Ritika Prasad | University of North Carolina at Charlotte (original) (raw)

Papers by Ritika Prasad

Asian Affairs, 2017

India's railway history has mainly been studied from the perspective of economic history or how i... more India's railway history has mainly been studied from the perspective of economic history or how it was constructed in the colonial period, through the ages. Railway management, construction, railway economics, labour, technological impacts are the major themes for research on Indian railways. Ritika Prasad's work, Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India is a very exciting and refreshing addition to the existing historiography of Indian railways. The author fascinatingly discusses how railway became an integral part of the everyday life in colonial India and also the Indian responses, resistances to adopt the new technology or 'tools of Empire', which 'materially shaped India's History'(p.3). The brilliant scholar on railway history, Ian J Kerr, in his book 'Railways of the Raj', (Building the Railways of the Raj: 1850-1900, OUP, Delhi, 1997) discusses the menwomen and children who built the railways through their physical labour and who had only one connection with the companies i.e. 'labour power'. More recently Manu Goswami (Producing India, Chicago, 2004) and Ravi Ahuja (Pathways of Empire, 2009) explicated railways in India within a larger colonial ideology of infrastructure and public works. Thereafter the outstanding works by Laura Bear, Marian Aguiar, Nitin Sinha have also brought out the cultural and ideological dimensions of the transfer of railway technology in nineteenth century India. John Hurd

Tracks of Change

I n June 1916, an agent of the Bengal–Nagpur Railway (BNR) asked the Bengal government to clarify... more I n June 1916, an agent of the Bengal–Nagpur Railway (BNR) asked the Bengal government to clarify the link between railway travel and the spread of infectious diseases in India. Recent official analyses of sanitary conditions along India's pilgrimage map not only implicated railways in disseminating infectious diseases but also suggested that the situation would deteriorate further: as railway communication became ‘better and quicker,’ infectious diseases would spread ‘faster and further.’ The Bengal government however, had a differing opinion, blaming the insanitary conditions of railway travel itself for outbreaks of epidemics, especially during periods of heavy traffic. Which was it to be, enquired the agent? The decades in which India's railway network began carrying unprecedented numbers of people further, faster, and more frequently were the same ones in which cholera and plague effected substantial ravages among India's population. While cholera epidemics preceded the advent of railways in colonial India, David Arnold estimates that at least 23 million people died of the disease in British India between 1865 and 1947. Similarly, Ira Klein describes the savage impact of plague in the two decades after its outbreak in Bombay in 1896, calling it ‘India's most feared and one of its deadliest maladies.’ He estimates a toll of at least 12 million, pointing out that ‘India was recorded as having suffered about 95 percent of the world's plague mortality from the onset of the modern pandemic down to World War II.’ Both the increasing speed and facility offered by railways were important in this context: Arnold writes of how cholera's terror was exacerbated by ‘the speed with which the disease spread,’ while Klein describes how ‘plague rode the rails and steamships’ out of Bombay. The colonial medical and sanitary establishment further scrutinized the link between railways and epidemics because trains facilitated mass travel to pilgrimage centres, places deemed as especially ripe for the spread of contagion—the immersion of Hindu pilgrims in sacred tanks or rivers was seen to provide ‘almost ideal conditions for the rapid transmission of the water-borne [cholera] vibrio.’

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, railways became increasingly important in the lives of a... more From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, railways became increasingly important in the lives of a growing number of Indians. While allowing millions to collectively experience the endemic discomforts of third-class travel, the public opportunities for proximity and contact created by railways simultaneously compelled colonial society to confront questions about exclusion, difference, and community. It was not only passengers, however, who were affected by the transformations that railways wrought. Even without boarding a train, one could see railway tracks and embankments reshaping familiar landscapes, realise that train schedules represented new temporal structures, fear that spreading railway links increased the reach of contagion, and participate in new forms of popular politics focused around railway spaces. Tracks of Change explores how railway technology, travel, and infrastructure became increasingly woven into everyday life in colonial India, how people negotiated with the g...

Modern Asian Studies, 2012

This paper traces the establishment of standardized railway time in colonial India between 1854 a... more This paper traces the establishment of standardized railway time in colonial India between 1854 and 1905, and explores how the colonized—as passengers and population—negotiated the temporal re-structuring introduced through railways. Millions were affected by the process through which the time of a single meridian was selected as an all-India railway time, and gradually deemed civil time, continuing even today as Indian Standard Time. The paper explores everyday responses to this dramatic change in ‘time-sense’ engendered through railways, both as speedy transport and as standardized time. This allows for a historical analysis of how individuals and societies deal in practice with abstract technological transformations, and of how colonized populations have navigated the modernizing intervention of imperialist states. It argues that the ways in which the population of colonial India accepted, contested, and appropriated the temporal standardization instituted through railways and ra...

Modern Asian Studies, 2020

Examining cases of libel between 1780 and 1823, this article analyses how the theory and practice... more Examining cases of libel between 1780 and 1823, this article analyses how the theory and practice of press regulation and governmentality was initially articulated in colonial India, embodied in everyday transactions between the newly invented East India Company state and an emerging newspaper press. While Company officials recognized that scrutiny by a free press was central to establishing their fairly new claims to just governance and public legitimacy, they feared that public critique would destabilize the very sovereign authority that they sought to establish. Concerned with appearing arbitrary, officials developed strategies through which they could demand obedience without necessarily predicating it on censorship. Journalists derived much of their negotiating power from the early colonial state's vulnerability to public scrutiny, but they also knew that the state possessed extensive control over their livelihood. Cognizant of the power and constraints of colonial governme...

Mobility in History, 2015

South Asian History and Culture, 2012

Tracing the history of accommodation for female passengers on Indian railways, this article explo... more Tracing the history of accommodation for female passengers on Indian railways, this article explores the anxieties and imperatives that regulated the presence of women in railway spaces in colonial India. Examining the entry of women into the public space of the railway, it emphasizes how an axiomatic relationship between female seclusion, respectability and mobility became pivotal to the conversation about

History: Reviews of New Books, 2010