Introduction
Recent history has revealed that national maps conceal the dynamic spatial complexity of modernity, for diverse trends combined in globalization are transforming what appear on official maps as stable geographies. The world of legally fixed national borders is fixed firmly in place by territorial passion and by state discipline, but capitalism is also reorganizing space to secure expansive circuits of mobility and feed capital accumulation in protective harbours of state power.Footnote 1 Such complicated mixtures of mobility and territorialism have been active for a very long time,Footnote 2 but they came to light more vividly when another new round of expansive globalization began to undermine assumptions about spatial stability in the 1970s, provoking novel approaches to studies of space in post-modernismFootnote 3 and world systems theory.Footnote 4 More dramatic provocations after 1989 forced more intellectual adjustments: globe-trotting private violence revitalized the United State's global militarism, and internet globalism, financial crisis, and Asia's economic ascendancy joined many other forces to propel a spatial turn across the disciplines.Footnote 5
All this spatial turmoil nevertheless inhabits a world that is still carved firmly into national containers. The widespread remapping of modernity thus proceeds in national idioms and contexts, in what Arjun Appadurai has called ‘the global now’, filled with mobile ‘-scapes’ promising rampant de-territorialization.Footnote 6 In South Asia, recent globalization has accompanied increasing territorial conflict wrought by disruptively mobile neo-liberalism, Hindutva, Islamism, ethno-culturalism, Maoism, and US militarism. As Bangalore became Silicon Valley East, and Asian products filled Western stores, India acquired an imperial identity,Footnote 7 and struggles for territory intensified in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Kashmir, and Gujarat; in mountains of Northeast India, Bangladesh Hill Tracts, and BurmaFootnote 8; in Maoist rebel zones in eastern India; and in all national borderlands, most brutally those connecting Pakistan and Afghanistan, America's new AfPak military zone, where drone aircraft flown by remote control from Nevada bomb local people and places irrespective of national boundaries. Academic life is caught in these struggles and travels the world with increasingly mixed, overlapping attachments to national territory. Historical geography still serves national order.Footnote 9 State cartography remains etched so deeply into intellectual life that even critical work in globe-trotting post-colonial and subaltern studies has reinforced national borders in South Asia.Footnote 10 Yet notably since 1989, more mobile and diasporic scholarship has been mixing territorial sensibilities and generating more spatially complex ideas.Footnote 11
Globalization calls for spatial histories which explore national territory as a dynamic process, not a natural fact of life. Territorialism in South Asia has a very long history, which continues today. National maps are not the last stop. Imperial spaces expanded for centuries before modern times, covering most but not all of the space claimed by nations today, though never uniting them conceptually or politically as national territories.Footnote 12 A distinctively Indian national space emerged for the first time in the period 1870–1914, inside Britain's imperial globalization.Footnote 13 Indian nationalists designed the nation's geo-body as Indian imperial space reached its greatest extent inside the spaces of British Empire and global capitalism.Footnote 14 Nations all across Asia and Africa acquired their spatial form in a world of empire, before 1930, but after 1945, these national spaces became territories of sovereignty in a totally new kind of global space defined by the universal reign of national state territorialism. The post-war spatial reorganization of the world provided post-imperial stability, ending decades of economic retrenchment and imperial conflict. It fostered recovery and growth, as it forged a spatial paradigm for modernity as a whole.Footnote 15 National state territorial permanence only then became firmly entrenched as the spatial bedrock for politics, culture, and academic work. National territory in South Asia acquired its legal authority and cultural permanence inside this global space, defined by the post-1945 world of nations, which authorized a national template for all of human history. Dialectically, however, this new stable world map also provided a new basis for a new burst of expansion by globalizing capitalism, which had begun before 1970,Footnote 16 then accelerated, and continues into the twenty-first century, destabilizing territorial order once again, in South Asia and elsewhere.
The long century spanning two periods of expansive globalization since the late nineteenth century provides a useful temporal frame for historical studies of national space, exposing the spatial dynamics which are concealed in static state maps. Nations are invested in those maps, however, and prefer to cut the century in half, dividing epochs of empire and nation, stopping and restarting time at independence. National time-in-space thereby erases imperial dynamics from national territorialism, renders globalization a recent intrusion, and makes all history moving across state borders international by definition. Splicing that long century back together, we can put national territory back in place as one feature of spatial history, not its master. The nation's current mastery of space entails a naturalizing of borders to extrude aliens and outer worlds and bury spatial anomalies, making unruly space appear as a managerial problem for the nation. In a long-century view of spatial history, these spaces provide opportunities to explore problematic qualities of national territory itself.
One unsettling space of this sort connects and divides India and Bangladesh. It is cut by a national boundary surrounding Bangladesh and separating India's northeast from the rest of India except for a narrow ‘chicken's neck’ corridor running between West Bengal and Assam. Most people in Northeast India live closer to Bangladesh than to the Indian mainland; many also live closer to China and Burma. The space embracing Bangladesh and Northeast India also forms the Meghna-Brahmaputra river basin,Footnote 17 which never touches mainland India, and fell into one unified state territory twice in its history: first, in the Bengal Presidency of British India, from 1826 to 1874; and second, in the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, from 1905 to 1911. Divided decisively in 1911, the basin's deltaic and upland regions were assigned to Pakistan and India, respectively, at the 1947 partition of British India, but they nevertheless share histories of alienation from Indian territorialism, for when East Bengal became East Pakistan, Assam became a rebellious northeast region of India.Footnote 18 This river basin forms, in fact, a transnational space where people have died fighting for independence from national states built by the 1947 partition: Bangladesh fought its way out of Pakistan in 1971, and Northeast India has (like Kashmir) seen many deadly encounters between rebels and Indian forces.Footnote 19
The year 1905 is crucial in the spatial history that connects and separates Bangladesh and Northeast India. In that year, the Meghna-Brahmaputra basin acquired the unitary form that provoked its decisive division. Indian nationalist opposition to the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam brought Indian national space into public politics for the first time. This dramatic debut also invisibly inscribed spatial inequity into Indian nationalism, weaving together economic inequality under uneven development with power disparities which disadvantaged people living in poorer places. In 1905 began a long history of spatial inequity in the territorial politics of South Asia, which continues into the twenty-first century. It arrived during decades of growing spatial inequality under imperial globalization,Footnote 20 and a century later, such inequalities are growing once again, under national globalization. Then, as now, increasing inequality came from disproportionate capital accumulation in favoured urban areas of increasing returns to investment.Footnote 21 In 1905, spatial inequity privileged Calcutta, inflecting Indian nationalism and its economic programme (swadeshi),Footnote 22 and after 1911, it fostered alienation and discontent in subordinate and peripheral regions of the basin, inflecting history in Bangladesh and Northeast India. In the world of globalization today, spatial inequity is once again favouring urban centres of capital accumulation and fostering alienation and discontent in disadvantaged regions of South Asia.
Spatial history in national territory
In 1905, when the King's Viceroy, George Nathaniel Curzon, proclaimed the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, combining eastern Bengal with Assam, it was immediately dubbed ‘the partition of Bengal’. Preliminary proposals had provoked opposition for two years, but the final announcement sparked loud public protests that spread, diversified, intensified, and eventually, in 1911, induced government to redraw boundaries again, reuniting Bengal and re-separating Assam.Footnote 23 That political victory gave Indian national space a definite form and launched the national history of partition, for 1905 is best known as the opening of a divisive historical trend that separated east and west Bengal, leading to a second partitioning in 1947. In India, partition connotes national trauma, a dismemberment of a nation's geo-body.Footnote 24 In Bangladesh, partitions led to independence and 1905 found its true meaning in the freedom struggle in 1971.Footnote 25 In India, partitions mark national struggles to preserve territorial integrity,Footnote 26 which continue today and worsen periodically, as they have again recently, spilling routinely across borders into land ‘lost’ to Pakistan.Footnote 27 Visions of undivided Bengal still inflect public and academic discourse in India, while in Bangladesh, the eastern deltaic region of Bengal has always had a separate regional identity, though in both countries, the border remains a site of anxiety, with armies on each side, and upheaval on borders with Burma a constant worry. India and Bangladesh share border anxieties expressed in spatial scripts that reinforce the authority of national territory by denigrating anti-national ways of seeing and using space with terms like ‘separatist’, ‘fanatic’, ‘alien’, ‘refugee’, ‘infiltrator’, ‘incursion’, ‘terrorist’, ‘communal’, and ‘smuggling’.Footnote 28 They share the antipathy to anti-national ways of thinking about space that pervades national cultures and inflects historical writing around the world.Footnote 29
Remapping 1905 a century later, we can see that Indian national territory emerged inside many overlapping spatial histories, as one product of human agency inside spaces of experience, thought, and action defined in other ways. Manu Goswami and Peter Robb elaborate contextual spaces of globalizing capitalism, British Empire, and British India.Footnote 30 Opening our lens wider, we can see physical spaces of nature and human livelihoods, cultural spaces, very longue duree imperial spaces, and spaces of uneven economic development. The physical environment is composed of mountains, valleys, and deltaic flatlands of the Meghna-Brahmaputra basin, flowing from China and Burma into the Bay of Bengal.Footnote 31 The modern history of this natural space began in 1824, with the British conquest of the northern basin and its annexation to the deltaic lowlands of the Bengal Presidency.Footnote 32 In 1874, government detached northeastern highlands and valleys (including Sylhet) to form the new province of Assam. This province expanded in size through the 1880s, with additions of new conquered territories in southern mountains, which also led to the conquest of Burma.Footnote 33 In 1905, Curzon's redesign brought this larger Assam and eastern Bengal lowlands of the basin into the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. The 1905 province thus overlaps today's national state boundaries and the cultural boundary between Assam and Bengal that became more rigidly drawn during the anti-partition agitations and hardened further thereafter. The word ‘partition’ refers only to one part of the production of the new province, the separation of east and west Bengal; the combination of Bengal with Assam also offends national sentiments. As a result, Curzon's 1905 province is deeply unpopular with historians, who have used it primarily to dramatize national thought, rendering it a spatial anomaly, a mere administrative convenience,Footnote 34 and a cynical divide-and-rule ploy,Footnote 35 whose real significance lay in struggles between imperialists and nationalists that produced lasting legacies of swadeshi Footnote 36 and Bengali nationalism.Footnote 37
Much of the space comprising the 1905 province disappears in national accounts. Ancient Tamil poets prove surprisingly useful in its recuperation. The ancient poets thought about space without nations, without binaries of mind and matter, culture and nature. They imagined landscapes of humanity and nature inside one another, and social life as composing a physical world of mountains, forests, river lowlands, seashores, and wastelands. Everything in the mountains filled the life of mountain people; and so it was in the forest for hunters, in the lowlands for farmers, on the shore for fishing and boat people, and in arid wastelands for thieves and travellers.Footnote 38 This poetic vision of living-in-space sheds useful light on petitions composed by elite Bengali bhadralok gentlemen who wrote to oppose the imperial plan to reorganize the Bengal Presidency published in December 1903.Footnote 39 One petition is dated March 1904, submitted by Babu Sita Nath Roy, Secretary of the Bengal National Chamber of Commerce, major zamindar, and banker, who remained active throughout the anti-partition movement.Footnote 40 He wrote a long essay opposing what he called ‘the severance from Bengal of two of the most flourishing, cultured, and progressive districts, namely Dacca and Mymensingh, and of the Chittagong Division as a whole, and their enforced annexation to a backward province like Assam’. He goes on to explain what he means by ‘backward,’ a term used by other petitioners with the same intent, which translates as ‘underdeveloped.’ The province of Bengal and districts of Dhaka and Mymensingh were ‘flourishing, cultured, and progressive’, while Assam was backward because it lacked a High Court, Board of Revenue, Legislative Council, industry, and centres of culture and education. Assam was not even a real province, governed by an autocratic Commissioner who depended for personnel on Bengal officers. Assam was a virtual dependency of Bengal. Pushing Bengal districts into Assam was like forcing a rich girl to marry a poor man: it violated common sense.
Babu Sita Nath also gives another reason why eastern Bengal districts should not be alienated to Assam, saying,
From a Shastric point of view as well as from European evidences it is abundantly clear that Dacca and Mymensingh were the real Banga or Bengal. . .Bikrampur in Dacca was and is still the home of all Kulin Brahmins and Kayasthas, and. . .every Kulin Brahmin in Bengal traces his descent to someone in Bikrampur. . . . Dacca and Mymensingh have always been the principal seats of Sanskrit learning. . .there are in Dacca and Chittagong not less than 800 indigenous Sanskrit tols kept and maintained by pundits without any aid from Government. . . . The pundits of East Bengal, equally with those of Nabadwip in the district of Nadia, exercise a predominating influence in all matters concerning religion and society, that is, in regulating all religious rites and ceremonies [in all Bengal].Footnote 41
Giving Bengal districts to Assam would therefore divide, weaken, and insult Bengal's cultural heritage, to which its people are deeply attached. This attachment to the land represents a cultural rootedness, but also a contrast, opposition, and elevation, as Ananda Chandra Roy, another activist petitioner from Dacca, elaborates.Footnote 42 He was the President of the People's Association, Secretary of Landholders Association, Pleader and Zamindar, and he informed government that, ‘the land beyond the river Meghna has always been looked down upon as the land of the aborigines’. He then quotes Sir William Hunter, who he says described Dacca district as ‘the Easternmost District of Bengal. . .[and] Eastwards, the broad stream of the Meghna always served as a barrier against the wild aboriginal races, whose names are preserved in the dynasties of Tipperah and Cachar’.Footnote 43
Both these petitioners, like the ancient poets, describe peopled landscapes formed by textual conventions with poignant meanings, depicting differences between mountains and plains and among peoples living in each. Likewise, petitioners deploy their imagery for a purpose, in this case, to oppose (what turned out to be) the penultimate version of a plan to reorganize Bengal and Assam, published by Henry Risley, Curzon's Secretary, in the Gazette of India, on 12 December 1903.Footnote 44 Like the poets, these petitioners inhabit social power relations: they address people who have power to affect their lives as people whose words are important (in this case, being printed and archived with Curzon's official correspondence). Our petitioners compose landscapes where spaces are not only different, however, but also very unequal. Their textual production of spatial inequality invokes ranked people and places, elite civility, ritual regulation, erudite condescension, and privileged defensiveness. Unequal spaces are marked with borders, cities, elite kinship, and cultural authority. These authors depict imperial as well as national space. They use a palimpsest of old imperial spaces to map the present, with references to Hunter, Shastras, Sanskrit tols, Brahmanical Bikrampur, and to Dacca and Mymensingh as ‘the real Banga or Bengal’. Long histories and deep heritage in Bengali spaces appear in these texts, situated firmly in their political present. These high-class, urbane, Hindu (bhadralok) men of distinction are describing their Bengal, their homeland. They are composing a national space with ancient Indian imperial substance.
National and imperial space
These and other respondents to the penultimate plan published in December 1903 entered a political discourse that was then very new, a public disputation over the composition of India's spatial design. They composed national space in opposition to the new province, at a distinctive historical conjuncture, when Indian national space overlapped Indian imperial space at a moment of conflict triggered by imperial innovation amidst competitive pressures of world capitalism, and also, as we will see, at a time of increasing spatial disparities among regions of British India during the first big surge of globalization. Our petitioners indicate the constitutive interaction of national and imperial spaces, which they inhabit at the very moment when Indian nationalism internalized the imperial ethos of spatial inequity.Footnote 45
Indian national space was a territorial product of the late nineteenth century, emerging from experiences of life inside the world of capitalism, in the British Empire, and in British India. It was a bounded, mapped, and culturally embellished territorial homeland for a huge population comprehensively classified but only partly self-identified as Indian.Footnote 46 Though Indians lived almost everywhere in the British Empire, Indian national space did not include overseas Indian places. Though British India did include Burma, Indian national space did not, and its embrace of Native States was weak at best. Manu Goswami argues convincingly that Indian national space was most culturally embellished and firmly established as the territorial habitus of the Indian nation where British India overlapped classical Bharat in the Gangetic lowlands. Babu Sita Nath and Ananda Chandra Roy reinforce that argument emphatically.Footnote 47 They situate Assam outside Bharat, inferior to Bengal, indicating that Assam lay outside or at best on the margins of Indian national space. The production of the Indian nation in 1905 kept Assam and Bengal apart, with Bengal superior as an embodiment of India's national homeland. Congress opposition to the new province stressed the importance of maintaining Bengal as it was, because imperial boundaries had institutionalized Bengali cultural space in a definitive territory, called Bengal, an essential feature of India, separate from Assam.
Indian imperial space is a different kind of space. It is not a product of modern times. It is ancient. It expanded and contracted over many centuries, moving across Gangetic plains in all directions, far beyond Bharat, becoming vastly eclectic, multicultural, including peoples from all over Eurasia. It is adorned with superior central sites of urbane regal power and authority, dramatized in state rituals, and includes vast peripheral regions remote from the centre, out in the countryside, in distant rural areas. Conquest, competition, rebellion, and the incorporation of peoples on the frontier had reorganized Indian imperial space many times. After 1825, imperial India expanded east as never before, adding Assam and finally Burma.Footnote 48
Integrating upland valleys and tropical mountains of the Meghna-Brahmaputra basin into Indian imperial spaces built in the Gangetic lowlands posed problems which have remained unresolved. That problem lay at the heart of Curzon's imperial project in 1905, implicating Bengal uniquely as the eastern frontier region of imperial India. Archaeological sites in Bogra and Comilla show Mauryan imperial frontier settlements in Bengal. A seventh-century inscription described Sylhet as a land ‘outside the pale of human habitation. . .infested by wild animals and poisonous reptiles’,Footnote 49 but in the tenth century, Kamarupa kings (from Assam) settled Brahmans and supporters in Sylhet, in Srihatta and Khanda Kamarupa. Brahmans personified imperial India as Bharat, and in Bengal they did so long after thirteenth century Sena rajas built a capital at Vikramapura (Bikrampur) and Islamic culture began spreading eastwards across the delta.Footnote 50 Eighteenth-century Nawabs consolidated Bengali eastern frontiers with land grants to Hindu and Muslim settlers, but marches east from Murshidabad typically stopped at Dhaka, whose 1830 population was 47 per cent Hindu and 8 per cent Brahman.Footnote 51 In Sylhet, on Bengal's northeast frontier, Brahman administrators remained the mainstay of Nawabi and East India Company regimes. The medieval Brahmanical landscape of imperial Bharat remained part of British India's imperial space in Bengal; it personified Bengal as Indian ‘national space’, as our petitioners so nicely explain. Mountains east and north of lowland Bengal remained beyond the pale for lowland elites. Once, when I asked a scholar in Shillong why Christianity had been so uniquely successful in Northeast India, he said, ‘because the Brahmans and Mullahs would not climb mountains’. Mughals did not climb either, and when they failed to conquer Assam by river, they marked their eastern mountain frontiers with faujdaris and tributary hill rajas attached to Bangala subah, in Sylhet, Tripura, Jaintia, and the Khasi hills.Footnote 52
Imperial Bharat stopped short of the eastern jungle highlands. When British India broke through India's old eastern frontiers to conquer Assam and adjacent mountains, they were initially attached to the Bengal Presidency, until 1874, continuing the old pattern of imperial expansion eastwards from Bengal, through Bengal. British India expanded in all directions from its capital in Calcutta. Many things Bengali attached to Indian imperial space and thus pervaded Indian national territory. Bengal Regiments conquered Punjab and rebelled in 1857. The Bengal Permanent Settlement anchored the discourse of landed property rights in British India. Bengali zamindars, bureaucrats, literati, reformers, educators, scholars, and bhadralok nationalists became central figures in Indian history. The capital of Bengal was the capital of British India, the hometown of Indian nationalism. Calcutta was an imperial capital, steeped in Indian imperial culture, where Bengal was a land of ancient Indian civilization, and Assam was not.
The late-Victorian conjuncture
Far from Calcutta, peripheral, poor, and poorly connected, Sylhet was a Bengali frontier district which had been moved out of Bengal to strengthen the new Assam Province in 1874. This departure raised no protest in Calcutta. In fact, my conversations with Bengali historians suggest that Sylhet's move to Assam during formative decades of Indian national space detached it from Bengali spatial identity. After 1874, other government programmes also endeavoured to bring eastern uplands and mountains more fully into British India, notably, expanding military activity, railway building, and tea plantations.Footnote 53 Curzon's 1905 province was part of an old imperial project to better integrate the new eastern territories,Footnote 54 and this in turn was part of a continuous search for territorial designs that would enhance imperial power and capital accumulation. During the late nineteenth century, as British imperial and economic expansion accelerated, they met serious constraints that Curzon's spatial redesign of Bengal and Assam sought to reduce.
The basic imperial problem was always financial. For centuries, imperial India had built its state machine with tax gathered inside constituent territories,Footnote 55 but local revenues served broader purposes under the British, as imperial India expanded beyond all previous bounds. Increasing tax returns in India supported imperial expansion generally and required more intensive administration in India.Footnote 56 British globalization compelled Indian government to deepen its command of Indian wealth with new forms of taxation, and to generate more wealth to tax by investing in ports, irrigation, and railways. Victorian imperialists measured economic progress by increasing output, trade, taxes, and opportunities for British investors, all stimulated by government policy.Footnote 57 After 1870, competitive pressures from rival imperialists in Africa, China, and the Americas increased the cost and set new limits on British territorial expansion. Raising new revenue in India became more difficult, amidst a long recession in Europe, forcing London to cut costs and press harder for more Indian revenue, just as plague and famine struck India.Footnote 58 British India's fiscal decentralization was driven by these financial pressures; it forced Indian regions to become more financially self-sufficient, pushing more revenue collection on provincial and local authorities. So as land revenue declined as a proportion of total revenues, receipts from customs, excise, telegraph, stamps, post office, irrigation, railways, and later income tax increased, and provinces and localities came to control more of total revenues.Footnote 59
Indian imperial territory became more comprehensively mapped, controlled, and taxed as officials sought ways to intensify low-cost administration and increase revenue. Programmes of decentralization became the institutional ground for imperial and national politics, and they also aggravated spatially uneven economic development by localizing powers of revenue enhancement and control in places with differing trends of capital accumulation and attractiveness for new investors. Decentralization brought more Indian representation into state institutions, promoting the political institutionalization of national space, and in this context, debates about state finance became more political with their absorption into the discourse of public improvement. India's imperial development regime defined a national agenda. The Indian National Congress complained at every annual meeting about excess taxation and government spending (particularly for the military) and about low funding for public works.Footnote 60 The government responded with Moral and Material Progress Reports touting all kinds of government outlay as investments in Indian economic development.Footnote 61 Dams and canals, railway and road building, port facilities, cooperative credit schemes, agricultural improvement programmes, hospitals, jails, schools, and all other major new projects depended on government funds.
Railways were empire's lifeline into the Indian interior, connecting administrative and military penetration with advancing signs of civilization and increasing revenues as well as opportunities for British investors. Curzon had a particular passion for railways. His tenure as Viceroy brought the first and only annual series of reports to account for every railway project under way in British India.Footnote 62 By the time of his arrival, in 1898, imperial data also allowed for rather sophisticated spatial analysis of economic conditions. Regions had long been classified as being more and less productive, as measured by revenue and agricultural output; after 1870, the discourse of improvement equated territorial progress generally with inflows of state expenditure, particularly for irrigation, transportation, industry, law and order, and education. Petitioners against proposals for reorganizing Bengal made it very clear that comparisons of rich and poor regions were part of national discourse. An equation of advanced administration and government spending with national progress became basic for Indian nationalism when Dadabhai Naoroji argued that a net outflow of wealth to England from India explained Indian famine and poverty. Britain was being enriched at India's expense as empire was draining wealth from the country.Footnote 63 Another version of this same idea emerged in the 1888 Dufferin Commission study, which argued that zamindari (landlord) wealth left rural areas in Bengal, flowing to the city, impoverishing workers more in western Bengal because peasant farmers owned more land in the east.Footnote 64 The old English idea that yeoman farmers invest more in land productivity acquired a new meaning as zamindar wealth migrating to the city came to be seen as a cause of rural poverty, stimulating anti-zamindari sentiments among officials,Footnote 65 and strengthening arguments for tenancy reform, as Congress stood firmly behind zamindari interests in its annual attacks on excessive land taxation.Footnote 66
Official debates about imperial finance took a spatial turn in the 1890s when the rendition of Berar from Hyderabad to British India demanded a redesign of provinces. Berar had to be put somewhere. Some boundaries had to change. Berar had to go either to Central Provinces or to Bombay. What were the benefits and demerits of each choice? Such questions opened discussions of other re-mappings. What about separating Sindh from Bombay?Footnote 67 What about moving all Oriya-speaking districts into one province? The Linguistic Survey was measuring language regions and the idea then entered official discourse that territories defined by dominant language might be governed more efficiently and simplify consultation with native groups. Indian representatives in provincial and local councils, established under decentralization, embraced this idea of linguistically designed administrative territories. In Bengal, opponents of Curzon's plan argued that government should not divide the homeland of Bengali speakers, and in Assam, they argued that Assamese language and culture would be threatened by Bengali influence. Curzon and Bengal Lieutenant Governor Arthur Fraser rejected the linguistic argument, insisting they could solve fiscal and administrative problems in both Assam and Bengal by combining Assam with eastern Bengal. But linguistic territorialism had taken root, with major impact in 1905.
By the time Berar joined the Central Provinces in 1903, correspondence had piled up concerning Bengal and Assam. Officials found a gross mismatch in their respective needs and revenues. Bengal was too big to be administered effectively. Some parts were under-served as state finance focused on favoured regions, particularly in the west, most of all, Calcutta. The Lieutenant Governor's time was consumed in Calcutta; he could tour eastern districts and visit Dhaka and Chittagong only once or twice in his three-year term, while locals in Calcutta had his attention all the time. In eastern Bengal, government could not attend even to basic law and order problems, notably on waterways, where violent struggles for river char islands and river piracy hampered river trade and transport. The Chittagong port was underdeveloped because it could not compete with Calcutta lobbies for government funding. The poverty of the Chittagong port terminus plus lack of support in Calcutta also hampered the Assam-Bengal Railway, formed as a company in 1892, which had built some 342 miles of track in disconnected bits by 1903.Footnote 68 Railway investors seem to have been pressing Curzon for help in expanding their hold over jute, tea, coal, and oil, whose exports had languished in a period of export growth from British India. In Assam, officials found a provincial administration with too little income to support any progress whatsoever. As a virtual dependency of Bengal, Assam did not attract able officers, or keep them long enough to make them local experts; they all worked in Assam waiting to return to Bengal. Tea planters ruled the roost, along with local landowners, under a single, relatively low-status British officer, the Commissioner. Even core Assam regions in the river valleys were barely integrated into British India; mountain areas lay altogether outside government's competence, which—as my Shillong informant did admit with a little prodding—goes a long way to explaining why Christian missionaries became so important in the hills. In effect, Assam was in private hands. Under the imperial discipline of decentralization, new government investments in Assam would require new revenues to be raised inside its provincial boundaries. Under current conditions, the only way to get more revenue into Assam was to redraw its borders, and the only practical way to do that was to combine Assam with the more revenue-productive region of eastern Bengal.
Territorial politics
Assam had been carved out of Bengal Presidency in 1874 to improve administration in the same ways and for the same reasons that preoccupied officials two decades later. Assam now had to be enlarged and enriched to expand its administrative integration and economic growth as imperial territory. The final plan towards this end emerged in three stages over a decade. In 1897, officials rejected a plan to move only Chittagong Division into Assam. In 1903, Risley published a second, larger plan, which added Dacca and Mymensingh divisions; this came in response to a statement by Maulvi Seraj-ul-Islam Khan Bahadur, representing Chittagong in the Bengal Council, saying that if this larger area were added, there would be less Indian opposition. A meeting on 26 December 1903 of 16 major zamindars ‘(both Hindu and Mohamadan) from Dacca and Mymensingh districts’, proposed that Faridpur and Bakerganj could also be added. Government concluded that, ‘There are many zamindars of Dacca and Mymensingh who hold lands also in the other two districts and it would for obvious reasons be exceedingly difficult for them to manage estates lying outside their own province’.Footnote 69 The publication of this enlarged plan, drawn up in December 1903, launched a third phase, when the plan was again expanded to meet objections like those of Babu Sita Nath Roy, whose long, erudite memo Curzon and Fraser cite respectfully. In February to March 2004, Curzon travelled to meet local notables in Dhaka and Mymensingh. On his return, he produced the enlarged final plan, which appears to have been designed by Dhaka Nawab Kwajah Salimullah, in January.Footnote 70 Curzon pressed it upon Fraser, who submitted quickly, like a good subordinate ally. This final plan brought all the districts in the Meghna-Brahmaputra basin into a totally new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, with its capital in Dhaka.Footnote 71
By encompassing the entire basin, the new province would divide the fewest possible zamindari estates and bring all routes to and from Assam under one administration, which Curzon believed would have many benefits. Trade by rail and river was very substantial in the basins. Though tea from Assam moving to Chittagong by rail was a small proportion of total trade, tea planters were influential and told Curzon that improving Assam railway connections with Chittagong would bring down the price of tea in England.Footnote 72 The Surma River Valley (including Sylhet, Cachar, Manipur, Lusai Hills, and Khasi and Jaintia hills) sent 97 per cent of its exports to Calcutta, mostly chalk and lime (60 per cent) and tea (20 per cent), along with bits of jute, fruits and vegetables; and its exports by river also went almost entirely to Calcutta, almost all rice, as they had been since the eighteenth century.Footnote 73 Fraser therefore stressed that river administration needed improvement in the east. Improved river docking facilities would benefit British investors in the limestone mined in the Khasi hills, for their chief problem was transport, because
the streams that issue from the hills do not admit of the passage of large boats, and the stone has to be conveyed over the rapids in small canoes. Below the rapids, it is generally reloaded on[to] larger boats, and carried down to the Surma river, on the banks of which it is burnt into lime during the cold weather.
For his part, Curzon focused on industry and railways. Coal mines in Naga, Khasi, Garo, and Jaintia hills were the property of Assam Railways and Trading Company. Digboi wells were owned by the Assam Oil Company.Footnote 74 Tea companies wanted better transportation to Chittagong. Curzon believed his new province would stimulate investments in the port, railway, and a new provincial capital, providing new avenues for British and Indian investors, expanding the imperial economy, enriching the treasury. In addition, the province would focus politics in the east on locally important issues; it would put unruly Assam tea planters under rigorous, responsible authority; it would give Muslim majority areas a political voice; and it would reduce the accumulation of native political interests in Calcutta which so irritated the Viceroy and Lieutenant Governor.
The simplicity of the final plan captivated Curzon. The goal was to tighten imperial administration, but Curzon was also intent upon representing local notables as being part of the planning process, and his archival papers thus came to be organized so as to make native petitions prominent. He clearly did not care for the Congress; he and Fraser felt that if partitioning Bengal weakened Congress, so much the better. They did not believe Congress represented Indian public opinion, but they disdained any and all opposition, from any quarter, inside or outside government. What most enraged them was that Congress anti-partition activists continued after 1905 to mobilize opposition to the final plan based on objections to earlier plans which had been scrapped to meet native objections. Activists raved in public meetings against moving Bengal districts into Assam, when this objection had been met by the final plan.Footnote 75
Curzon was confident his final plan met all reasonable objections. The new province would not be Assam. It would not be backward. It would have a High Court, Board of Revenue, Legislative Council, and all institutions of advanced administration. Its officials would be equal to those in Bengal. Few zamindaris would need to manage estates divided by new boundaries. Business in Calcutta would not be hampered and Indian as well as British businesses would find new sources of profit as Dhaka developed quickly as a new capital replete with educational and cultural institutions. Curzon assumed that elites in the east would flock to the new provincial capital. He was clearly oblivious to the complexity of the political scene in India when he resigned and left for England in August 1905.
Politicians who fought the new province understood it as a partition of Bengal, a violation of their Indian homeland, while the energies they mobilized emerged in spaces of uneven development where decentralization had shaped the territorial substance of India's national identity. Major imperial cities were privileged sites for national sentiments, first and foremost, Calcutta, where private and public investments had focused the accumulation of wealth for empire and nation alike.Footnote 76 Investors from all over India, led by Marwaris, and from all over Bengal, led by zamindars, had lavished attention on Calcutta, where they came to buy real estate, to do business, for work and education. Calcutta grew with wealth drawn from rural Bengal in the form of rent and interest, and also in the form of consumer goods and export commodities, most notably jute.Footnote 77 All the jute mills of Bengal were in Calcutta and almost all the jute came from the east. National identity and interests developed together in Calcutta inside the grandeur and stature of a city that was heavily invested in the wealth of eastern Bengal. Curzon's concern with zamindaris being split by the new boundary was trivial compared with the composite power of social and economic interests tying Calcutta tightly to eastern Bengal, but barely touching Assam, which remained outside the territorial frame of national identity. Most major zamindars in the east were invested in Calcutta and thus in the continued flow of wealth there from eastern Bengal. Brahmans from Bikrampur, a major force in the Bengal civil service, looked to Calcutta, not nearby Dhaka, Bengal's second city, one-tenth the size of Calcutta.Footnote 78 Calcutta's grandeur increased with Dhaka's decline and spatial inequality in Bengal aggravated by power inequities of decentralization.Footnote 79 Business lobbies in Chittagong made it clear, for example, that the port remained underdeveloped compared with Calcutta because of their inability to garner political support in the capital.
Opposition to the new province emerged from territorial attachments to a unified Bengal that was strongly centred in Calcutta, when connections were weak among places in eastern Bengal and weaker still between Bengal and Assam. Curzon's province upset this pattern by connecting Assam and eastern Bengal and focusing investors on Dhaka as a new centre of regional integration. In the spatial context of 1905, it was logical that opposition to the province erupted in the east, where fortunes were tied to Calcutta. Even Nawab Kwajah Salimulluah, who supported the province, did not initially oppose the movement against it. The Muslim League, formed in Dhaka, hosted by the Nawab, in 1906, after a series of meetings in Calcutta, focused its attention instead on increasing Muslim representation in government.Footnote 80 Diminishing Calcutta did not attract any major Indian political interests. Muslim leaders in east Bengal even formed a Mohammedan Provincial Union to oppose the new province, arguing that separating from Calcutta to join ‘the already impoverished Assam meant that the condition of East Bengal would also decline’.Footnote 81 Dynamics of uneven economic development that typify capitalism had heaped enduring privilege on Calcutta as the capital of India and of India's largest province. In 1901, Bengal Presidency was more populous than all but six countries/empires in the world, with 45 million inhabitants.Footnote 82 Calcutta loomed over its surroundings like no other Indian city. In 1911, it was almost ten times bigger than Dhaka, which lagged even further behind in education, industry, and urban attractions. Bombay was only six times larger than its Presidency's second city, Poona. Madras, much smaller, was only four times larger than the next largest city in the Presidency, Madurai, a provincial town, about the same size as Dhaka, with around one lakh residents in 1911.Footnote 83 Calcutta was the capital of Indian imperial space, Indian national space, and Bengali space, with five times more English-literate residents than Madras and Bombay combined. The Calcutta elite spoke to London. Laws made in Calcutta covered British India. Calcutta intellectuals had imperial authority; they were India's most influential public. Calcutta's bhadralok spoke for India to the world: Rabindranath Tagore, an east Bengal zamindar, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913. Calcutta was even a more Muslim city than Dhaka, at least demographically. In 1911, both had Hindu majorities, but Calcutta had only twice (2.3) as many Hindus as Muslims, while Dhaka had three (2.9) times more. Calcutta had six times more resident Muslims (298,986) than Dhaka (47,295). Muslim Calcutta was three times more populous than Dhaka, a mere district town and no rival for the loyalty of any major Indian politician.
In 1905 planners wrote a lot about the over-sizing of Bengal, but not of Calcutta. The movement to reunify Bengal mobilized support for indigenous enterprise (swadeshi) without mentioning its concentration in Calcutta. The new 1905 province challenged the prevailing pattern of uneven development that favoured Calcutta and increased spatial inequality in eastern India. By meeting objections to earlier plans, by enlarging the new province to make it equal to Bengal, Curzon provoked even more opposition, by downgrading Calcutta. The new province included most Bengalis. It gave Bengal two capitals, which was unprecedented. By separating most Bengalis from Calcutta, at a time when increasing Indian representation in the administration was integral for decentralization, the new province promised a new formation of political identities as well as interests. It would divide Bengalis and bring into Indian national space peoples who had been alien to Bharat in Assam and the surrounding mountains. Indian national space as defined in Calcutta would be no more. Curzon's attack on Calcutta was therefore an assault on Bengal and on the territorial identity of the Indian nation.
Spatial inequity in swadeshi
The new province did benefit inhabitants. This would have been visible to observers by 1907. Relevant data in Statistics of British India and Reports on the Administration of East Bengal and Assam do not allow us to follow many trends accurately across the 1905 divide, but they do indicate that between 1905 and 1911, capital investments, money orders, mail, and taxable business activity accelerated in the new province, and external trade increased by about 8 per cent along with Chittagong port activity. New government funding flowed into transportation, river policing, cadastral surveys, and educational institutions.Footnote 84 Much of the new economic activity occurred in Dhaka, where government produced new spatial privilege. A new capital began rising with government buildings. Dhaka's oldest modern government buildings and a plan for a new government complex date to 1906. The Dhaka club was founded in 1909.Footnote 85 Dhaka's population grew faster in the decade after 1901 than during any previous census-decade. The prospect of zero-sum growth, pitting Dhaka against Calcutta, does appear in population data, which show inverse trends for the two cities between 1901 and 1921. But at the provincial level, there was no economic trade-off: both provinces grew at the typically slow rate of the day, during 1905–1909, with the new province moving ahead a little faster, though the period is too short and statistics too gross to make much of this data. Sex ratios in the census indicate, by the much higher proportion of females in the more rapidly growing Dhaka population, that Dhaka grew from the influx of families from surrounding areas, while Calcutta remained an imperial, industrial metropolis, swarming with male migrants. Dhaka's base economy remained tied to farming, while Calcutta had jute mills to process all the jute from east Bengal, the bulk of world supply.Footnote 86
Closer research would reveal more local benefits from the new province, but here are some hints. The new Legislative Council launched a discussion of zamindari tenancy reforms, surely undesirable for landlord supporters in Congress.Footnote 87 Namasudra tenant farmers refused to support anti-partition agitation because they saw potential benefits from reforms and new potentials for government employment and education.Footnote 88 Small towns along rivers would have felt a boost in river traffic into and out of Assam. Bengali colonization of river lowlands in Assam increased, with provincial support.Footnote 89 Amalendu Guha says the period 1901 to 1911 was
a turning point in the pattern mechanism of economic change in Assam. Railway mileage increased rapidly, and land hungry jute-oriented peasants of East Bengal could now come by the thousands to colonize riverine waste-lands, on which the production potential for tea was almost nil. . .[and] the usury and trading capital which had accumulated over the past decades in the hands of the Marwai Banias could new be more productively used and speedily turned over as a result of increased commodity circulation.
Marwaris invested in tea and jute in Assam, where jute became important for the first time.Footnote 90
The spatial inequality of the old Bengal Presidency, so visible in official discussions, found no place in the national agitation. Hidden in the uproar over the partition of Bengal was an erasure of Assam. Unified Bengal was the only issue for nationalists. Benefits for people in the new province were not an issue. When support for the new province did arise, along with visible benefits rallied around the Dhaka Nawab, it was subsumed by the Orientalist discourse, prevalent on all sides, as an expression of Hindu-Muslim difference, and by arguments of Nawab's political self-interest as a pro-British politician.Footnote 91 Spatial inequity and associated social and political inequalities were not public issues at the time, though they privileged Calcutta and enabled Calcutta-based nationalists to speak for the Indian nation. Swadeshi theory and activism expressed an economic nationalism that effectively naturalized existing spatial inequalities. The new province had threatened Indian investments in Calcutta in land, business, education, culture, and politics. The overlapping of Bengali, national, and imperial space in Calcutta gave Calcutta people low-cost options for cross-over investments in many fields. Influential people had planned families, businesses, and careers with their eyes on secure returns in Calcutta, and prospects were at best uncertain in a virtually unknown provincial town, Dhaka, where Calcutta people had few connections. Swadeshi made the unity of Bengal a national issue and also targeted one of Curzon's real motives for creating the new province, to benefit foreign investors. Nationalists now launched a critique of government investment in railways, which had always benefited British investors disproportionately and discriminated against Indians.Footnote 92
The direct connection between anti-partition agitation and swadeshi derives from the valorization of pre-1905 Indian national territory as a container of India's national economic development, as distinct from the British Empire and from the new Indian space defined by Curzon. Swadeshi was an explicit attack on British imperial privilege. Implicitly, however, it also mobilized mass support for an Indian national economy that valorized united Bengal, privileged Calcutta over Dhaka, and isolated Assam. National attachments to India in 1905 focused on Calcutta, travelled amongst major Indian cities, embraced eastern Bengal, but barely touched Assam. Indian national space became a terrain of privilege for established circuits of Indian investment in wealth moving out of Assam and out of east Bengal into Calcutta. To reunite Bengal, nationalists fought a boundary change that intentionally delivered benefits to Assam and east Bengal, especially Dhaka and Chittagong, but also to Shillong and Guwahati. Benefits there accrued to people who were less able to profit from Calcutta connections that favoured the landed and literate bhadralok service elite over lower status tenants, small businesses, and illiterate workers. The territorial politics of economic nationalism thus invisibly internalized inequities of power and uneven development, planted by imperial capitalism.
Back to the future
Counter-factual possibilities are intriguing: what if Congress had embraced the new province in 1905? It might actually have done so to expand its own political influence. The new province would have become part of a redefined Indian national space, embracing Assam and adjacent mountains. More benefits would have accumulated for inhabitants as new patterns of spatial integration and economic development emerged with improvements in transport and education and likely industrialization by the addition of jute mills in Dhaka and Chittagong. Dhaka would have brought in people from all over the province. Social and political divisions and oppositions would surely have developed along familiar Hindu-Muslim, Bengali-Assamese, and other ethnic lines, but their novel diversity would have complicated cultural politics and muted binary oppositions. Spatial inequality separating east and west Bengal, and Bengal and Assam, would have been reduced, and would thus not have aggravated ethnic and religious tension as much as in real history. Zamindari tenancy reform would have moved ahead in the new province, so the overlay of spatial, ethnic, communal, and class inequities dividing east and west Bengal would have been less volatile.Footnote 93 We can reasonably speculate that with Congress support the new province could have arrived in one piece in independent India. Had it survived, it would have formed—and its erstwhile space could still form—the basis for a territorial authority to manage the mobility of water, people, and commodities among highlands and lowlands of Meghna-Brahmaputra basin, which actual history has rendered impossible to date.
Counterfactuals aside, what did happen was a reunification of Bengal accompanied by political disaffection of east and west Bengal.Footnote 94 Assam and mountain regions were never effectively integrated into India. The mobility of peoples between mountains and lowlands became fraught with international tension and conflict. Today, India has built massive wire fences to prevent its citizens from crossing the border with Bangladesh because some citizens are fighting for territorial autonomy. The physical isolation of India's Northeast continues. Agartala, the capital of Tripura—a short walk from Bangladesh, from which it is cut off by a fence—finally got reconnected with the Indian mainland by railway, via Assam, in 2008. Tied to India by the narrow ‘chicken neck’, India's Northeast became a separate world of inward-looking ethno-regional politics resisting outsiders from India; it became a virtual Indian military colony where all the best roads are built for the Indian army. After 1911, politicians in Assam fought to expel the Bengali district of Sylhet, which left India in 1947, having served as a bridge between Bengal and Assam from medieval times. When Sylhet joined Pakistan, that linkage broke. The Assam-Bengal rail line was torn up at the Sylhet border with Cachar during the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war. State military border violence still accompanies efforts to maintain age-old cross-border livelihoods in Sylhet and the adjacent mountains.Footnote 95
In 1911, King George V happily embraced Lord Crewe's proposal that ‘HM’ announce the annulment of the Bengal partition and the building of India's new capital in New Delhi at a great imperial Darbar.Footnote 96 Calcutta then lost its status as India's capital but returned to regional supremacy as the capital of Bengal. Along with this came the renewed underdevelopment of imperial administration in east Bengal; its weakness appeared in its darkest form in 1943, when the empire at war with Japan fed and fortified Calcutta as millions died of famine in the Bengal countryside.Footnote 97 When the Famine Commission considered the establishment of a state food distribution system, to prevent such disasters, it concluded that it was not possible in Bengal because rural administration was too weak.Footnote 98 After 1911, Dhaka ceased growing and Chittagong's Chamber of Commerce returned to its old complaining. The bhadralok regained its rural supremacy.Footnote 99 Tenancy reform stalled, leaving agrarian activists permanently opposed to Congress who eventually joined the Muslim League. The demand for Pakistan in Bengal emerged from efforts to improve the position of people in the east who had been alienated from the India defined by Congress in 1905. Less than a decade after 1947, leading politicians in East Pakistan left the League,Footnote 100 and then they struggled against Pakistan's even more blatant spatial inequity, which more than doubled economic disparities between East and West Pakistan during the 1960s.Footnote 101 When efforts to rectify spatial inequity again failed inside yet another state context, the resulting upheaval yielded independent Bangladesh. Dhaka revived in 1947 and boomed after 1971, indicating how benefits accrue from such territorial redesigns, as they have done repeatedly from the formation of new states in India.Footnote 102
The year 1905 quickly acquired intensely binary iconic meanings. For most readers, it still evokes an imperialist assault on India, pitting Curzon against Congress, and a victory for the struggling nation against domineering colonialism. Documents of the day are replete with rhetorical passion that pushed the national movement to another level but also divided radical anti-partition swadeshi campaigners and Congress moderates and alienated people in east Bengal, including Rabindranath Tagore, who explored his feelings in his novel, Gora, which was serialized in 1907 and translated into English in 1909.Footnote 103 Tagore had joined the movement but became ‘repelled by the elements of parochialism, obscurantism, and Hindu chauvinism’ which it politicized,Footnote 104 and his 1917 short story, Ghore Bhare included a preface expressing his desire to heal the wounds of 1905.Footnote 105 Debates about partition in 1947 gave 1905 even more intensely political meanings, which still dominate.Footnote 106
I want to suggest another way of reading 1905, lifting it out of national history, remapping it inside a spatial history that is focused instead on overlapping patterns of uneven development, spatial inequity, and territorial politics. Bangladesh indicates how these patterns have changed over time and how the power relations that form spaces of uneven development appear in many guises. In 1905, Bengal government represented eastern Bengal as a region of official neglect.Footnote 107 Tenant farmers spoke of their land in terms of tenure rights. Congress painted east Bengal as part of the nation. The Dhaka Nawab imagined a space of public authority. The Muslim League and many later writers represented east Bengal as a Muslim space.Footnote 108 Forty years later, the last of these images became predominant in the imperial space of the ‘two nation theory’.Footnote 109 This changed quickly after 1947. Bengali solidarity took centre stage in the political transformation that turned East Pakistan into Bangladesh. Despite all this change, eastern Bengal is consistently described as a disadvantaged region inside spaces of inequity in South Asia. At the same time, Assam was being more and more strictly separated from Bengal. By 1947, Nagas and others had laid their own nationalist claims to regions in Assam.Footnote 110 Meanwhile, Indian nationalists subsumed all these into a unitary, disadvantaged Indian national space struggling for autonomy in the British Empire. Thus 1905 opened a continuing history of territorial politics entangled with spatial inequity operating simultaneously at various levels of scale. It is attached not only to histories of partition and to national struggles for territorial integrity, but also to ongoing present-day struggles for territorial autonomy inside the spatial inequities of national territorialism.
In South Asia, colonialism frames national history, but spatial inequity is framed in addition by globalizing capitalism, which complicates and contextualizes national history by spanning regime transitions. Market integration of the modern world economy proceeded steadily after 1820, slowed a bit in the late 1800s, accelerated around 1905, crashed in 1929, expanded after 1950, and accelerated dramatically again after 1980.Footnote 111 The politics of 1905 inhabit a little boom in world market expansion, which was particularly prominent in India,Footnote 112 where uneven development was being propelled at the time by the same kind of open market policies that drive globalization and promote increasing spatial disparities today. In 1914, the United States Consul at Bombay described British India as ‘one of the few large countries of the world where there is an “open door” for the trade of all countries’.Footnote 113 Most goods arriving at ports were imports and exports. British India was the world's fourth largest industrial cotton textile producer. Manufactured goods comprised 20 per cent of exports, a figure never surpassed. In the next two decades, industrial output grew faster in India than in Britain and Germany,Footnote 114 as trade with countries outside the empire increased.Footnote 115 Indian labour was also going global: by 1921, Indian emigration far exceeded immigration, moving mostly to Ceylon, Malaya, East and South Africa, Fiji and the West Indies, all in the embrace of empire.Footnote 116
During those decades of globalization, much of India's global mobility flowed through Calcutta. Empire channelled the wealth of globalizing capitalism up the imperial status ranks to benefit people and places in proportion to their rank in empire's many-layered cake, from top to bottom, most of all the British at the very top, but also Indian professional, business, and landowning elites in higher echelons below, mostly in major cities, most notably Calcutta and Bombay. By 1905, it was apparent that profits of imperial globalization benefited empire as a whole more than either England or India,Footnote 117 pitting economic nationalists against imperialists in both countries. Curzon's imperial vision crashed against the Congress vision of empire dismembering Indian space. When swadeshi promoted Indian investments in Indian national space, it invisibly inscribed spatial inequity into Indian nationalism by weaving the economic inequality of uneven development into imperial power disparities so as to favour Indian investors with Calcutta connections over disadvantaged people in poorer places in East Bengal and Assam.
Spatial disparities were increasing in India at the time. Their patterns proved persistent and their severity is increasing again during the second great expansion of globalization. A century ago, Radhakamal Mukerjee explained that economically dynamic Jats were making the thinly-populated western region of the Indo-Gangetic richer and more productive than the stagnant densely populated high caste landlord-based regions of Bihar and Bengal. In 1911, William Moreland blamed zamindars for sluggish development,Footnote 118 and 60 years’ later, Eric Stokes did the same, once again highlighting the superior productivity of small-holding farmers,Footnote 119 which also emerged in debates about the Green Revolution.Footnote 120 Today, Lakshmi Iyer and Abhijit Banerjee argue that persisting legacies of colonial land tenures help to explain growth disparities in rural India,Footnote 121 though other explanations could highlight exogenous forces like state and market forces, following Dadabhai Naoroji, whose notion of ‘drain’ has never been applied systematically inside India. Nonetheless, our 1904 petitioners did implicitly combine these two kinds of explanation, citing aboriginal cultures and also inadequate government investment for backwardness in Assam. The World Bank would certainly agree with Congress and Curzon that large scale infrastructure investment is essential to promote economic growth. A mix of endogenous and exogenous causes can thus be mobilized to explain local trends inside patterns of uneven development. The nineteenth-century construction of vast systems of canal irrigation and urban infrastructure opened new productive horizons in western regions of old Bharat; the new capital in New Delhi and later national state expenditures for the Green Revolution also favoured western regions, which have remained more attractive for investors and comparatively fast-growing for a century.Footnote 122
In 1905, Calcutta was a privileged place in a region that was weakening economically compared to others while Calcutta was falling behind Bombay as India's economic center.Footnote 123 Calcutta thus enjoyed but also suffered the force of spatial inequity, which works against people in poorer places who seek to mobilize resources they need to improve their conditions locally. Calcutta's relative decline does not appear to have been visible in 1905, but one logical response to the spatial pattern of uneven development surrounding the city was very visible: people left villages in greater numbers to move up the central place hierarchy into urban sites of increasing opportunity. In the half-century after 1870, all kinds of people left rural India, at increasing rates, for cities and overseas, above all from the eastern Gangetic basinFootnote 124 and likewise disadvantaged dry interior regions of southern India.Footnote 125 Calcutta was the central place for migratory arrival and departure in eastern India. Such mobility made some migrants better off and enriched urban economies but aggravated spatial inequity between city cities and hinterlands. Urbanization in British India was not rapid by post-1947 standards but steady and influential in the urban-based perspective of Indian nationalism, which worked inside the spatial inequity of globalizing capitalism, and also in a position of relative privilege inside India. Indian nationalists looked up the imperial ranks to challenge the British: they saw spatial inequity dividing India and Britain; they did not focus sharply on spatial inequity inside India. The upward and outward flow of wealth leaving India was what captivated nationalists, not the disproportionate flow of wealth into privileged places inside India.Footnote 126 Staunching the outflow of national wealth to increase the accumulation of wealth inside the country became India's definitive economic project, under the banner of swadeshi.
Success had stunning results. After 1947, India became an ever-richer part of the world economy. Lant Pritchett has shown that between 1870 and 1985, ratios of per capita income between rich and poor countries increased globally more than six-fold.Footnote 127 Today, the gap between the richest and poorest countries is still growing,Footnote 128 but by contrast, Gregory Clark and Susan Walcott have shown that India's century-long declining per capita GDP, compared with that of Britain and the United States, stopped abruptly in 1947.Footnote 129 Independence allowed India to keep and create more wealth inside national territory,Footnote 130 although it remained poor, with per capita GDP hovering around 10 per cent of the Britain/United States’ average.
India is still the poorest of the world's five largest national economies.Footnote 131 Even so, India's trend of relative impoverishment compared with rich western countries stopped dead in 1947. Most analysts point to liberalization in 1991 as India's great economic watershed, but the turn-around in 1947 was more historically significant: independence allowed India's comparative national wealth trend to shift from negative to positive. The same trend holds for China and the weight of their combined populations brought global inequality down significantly after 1950, when the rate of increase in world inequality slowed considerably.Footnote 132 After 1980, India's comparative wealth-trend moved upwards faster, and after 1991, faster again.Footnote 133 The same trend holds true for China, so if we weigh national wealth by population, rapid growth in India and China is now reducing the rate of increase in global inequality, even as the gap continues to increase between the richest and poorest people and countries.Footnote 134
The significant decisions that produced growth-trends in India did their productive work in a world organized by spatial inequities of globalizing capitalism. Until 1991, Indian central planning managed its market economy, but in 1991, India joined a global trend by returning to the same kind of free-market, import-export oriented economic policies that had prevailed in Curzon's day.Footnote 135 Indian state investment in the early planning period kept regional disparities relatively stable at comparatively low levels, though spatial inequality was not an explicit policy concern.Footnote 136 In 1985, however, R. H. Dholakia showed that inequality among Indian states had been increasing along inherited lines since the 1960s. Studies of this trend have since multiplied,Footnote 137 and spatial inequality is now seen to be ‘a serious problem’ in India, having remained entrenched ‘in spite of planning,’ increasing notably after 1991.Footnote 138 The same trend is visible in China and the causes seem to be similar in both countries: government decisions to invest in planned growth and also in market-based growth tended to favour regions that were already richer, with better infrastructure, more productive populations, and more effective political connections. Liberalization aggravated entrenched spatial inequality because it freed and forced each region to engage globalizing capitalism with its own inherited strengths and weaknesses.Footnote 139 The decentralization of state economic power turned state officials into sales people seeking domestic and foreign investors. In China, Yongnian Zheng calls this devolution of power a ‘state transformation’,Footnote 140 and the phrase also applies in India, where national politics changed dramatically in the 1990s, as regional parties came to control the central government in coalitions organized around the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party.
Economic convergence has not occurred in India, but rather divergence. Convergence depends on structural fundamentals being similar in richer and poorer areas, but as Farhat Noorbaksh explains, ‘the lack of social and economic infrastructure in some backward regions encourages further investment and progress in the richer regions which race ahead and the vicious circle goes on’.Footnote 141 Important decisions that shape spatial patterns of economic development in independent India followed tracts laid down in British India and produced durable patterns of spatial inequity. Where empire put landlords in control of the countryside, independent India delivered relatively low levels of private and public investment in agriculture, health, and education.Footnote 142 In the rush to enhance aggregate national economic growth, state planning tended to favour already privileged people and places. After 1980, the upwardly-mobile social strata which had guided nationalism from the outset turned government towards free-market policies that predictably rewarded them most.Footnote 143 Indian nationalism changed along the way, as liberalization mixed the consumer culture of ‘India shining’ with a strong dose of Hindu chauvinism.Footnote 144 Wealthier groups and regions have led the way in globalizing India and they have become steadily richer by doing so.Footnote 145 In 2004, National Sample Survey data indicated that, after 1991, new wealth went mostly to wealthier classes with privileged access to governments and markets. The urban rich benefited most: the top quintile of income groups in cities increased their per capita consumption by 40 per cent, but in rural areas, by only 20 per cent. The rural rich thus became richer compared with their neighbours, but poorer compared with the urban rich.Footnote 146
The continuing history of spatial inequity under globalization in India is a feature of worldwide capitalismFootnote 147 and of the nation's unique composition.Footnote 148 Spatial analysis needs to bring many levels of spatial scale into view at once, but a basic point of departure for this long research agenda is the coexistence of two spatial trends, which connect 2011 with 1905 and have important political implications: urban-rural and regional disparities increase together during periods of expansive globalization.Footnote 149 For India, Angus Dean and Jean Dreze have showed that recent growth favours states in the south and west, distressing states in the north, east, and northeast which had been disadvantaged previously by public and private investors.Footnote 150 The relative poverty of regions in the east (Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal) compared with the west (Delhi, Punjab, Haryana) is longstanding, but recently all regions that depend on farming, including Punjab and Haryana, have had slower growth, because overall growth in agriculture and allied services has declined to less than half (3.2 per cent) the rate of growth in India's aggregate per capita GDP (6.7 per cent), thus increasing the ratio of rural-to-urban poverty.Footnote 151 Foreign Direct Investment also favours more industrial regions.Footnote 152 Similar trends pertain elsewhere in Asia. And meanwhile, regions out of the loop of capital accumulation under the old empires of the Mughals, British, Dutch, French, and Chinese, in mountain regions across Nepal, Northeast India, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, highland Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, and South China, still remain out of the loop.Footnote 153
Territorial politics can be usefully reconsidered in the light of a long history of spatial inequity on the underside of globalization. Looking back from the present, it seems that Indian national politics in 1905 increased East Bengal's subordination and Assam's marginality, as eastern regions of British India were declining economically compared with others. These trends continued past 1947. The subordination of East Bengal left a durable imprint on its politics: the Indian National Congress never won elections after 1905 and the political pursuit of spatial equity encouraged partition in 1947, after which, spatial inequity in Pakistan provoked a Bengali war of independence. Bangladesh thus acquired the territorial authority that allowed its inhabitants to pursue benefits like those enjoyed in independent India. In Assam and Northeast India, the politics of 1905 aggravated the isolation that had become entrenched in regional politics, and spatial disadvantage worsened with each failed struggle for autonomy. India's planning period reduced spatial inequity but liberalization brought Assam the most drastic decline of any major Indian state in its relative per capita income.Footnote 154 The freer mobility of capital under liberalizing governments after 1991 delivered benefits to places in proportion to their security and profitability. Neo-liberal hegemony increased economic penalties for physical isolation and political instability, stimulating more demands for autonomy, more instability, violence, and repression. This occurred not only in Assam and Northeast India but also in the adjacent Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, which is subject to a similar history of spatial inequity,Footnote 155 and in Kashmir. The Planning Commission described the Assam situation as follows:
Notwithstanding a decade of relatively rapid economic growth in India following the sweeping economic reforms initiated in 1991, the pace of growth in Assam has slowed down in recent years. It has among the poorest infrastructure and social indicators. Its infrastructure development index is only 79 in comparison to the base level of 100 for the country. Despite its natural resources and environment, its per capita income is the third lowest among Indian states (after Bihar and Orissa). In this respect, its position has also been worsening relative to states such as Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh that were on similar levels five years ago but have now advanced to higher levels. There has been little progress at reducing poverty and Assam's population estimated to be below the poverty line was about 41 percent in 1993–94 against the all India average of 36 percent. While poverty in Assam declined from 51 percent in 1973–74, its relative ranking about major states dropped from 6 to 12. Apart from Haryana, Assam is the only state where there was a drastic worsening of rank. Together with large-scale migration, this has led to a large and rapidly rising unemployment.Footnote 156
Many conflicts have developed in spaces of inequity during the long century spanning the first and second globalization and regime transitions between empire and nation. Nationalists opposing empire a century ago unknowingly subordinated and marginalized regions in the Brahmaputra-Meghna basin and spawned regional struggles for autonomy that nationalists in post-colonial states met with violence in pursuit of territorial integrity, spawning independence in Bangladesh and rebellious disorder in Northeast India. Regional struggles of a similar kind have occurred in all South Asian nations and spatial inequity at various levels of scale have also provoked territorial politics at other levels of spatial scale, notably in NepalFootnote 157 and Telangana.Footnote 158 Globalization targets specific localities in dispersed territories where investors pursue opportunities in expansive agricultural production and natural resource extraction in uplands, woodlands, mountains, and dry lands that thus enter new power relations of spatial inequity, as private and public coercive power accumulates capital under the authority of national development regimes. People in such localities may have no territorial authority to cling to, except that of those who oppress them, generating conflicts on capitalist frontiers with no firm regional roots, such as nineteenth century Santhal struggles against zamindars and imperialists, and current Maoist struggles in regions of mineral wealth boosting India's economic ascendancy.Footnote 159 The year 1905 thus opens a window into disparate histories of spatial inequity in territorial politics, which merit much more scholarly attention.
