Paper short abstract:

This paper will situate the role of roads in the prevalent frameworks of study of colonial state-formation in South Asia. While doing this, it will highlight the ways in which structures of communication played a crucial role in consolidating state power.

Paper long abstract:

The early colonial rule in India, unlike the Utilitarian claims of the 1820s and onwards, and also the nationalist allegations, paid diligent attention to constructing and maintaining roads. The concern for good roads, as was evident in a variety of interrelated aspects of trade, military movements, political clashes and negotiations, and not least, in surveys and mapping of the territory, testify to the fact that the colonial state regarded good roads and safe passage as a matter of significant importance.

This paper will focus on two major thoroughfares, the New Military Road (built in 1781) and the Grand Trunk Road (started building in phases from the early nineteenth-century) to discuss some of the issues related to the role of material infrastructure of transport and its role in state-formation. The paper will also focus on some of the early initiatives, such as the establishment of a Road Fund in Bihar in the late eighteenth-century, to suggest that local initiatives were no less important than the more centralized efforts.

While describing some of these early efforts, the paper will situate the road amidst the social and political forces of contestations (such as the state vs. the zamindars) to suggest that roads or broadly speaking the means of communication were not just physical tracks; they indeed were central to the practices of the consolidation and resistance to governance.