Introduction: ‘the reason I am worth what I am’
. . . allow me to inform you that if I have any talent at all it is in being able to manage things cheaply, which is the reason I am worth what I am. I know many here who have had better chances than I have of making a fortune and who are not worth Rs 100 after years of work.
A touch of impatience with a risk-averse father affords us a rare personal statement from a successful early contractor of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR). After nine years in the Bombay Presidency and Central Provinces, in 1868, Joseph Samuel Frithiof Stephens was preparing to go home—though not to Britain, but to Scandinavia. His precise destination was a tract of forest, near Huseby in Småland, that he hoped might be turned to account. Swedish iron had already made its appearance on the Bombay market, and the lakebeds on his new estate were waiting to be dredged for ore. He also knew of the demand for creosoted pine sleepers on the GIPR and, now a railway promoter instead of a contractor, he wanted a line to haul these cargoes to the coast. Roughly half a million rupees of hitherto mobile capital were now sunk into landed property and machinery. Meanwhile, the paper trail of that Indian fortune—letters, receipts, maps and diagrams, payrolls, subcontracts, and diaries—went into a shipping crate in the attic of the manor house. Two generations passed at Huseby Bruk. Joseph's line died out. The house and its land reverted to the state and, in 2008, this forgotten archive was unearthed by conservators and moved to the library of Linnaeus University in Växjö.Footnote 1
Running to some 20 boxes, the Stephens documents form the remarkably complete record of a railway contractor's transactions, business network, and daily life. The archive is not without its lacunae: we lack Stephens's outgoing correspondence to his agents, as well as the diaries for his last five years in India. But what remains is evidently the work of a scrupulous record-keeper. His articles offer scope for many separate lines of enquiry—not least the role of colonial wealth in Swedish industrialization—but my discussion will confine itself to Stephens's business methods and business networks. These networks can be seen to extend both above and below: that is, with both the larger contractors and engineering staff directing Stephens, and with the broad mobile labour pool that he did his best to manage. Something on which the archive is particularly informative is the employment and retention of workers, and negotiation with strikers. It is also possible to closely triangulate Stephens's situation as an intermediary between ‘coolie’ and capital—a category that is now receiving renewed interest from scholars, most extensively in a recent special issue of the International Review of Social History.Footnote 2 In respect to labour relations, therefore, the second half of this article will aim to further this trend, and to throw into sharper relief the topography mapped out by Ian J. Kerr in Building the Railways of the Raj. The first two sections, though, will place the subject more closely within his milieu, both as a Scandinavian and as a petty, later mid-sized, contractor.
However efficient a business, Stephens & Co. by no means ranked among the major establishments of its time. For most of his Indian career, Stephens executed embankments, small bridges, and station buildings on subcontract to larger firms. He personally organized labour at the local level, later engaging two or at most three ‘agents’ or subordinates for between Rs 150 and Rs 200 per month. The diaries describe a fatiguing and isolated life: mornings and evenings spent on horseback surveying the little empire allotted to him, the purchase of timber and charcoal from local merchants, the supervision of quarries for the supply of ballast, and whole days spent in paying—or withholding—wages with the help of a Gujarati or Jewish clerk. Bombay is seen occasionally, but Stephens relies principally on city friends to keep him in-the-know about upcoming opportunities to tender. Life revolves around the bungalow: colleagues stay the night, or loafers mooch in demanding workFootnote 3 ; cooks argue and butlers abscond; he collects birds’ eggs and dabbles in photography; tools are downed for Muslim or Hindu festivals; earthwork slips, a boy is crushed, and the parents paid off.
Men like this are shadowy, elusive figures in early railway history. Writing of the United States of America, Walter Licht confessed that it was ‘practically impossible’ for the industrial historian ‘to learn about the independent contractors and their experiences’.Footnote 4 The Stephens archive would represent a substantial find even in Europe or North America. In the colonial context, it is particularly valuable. If the archive's survival is highly fortuitous, however, its specific provenance—the GIPR in the first decade of intense construction—is no accident. The circumstances and company policy of the time, I will argue, created a short-lived but favourable climate for opportunists of slender means and doubtful background. We will see how these slightly ad hoc arrangements came about, and we will see them put under strain during the disastrous accidents and bridge collapses of the 1867 monsoon.
Company and contractor during the first 20 years of the GIPR
The Anglophone press of the 1850s and 1860s, not least specialist periodicals like the Engineer's Journal (Calcutta) or Bombay Builder, often dwelt on the desirability—or otherwise—of introducing the contract system under which British railways had already been laid. Soliciting tenders for public works was not new to India. Indeed, it was in the Bombay Presidency that The Engineer (London) suspected the practice had been longest established. The contract system was used at ‘a comparatively early date’ for maintaining roads on the island of Salsette and, in 1843, a similar plan was introduced for the maintenance of ‘the Poona and Panwell road about the Ghauts’.Footnote 5 That the coming of the railway had also signalled the arrival of itinerant European contractors was a natural progression, therefore, as was the consequent trend for other works and industries to adopt the contract system. Its advantages over the ‘Departmental System’ (whereby construction fell to officers of the railway company or Public Works Department, directly supervising low-level indigenous contractors) were put forward eloquently by the Bombay Quarterly Review in 1855. First, contractors had a personal, financial incentive to finish their work on time; if incompetent, they could also be dismissed without notice and replaced by rivals. Furthermore, given the chance they would become specialists in the local acquisition of materials and labour, and in circumventing the ‘obstinate monopolies’ or cartels through which Indian merchants would attempt to fix prices against railway companies (as had occurred recently, the Quarterly noted, in the Bombay timber market).Footnote 6
Despite this sanguine assessment, contracting did not catch on universally. Railways in Madras stuck stubbornly to the departmental system, while, in Bengal, the East Indian Railway suffered an early, chastening experience. Unable at first to attract the ‘respectable’ metropolitan tycoons who would later do them proud, such as Thomas Brassey, they fell back on undercapitalized local firms that promptly folded.Footnote 7 Private opinions amongst the contemporary administration often seem to rest on the individual's general degree of respect for free enterprise. ‘I have always found that the employees of a contractor enjoy greater liberty of action than those of a Company, and that the employees of a Company have greater liberty of action than those of a Government.’ This was G. L. Molesworth, Consulting Engineer to the Indian government, very much echoing the views of the viceroy who appointed him, Lord Mayo. By contrast, in an outgoing minute of 1869 Mayo's predecessor, the paternalist liberal John Lawrence, had alluded to the ‘notorious’ and ‘flagrant failures’ of contractors who should have been more closely watched by the companies that engaged them.Footnote 8 We will touch later on some of the various 1860s mishaps that had left such a bitter taste.
The jury was still out in 1868 when Edward Davidson published the first history of India's rail development, taking careful note of the ‘petty’ contractors who had disappointed the East Indian Railway and the company's subsequent success with Thomas Brassey. His view was that the GIPR in Western India had in fact shown the way, despite undoubted shortcomings in execution, by letting their line in ‘a system of large contracts’ to well-established British firms.Footnote 9 Dividing their network into sections, they had, for example, awarded the stretch from Igatpuri to Bhusawal to Messrs Wythes & Jackson, and the important branch from Bhusawal to Nagpur to Lee, Watson & Aiton. The very first contract, from Bombay to Thane, had been won by Fowler & Faviell in 1851.
Davidson seems to have overlooked the fact, however, that, from the earliest years of the GIPR, these larger men had actively subletted to many smaller players. Struggling to keep his costs down, William Faviell had converted his agents to risk-accepting subcontractors with an additional incentive to squeeze labour—a policy that persisted even though, as Ian J. Kerr suggests, it led directly to the Bhore Ghat disturbances of 1859 in which one European was killed.Footnote 10 This well-publicized commotion among a large and restive workforce adds another dimension to anti-contractor sentiment. In the same year, the Calcutta Review took note of ‘a daily increasing class of Europeans, those employed on the Indian railways, many of them rough, uneducated men’.Footnote 11 It was feared that these platelayers, boiler-makers, and petty contractors—ignorant of the customs and language of the natives, but well persuaded of their villainy by the late Rebellion—would betray racial prestige. Such anxieties were not without precedent. The great reformer Ram Mohan Roy had put forward similar arguments in 1833, when the East India Company lost its battle to protect its monopoly and keep ‘interlopers’ out of its territories.Footnote 12 Subsequently, a population of indigo planters established themselves in Bengal, though the Calcutta Review downplays their reputation for brutality and coercion. The aforementioned article remarks that a roughneck minority among them ‘were seafaring men who, leaving their ships, took service as factors with the Calcutta agency firms’, while the majority, as a subsequent article makes clear, were of ‘the middle class . . . the sons of traders, merchants, farmers, and manufacturers, lawyers, clergymen, and doctors, officers of the army, navy and civil service’.Footnote 13 Within 20 years of 1833, the number of non-official residents had increased from some 2,000 to more than 10,000, while, by 1858, that number would rise to 22,000, after which press scrutiny intensifies. The new influx was markedly more working-class, argues Harald Fischer-Tiné, principally connected with railways but also with the growth of the tea industry.Footnote 14 Indeed, as one old hand recalled, during the tea bubble of the 1860s, proprietors were extraordinarily lax in their appointment of plantation staff:
[A]ny one—literally any one—was taken, and Tea planters in those days were a strange medley of retired or cashiered Army and Navy officers, medical men, engineers, veterinary surgeons, steamer captains, chemists, shopkeepers of all kinds, stable-keepers, used-up policemen, clerks and goodness knows who besides.Footnote 15
This declining order of respectability offers an interesting analogue to the railways, especially if it can eventually be shown that here too there was a perceptible and perhaps even deliberate reduction in ‘adventurers’. As even the most sentimental historian of the tea industry admits, the continuance of the hiring policy of the 1860s would have meant not only inefficiency for the planters, but also ‘tyranny’ for the workers.Footnote 16 We will hear more of William Faviell's abuses later, but, with respect to business practice, his rule (Henry Fowler had succumbed to the Indian climate in 1854) set other bad precedents for years to come. His mechanical engineer, Godfrey Oates Mann, leaves a picture of a mean and abusive employer fixed in a confrontational attitude with company staff (he supposedly sacked a mason for doing his job ‘too well’ and ‘working for the Engineers’).Footnote 17 This was no doubt matched on the company side by suspicion and resentment. In 1868, for example, a senior official wrote to the board in London complaining about ‘pampered’ contractors who will resort to any pretext to obtain increased rates and who soon learn the contents of any private correspondence about their doings from the company's pliable ‘native employees’.Footnote 18
The unsettled nature of this climate was, nonetheless, the very factor that favoured Joseph Stephens and men like him. He began as an agent's assistant under a minor figure named E. W. Winton, before subcontracting for Wythes & Jackson and then Lee, Watson & Aiton. His intercourse with these bosses was relatively slight: in the diaries, they come along the line periodically by engine or trolley, but are more commonly represented by their inspectors—though on one occasion Alexander Lee makes a penetrating audit of Stephens's accounts, before consenting to a Rs 6,000 advance.Footnote 19 This last incident is revealing. Stephens was not paid directly, but was given a cheque that he was told to cash with Charles Payne, the company's superintendent on the Nagpur Branch. The transaction not only makes it clear that Stephens was often struggling for funds, but also seems to support Kerr's assertion that his employers were themselves undercapitalized and reliant on company advances. Davidson had clearly overestimated the ‘wealth and respectability’ of firms like Wythes & Jackson (much criticized for their slowness) and Duckett & Stead (who failed altogether).Footnote 20 Indeed, some of the Bombay Presidency's contractors were evidently not practical men at all, but ‘capitalists’ who won contracts only to subletFootnote 21 or even crooks who milked the company for advances before packing up work. The cotton boom that fuelled early railway construction on the west coast had been triggered by the North's blockade of southern ports during the American Civil War and, as the Bombay Builder observed, the conclusion of hostilities had diverted many erstwhile stock-jobbers to a new field of speculation: ‘. . . the brokers of 1864–5 are transformed into the most enterprising contractors of 1867’.Footnote 22 They were not alone in jumping ship. Kerr registers a ‘parade of GIPR engineers’ who deserted the company to go freelance and, in 1869, a bemused official reported meeting an ‘anomalous’ man who remained on its payroll while acting effectively as the representative of three petty contractors.Footnote 23 The Linnaeus documents also offer evidence to confirm Kerr's ‘tantalizing’ proposal that some, if not many, small-time contractors may in fact have been local shopkeepers looking to further their trade.Footnote 24
1860s Bombay was plainly a volatile and unregulated economy, with railway building characterized by a long chain of deferred risk. Indeed, for some officials, it may even have become an object-lesson in how not to do things.Footnote 25 As Ian Derbyshire has described, sectional contracts promoted labour competition; moreover, the system left senior figures with little control over Indian subcontracting chains.Footnote 26 Both of these drawbacks are reflected in the experience of Stephens, who devised incentives to retain workers, as we will see, and who was at liberty to engage Indian suppliers of labour, lime, stone, and timber, but was also to a large degree dependent on them. Letting lines in sections to firms like Lee, Watson & Aiton would become less common, most subsequent railways being built on the departmental system, with engineers directly supervising petty contractors who were increasingly Indian. The fluid quality of Stephens's milieu, then, is of great significance for our enquiry. It is considerably less likely that, in another time or place, he would have succeeded in ultimately rising to the status of his former employers, making perhaps his greatest profits constructing station buildings on the Nagpur Branch.Footnote 27 Furthermore, he may not have established himself in India at all, had he not arrived in the heyday of firms who, as one government engineer complained in 1859, were free to sublet to miscellaneous knockabouts who proved themselves ‘neither educated nor respectable nor scrupulous’.Footnote 28
‘A daily increasing class of Europeans’: enterprising middlemen in the cotton boom
If he possessed an innate knack of managing things cheaply, the colonial outlet for this talent Stephens owed entirely to happenstance. His was not an engineering family; on the contrary, his father's vocation was the chivalric past. George Stephens was a Liverpudlian Methodist who migrated to Sweden in 1834, where his interest in runic inscriptions led to a career as a distinguished antiquary. His son Joseph and elder daughter Ingeborg were born in Stockholm, but raised in Denmark after their father won a chair at Copenhagen University. Here, John Hallen Abbott, an English engineer at work on the Zealand Railway,Footnote 29 married into the family before leaving with Ingeborg for India in 1857. He had joined the GIPR's staff in an unpropitious year. The young couple were forced to flee their upcountry bungalow at the outbreak of rebellion but, notwithstanding this scare, Ingeborg's brother was persuaded to follow them in late 1859. Still aged only 18, his CV must have made quick reading. For the first year, he served a loose apprenticeship with Abbott, honed his draughtsmanship, made some inroads in the vernacular, and digested an instruction manual by William Davis Haskoll.Footnote 30
Stephens's example raises the question of how many of his contemporaries were, likewise, autodidacts with no formal qualification. This was no doubt a contributing factor to the class snobbery that appears to underlie exchanges, often adversarial, between the professional cadre of engineers attached to railway companies or the Public Works Department (PWD) and the more heterogeneous body of contractors under their supervision.Footnote 31 The teenaged Stephens had clearly hoped to become one of the former, and did not disguise his disappointment when Abbott instead found him an assistantship under a contractor, E. W. Winton: ‘. . . he did not seem much to relish the idea fancying perhaps that it was lowering himself down somewhat.’Footnote 32 Although he fails to account for noticeable Scottish representation, Derbyshire's inspection of the covenants signed by East India Railway staff upon their appointment in Britain suggests that engineers were typically drawn from London and the Home Counties (Abbott himself was the son of a City solicitor). Footplate and workshop staff, on the other hand, gave addresses in the Midlands and the North.Footnote 33 Ranking socially somewhere between the two groups, the contractors seem at least initially to have been firmly affiliated with the latter milieu. Fowler and Faviell were both Yorkshireman, as was Godfrey Oates Mann (Faviell had written to the latter's father in Leeds requesting competent subcontractors for the project). If this gives us an idea of the social blocs that divided engineers from contractors, however, Stephens's networks as well as his own example suggest a more diverse and less exclusive field of enterprise.
‘Fear God and flee the devil’, the Methodist professor told his son on departure, before minding him also to take care with his spelling.Footnote 34 Most probably, English was not his first language.Footnote 35 Whether he spoke with a Scandinavian accent is a matter of guesswork, but his appetite for Danish newspapers sent from home, his reference to a ‘watermonster’ (presumably a crocodile), and his inviting friends for a rubber of ‘hvist’ one evening give us a clue perhaps to how his contemporaries may have heard and perceived him.Footnote 36 Whether or not he felt the need to assert his Englishness, however, he need not have felt the odd man out. The government at Brussels was the first in continental Europe to embrace rail transport, and an encounter with a Belgian contractor in 1862 was an opportunity for sneering: ‘. . . he had got no servant of any kind, did not know a word of Hindostanee and spoke broken English, altogether badly off.’Footnote 37 Stephens later took on two fellow Scandinavians as agents—one a family friend, Charles Brandt; the other, Tegnér, a labourer in a Bombay sawmill—and the archive also brings to light two Dutchmen: Rolf and Coen. These names are especially valuable, since all seemed to have passed under the radar of the almanacs, although the latter do draw attention to the substantial Indo-Portuguese contingent on the railways. Among the 85 contractors listed in the Times of India Calendar and Directory for 1868, we find Alves, Bartola, Costa, Lobo, Pinto, and Xavier, as well as William Isaac Sargon—possibly an Anglicized Jew.Footnote 38 Another of Stephens's agents, Louis Pereira, also sprang presumably from the former milieu.
Furthermore, it is vital to remember that Parsi contractors, who, even before the coming of the railways had been commissioned to build municipal waterworks and other projects for the city of Bombay, were swift to capitalize in this new field. According to a memoir compiled by one of the early route surveyors, Arthur West, it was even the ‘policy’ of the GIPR's first Chief Engineer, J. J. Berkley, ‘to interest the natives in Railway works’. ‘The profits would be kept in the country, instead of going to Europe, besides other reasons.’Footnote 39 Inasmuch as their competition cut into Faviell's profits, they may indeed have contributed to the rise in subcontracting (Godfrey Oates Mann also takes rueful note of Berkley's attitude, and of Faviell's difficulty in bringing his estimates below those offered by the Parsis).Footnote 40 The most successful among them was undoubtedly Jamshedji Dorabji, who won the GIPR's third contract and later expanded his operations to Gujarat,Footnote 41 and who would appear to be the man Stephens hoped—with typical opportunism—might fail on a length of double-tracking in 1866. ‘[A]s he did the work between Wassind and Russara,’ however, Stephens's company informant confided, ‘[I] think he is likely to stick at a small job like that between Nandgaum and Chalisgaum.’Footnote 42 G. B. Peck, Stephens's long-suffering agent at Amravati, also purchased some stone from a Parsi engaged on a nearby barracks when his own supplier failed, while the arrival of a representative from a major contractor to buy up Stephens's remaining plant at the conclusion of his Indian career indicates perhaps a strengthened grip on the market following the departure of the first generation of Europeans.Footnote 43 The role of the Parsis further complicates our picture of the contractors, and adds a racialized slant to the distrust of them voiced in the press and amongst their betters.
To focus on Stephens, it is clear that he very much favoured the pertinacious and pugnacious stance often complained of by engineers. During his early years, he was in frequent dispute with Charles Payne, superintendent of the Nagpur Branch, and the latter's colleague Richard Stack over the quality of his masonry, the trio nearly coming ‘to high word [sic]’ over the Ullusna [Alasana] Bridge in 1863. In an amusing episode four months earlier, Stephens had been forced to ‘sceme [sic] a good deal’ to conceal a bad error on another bridge from the company's ‘Maistry’ (probably an Indian inspector on patrol), working all night to correct the error. ‘At the bridge in the morning, Stack there and he made no complaints for a wonder.’Footnote 44 Not all engineers were so vigilant: John Wells, Stephens's sometime partner and later rival, was told for example that he might use ‘inferior ballast so long as he made a good road’. Neither were their overseers altogether impartial amidst often cutthroat competition. According to Peck, in 1867, a rival contractor ‘instigated’ local inspectors to bring official ire down on Stephens's haphazard fencing.Footnote 45
It is unsurprising, therefore, that engineers and contractors would try to shift blame and public outrage onto the other party in the aftermath of the 1867 monsoon. The heavy rains of that year claimed their first victims in late June, when Peck wrote to Stephens of a ‘frightful railway accident’ north-east of Bhusawal at Nimbhore.Footnote 46 The misleadingly named Sukhi (dry) River had risen at night and washed away an embankment, with perhaps 130 perishing in the subsequent derailment. On 2 July, the Times of India greeted the railway magistrate's decision not to hold an official enquiry with insinuations of a ‘hush up’, before repeating the Indu Prakash’s allegation that the GIPR had been shoring up unsound masonry with planks of wood.Footnote 47 Over the coming months, the newspaper would pursue a trenchant campaign against the company and especially its contractors, citing the spectacular collapse of the 50-metre-high Mhow-ke-Mullee Viaduct on 19 July. Its focus later shifted to the ‘shaky bridges’ on Stephens's own Nagpur Extension, which were also universally condemned by an independent engineer in 1868.Footnote 48 Following government's controversial decision to assist the company in funding reconstruction,Footnote 49 what had begun as a ‘tragedy’ had become a ‘gigantic swindle’. The following words drew threats of libel action from Wythes & Jackson in February 1869:
If there is any man who has yet any vestige of doubt in his mind as to the real cause of so much disaster and ruin, or who has yet any faith in great contractors and their wise and honorable agents, if left to do as they like, or who believes in either the wisdom or energy of action of a railway Engineer, let him take a trip into Berar and see for himself the vile things that are there.Footnote 50
Noting the widespread use of petty subcontractors, the Times’s leader drew special attention to their purchase of defective or adulterated mortar from Indian suppliers. Probably against his better judgement, clearly Peck had been drawn into this low-level scamping. Unable to afford the charcoal to fire Stephens's own lime kilns, he struck a deal with a local operator who burned wood (an inferior substitute) and used his larger capital to purchase fuel for the man at bulk prices. Corners were cut again when mixing the mortar. With scrutiny falling on him in July 1867, Peck protested to Stephens that he never allowed more than two measures of sand to one of lime (the Company's contractually specified ratio was 1.5:1).Footnote 51 Conditions were evidently tough. Peck complained that increased competition (‘Contractors are getting as thick as blackberries’), compounded no doubt by profiteers speculating in contracts, had forced tenders down to ‘miserably low’ levels. The pressure exerted by the Bombay press, however, which by this point was ‘pitching into Engineers with a vengeance’, led to much blame being laid indiscriminately on either small-time contractors or Indian mortar producers. In Stephens's case, it appears to have furnished old enemies with an excuse for blacklisting him. ‘My impression is they do not wish you to take more work on this district,’ Peck explained, ‘owing I suppose to the rows you had with them.’Footnote 52
More work will be required to determine the long-term significance of 1867 for the nature of Indian contractors—though the Bombay PWD's despatches to London do suggest a hotter pursuit of scampers and their official accomplices.Footnote 53 It may well have hastened Stephens's own departure. Another factor, however, was the end of a boom that had afforded him opportunities to diversify into a startling range of ventures. Besides railway contracting, he tendered (unsuccessfully) for an irrigation works near Pune, and over several years built cotton-processing facilities at Amravati and Khamgaon for the Mofussil Press & Ginning Company.Footnote 54 With a Gujarati trading firm, Megji, Mulji & Co., and an Indian stationmaster whose access to the telegraph gave him up-to-date prices, he set up his own small cotton syndicate. Although this came to an acrimonious end when Stephens accused his partners of ‘swindeling [sic]’ him in the pages of the Indu Prakash, a bilingual English–Marathi newspaper, he subsequently made at least one cotton shipment to London, pocketing Rs 3,500 in 1866.Footnote 55 He refrained from playing the stock market—‘. . . had I been that way inclined I have had lots of chances of doing so,’ he told his father—though a canny investment in one of Bombay's land reclamation companies yielded a Rs 1,500 profit.Footnote 56 He considered speculating in linseed oil and, most enterprising of all, was possibly the first person to import dynamite into India—a newfangled Swedish invention of course, which his shipping agent Henry Rogers tested on the waterfront at Bombay: ‘Capt Ducat was thunderstruck . . . it was just as great a success under water as out of it.’ ‘I have already had 2 men,’ Rogers added, ‘offering me any thing I liked to ask for it’—but sadly the reluctance of the customs authorities to allow the powerful explosive to be unloaded put paid to this venture.Footnote 57
In the final analysis, such hard-headed and even cynical pursuit of profit offers us the most compelling ground for anti-contractor bias amongst anyone with some professional commitment to the Raj and its self-styled mission—not least John Abbott, who it seems bitterly envied his brother-in-law's wealth. While Stephens fraternized with his railway peers, both contractor and company, there is little evidence of social integration with the wider British community or subscription to its values. A suggestive passage in the 1860 diary has him watching—not participating in—a cricket match between a party from Nashik and one from Malegaon.Footnote 58 Quite probably, he did not know how to play the game. And, though his sister's record is more detailed and descriptive, there is nothing resembling the passage in Ingeborg Abbott's correspondence where she watches the 78th Highlanders marching into Bombay city in 1859 and gives thanks, echoed presumably by her English husband, for British victory in the rebellion. Certainly he did not echo his father's misty-eyed projections for the railway: ‘a great weapon in the hands of Providence, for the spread of Christianity and civilization.’Footnote 59 Self-reliance in a highly competitive marketplace would seem to have been his rationale and, by 1868, he summed up his trade, for the professor's benefit, with typical candour: ‘. . . the whole and sole interest is to get done with it as soon as one can and pocket the proceeds.’Footnote 60
Obtaining, retaining (and placating?) labour
From the Stephens archive emerges a picture of the 1860s Bombay Presidency as a vibrant but transient field of opportunity, created by a confluence of different factors. Perhaps its greatest value, though, lies in what it can tell us about labour management on the small-scale, everyday level. Though incomplete, the records are precise. Among Peck's list of expenditures for work on Paras Station, for example, we find:
. . . carpenter, 11 annas; Luxman Danah for earth work on signals, Rs 3; Janoo Kutcha to a/c of lime, Rs 50; Mahdoo advd for lime, Rs 75; Dad Khan for 5½ candies lime, Rs 74; blacksmith for several jobs, Rs 2; 3 cartmen 2 days, Rs 6; Purseram Ramjee for earth work & ballasting, Rs 10; Ramsing Tileman, Rs 20; Durma Rama to a/c of chips for concrete, Rs 35; Damajee for 35 headers, Rs 5; Mr Moram to a/c of platelaying, Rs 150; Presented to Well men, Rs 6; Govinda Beldar to a/c of stone, Rs 50.Footnote 61
The list abounds in telling details. Probably undercapitalized, Mahdoo is taking advances for his lime and thus cannot raise prices; the specialist task of plate-laying is performed by a European, Moram; danger-pay has been gifted to men digging a well. Purseram Ramjee and Govinda Beldar, it should be noted, are not labourers, but muqaddams (or, in the case of the latter, who bears the name of a stoneworking caste, a ‘maistry’)—that is, foremen directing a team of workers.Footnote 62 As such, Purseram would have received perhaps Rs 20 per month and Govinda 30, with their men (or women) receiving 10 and 20, respectively. It is clear from Stephens's own payrolls that masons typically earned twice or even thrice as much as ‘coolies’.Footnote 63
This documentation must surely remedy Ian Kerr's regret that records ‘do not penetrate to the level of the gangs and the gangers’. Indeed, its goes further still. Generally, it would appear that Indian subcontractors gave no more than their verbal assentFootnote 64 and that many Europeans would have shared Peck's opinion: ‘. . . do you think it advisable to have a stamped agreement. I think it matters very little.’Footnote 65 But in fact one folder in the archive contains a number of bargains drawn up on stamp office paper, witnessed by clerks or sometimes Parsis who were pledging surety for the Indian parties, and compensating for their somewhat ad hoc nature with a measure of legal bluster:
This agreement made on the 28th September one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, between John Smith Wells Subcontractor on the one part and Cheema Suttoo Wuddaree Contractor on the other party, witnesseth that the said Cheema Suttoo do hereby agree to supply stones for Bridges.Footnote 66
Formal deals presumably gave Stephens useful leverage in holding defaulters to account (in some case penalties are stipulated), but I would suggest that such an exercise also served to establish a certain rapport with men like Cheema Suttoo—we will return to him and his ‘Wuddarees’ shortly. The introduction of this new evidence brings me to the heart of my argument on labour. The Linnaeus evidence underlines the vital role of middlemen in obtaining labour for this, along with so many other, colonial building projectsFootnote 67 —but it also should lead us I think to identify the small contractor as a helpmeet, rather than a fully fledged partner of capital, who transacted with gangers as fellow intermediaries. I aim to define this metier of Stephens in full by ratifying a number Kerr's core hypotheses, while also complicating the picture he paints of the contractor–muqaddam–labourer relationship.
Railway construction was a seasonal business and, with machinery underused in India well into the twentieth century, one that each year swept its net wide across the provinces to draw in the tens of thousands of hands needed to shape its designs. It was also in competition with other sources of manual employment: principally agriculture, but also public works projects such as canals that benefited from government's capacity to impress labour. Contractors in need of a workforce, therefore, that could be mobilized in a swift and timely fashion, that would not desert its employer, and whose return could be expected the following season began to draw a distinction between ‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’ sources of labour. Kerr stresses, however, that ‘reliable’ manpower was, counter-intuitively, not recruited from districts bordering the line—on the contrary, village power-holders or agrarian priorities had a way of recalling locals at inconvenient moments.Footnote 68 Railwaymen favoured instead itinerant, specialist communities that would often be best understood not as ‘migratory’, but as ‘circulating’ groups: either returning from the ganger's to the farmer's life only at uncertain intervals, or indeed shifting continually between construction projects with no fixed village.Footnote 69 As Ravi Ahuja has made plain, we should not think of footloose manpower as a singular outcome of colonial modernity.Footnote 70 Such groups had long served the needs of tank-digging and irrigation work in Southern India and the Deccan, and aligning their programme with this established labour economy during the early 1860s was a significant step by which engineers upped their efficiency through, as Kerr makes clear, ‘adapt[ing] to Indian conditions’.Footnote 71
Perhaps the most prominent such group was the constituency represented by muqaddam-cum-contractor Cheema Suttoo, known to Stephens as the ‘Wuddarees’, ‘Woddaries’, or ‘Woodaries’, and to ethnological guides as the Vadar, Vadda, or Odde.Footnote 72 When the Bombay Quarterly Review cited them, too, as an argument in favour of the contract system, the keyword was ‘pertinacious’: it portrayed a close-knit, inscrutable, aboriginal community, ‘old as the hills’, with set habits to which the pragmatist must reconcile himself.Footnote 73 They keep their own hours and will only take task work, the Quarterly remarked, not employment by the day—a custom that actually boosted their reliability, contractors would come to realize.Footnote 74 Husband, wife, and child work together, and all it seems are accustomed to receive a parting gift in return for reappearing the subsequent year. Arthur West had witnessed their capacity to mobilize when surveying potential routes for future lines in 1851: at his behest, one Mokaria set to work on a drain with six others on the evening of 8 November. By the next day, there were 30 at work, by the day after 50, by the 11th 80, and by the 12th 100 men, women, and boys.Footnote 75
Interestingly, this arrangement went counter to a PWD general order West had received ten months earlier, instructing him to steer clear of this quarrelsome and disloyal group.Footnote
76
Indeed, though the stoneworking Vadars seem to have received more respect than their separate, earthworking counterparts, these ‘navvies of India’ and their vagabonding lifestyle are often handled with a suspicious and derogatory tone in official discourse.Footnote
77
Edgar Thurston describes them as coarse and hard-drinking, and fond of using their crowbar skills to effect night-time entries into respectable homes. Ananthakrishna Iyer accused them of absconding with their employers’ advances,Footnote
78
while Manwaring's Marathi Proverbs contains this jagged-edged gem: ‘
. Vadāryātsā bhogā phatakarātsā sogā. A Vadāri's adornment is a trailing coarse blanket.’Footnote
79
The Criminal Tribes Act did not come into force until 1871 and, even then, not in the Bombay or Madras Presidencies.Footnote 80 But ‘Wuddias’ and ‘Bildars’ (Beldars) were already being sized up in 1859, when they were described as ‘vagrant tribes’ in the halls of government, and some recent disturbances at the Bhore Ghat works blamed on their ‘wildest and most uncivilized habits’.Footnote 81 Ultimately, they would be deemed, in both jurisdictions, ambiguously criminal. Handbooks in Madras identify one roguish sub-caste (the ‘Donga Woddars’) and exonerate the rest, while Kennedy's well-known Bombay Notes of 1908 sees the whole population on a sliding scale of criminality—an attitude borne out in the various Vadar groups represented within the forced settlement camps that were set up, three years later, under the second Criminal Tribes Act.Footnote 82
Stephens's records provide day-to-day illustration of his coming to terms with the Vadars when, as Kerr conjectures, they had just begun to extend their operations into Central India in the track of the railways.Footnote 83 Perhaps his most sustained relationship came when building small bridges between Nandura and Shegaon on the Nagpur Extension, during which Vadars set up their camps close to the quarries from which they supplied his ballast (‘on the road saw Babagee Wooddary and his gang pitched at Lanjuhr’).Footnote 84 His diaries reveal what could previously only be partially inferred from the West journal. The Vadars’ efficiency and internal discipline made them eminently ‘reliable’, but also enabled them to stage organized protest. Disputes constantly arose over the agreed size and shape of quarried stone: ‘. . . they made a noise about me not giving them enough measurement and I stopped measuring and Wells as usual took their part and I told him a bit of my mind which he evidently did not like.’Footnote 85
A frequent occurrence, moreover, was for Stephens to return home to find an entire Vadar group clustered sullenly around his bungalow, waiting for him to tally their accounts and settle their payment. ‘Rows’ and ‘talkings to’ often ensued, with Stephens sometimes choosing to ‘cheer them up’ with one of the bottles of brandy he ordered from downcountry (he himself seems to have mostly abstained).Footnote 86 Sensing weakness, Peck's Vadars later successfully extracted advances by threatening to halt work (consequently, he seems to have rectified his earlier indifference to written agreements). But, nevertheless, the gangers’ all-night labours were vital to Stephens's aforementioned ‘sceme’ to conceal bad work from an inspector, and they had the skills to supply him with shaped masonry like arch-groins and culvert covers.Footnote 87 Such was their mutual dependence, one wonders whether some of the Vadars’ alleged misdeeds—as when ten were charged with a burglary at Khamgaon—also tarnished Stephens's reputation.Footnote 88 Another dimension is added to anti-contractor sentiment when we consider that the administrator's disdain for the interloping, possibly foreign railwayman may have been in some way analogous to his suspicion of roving ‘criminal tribes’.
The Vadars’ habit of ‘making noise’ brings us to the matter of outright striking: ‘Some of Wells men jacked up work wanting more pay’, notes Stephens on one occasion; and, on another, ‘the masons struck work’.Footnote 89 Tools were downed all too frequently in the 1850s and 1860s in retaliation for non-payment of wages, Kerr identifying this as another consequence of putting so much work into the hands of unknown men with little or no capital.Footnote 90 It was also common to retain workers by purposefully withholding wages. Noting in 1868 that several well-diggers would abandon their dangerous task if he did not pay them in arrears, Peck found himself walking the usual contractor's tight-rope between discontent and desertion.Footnote 91 But, while Kerr's examples of striking are drawn almost wholly from major bridge and viaduct works, where protest was ‘crushed’ and troublemakers swiftly ‘put back to work or replaced’, the Stephens record is one of small-scale resistance met with little coercive power or official backing.Footnote 92
Indeed, disputes often played out face to face with the muqaddams. In March 1863, Stephens was called before the magistrate at Akola following complaints of non-payment by John Mahomed of Shegaon, though the case was dismissed when the plaintiff failed to appear.Footnote 93 A more persistent nemesis was Sultanbhoy, maistry of a gang of masons, who first appears in April 1863 when his men at Jalamb refuse to proceed with work on the grounds of ‘a native holiday’. Stephens's move to replace him with a rival, Ibrahim, at first brings repentance but later, on 18 May, an embarrassing snub ‘in presence of Louis [Pereira] and one of Peragies men’. A compromise offer to release enough cash for his men to buy food is turned down the following evening and, in the dispute's poignant and comic climax, Sultanbhoy arrives at the bungalow on 22 May demanding to see ‘the time sheets’. When Stephens denies him access to this documentation, the maistry enacts his parting revenge by refusing to return some ‘tankys’ (chisels) that his men had borrowed from the stores.Footnote 94
It is a pity the archive does not offer more narratives of this kind, but Stephens's itineracy between various worksites, including two trips to Europe, and above all the absence of the 1864–69 diaries make it difficult to trace developing—or deteriorating—relationships with indigenous actors. Cross-referencing different classes of documents does yield some intriguing aperçus, however. Cheema or ‘Chimma’ is seen first in October 1862, when Stephens gives him some steel, presumably in connection with the contract for stones he had signed the previous month. Trusted supplier, he appears again in Peck's correspondence for August 1865, being advanced Rs 200 at Badnera, some 120 kilometres east of where he first struck a deal with Stephens and Wells. A degree of affection or at least recognition of seniority is suggested by Peck's referring to him, parenthetically, as ‘Bappoo’ (father)—he could even be ‘the old Woddary’ to whom Stephens gave a Rs 5 bonus, and ‘nothing’ to the others, during Holi in 1863.Footnote 95 A beldar called Mullaree spans an even broader period: 1863–68—and this in spite of his arrest for housebreaking. This would certainly suggest that partnerships with Vadar masons or beldars (but not necessarily excavators) could prosper, and perhaps were more likely than others to prosper, over the long term. Of course, it cannot be said with complete certainty that these are indeed the same men, though identity is sure at least in the case of shopkeeper-subcontractors like Dadabhoy Dorabji and his subordinate Gabriel Matthew de Braganza. Stephens probably met or knew of this enterprising Nashik merchant during his first residence in and around that city and, as bills attest, he and Pereira continued to depend on the Parsi both for cut stones as well as petty needfuls like sardines and brandy.Footnote 96 Most intriguing of all is the enigmatic ‘Venketish’, who appears to have acted as clerk, labour boss, supplier of firewood and cottonseed oil, and possibly even bungalow landlord.Footnote 97
The confrontation with Sultanbhoy was perhaps the fruit of inexperience. The agent Charles Brandt's letters three years afterward show a greater understanding of muqaddams and their ways, both in respect to advances, often requested but not always granted, and absences (the apparent desertion of some coolies to a rival contractor turns out to be ‘a play’, or exchange of manpower, between two muqaddams).Footnote 98 The former is of particular importance. Foremen would often have enticed their gangs with an initial advance and paid them subsequently in arrears, borrowing perhaps from local moneylenders, and creating a nexus of credit without which the swift mass-mobilization that Arthur West witnessed in 1851 may well not have been possible. The ‘native holiday’ is also a case in point. In 1851, William Faviell had told Godfrey Mann that engineers did not go out to India ‘to be Gentlemen’, leaving Henry Fowler to fret that his partner's policy of treating the men ‘like dogs . . . will operate sadly against us’.Footnote 99 But the Stephens archive offers some evidence of greater cultural sensitivity post 1857. John Abbott, probably recollecting that the rebellion that had sent him fleeing downcountry had commenced during Ramadan, upbraided his brother-in-law on this matter seven months after the youngster's arrival:
It is the third day of the Mohurrum, an [sic] Mussulman festival, just before breakfast came a whole troup [sic] of Natchwallas with a bear, two boys danced and one of the men fought with the bear, just as they left there came a second lot mostly dressed as women who dansed [sic] an African danse, they had nearly all got sticks with which they struck the ground as they dansed, just as they left a third lot arrived with a man dressed like a tiger. I would not see them, which made John so angry that he said he would have me with him no longer. I wrote a letter to him telling him that I had not intended to offend him and begged his pardon.Footnote 100
Stephens is more circumspect of his masons’ Muharram observances three years later,Footnote
101
and takes care on all festivals to distribute at least some ‘cherry-merry’ or small gifts (
= baksheesh, Marathi). Like the bonus Peck paid to his well-diggers, or the brandy given to Vadars and carters, such sweeteners were used to reward and placate workers—perhaps even, it seems, to compensate the productive while excluding the idle—and also to build rapport or loyalty. Kerr uses Marx's concept of formal subsumption to describe how railway builders had to negotiate a labour economy governed by both ‘capitalist and pre-capitalist forces and relationships’, learning to link ‘down and across these different structures’.Footnote
102
To conclude by proposing a route for future research, it is tantalizing to speculate how much of Stephens's hard-won experience was gained through observation of the Indians around him. An innovative, hybrid approach may even have garnered praise—‘[M]uch might be learnt on both sides’, noted the Bombay Quarterly Review, comparing the European contractor's use of locomotives and mechanical helps with Jamshedji Dorabji's knack for establishing supply chains with local villagers, ‘by means which would never have entered the mind of a European’.Footnote
103
And, if he is more likely to have mimicked his own muqaddams than the Parsi entrepreneur, a contemporary sociologist working in a Pune slum provides a suggestive analogy. Ratna N. Rao recorded very similar modes of patronage among Vadar muqaddams and their work-teams in the 1980s, the former attaining their position by virtue of saving up the capital needed to extend advances, but also cementing alliances with gifts of paan and cigarettes.Footnote
104
Whether or not Joseph Stephens consciously imitated any Indian peer, it is telling to see him falling in to these accommodative arrangements of clientage and mutual obligation with his often fractious labour force. More work will be needed to uncover the full significance of the early, small, independent contractor, in other fields as well as the railways. Such men were agents of modernity not formally affiliated with the imperial project, or even necessarily subscribing to ideals of imperial progress and duty. They were free to sublet and speculate, but also forced to bargain with merchants and strikers with little outside support. Theirs is a record of specialization and complex negotiations at the local level, carried out at a time of political upheaval and amidst the cosmopolitan, profiteering free-for-all that was the cotton boom.
