prestige and authority attached to one kind of road technology (along with its owners or operators) as opposed to another. While defective or badly driven trams, trucks, and buses were afforded their share of the blame, responsibility for traffic accidents was routinely assigned to pedestrians and cyclists. Together they were said to cause as many as half of all road accidents: ‘the necessity for instilling road sense’ into them was accordingly seen by the police as ‘a very urgent need’.Footnote 54 From early in the century cyclists were among the leading traffic casualties as they were hit by cars, taxis, and trams. They suffered not only as a result of ‘reckless driving’ by other road users but also, so it was claimed, as a consequence of their own folly. The newspapers of the period were full of sensational accounts (illustrated with photographs of wrecked lorries or cars that had turned turtle) of episodes like the ‘Serious Smash in Chowringhee’ in June 1922 when two racing taxi-drivers in Calcutta collided with a cyclist and the Tollygunge tram, and the ‘Flora Fountain Tragedy’ in central Bombay in December 1926 when a 15-year-old telegram peon was knocked down and killed by a speeding taxi-driver (who was later charged with homicide).Footnote 55
The growing frequency of road accidents and traffic fatalities resonated throughout Indian society at both an individual and collective level. When the car in which Gandhi was travelling ran over a villager who pressed too close to Gandhi's car at Almora in June 1929 and later died from his injuries, the Mahatma criticized all chauffeurs, whom he had found to be ‘almost without exception hot-tempered, easily excitable and impatient, as inflammable as the petrol with which they come into daily contact’. But he also blamed himself for not getting out and walking or ordering the driver to move more slowly: ‘constant motor-riding has evidently coarsened me,’ Gandhi confessed. It had left him indifferent to the safety of pedestrians. When accused of inconsistency for travelling by car, considering his stated objections to motor vehicles, Gandhi reiterated his view that motoring, for all its advantages, was ‘an unnatural form of locomotion’. It behoved those who rode in cars to restrain their drivers ‘and to realize that speed is not the summum bonum of life’.Footnote 56 The fictional tales and personal memoirs of the period yield frequent references to traffic accidents and their tragic or unwitting consequences for drivers, passengers, and victims alike.Footnote 57 But sometimes, amid the recurrent deaths and injuries, onlookers took their revenge. In Calcutta in March 1946 angry residents attacked truck-drivers and burned vehicles that had injured or killed pedestrians and cyclists. This episode needs to be understood, though, as occurring against a background of growing urban tension over the fast and reckless driving of heavy US and British army lorries through busy city streets and suburbs which had already resulted in a large number of injuries and deaths.Footnote 58
Yet, in the main, cyclists and pedestrians figured in this discourse of traffic less as innocent victims than as the foolish or impetuous agents of their own calamity, or, as one police officer put it, they ‘punish[ed] themselves through their own carelessness’.Footnote 59 During the interwar period cyclists were frequently blamed for causing road accidents, a claim extensively backed by statistics. As if to refute their modest claims to modernity, bicycles and their riders were classed along with ignorant pedestrians and lumbering bullock-carts as among the ‘traditional’ hazards with which the modern motorist had to contend. The cyclist was rated a lowly animal.
Rule of the road
From early in the twentieth century India's provincial governments were at pains to explain and enforce ‘the rule [more commonly, ‘the rules’] of the road’—the priority of one road-user over another, the proper position to be taken when travelling along the highway, on overtaking, or entering a major road, the appropriate hand-signal to be given with each manoeuvre, and so forth.Footnote 60 The official privileging of motor traffic over other road-users often took the form of a lecture delivered by the provincial inspector-general of police on ‘the irresponsible cyclist and bullock cart driver’ whose ‘vagaries’ put the ‘careful motorist’ in ‘a predicament not of his own making’, or who were more generally denounced as ‘a source of annoyance and danger to all other classes of road users’.Footnote 61 ‘No single factor,’ declared the Madras government in July 1939, ‘would. . . contribute more to the reduction of road accidents than an improvement in the “road sense” of pedestrians and cyclists.’ There was, it added, a need for ‘constant propaganda and instruction, not only by the police, whose numbers and time are limited, but by all educational and local and non-official bodies and individuals who can obtain a hearing on the subject’.Footnote 62 In Madras city this propaganda included requiring schoolteachers to attend weekend talks by police traffic officers and the distribution of pamphlets on appropriate road-use to aberrant cyclists.Footnote 63
Initially the appeal to ‘the public’ was made by the government, conscious of its scarce manpower resources and aware of its limited ability to enforce behavioural change. In 1914, commenting on the publication of a new pamphlet on traffic rules issued in Urdu, Hindi, and English, the Inspector-General of Police in the United Provinces remarked, ‘The police cannot improve beyond a certain stage unless the education of the public in this respect also improves.’Footnote 64 But concern for the more effective and orderly regulation of traffic was not just an official cause nor one confined to Europeans: it was widely adopted in India's late-colonial civil society. The idea of there being a new, modern (essentially middle class) ‘public’ in relation to traffic began to establish itself during the interwar years. It was particularly disseminated through newspapers which carried regular articles and reader's letters on traffic issues.Footnote 65 In the early 1920s Calcutta's Statesman gave extensive coverage to traffic issues, condemning ‘rash’ and ‘furious’ driving and applauding measures by the city police to ban the ‘horribly ear-splitting’ car and bus horns whose ‘tooting and braying’ had become ‘so tormenting’ to city residents.Footnote 66 Headlines began to appear, as in the Bombay Chronicle in June 1938, deploring the ‘Cycle Nuisance’ and urging the suburban police to do more to stop and reprimand ‘the defaulting cyclist’ who failed to carry a light on his bicycle at night.Footnote 67 By the late 1930s English-language papers were full of schemes to teach schoolchildren ‘the rules of the road’. A playground game, complete with miniature pedestrian crossings and road junctions, was created to improve children's understanding of how traffic worked.Footnote 68 According to Sir Rahimtoolah Chinoy, President of the Safety First Association of India, in June 1938, 30,000 schoolchildren across the country were receiving road-safety training.Footnote 69 The association's General Secretary further observed that education was the first step towards creating a wider popular awareness of the need for road safety.Footnote 70 When not giving publicity to urban ‘danger spots’ or campaigning for city pavements to be cleared of beggars, street vendors, typists, and cobblers,Footnote 71 Bombay's Illustrated Weekly conducted its own road safety propaganda. It even organized a competition (with a first prize of Rs 100 and a gold medal) for an amateur ‘traffic safety’ film, but, with war looming, it found few takers.Footnote 72
Accompanying the growth of an urban, middle class public constituted around the ‘traffic problem’, a new discourse of personal discipline and street regulation emerged. In part this meant publicizing the elaborate lexicon of hand-signals that all road-users were expected to use, recognize, and obey when employed by the traffic police. The semiotics of modern traffic control was assiduously propagated through manuals, booklets, newspapers, classroom instruction, ‘magic lantern’ slides, and educational films.Footnote 73 But the new regulatory regime also entailed castigating and stigmatizing those who failed to adjust to the expectations and demands of modern life as represented by traffic rules and proper street behaviour. The urban poor who slept on the streets at night and so were crippled or killed by passing traffic or the unseen beggar run over by a taxi,Footnote 74 the cyclist who failed to stop or signal when entering a main road, the bus passenger who jumped down from a bus without looking, all seemed to fail one of the basic tests of modern urban existence—knowing and anticipating what a machine might do. As with Indian factory workers who failed to dress in what was deemed to be the proper manner and whose loose-fitting saris, dhotis, and shawls became trapped in the whirling machinery and caused their death or injury, so too with traffic accidents the burden of culpability rested with ‘unmodern’ bodies and undisciplined minds. Conversely, recognizing and obeying ‘the rules of the road’ formed part of the normative discourse of an aspiringly modern nation. However, the observation made by one district traffic board in Madras in 1941 should be noted: not only were the public ‘sadly wanting in road sense’ but they took ‘perverse delight in disregarding all traffic rules’. They obeyed the rules ‘only so long as the policeman is present and break them immediately his back is turned’. In his absence, they stood in the middle of the road ‘discussing all their family or business affairs, absolutely callous [sic] of the fact that they are impeding the road and they. . . behave badly when asked to move off.’Footnote 75
It is hard to say in practice how rigorously such rules and regulations were enforced or to what lasting effect. To judge by repeated complaints, many traffic rules and regulations were simply ignored or evaded. Even so, a growing proportion of police time was taken up with point duty and traffic patrols, with checks on defective vehicles, and the pursuit of errant drivers. By the 1930s a raft of local, provincial, and all-India traffic acts and regulations had come into force, and were repeatedly updated to keep pace with the growing scale and complexity of India's traffic. The scale of this state engagement is remarkable. As early as 1923 the Madras city police established a special staff to deal with traffic offences: in that year alone 1,637 cases were prosecuted and 783 individuals convicted, including 82 for rash or negligent driving, 219 for disobeying police directions, driving on the wrong side of the road or without lights, 151 for driving a vehicle without a permit, and 73 for road-tax offences.Footnote 76 By the late 1930s thousands of cases were being pursued by the police and magistracy in every Indian province. In Punjab in 1939, for instance, there were 35,917 prosecutions under the Motor Vehicles Act, with a further 878 cases relating to motoring offences under the Indian Penal Code. The following year both categories fell slightly, perhaps due to the formation of five mobile police patrols.Footnote 77 Police chiefs might complain wearily about the ‘dilatory and ineffective disposal of traffic prosecutions’ and the gross inadequacy of the fines and sentences meted out to offenders (which were insufficient to prevent many vehicle-owners and drivers from reoffending),Footnote 78 but the amount of effort involved in even attempting to regulate road traffic remains a striking (if barely noticed) feature of late-colonial law enforcement and policing. At the same time, in this rapid expansion of the ‘everyday state’, increased police regulation created unprecedented and almost routine opportunities for zulm, for corrupt constables and sub-inspectors to demand bribes or other favours to overlook vehicle defects or turn a blind eye to traffic violations.Footnote 79
There is, however, another side to the question of who, formally or informally, ruled the road. The early twentieth century witnessed the colonial state's increasing use of street-level technologies of surveillance and control, not just to police everyday traffic flows but also to develop an armoury of modern technologies—from motorcycles and armoured cars to tear-gas squads and radio vansFootnote 80—that could be deployed against political demonstrations and urban riots. Although it was not until 1942 that the Madras government formally abolished the equitation test for its deputy superintendents of police,Footnote 81 it was widely recognized even by the 1920s that most senior police officers now spent much of their time in cars. Indeed, every fresh round of agitations, strikes, and terrorist plots produced new demands for faster and more reliable vehicles.Footnote 82 Just as lorries, under police escort, were used to ferry strikebreakers in through factory gates, so rank-and-file policemen, especially those in the armed police and paramilitary units, were routinely deployed using motorbuses and trucks. The everyday state in late-colonial India was an armed state, its growing technological capabilities made manifest on the street.
But the converse and corollary of this was the increasingly powerful attempt by opponents of the colonial state to neutralize its technological advantage, and to establish, however fleetingly, their own ascendancy over that most everyday of urban phenomena: traffic. There were many events that illustrate this emergent trend before and shortly after the First World War,Footnote 83 but perhaps the most emphatic example of this were the demonstrations against the tour of the Prince of Wales in late 1921. In Bombay protesters took to the streets—stoning and stopping trams, cars, and buses, closing shops and cinemas that had failed to heed the call for hartal (a strike), while nationalist leaders used telephones and cars to instruct followers or investigate conditions in different parts of the city. The episode ended when Bombay's mill hands went back to work and, as a telling indication of the restoration of normality, ‘tramcars, motor cars and other conveyances began to ply as usual’.Footnote 84
By the 1930s and 1940s oppositional use of the street and street-level technology had become relatively commonplace. One of the consequences of the picketing of city cloth- and liquor-shops in Madras during the civil disobedience movement in the early 1930s was the pressure put on the government by the disruption of traffic, often in the busiest thoroughfares of the city.Footnote 85 Taking control of the streets could have far more devastating effects and far-reaching consequences as the struggle for Indian independence and for Pakistan reached its climax. The American photographer Margaret Bourke-White cited the testimony of a Hindu teashop owner, Nanda Lal, to show how, as communal tension erupted in Calcutta on ‘Direct Action Day’ on 16 August 1946, one of the first signs of impending calamity was the sudden cessation of traffic—with only a single, nearly empty tram hurtling down Harrison Road. ‘It was the sight of that tram,’ Bourke-White observed, ‘that confirmed Nanda Lal's fears that this day was to be unlike all other days.’ Normally it was ‘so crowded with commuters that they bulged from the platform and clung to the doorsteps and back of the car. Today there was hardly a passenger on board.’Footnote 86 Soon afterwards, truckloads of Muslim goondas (thugs) arrived to attack Hindu shops, smashing rickshaws and setting fire to cars and carriages to demonstrate their mastery over the street and its occupants. Only gradually, after army tanks and machine-guns had appeared on the streets, and following an estimated 5,000 deaths, was the return of normality signalled by the resumption of everyday traffic.Footnote 87 Partition a year later saw the re-enactment of many such scenes in which the cessation of everyday traffic was accompanied by the use of street technology—trucks, cars, even bicycles—as the means of delivering violence or trying to escape it.Footnote 88 This abnormal use of the technology of the modern street signalled exceptional catastrophe but it also provided evidence of an increasingly everyday familiarity with, and utilization of, the modern machine.
Conclusion
Modern traffic can be understood as an assemblage of many different but increasingly commonplace technologies operating together at street level—or, not infrequently, colliding and coming into conflict with one another. Part of the interest in the subject of traffic from the perspective of everyday technology is the way in which historically new transport technologies became familiar and accessible to the public, became items of everyday use, acquired prestige and authority, or marginalized and excluded older forms of transport like the palanquin and the buffalo-cart. But the modern history of traffic in India (as elsewhere) is not simply a history of how that traffic came into being—so many buses, so many cars—but, more essentially, how the phenomenon of traffic was socially, culturally, and politically constituted, what it made possible in people's lives (or, alternatively, how it endangered lives and jeopardized livelihoods), what it brought perceptually and experientially to a changed understanding of modern existence. The rapid emergence in the early twentieth century of a modern notion of traffic, reinforced by its multiple, discursive presence in media as diverse as photographs, newspaper reports, short stories, novels, in the discourse of urban policing and planning, lent itself to new ways of thinking about urban governance, about the problematic relationship between machines and the modern body, and about what constituted the public, the nation, and the state.
If few in India seemed to exult in the excitement and bustle of modern traffic, to its many critics traffic represented what was wrong about India or the technological modernity that was being foisted upon it. Although in part framed by colonial needs and preconceptions and by the political imperatives and regulatory aspirations of the late-colonial state, traffic embodied a wider discursive and experiential shift in attitudes to mechanized modernity that transcended colonialism itself. Even though the phenomenon of traffic, and the ‘problem’ it represented, became so everyday as to seem commonplace and barely worthy of remark to all but the innocent outsider, it served nonetheless as a vital public arena for the physical display, social utilization, and cultural assimilation of new technologies and hence the potentiality for ownership, control, and contestation over their daily use.
