The language of building furnished the promoters and apologists of Empire with some of their most cherished metaphors. As one elder statesman of Indian colonial service proposed in a statement to Parliament in 1873, the administrative infrastructure of British India “… was but a provisional temporary arrangement, … a sort of scaffolding which [has] been erected until the edifice of our Indian Empire is completed. And as it is completed,” he argued, pursuing the logic of his metaphor, “… that scaffolding should be taken down”1 (Figure 4.1).

In the Victorian heyday of the British Raj, the Public Works Department of the Government of India (PWD) was a prime, even literal, exemplar of this metaphorical “scaffolding” of empire. As the technical branch of the colonial administration, it had rapidly produced a ubiquitous array of utilitarian buildings and infrastructure through which the British were significantly restructuring the Indian subcontinent, both spatially and technologically. By the early twentieth century, however, these works and buildings had acquired a far more structural connotation. What had been regarded at first as merely provisional installations had become a permanent 

framework over time, seemingly integral to both the formal and the conceptual structures of the colonial system and its various sub-cultures. “Deprived of roads, railways and canals, the country would even now revert to savagery,” boasted the official corps historian of the Royal Engineers in India, in 1935. “After British soldiers had dug the foundations in sweat and blood,” he continued, “British engineers raised, as it were, a steel framework for the expansion of the civil administration”2 (Figure 4.2).

In the end this built framework of the British Indian Empire – its physical “skeleton” – was among the few tangible artifacts of the colonial project of which both the retiring colonizers and their successors remained unreservedly proud.3 The means had supplanted the supposed object of the colonial enterprise. The metaphorical “scaffolding” had been rendered concrete and permanent. But the meanings that these buildings and structures had come to embody remained ambiguous.

  • 1. Evidence of Sir Charles Trevelyan to Fawcett’s Parliamentary Committee on Indian Finance of 1873, in Parliamentary Papers, 1873, vol. XII, pp. 96, 99–100, as quoted in Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 287 (1st edn, 1959).
  • 2. E. W. C. Sandes, The Military Engineer in India, Chatham: The Institute of Royal Engineers, 1935, vol. II, p. 347.
  • 3. In addition to the tide of popular and nostalgic histories of the architectural “splendours of the Raj” published in recent decades, the engineering triumphs of the British in India received a special dispensation in the final accounting of the colonial project. See, for example, Maud Diver, The Unsung: A Record of British Services in India, Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1945. For instances of the passionate reception and celebration of the infrastructural legacies of the Raj in postcolonial India, see J.N. Sahni, Indian Railways: One Hundred Years, 1853–1953, New Delhi: Ministry of Railways, Railway Board, Government of India, 1953; Prakash Tandon, Punjabi Century, 1857–1947, London: Chatto & Windus, 1961; and Rahul Mehrotra and Sharada Dwivedi, Anchoring a City Line: The History of the Western Suburban Railway and its Headquarters in Bombay, Mumbai: Eminence Designs, 2000.