Heptanesian Archives

A friend from Pune, Dnyanada, while visiting today reminded me that there are two types of scholars — those who are studious, and those who are creative. And historians, in most cases, must value the former as much, if not more, than the latter. For while there is no denying the labour of creativity involved in the act of interpretation, for under-investigated areas such as the urban history of modern India, give me a studious archive rat any day. The recently deceased Raj Chandavarkar always insisted, often polemically, that the most basic questions about urban history, such as about party politics in the Bombay Municipal Corporation, have still not been written about in any serious way, and the new research interest in cities will prove ephemeral without a solid empirical focus. Indeed a basic political history of the municipal corporation is waiting to be written, and the primary materials for this task can, I am confident, be found in the Maharashtra State Archives.

While sitting there yesterday, I happened upon a reference to a compilation of files from 1920-24 on “the reconstitution of the BMC on a more democratic basis” containing a fascinating debate around the extension of the municipal franchise following the constitutional reforms of 1919. Government sought an expansion in the franchise for municipal elections, which until 1920 was based on an electorate restricted to rate payers, who numbered no more than 12,000 in the entire City of Bombay. While the directive was to seek an expansion to between 50,000 to 60,000 voters for the reconstituted corporation, a debate ensued between British civil servants, and corporators and civic representatives, and nationalist reformers on the principle of the franchise. This was to be changed from a basis in “rate-payers” to “rent-payers”, the question arising as to the minimum rent paid which would qualify someone for the vote in Bombay City. Various statistical distributions of the rent-paying populations of each ward in the city were presented in the debate as to whether to fix the minimum from between Rs 10 to Rs 25.

As I remarked to Nikhil, who initially got me thinking about municipal elections, this was the first time I had seen a real breakdown of ward-wise rates of rent in this period. This is where the debate also turned communal, as the question of reserved electorates for minorities such as Parsis, Mohammedans, Christians and others were mooted along with the new principles of expanding the franchise on the basis of rents, and increasing the number of seats in the Corporation. It seems from the correspondence between the Indian members of the Municipal Corporation and the British officials deliberating the new principles of enfranchisement that the former were concerned with the dilution in the influence of Parsi community, whom Ibrahim Rahimtoola hailed as having shouldered the great burden of local self-government (and who must have also represented a significant number of the rate payers in the old franchise). Nonetheless they rejected the idea of communal electorates as divisive and unnecessary to secure minority interests, which they still claimed would be best managed by a propertied elite. Some British officials strongly remarked that Government should not stick too closely to the “class of landlords” who on the one hand directed civic affairs and on the other hand abetted in the creation of slum areas, the single biggest problem of colonial administration in Bombay at this time. The expansion of the franchise based on rent payers was eventually accepted with some amendments, and instituted in 1923.