Introduction
In the 1930s, the colonial Indian city of Madras stood on the cusp of an important urban transformation. Stimulated by a combination of conservancy labour resistance and anxieties around recurring cholera epidemics, the municipal government initiated a programme of compulsory water closet construction in the city’s households. Named the ‘flush-out latrine’, these water closets, made of cheaper materials so as to be budget friendly to lower middle- class households, began to replace manual nightsoil conservancy. By 1947, according to official statistics, the load on manual nightsoil conservancy had reduced by half, with the city seeing a move away from this practice towards water-carriage of sewage via closed sewers, albeit through the austere ‘flush-out latrine’. By examining the history of such adaptive efforts, this article makes two scholarly interventions. First, it moves the literature on colonial sanitary modernization forward by going beyond analyses of fragmentation and draws attention instead to the nature and limitations of adaptive paradigms of colonial civic improvement. Secondly, by throwing light on the emergence of novel configurations of infrastructure provision such as the ‘flush-out latrines’, the article also contributes to an evolving scholarship about the production of novel materialities in colonial cities, challenging static characterizations of the colonial built environment rooted in the Western/indigenous or formal/informal dichotomies.
That colonial civic improvement efforts were limited and constrained on several fronts has been well established in the historiography of Indian cities. As recent literature points out, not only were these efforts underfunded, inadequate and disproportionately biased towards the elites, but they also did not command the support of the residents, leading to failures in implementation, resistance and protest, creating an unequal, uneven and crisis-prone city.Footnote 1 Scholarship has focused on explanations for the failure, and has also analysed the governance consequences of these failures.Footnote 2 However, the question of how these processes translated and materialized in the realms of infrastructure provision for vital public services, such as water supply, sanitation or urban transport has not been examined in adequate detail. The implicit understanding about unequal infrastructures that emerges out of the literature is that of a polarized duality, whereby the elites enjoy planned, state-supported services along Western or metropolitan standards, while the rest are left out of the loop of these modern infrastructure networks, often reliant on traditional, unplanned and informal systems.Footnote 3 Literature on colonial sanitary systems is no exception. Key scholarship on the subject has argued that sanitation systems in colonial Indian cities suffered from the dual burden of underinvestment, on the one hand, and the colonial politics of difference, on the other, leading to splintered infrastructures.Footnote 4 As Vijay Prashad observes in his study of colonial Delhi ‘spaces inhabited by the colonial officials and by unofficial Europeans enjoyed the fruits of modernity, [while] the natives remained in the sloth of another kind of colonial modernity, one that relied upon manual labour and outdated technology’.Footnote 5
Recent scholarship on the colonial city in India has however cautioned against thinking about the colonial built environment in such strictly dichotomous and static terms, arguing that it might obscure new sources of dynamism.Footnote 6 It has pointed out that much was changing in the Indian city, especially after 1920, when Indian actors began to play a more assertive role in urban affairs, with important implications for urban services.Footnote 7 As Nikhil Rao points out in his study of housing in inter-war Bombay, new forms of apartment living emerged among the city’s upper-caste, lower middle-class Indian residents, particularly in the sub-urban areas, complicating the dual cities framework. As he notes, one distinctive aspect of these new forms of habitation was the embedding of flush toilets within these houses, suggesting that an important transformation in sanitary practices was already afoot in the late colonial period.Footnote 8 Yet, prevailing literature on colonial sanitation, with its main emphasis on fragmentation does not provide enough clues for thinking about how these transformations took shape. As a result, we have very little understanding of how the transition from dry and manual conservancy methods to water-carriage of nightsoil took place in Indian cities, a crucial change emblematic of urban modernity. Even the parallel literature on caste and sanitation systems in India is mainly focused on the politics of conservancy workers, without paying sufficient attention to the broader processes of technological change within which it was embedded.Footnote 9
By examining the history of modern sewerage systems in colonial Madras city, this article contributes to the evolving conversation about the emergence of new built forms in the historiography of cities in colonial India. It will show that, much like the case of housing in inter-war Bombay, sanitation systems in contemporary Madras also saw the emergence of new built forms such as flush-out latrines and special drainage devices, specifically geared towards the houses of the lower middle classes. Whereas Nikhil Rao situates such changes in built form to changing ideas of caste and community among the Indian subjects, this article emphasizes the centrality of the state in the development and implementation of such changes. State intervention was vital in two respects. First, the building of trunk infrastructure for water carriage of sewage was backed by substantial financial subsidies from the colonial state at both the provincial and the national levels. The city government also had to provide economic incentives to stimulate the adoption of flush latrines at the household level. Secondly, state intervention was needed in another crucial respect – engineering work. The city’s engineering department took up the task of designing and manufacturing cheap sanitary appliances that the city’s lower middle classes could afford, itself, as the article will show, an embodiment of an adaptationist current of engineering thinking among colonial sanitary engineers active in India. Underlying both these interventions were urban anxieties around epidemics such as cholera and plague. Yet, as this article will show, these interventions came with their own logics of exclusions and internal limitations. The sewer system that emerged in the wake of these changes was fragmented along lines of class and wealth ownership. The ideal of individual flush latrines at the household level did not apply to the residents of slums who had to rely on public toilets, the provision of which remained woefully inadequate and a neglected issue. Moreover, anxieties around control over urban engineering projects in the context of Indianization of the engineering bureaucracy in the inter-war years led to the imposition of new forms of financial control and discipline over the autonomy of city government in executing sanitary works, slowing down the speed with which such transformations could take place.
The design and implementation of colonial engineer J. W. Madeley’s Madras Main Drainage Scheme of 1913 provide the empirical basis for many of the above arguments. Madeley’s scheme provided the central framework for sewerage modernization in the city in the decades that followed, providing a crucial window for understanding the nature and limitations of colonial sanitary modernization efforts. In what follows, the article first describes the technical and institutional landscape of sewerage engineering in colonial India to help situate Madeley’s scheme within the context of the broader sanitary engineering discourse in colonial India. In the last three sections of the article it then tracks the history of Madras Main Drainage Scheme of 1913.
A contested discourse: landscape of sewerage engineering in colonial India
Modern sewerage systems for the waterborne removal of human waste were legacies of Victorian sanitary reform. As rapid urbanization stretched pre-existing arrangements for housing and sanitation in the nineteenth-century industrializing world, urban populations were exposed to devastating epidemics such as cholera and typhoid. Centralized city-wide sewerage systems were part of this package of protective measures. The implementation of these systems, at least in the Western world, saw the water closet and the network of sewer pipes that flushed their contents away from urban habitations gradually displace various practices of manual nightsoil removal, setting the standard for what was to be considered modern and hygienic.Footnote 10
The sewage handled by modern sewer systems comprised two components: nightsoil from the water closet and sullage (the wastewater from houses). In some instances, sewer systems were also equipped to handle storm water (rainfall run-off), in which case they were called ‘combined’ sewers. Where geographically practical, the collected sewage was conveyed via gravitation to disposal sites; if not, pumping was deployed. In the late nineteenth century, there were a variety of sewage disposal methods, ranging from land treatment (sewage farming), river dilution and biological treatment methods such as septic tanks, the activated sludge process, etc. Britain, quite unsurprisingly, was a global leader in the implementation of these systems and by the second half of the nineteenth century, most British towns were equipped with such systems, a process that assisted in the systematization of engineering knowledge in this domain.Footnote 11
In colonial India, the process of diffusion of these systems was rather slow. For much of the latter half of the nineteenth century, only the two largest cities of Calcutta and Bombay had sewerage systems on the water carriage principle. Calcutta was the first city to implement it in 1858 and Bombay, the second in the late 1870s. In both cases, the sewerage systems were aimed to replicate the experience of Western cities, with sewers directly communicating with households through internal plumbing.Footnote 12 It is important to note that both schemes involved building sewers in areas of Indian residence too.Footnote 13 Bombay’s scheme even included financial provisions for equipping all houses covered by the scheme with water closets, except those houses that officials considered to be inferior.Footnote 14 By the late 1890s, Bombay’s houses began to see a gradual introduction of what were called ‘native’ water closets.Footnote 15 These types of latrines were made to suit the squatting posture and were of a shape that was considered by engineers to be ‘agreeable to the natives of India’.Footnote 16 As the former drainage engineer of Bombay C.C. James noted in his book in 1902, ‘many forms of this latrine have been tried in Bombay with varying success and of late years great improvements have been made’.Footnote 17 Engineering firms based in India, such as Richardson and Cruddas of Bombay and Burn and Co. of Calcutta, had begun making sanitaryware geared towards the Indian market, as shown in Figure 1.Footnote 18
A ‘Native’ water closet marketed by Richardson and Cruddas. Source: ‘Doulton’s Improved Wash-Down “Hindostan” Closet for Natives’, in Richardson and Cruddas, General Catalogue, 1909 ed. (Bombay, 1909), 171. From the British Library Collection: Cup.1262.ff.18.
Beyond Bombay and Calcutta, modern sewerage systems in India were conspicuous by their absence. An important stumbling block was availability of adequate financing. As historians of public health in colonial India have pointed out, even as the colonial government created the bureaucratic and institutional set-up for sanitary reform in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it did not have any policy provisions for financing sanitary improvements.Footnote 19 Sanitary infrastructure building lay outside the remit of the public works policies of the central Indian government. Therefore, it did not garner levels of official support from the imperial treasury in the way that transport or irrigation projects – the so-called ‘productive’ public works of colonial capitalism – did.Footnote 20 The responsibility for executing sanitary works, therefore, lay with local governments, such as municipalities, which had to meet these costs solely from the property tax base, much like in the cities of Europe and North America.Footnote 21 But in the case of the latter, capital-intensive engineering projects like sewerage systems were bankrolled by the creation of new financial instruments such as municipal bonds.Footnote 22 In colonial India, the creation of such mechanisms was stifled by a lack of clear policy direction; the fact that most Indian cities at that time lay in the periphery of global capitalist urbanization did not help either. As Hugh Tinker notes about the conditions of municipal finance in India, lenders were hesitant to ‘lend to the average municipality whose credit and reputation for financial reliability would not be reassuring’.Footnote 23 Moreover, a sizeable component of municipal leadership was in the hands of Indian propertied classes throughout the late nineteenth century, which made increasing property taxes a politically fraught exercise for the colonial regime. This meant that smaller cities, which had a much lower tax base than a Bombay or a Calcutta, lay outside the ambit of sewerage modernization.
Most other cities in colonial India, including Madras, were drained using what was known as the ‘open drain’ system, an austere alternative to underground sewers.Footnote 24 This consisted of a network of open household and streetside open drains for exclusively receiving and transporting household sullage to desired outlets.Footnote 25 Under this system, nightsoil was removed manually, the labour for which was exclusively recruited from groups belonging to a low caste, with both the work and the workers facing stigmatization.Footnote 26 It is important to stress however, that even in Bombay and Calcutta, which had underground sewers capable of waterborne removal of nightsoil, water closet use remained marginal and manual nightsoil conservancy remained the norm throughout the late nineteenth century.Footnote 27 To be sure, the continuation of manual conservancy was not exclusive to India nor, for that matter, the British Empire. The practice of manual conservancy was quite active in East Asia, well into the twentieth century, due to the agronomic potential of nightsoil.Footnote 28 In the early twentieth-century Western world, sewerage reform was a class-divided process, with working class houses still relying on some form of manual collection of nightsoil.Footnote 29 What set the Indian situation apart was that these regimes of municipal sanitation incorporated a caste dimension, as the night conservancy workforce was almost exclusively recruited from the ‘untouchable’ castes.Footnote 30
For British engineers involved with the design of sewerage systems, the main issue was whether, how and to what extent the European experience in draining households could be transferred to the Indian context. What gave fillip to this discussion in the 1890s was the formation of a committee in Bombay to enquire into the working of the house connections, in the wake of operational difficulties encountered in handling the sullage from houses.Footnote 31 The committee found that the sullage pipes were ‘loaded continually with sand, earth, rags and other solid waste matters’ leading to frequent choking of the pipes, thereby worsening rather than ameliorating insanitary conditions.Footnote 32
One option to solve those issues, advocated by sanitary engineer John Wallace, one of the first to author a sanitary engineering textbook for Indian engineers, was dispensing with English-type internal plumbing altogether. Wallace considered it unsuitable in the Indian context because it required ‘co-operation’ and suitable ‘habits’ from residents, both of which he found wanting among Indians.Footnote 33 His book, saturated with notions of Indian cultural inferiority, even advised fellow sanitary engineers to aim for ‘a standard of excellence considerably below perfection’ when designing and carrying out sanitary works in India, noting that ‘the Indian has for ages past lost that perception of smells, which distinguishes the European and renders him something of a faddist in the eyes of his Indian fellow subjects’.Footnote 34 At a practical level, he suggested using open drains and manual nightsoil conservancy, noting that the latter was a ‘lesser evil’.Footnote 35 Wallace’s view on cultural exceptionalism in designing drainage systems for India had other proponents as well, like C.C. James, a former drainage engineer from Bombay, whose book, Oriental Drainage was premised on ‘the fact that in dealing with the sanitation of an Eastern city it has to be borne in mind that what may be wholly successful in Europe is not necessarily so in Asia’.Footnote 36
A diametrically opposite view was advocated by the journal Indian Engineering (IE), the unofficial voice of the colonial Public Works Department (PWD). It argued in favour of abandoning the open system in ‘any but very small towns’, on grounds of economy, ease of construction and safety.Footnote 37 For the journal, the problem of the excess solid content in the house sullage in India could be managed with ‘very small mechanical modifications’ to the connections rather than deploying open drains, which it considered a ‘crude’ solution.Footnote 38 It saw no reason why ‘modified systems cannot be evolved that would suit native requirements whilst the principles adopted in Europe are adhered to’.Footnote 39 It also observed how a ‘correctly laid’ water carriage sewerage system could diminish, if not abolish, ‘the expenditure on transport and the nastiness of the “separate removal” system’.Footnote 40 IE was hardly alone in echoing such sentiments. An official handbook on sanitary science from the Madras presidency, penned by some of its top medical and sanitary officials, to give an example, observed with respect to the introduction of water-carriage method in Indian towns that,
much has been heard of the inadvisability of thrusting innovations of western origin on an eastern community whose customs and prejudices are not in harmony with them…but there is no reason why, when due modifications have been introduced, an up to date system should not work as successfully in India as in Europe.Footnote 41
Thus, the landscape of modern sewerage engineering in late nineteenth-century India was beginning to be populated by adapted artefacts of Western provenance. At the same time, the question of whether and how to adapt Western engineering practices was a point of serious contention among the British engineering community, revealing that the history of colonial sanitation was more complicated than the implicit picture of duality available in the literature.
Politics of design: the Madras Main Drainage Scheme of 1913
Madras city occupied an interesting position in the spectrum of cities in colonial India. It was the third biggest of British India’s port cities, behind only Bombay and Calcutta in terms of population.Footnote 42 However, unlike the latter two, which were emerging as industrial powerhouses, Madras’s primary character remained that of a centre for administration, trade and education.Footnote 43 The financial power of Madras was therefore considerably inferior to that of Calcutta and Bombay, with the city coming a very distant third in terms of both municipal income and taxable property value.Footnote 44 This meant that the city did not have the resources to build a modern sewer network along the water-carriage principle like Calcutta or Bombay in the nineteenth century. The city’s Indian elites who were part of municipal leadership were keen to implement such a system but requests for financial support from the higher echelons of the colonial state did not elicit a favourable response.Footnote 45 For much of the colonial period then, open drains and manual nightsoil conservancy were the mainstays of sewerage management.Footnote 46 Between 1897 and 1905, after high epidemic death rates, the city did build an austere underground sewer network in some divisions of the city. This was designed to get rid of sullage but not nightsoil, and the system was plagued with various design faults and soon became operationally dysfunctional.Footnote 47 The household sullage was sent to sewage farms, while, after manual collection from houses, the nightsoil was either trenched in the outskirts of the city or was sold to nearby farmers.Footnote 48
It was not until 1913 that the city was able to mobilize finances for building its first drainage scheme on the water-carriage principle. This was in some ways a direct result of the greater activism of the colonial Indian government in fixing sanitary issues in its larger cities following the devastating plague epidemics of the late 1890s. As historians such as Prashant Kidambi have shown, following the plague, there was a strong impulse among the colonial administrative classes to increase their interventions in the sphere of urban governance, even if this required superseding the local governmental institutions.Footnote 49 The imperial Indian government at this time supported municipalities in large cities with liberal financial aid to boost their sanitary infrastructures, thereby making capital spending on sanitation independent of the financial means of cities.Footnote 50 Madras was a major beneficiary of this largesse. Between 1904 and 1913, several sanitary engineering projects, among them a renewal of the water supply and distribution systems, were commenced in the city. All of these were aided by the imperial and the provincial government, with aid amounting to nearly 70 per cent of the capital expenditure on these schemes by 1920.Footnote 51 For overseeing the implementation of these schemes, the colonial state superseded the local engineering bureaucracy and in 1907 brought in a British sanitary engineer named J.W. Madeley from Birmingham. Although he initially came on a five-year contract, Madeley spent nearly a decade-and-a-half (1908–1924) in Madras designing and building its water supply and sewerage systems. Upon his arrival, the construction of all new water supply and drainage works in the city were brought under one department called the ‘Special Works’ department. Madeley was the engineer-in-chief, with the title ‘Special Engineer’, a sign of serious sanitary reformist intent from the colonial state. What with the sorry state of sanitary works in the city, Madeley’s appointment was supported by the city’s Indian elites. For instance, Dr T.M. Nair, a key Indian spokesperson in the city and a founder member of the Madras-based Justice party, felt that getting an expert from England ‘of sufficient experience, so that he might be taken as an authority’, would help avoid the city’s bitter experiences with sanitary works in the past.Footnote 52
Estimated to cost nearly Rs 1 crore, the Madras main drainage scheme of 1913 was the most expensive project that the city had ever handled. The drainage scheme had two components, the city-wide trunk infrastructure and the drainage appliances at the household level. The scheme for trunk infrastructure divided Madras into three drainage divisions: the Western, the Northern and the Southern, as shown in Figure 2.Footnote 53 Each drainage division was in turn further divided into different areas commanded by a pumping station. The pumping stations were the nodal points which would receive household sewage in different areas through a combination of street, branch and intercepting sewers and send them for disposal though the sewerage mains. The scheme was ambitious, and there were hopes of sewering every road in the city, except for what were referred to as ‘narrow lanes’ and paracherries (Tamil word for ‘slums’ occupied by ‘untouchable’ castes).Footnote 54
Three drainage divisions of the 1913 drainage scheme. Source: ‘Plate No. IV’, in Madeley, Madras City Main Drainage, 1913: Vol. 1: Report. From the British Library Collection: IOR/V/27/842/11.
Figure 2. Long description
A historical plan titled Map of Madras Showing the Three Divisions of the Main Drainage Scheme with a scale of 1 inch to 1 mile. The map is oriented with the Bay of Bengal on the East side.
* The Northern Division is shaded in light red and occupies the Northeast quadrant. It is bounded by the Ennore Road to the North and the Buckingham Canal to the West. Key landmarks within this zone include the Madras Harbour and Fort St. George.
* The Western Division is shaded in light blue and is located in the central-West area. It is bounded by the Poonamallee High Road and the Cooum River.
* The Southern Division is shaded in light orange and occupies the Southeast quadrant. It includes the Island, Triplicane High Road, and extends South toward the Adyar River and the Southern section of the Buckingham Canal.
A thick black line marks the Municipal Boundary to the West. A compass rose in the bottom right indicates North is at the top. The bottom right corner also contains the signature of J W Madeley, Special Engineer, Corporation of Madras. A note in the top left explains that the three divisions are nearly independent of each other, allowing work in one to proceed without affecting the others.
At the household level, the appliances part of Madeley’s schemes embodied the design principles enunciated by the IE on the adaptability of water-carriage for Indian contexts.Footnote 55 It aimed to replace open drains with closed sewers and manual conservancy with the water-carriage of night-soil. To manage house drainage in Madras, Madeley devised a threefold categorization of services: the ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third’ class. In the case of the first class, the arrangements were to be ‘practically the same as are used in Europe or America’, affording provisions for households to connect their water closets, sinks and baths to the sewers with internal plumbing.Footnote 56 From the bylaws regulating their use, to the principles, the workmanship and the material used for their construction, the first class services planned for Madras were based on the standards set by the London County Council.Footnote 57
The second class service was meant for the ‘poorer class houses’, where the costs of installing indoor plumbing might become very expensive.Footnote 58 Here separate connections were planned for sullage and nightsoil. The house sullage would be conducted by an open drain inside the house, before emptying into street sewers via a device known as the ‘silt-catcher’, as shown in Figure 3. This was to deal with the accumulation of silt which, as was highlighted earlier, was one of the key design problems in adapting Western drainage practices for Indian contexts. For nightsoil removal, provisions were made to connect ‘native’ water closets directly to the sewers by a short length of cast iron pipe, independent of the sullage removal arrangement described above, as shown in Figure 4.Footnote 59 The onus of adopting the water closet, however, was placed on the householders.
A second-class house connection with a silt catcher for house sullage. Source: ‘Plate No. XIII’, in Madeley, Madras City Main Drainage, 1913: Vol. 1 Report. From the British Library Collection: IOR/V/27/842/11.
Figure 3. Long description
The diagram illustrates the flow of sullage from left to right.
* On the far left, an OPEN HOUSE DRAIN lined with glazed stoneware channels sits on a concrete base.
* The drain passes through an INCLINED C. I. GRATING into a 4 INCH S. W. PIPE that penetrates the HOUSE WALL and a PYAL structure.
* A CLEANING ARM WHEN REQUIRED is positioned vertically above this pipe section.
* The pipe transitions into a 4 INCH C. I. PIPE as it crosses over a STORM WATER SIDE DRAIN.
* The pipe enters a brick-lined SILT CATCHER BUCKET WITH CENTRAL DIAPHRAGM. This unit features a vertical bucket for sediment collection and a trap mechanism.
* From the silt catcher, the waste flows into a 4 INCH S. W. HOUSE CONNECTION pipe. This pipe slopes downward beneath the SURFACE OF STREET.
* On the far right, the house connection pipe terminates at the STREET SEWER.
Arrows indicate the direction of water flow from the house toward the main sewer line.
Flush-out latrine designs for households. Source: ‘Plate No. X’, in Madeley, Madras City Main Drainage, 1913: Vol. 1 Report. From the British Library Collection: IOR/V/27/842/11.
Figure 4. Long description
The image contains two architectural cross-sections.
Left Panel: Titled SECTION THROUGH INDIAN WATER CLOSET IN PLACE OF EXISTING DRY LATRINE AT G. Scale 1 inch equals 8 feet. At the top right is a flushing tank with ball tap and a hanging handle. A vertical pipe leads down to an Indian water closet set into the floor level. An automatic closing ablution tap supplied from the tank is positioned above the closet. Below the floor, the closet connects to an arch work structure and a 4 inch S W drain pipe that exits through a 1 foot 6 inch thick wall toward the sewer. The room width is marked as 8 feet 0 inches.
Right Panel: Titled SKETCH SHOWING FLUSHOUT LATRINE TYPE A IN PLACE OF EXISTING DRY LATRINE. Scale 1 inch equals 8 feet. This diagram shows a row of three latrine stalls separated by walls, each 2 feet 6 inches wide. A 1 and a quarter inch flush pipe runs horizontally beneath the floor level, connecting the stalls. To the right, the system passes under a verandah floor level, through a cement fillet and a 4 inch back inlet trap, before exiting to the sewer.
Below the diagrams is a signature for J. W. Madeley, M A, followed by the text M. INST. C E, M. AM. SOC. C E, SPECIAL ENGINEER, CORPORATION OF MADRAS.
The third category of drainage service was meant for ‘slums’ in the city, where, according to Madeley, each ‘separate dwelling cannot be provided with a connection to a sewer’.Footnote 60 These areas were to be served with open street side drains connected to sewers and public latrines for nightsoil removal.Footnote 61 As for public conveniences, Madeley’s scheme provided for two types: A and B. The former was made up of ‘cheaper materials’ with common flushing arrangements that received waste water from nearby water fountains or cattle troughs.Footnote 62 The latter was ‘superior’ and meant for the ‘educated and the intelligent’ class of people, and contained separate compartments with either an Indian or European type water closet, built very much on the ‘lines of European latrines’.Footnote 63
The first instalment of the construction of the drainage network started in 1914 in three of the city’s most populous divisions, namely Georgetown, Pursawakkam and Triplicane.Footnote 64 It must be noted here that Georgetown was the remnant of the formerly segregated area of Indian residence in the city called ‘Black town’. By the early twentieth century, Georgetown had become the most important area of Indian residence and commerce in the city.Footnote 65 While prioritizing Georgetown, Madeley notes that since the division housed many ‘wealthy merchants and persons of high standing in Madras’, it required immediate attention.Footnote 66 Pursawakkam, Chintadripet and Triplicane areas merited action on grounds of insanitation and public health.Footnote 67 In this sense, it was class, commerce and public health that guided the priorities in sewer building.
Piecemeal engineering; the politics of gradual implementation
Started with optimism, the implementation of Madeley’s scheme was severely delayed due to the onset of the Great War. Until 1923, only a limited version of the scheme, amounting to about 40 per cent of the total budget estimates, could be finished.Footnote 68 The next instalment commenced in 1923 when the post-war economic prospects improved, with hopes of completion by 1930.Footnote 69 By this time, though, the Madras municipal council had become a changed political entity following the enactment of Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of the Government of India in 1919. Instituted against the background of the dislocations and political repressions that followed the end of the First World War, these reforms created a halfway house between the nationalist demand for self-rule and the then prevailing status quo of near monopolistic British control over the governance of India.Footnote 70 The reforms involved the creation of a governance set-up known as ‘dyarchy’, under which the business of government was divided into two subjects, with one set (known as ‘transferred’ subjects) devolved to Indian ministers responsible for newly instituted legislative councils with an elected majority on a property ownership limited electorate, while the other set (known as ‘reserved’ subjects) was kept under official control by British officers. Local and municipal governance became a transferred subject, falling directly under an Indian minister, while the city council now had a greater proportion of elected members, a more expanded franchise and was led by an elected (as opposed to an appointed) president.Footnote 71 While an official with the title of commissioner controlled the different executive officers of the city council, including the engineers, the council now had relatively greater autonomy from higher levels of the government in conducting its affairs.Footnote 72
The non-Brahmin Justice party held the political leadership of the municipal council for nearly the entire dyarchy period. However, the reforms and the consequent emergence of Indian leadership in the city council did not translate into improved service provision in any automatic sense. For one, the Justice party did not take an active approach to improving the health and welfare of the labouring population, as historians such as Sarah Hodges have observed.Footnote 73 Their political adversaries within the city – the Swarajists faction of the nationalist Indian National Congress – did not fare better on civic issues. While they paid lip service to the improvement of urban services in the run up to municipal elections, their interventions remained tied to reducing the property tax burden for the city’s petite bourgeoisie, thereby making less money available for sanitary expenditure.Footnote 74
But reasons also have to be sought beyond the realms of formal politics to examine the structural weakness of colonial municipalities. Even into the dyarchy period, municipal income continued to rely on the same sources as in the pre-reform days, which meant that external support in the form of government grants remained central for sanitary improvement.Footnote 75 However, with public health, and municipal governance, made into transferred subjects at the provincial level, the imperial state, if anything, withdrew further from direct financial intervention in this sphere. This was in stark contrast to contemporary developments in Britain, where local governments were given greater support to ensure a ‘national minimum’ in social services via British government grants in the inter-war years.Footnote 76 Martin Melosi observes a similar tendency in the United States too, where the infusion of federal funds during the New Deal was significant for boosting the growth of waterworks.Footnote 77 In the absence of analogous interventions, aid to local government now had to be procured provincially. But the grant policy of the provincial governments for the period beyond 1920 lacked a clear direction. To the extent that there was any tendency in grant allocations from the dyarchy ministries, it was biased more towards rural services rather than urban ones, and mainly towards the extension of primary education.Footnote 78
The changed priorities around grants were further complicated by tensions within the colonial state arising out of the concomitant Indianization of the colonial bureaucracy that accompanied the dyarchy reforms. As historians such as Aparajit Ramnath have pointed out, one important aspect of Indianization was the increased staffing of the colonial engineering bureaucracy by Indian engineers. Partly the result of a deliberate policy to accommodate moderate nationalism and partly the consequence of the reduced lure of the Indian empire for metropolitan engineers, Indianization affected almost all arms of the colonial state.Footnote 79 While more Indian engineers were now employed by the state, the field was not necessarily level, with suspicions about the capacity of Indian engineers to excel professionally persisting throughout the colonial period; happenings in Madras provide an exemplary case.Footnote 80
In 1926, Madeley was succeeded by an Indian engineer named Srinivasachari. This development did not go down too well with the higher echelons of the colonial state. A Local Self-Government (LSG) department note on this subject observed that Srinivasachari did not have the ‘fairly high qualifications’ necessary to execute a ‘large’ project of this magnitude without ‘outside’ control and that he did not have the ‘status’ and ‘experience’ to ‘assure’ the government about the progress of the works.Footnote 81 For C.T. Mullings, the chief engineer of the PWD, the problem lay not with Srinivasachari but with the training available in India. He observed in this regard that:
All western European countries have colleges where sanitary engineering is a special course. Every town and even some villages have both drainage systems and proper water supplies. Consequently, European education in sanitary engineering provides great variety of practical experience to accompany a theoretical training. India cannot do this yet.Footnote 82
Mullings demanded that the ‘Corporation appoint … a man of varied experience and long practice’, observing that ‘no degrees unrecognized by the Institution of Civil Engineers can be accepted for a post of this importance’,Footnote 83 a policy that would exclude anybody with an engineering degree from Indian universities. This was a demand that the Indian elites were not willing to consider. For the city’s nationalist leaders, Srinivasachari’s qualifications were adequate and his local experience made him superior to any new imported engineer.Footnote 84 They also saw racist attitudes in the objection to Srinivasachari. For instance, while discussing the adverse report on Srinivasachari’s engineering work by provincial officers, where some of his engineering methods were called ‘childish’, council member and Congress leader, S. V. Chetti made the accusation that these reports were ‘surcharged with racial superiority’.Footnote 85 Srinvasachari’s appointment was confirmed in 1931, but only after he received a positive report on his work from a senior British executive engineer of the Public Works Department, named F.W. Ireland.Footnote 86
In the wake of the stand-off around Srinivasachari’s appointment, the colonial government changed the policy of grant disbursal to ensure a new ‘form of control’.Footnote 87 From 1928, it introduced what was known as the ‘post-payment’ method for grants to the city, reversing the order of grant disbursal it had been following until then.Footnote 88 Under this arrangement, while the government agreed to contribute half the cost of Madeley’s scheme, the grants for the project could be claimed by the city only after the expenditure was incurred as opposed to the previous practice where grants were given prior to the expenditure.Footnote 89 It was the conscious policy of the government in the early 1920s, when Madeley was around, not to apply the post-payment principle when it came to allocating grants to the city’s sanitary works.Footnote 90 The change of grant policy was made despite warnings from its own officials that this mode of grant disbursal was not suitable for works involving heavy capital expenditure.Footnote 91
With the city’s spending capacity once again linked to its municipal income in this way, it was hardly surprising that the progress of the scheme was slow. Expenditure on new works dropped from about Rs 10.2 lakhs in 1926–27 to 3.6 lakhs each in the next two years.Footnote 92 While investment improved in the subsequent years, it slowed down the completion of the project. It took until 1932, nearly 20 years after the conception of the scheme, for the trunk infrastructure of the scheme to be finished.Footnote 93 At this time, nearly 84 per cent of the city had been sewered.Footnote 94 From the mid-1930s, extensions to sewerage systems continued both within and outside the areas covered by Madeley’s main drainage scheme, particularly in the newly emerging suburbs of the city.Footnote 95 Despite the growth of such fresh projects, the annual capital expenditure on new drainage works never reached the highs of the mid-1920s when Madeley was in charge and the previous grant policy was in force, as the trend in Figure 5 suggests. The highest amount spent on new drainage works in the 1930s was Rs. 9.05 lakhs in 1938–39, about 67 per cent of the figure for 1925–26.Footnote 96 The lack of an adequate level of support was glaring, especially given the fact that the city’s population had grown rapidly in the inter-war years from about 526,911 in 1921 to about 777,481 in 1941.Footnote 97
Trend of capital expenditure on drainage works between 1920 and 1940. Source: ARMC: 1940–41, 238.
Figure 5. Long description
The horizontal X axis lists fiscal years from 1920-21 to 1940-41. The vertical Y axis represents values in Rs. Lakhs ranging from 0 to 16 in increments of 2.
Data flow:
* The line begins at approximately 9 in 1920-21 and trends downward to 6.5 by 1923-24.
* A sharp increase follows, peaking at the highest point of approximately 13.5 in 1925-26.
* A steep decline occurs over the next two years, reaching a trough of roughly 3.5 in 1928-29.
* The expenditure rises to 9 in 1930-31, followed by a period of minor fluctuations between 6 and 7 through 1934-35.
* After a peak of 8.8 in 1935-36, it drops to 4.5 in 1937-38.
* A final sharp rise reaches 11.5 in 1939-40 before ending at approximately 7.2 in 1940-41.
‘Essential sanitary reform’: replacing manual conservancy
Throughout the 1920s, even as the trunk infrastructure was gradually implemented, action at the household level was slower. While house drainage connections were provided free of charge from 1925, an analogous policy for water closets was lacking. Therefore, even in sewered areas, the uptake of water closets was rare and official displeasure at this situation was not uncommon.Footnote 98 The city therefore found itself in a situation where the expenditure on both drainage operation and manual conservancy was increasing.Footnote 99 The local English language daily the Madras Mail considered the city council too ‘timid’ to enforce the use of water closets.Footnote 100 But according to official estimation, it was costs that stood in the way. For instance, in a note to the city council on this question, the commissioner of the Madras city council had identified the ‘high cost of the fittings’ as a serious impediment to the broader uptake of flush toilets in 1929.Footnote 101 Initial users were limited to the salaried and professional classes, a very thin slice of the population. To give an approximate sense of the scale, by March 1929, household flush-out latrines, a form of the native water closet designed by the city’s drainage department, had been installed in only 528 private houses, a tiny fraction of the city’s total houses.Footnote 102 Testimonials of these early adopters suggest that convenience and the ‘independence’ it offered the households from the conservancy workforce were important factors for take-up. For instance, the testimonial of one M. Dorairaj, a professor of civil engineering and a resident of Triplicane, observed that flush latrines were working in an ‘efficient’ manner and that he was ‘no longer bothered by the piercing howls of the scavenger in the street’.Footnote 103 The limited uptake of private latrines did not necessarily mean that the number of public latrines was high. Supposedly geared towards ‘slum’ dwellers, the number of such latrines was also woefully inadequate, admittedly due to official apathy. As the health officers’ report from 1925 quipped, ‘year after year proposals for these are sent but the day when this reform will be accomplished seems distant as ever’.Footnote 104
Triggers to change this situation came from multiple fronts by 1930. First, there were the stresses caused by recurrence of cholera epidemics in 1927 and 1928. A committee constituted in their wake identified defective conservancy and sewerage arrangements, along with water supply, as the most serious causes of high mortality.Footnote 105 With specific regard to sewers, it recommended building sewers in the ‘densely populated’ areas and converting manual conservancy to the water-carriage system in every house.Footnote 106 Recurring anxieties on the control over the conservancy workforce added to these burdens. From the official viewpoint, the night conservancy workforce had always been considered as a ‘difficult and obstinate class’, which created serious problems of ‘management and control’.Footnote 107 In the late 1920s, they had formed a union of their own.Footnote 108 Their demand for wages was purportedly ‘continually increasing’ and there was a lurking fear of the ‘danger of a scavenger strike’.Footnote 109 In the late 1920s, no fewer than three strikes of conservancy labourers had taken place, the first in 1927, which coincided with the cholera epidemic. A picture of the conservancy workers’ strike from 1931 is given in Figure 6.Footnote 110
The conservancy workers on strike in 1931. Source: Madras Mail, 27 Jul. 1931, 4. From the British Library Collection: MFM.MC1184.
Spurred on by these factors, the city council began to consider urgent steps to phase out manual conservancy. In 1928, it initiated a policy of advancing small loans to house owners to convert dry latrines to water flushed latrines, a move that the Madras Mail hailed as ‘freeing…the city from the tyranny of the scavengers ever threatening to hold up the conservancy’.Footnote 111 As the commissioner of the city council noted, the scheme was an ‘essential sanitary reform’ that also economized on the expenses on manual conservancy.Footnote 112 For this scheme, a special variety of water closet, consisting of a ‘cheap type of pan capable of being flushed by hand’, was to be constructed in houses at the city council’s expense and their cost would be later recovered from house owners or tenants in ‘easy’ instalments.Footnote 113 Similar in design to the native water closets, they involved flushing by hand, rather than with a flush tank. To reduce costs, these latrines were constructed using pre-cast concrete units, with cement plastering. This was unlike glazed stoneware that is the usual material for sanitaryware. A blueprint featuring a salt-glazed pan that formed the basis of such latrines is shown in Figure 7.Footnote 114 Although deemed ‘inferior’, these latrines were still considered able to be ‘maintained sufficiently clean’ to justify the saving in material.Footnote 115 Beyond costs, such latrines were purported to consume less water and could be operated easily.Footnote 116
The blueprint of the Madras-type flush-out latrine. Source: Photo by author from the drawing available in TNSA, LSG, G. O. No. 1684 L&M, dated 28 Apr. 1930.
Figure 7. Long description
The blueprint is titled Corporation of Madras Special Works Department, Drawing Number 1, Salt Glazed Water Closet Pans Madras Type.
At the top is the Plan view. It shows an elongated oval basin with a circular opening at the left end. The basin width is marked as 7 and 1 quarter inches at the center and tapers to 4 and 1 half inches at the right end. To the left of the basin are two concentric circles representing the inlet or trap connection.
Below the plan is the Section on A A, which provides a side-profile cross-section. The left side shows a curved S-trap design with a vertical inlet. The inlet has a diameter of 4 and 1 half inches and a depth of 1 and 1 half inches. The trap curves downward into a base and then rises into the main basin. The basin floor slopes upward toward the right, reaching a total length of 1 foot 6 and 3 eighths inches from the trap wall to the right rim. The rim thickness is marked as 1 and 1 half inches.
In the bottom right corner, there is a handwritten signature and the title B A B E Special Engineer Corporation of Madras dated 12 11 29.
The initial plan was to build 4,000 such latrines per year (involving an annual expenditure of Rs 2 lakhs) over the next ten years, with the initial capital to be found by borrowing from the provincial government.Footnote 117 The work on the scheme started initially in one of the ‘most congested parts’ of the city, Chintadripet.Footnote 118 Soon after, the conversion of dry to flush-out latrines was made compulsory in eight of the city’s 30 divisions.Footnote 119 By 1938, the conversion was made compulsory throughout the city, except in unsewered areas.Footnote 120 The financial commitment, however, remained less than what was originally intended, slowing down the rate of uptake, as the implementation coincided with the Great Depression. The city could only spend on average about Rs1 lakh per year (half of the originally planned commitment) in the first 12 years of it being brought into force.Footnote 121 The latter half of the 1930s saw a much more rapid uptake and by 1937 nearly half of the city’s houses had a flush-out latrine according to the city health officers’ report.Footnote 122 So vigorous and coercive had the process been that there were pleas in the city council to show ‘special lenience’ for cases of ‘default due to poverty and incapacity to construct the latrines’; the council consequently resolved to use ‘persuasion’ rather than persecution to get the reform done.Footnote 123 The scheme continued into the 1940s, despite not being as financially self-supporting as was originally planned. The ‘interests of public health’ and the reduction in conservancy expenses it entailed were seen as reasons enough to keep the scheme running.Footnote 124
In stark contrast to private latrines, there was a lack of analogous intervention to reform the public latrines that mainly catered to the poorer classes and slum-dwellers. While the numbers of such latrines increased from about 200 in 1930 to 326 in 1940, it was a far cry from the large increase that the City High Mortality Committee had called for.Footnote 125 Even the city’s administration report for 1940 admitted that in regard to sanitary reform in the ‘slums’ not even the ‘fringe of the problems has been touched’.Footnote 126 In a context where most such slums were owned by private landlords, the city council was reluctant to spend public money on facilities that would end up benefiting these private owners.Footnote 127 On the other side, the owners themselves were unwilling to invest in sanitary improvements, because it was so costly that they would have no chance of recouping the expenses via rents.Footnote 128
A resolution of this contradiction never came, however. From 1947, the city council gave up on building further public conveniences for slum residents. Blaming them for lacking ‘civic consciousness’ to use these latrines properly, the city council proposed instead to provide ‘individual flush-out latrines’ for ‘each hut’, in the hope that ‘each hut owner will keep his latrine in a sanitary condition, as it is located in his own premises’.Footnote 129 It is unclear what the trajectory of this policy was, but what is clear is that class divisions continued to remain significant in how sanitary reform in Madras city panned out and that it was the model of building private latrines that garnered official support and financial resources. While acknowledging this facet of official indifference and disdain towards the urban poor, it is worth noting that the initiative of subsidizing toilet building in houses did result in a rapid reduction in manual conservancy. According to official estimates, between 1930 and 1940, the cartload of nightsoil removed manually halved because of these changes, heralding a very important transition towards the water-carriage of sewage in the city.Footnote 130
Conclusion
Madras’s sanitary history highlighted above shows that the analytical framework of fragmentation alone is insufficient to understand how uneven urbanization and infrastructure development in the colonial city are connected. Accounts of fragmentation, this article suggests, need to be complemented with accounts of adaptation, for a more comprehensive understanding of how the materialities of urban living changed in the colonial city. By drawing attention to how colonial engineers fashioned novel ways to make modern sewerage work in the constrained circumstances of colonial Madras, this article has shown how colonial thinking on city improvement also featured, alongside a line of thinking rooted in frameworks of Orientalist difference, an adaptationist line of thought with important implications for the colonial built environment. Underlying this adaptationist thinking was an acceptance of a cheap but self-confessedly sub-standard paradigm of urban improvement. In the case of Madras, this shaped the emergence of novel forms of infrastructure provision, from the cheap flush latrines and the household drainage devices that tolerated open drainage within houses, historical developments that cannot be captured using the Western/Indigenous dichotomy. These adapted modes of urban renewal were conceived in a class-differentiated fashion, and were geared mainly towards the lower middle classes. As the state saw it, it was the poverty of most of the city’s residents that got in the way of effectively fulfilling the reform, thereby justifying the resort to such measures. These modes were sandwiched between the metropolitan model of sanitary provision for the elite and the provision of public toilets for the city’s poor and slum dwellers.
The article also showed how these processes of colonial modernization were riven with internal inconsistencies. The colonial impulse to improve sanitary infrastructure provision came in fits and starts. Until the plague of the late nineteenth century, sewerage reform in the city was tardy. While important momentum for reform was generated in the immediate post-plague years in terms of sanitary spending, it was not sustained into the inter-war years in a consistent fashion. The emergence of Indian self-government in the municipal sphere and the Indianization of the bureaucracy in this period led paradoxically to the strengthening of more centralized control over urban development, slowing the process of sanitary reform, wherein the language of a lack of local expertise provided the justification.
That said, the Madras experience also provides a more nuanced reading of the capacity of the state to reform the colonial city. The article has shown that in the case of sewerage modernization, there was less of a disjunction between planning, implementation and the resources at hand, compared to activities such as housing reform and urban planning, which are highlighted as paradigmatic cases of urban failures in the colonial world due to lack of synchronization between intention, implementation, state capacity and official attitudes.Footnote 131 Here, public health imperatives sometimes forced the colonial state’s hand towards taking concrete action, wherein the plans for action had to be tailored to the resources available. The main aim of such efforts was not to ameliorate but to manage and defer crisis situations, where the gap between urbanization and improvement in service provision and crisis and planning would always endure.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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