Paper short abstract:

This paper studies the interrelation between increase in motorisation and processes of state formation in interwar India. It highlights conflicting and conflictual tendencies in the political sphere due to modified state transport policies and devolution to subordinate levels during the period of diarchy.

Paper long abstract:

Interwar India witnessed a considerable expansion of motor vehicle use for military purposes, in commercial operations and private commuting. Besides microcosmic implications for a large set of actors and social groups, the new transport mode, in conjunction with earlier and contemporary factors, also affected the political economy at the local, regional and countrywide level in several ways. Among others, motor transport contributed to on-going changes in the spatial relation between city and countryside and transformations in agriculture and agro-based industries. However, there were also substantial constraints to its further onslaught after the mid-1920s. Policy makers not only massively favoured railways in their overall considerations, but eventually implemented reforms, couched as rail-road coordination, that seriously impeded the motor transport sector. This paper takes these earlier research results as a given and looks further afield into whether and how specifically the increase in motorisation interrelated to state formation in the interwar years. It does so by examining provincial legislatures, district and municipal boards - who gained authority over many public works such as roads with the Government of India Act of 1919 - with attention to their 1) role in developing a network of metalled roads and performing attendant fiscal-legal tasks to meet present-day needs, and 2) political composition, functioning and transformation. A first survey of evidence from the provinces of Bombay and Punjab, to which the paper reverts, suggests a number of conflicting and conflictual tendencies for India's polity and politics of the time.