Three Colonial Port Cities in India

Abstract

Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta share a distinctive pattern of urban morphology that is part of their colonial past. Basic features are a nucleus with a Europeanstyle fort and open esplanade, segregated, residential areas for Europeans and Indians, a central business district, and peripheral military and manufactural zones. Evolution of these features varied in each city, and they survived largely intact until the early twentieth century. \M ADRAS, Bombay, and Calcutta are distinctive because they share similar morphological features that are a mixture of past European and Indian influences but that are not found in other Indian cities. British colonial influence on the Indian subcontinent was manifested in various settlement types, each of which was shaped by the circumstances of its origin and subsequent evolution. During the period of initial contact between England and India in the seventeenth century, the English East India Company, like other European trading enterprises, maintained commercial stations, called factories, in the preexistent Indian cities along the coasts and inland waterways. The early factories comprised warehouses enclosed in compounds together with dwellings for merchants and other facilities.1 Their effect on Indian urban structure was minor and ephemeral. In Madras and later in Bombay and Calcutta, fortified factories were erected at relatively undeveloped village sites, accessible to seagoing vessels and completely controlled by the East India Company. Hybrid towns arose at these three sites where Indian and other merchants, attracted by the commercial opportunities to be found under English protection, lived in a segregated fashion in or adjacent to the original European settlements. The three port towns served as the principal seats of English economic and military power on the subcontinent and were the bases for expansion inland.2 With the extension of British rule inland, other forms of colonial urbanism appeared during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The most common types were the military and civil stations, known as cantonments and civil lines, that were usually established near indigenous urban centers but were administered separately.3 Hill stations were another new settlement ' A Historical Atlas of South Asia (edited by Joseph E. Schwartzberg; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), plate VI.B.5, 53, 209. 2 John E. Brush, The Growth of the Presidency Towns, Urban India: Society, Space and Image, Duke University Program in Comparative Studies on Southeast Asia, Monograph 10, edited by Richard G. Fox, Durham, N.C., 1970, 91-114. 3 Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976). * DR. KOSAMBI is a reader in sociology at the University of Poona, Pune, India. DR. BRUSH is an emeritus professor of geography at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.111 on Tue, 09 Aug 2016 04:19:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms