Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the history of public electrical infrastructure in colonial Calcutta within multiple landscapes and environments - political, environmental, technological - and moves away from an image of a technological system shaped solely by governmental, economic and political factors.

Paper long abstract:

Histories of electricity in the context of colonial India tend to tell us one-sided stories of “development” and “growth” of electrical systems, and they usually analyse human activities and politics in these processes. By shifting the focus to the tangled ways in which the technical realities of electric supply was tied not just to the governance and socio-spatial restructuring of the city, but also the complexities that factors like the weather, climate, seasons and nonhuman animals introduced into electrical technologies and infrastructure, this paper tells a different story. Building on scholarship that has increasingly approached the natural world as both an active force in history and an object of sustained human concern, this paper shows how implementations of varied ideas of an “Electrical Calcutta” was a process involving financial and political negotiations that were majorly influenced by human-environment interactions. While the colonial government sought to use electric supply, lighting and trams to create an optical imagery that articulated and materialised colonial authority, public, urban and domestic spaces needed to redefined in order to accommodate for the affects of heat, humidity and termites on physical and electrical infrastructure, thereby disrupting the colonial government’s idea of a sanitised urban centre. Overall, this paper lies at the intersection of environmental history (weather, climate and nonhumans), urban and infrastructural mapping (soil conditions, urban planning, and stacked infrastructure), and history of technology (electric and gas supply), seeking out the relations between the technological, financial, urban, spatial and environmental landscapes of colonial Calcutta.