PART THREE
PUBLIC CULTURE

In our language, we have no such word as 'public.' . . . We have no equivalent for nationality or patriotism.
HARISH CHANDRA, INDIAN PLAYWRIGHT

Six
The Colonial Context

Elites who sought accommodation to the colonial order of late nineteenth-century Surat found themselves in an ideological and discursive context markedly different from the one their counterparts had faced a hundred or even fifty years earlier.^[1] Emerging during this period was a new "world system of cultural domination," a set of ideas and assumptions about political authority that often went hand in hand with the more visible spread of empire and the extension of European economic influence.^[2] Each of the imperialist powers carried with it to its various colonies and dependencies closely related beliefs asserting the supremacy of Western political and cultural values and institutions over those of Asia and Africa, insisting upon the racial superiority of whites over nonwhites and legitimizing European military, commercial, and political endeavors as a "civilizing mission."^[3] The peoples of the newly subordinated societies had to contend with these new languages of empire, whether they chose to reject colonialism or to operate within its confines. For the Surtis it was the British variant of this discourse that became important.

Not all the political languages of Great Britain traveled to its colonies equally well; not all, that is, became incorporated into the "world system." Liberal theory stressed the importance of rational individual judgments, rooted in universal principles and laws, to the constitution of the British polity. But in Victorian England there were a variety of political idioms sanctioning vote purchase, deference to men of influence, commitment to community groupings based upon birth and locality, and intolerance of religious minorities, that is, many of the same values that the British rulers would stigmatize in the cultures of those they had colonized.^[4] Among English working people, deprived of

the vote until the late nineteenth century, deference and loyalty to hierarchically defined communities often overrode the languages of class.^[5] English politics, too, were multilingual, with different idioms applying in different political arenas. Yet only those paradigms made sacred in the classical texts of political theory, the paradigms believed to embody the "highest" ideals of British civilization, were ever effectively transmitted to India. Missionaries, educators, civil administrators, and businessmen brought to their Indian subjects an image of British politics and society in which "lower" principles had been filtered out and delegitimized.

Late nineteenth-century Indian leaders who wished to influence the workings of empire thus were left with only a few privileged languages with which to bargain, pressure, and cajole their British rulers. These languages issued, as David Lelyveld and Bernard Cohn have suggested, from two sources: (1) a liberal conception of public politics associated with British parliamentary politics and enshrined in liberal political theory and (2) specifically colonial conceptions stressing the heterogeneity of Indian society and emphasizing the critical role of hereditary leaders thought to command the loyalty of specific Indian communities.^[6] Implicitly and often explicitly, both confirmed the unequal relations between Britain and India. As indigenous leaderships appropriated these languages of politics and accepted them as their own, even in confrontations with the Raj, they perpetuated cultural forms that would outlast colonialism itself.

Public Discourse

In the early part of the nineteenth century, the liberal paradigm had been most fervently articulated by men who considered themselves reformers. By late in the century, however, it had ceased to be the exclusive property of those with Liberal party affiliations and had, to a great extent, entered the rhetoric of Liberal, Tory, and Socialist alike. Still the writings of the great liberal thinkers—Bentham early in the century, Mill at midcentury, and Green and Hobhouse at the end of the century—are the best guide to the contours and assumptions of liberal political discourse.

Most liberal theorists explicitly or implicitly viewed the world through a mythological conception of history that attributed to British civilization and the British polity a particular genius but at the same time saw humankind as moving along a shared path termed "progress."^[7] This notion—progress—was at once material, political, and moral. First, it suggested the emergence of a society in which unparalleled levels of prosperity had become possible, largely through in-

dustrialism and modern technology.^[8] Second, it evoked a sense of movement toward forms of government increasingly founded on individual freedoms. Liberal thinkers viewed the English past as a series of struggles by the people of England to secure liberty against the tyranny of narrow oligarchic elites and the monarchy, struggles which had gradually given shape to a constitutional, representative order and which had freed religious belief, political opinion, and the ownership of property from state interference. Finally, accompanying these changes in the economy and polity, was a shift in consciousness. Commitment to the nation took deeper root, concern with the public good grew steadily, and popular involvement in political affairs constantly expanded. Progress proved to be a convenient scale along which all societies could be measured—and found lacking in comparison with Britain. According to liberal standards, British civilization had attained the highest level of progress; its history defined the road along which other societies would—or at least should—pass. British colonies in Asia and Africa were viewed as being well behind their conquerors in development.

A particularly important term that became entangled in these evolutionary assumptions was "public opinion." As used by philosophers and politicians, this concept generally referred to the assembled opinions of those unfettered by obligations to hereditary elites or communal groupings, and who could thus make "rational" judgments about politics without succumbing to social pressures. In theory, it was autonomous of the state, serving to check the state's workings from outside. Public opinion could express itself in voting, in which case it would come to be "represented" in government in the form of political parties. The representatives of the public, though themselves part of the state, would constantly be responsible to the private citizens who made up their constituencies. Or it could be brought to bear on the state through extraparliamentary forms of action—press campaigns, public associations, and public meetings. Political reformers of the nineteenth century sought to widen the franchise by creating an image of a public that clamored for inclusion in the ranks of the voters.^[9] By the end of the Victorian era, public opinion had become the most important arbiter of legitimacy in parliamentary politics. As the political philosopher L. T. Hobhouse declared in 1905: "The conception of popular sovereignty—the principle that the Government should carry out the popular will and be responsible for the manner of its action—would not be openly denied by any party."^[10]

A closer examination of political practice in England reveals that advocacy of the cause of the people or the public was always hedged with elitist assumptions. Despite the fiction of universal participation sug-

gested in the term, the public rarely denoted just anyone. Usually it implied only those who supposedly possessed the capacity for critical thinking, persons who were free of communal and social bonds that might impair their judgments, individuals who showed a concern with the "public good." Thus, liberal thinkers and British politicians only slowly extended the notion of public opinion to the working classes and women, who, some believed, did not have the autonomy, the interest in preserving civil society, or the experience in thinking about political matters to ensure that their full inclusion in the polity would work to the general welfare of society. Among the larger population, public opinion needed to be cultivated carefully and slowly through the process of "political education." It also needed to be controlled so that it would not run roughshod over the feelings of political minorities. Most important, it should not be allowed to determine directly the workings of government; it had always to be represented by men of superior intelligence and education, persons specially capable of placing the welfare of the whole above their own selfish private interests and who would not fall prey to the sudden shifts in political fancy that characterized the masses.^[11]

Given the conceptual limitations placed on the development of a truly participatory order in England itself, it is not surprising that liberal thinkers would have serious reservations about the applicability of representative notions in societies they believed to be at lower stages of development. Even for some of the most democratically minded, "public opinion" existed only in certain kinds of civilizations—those where men outside the state had taken an active interest in politics (i.e., politics of a formal, constitutional, and national character). The evolutionary and ethnocentric assumptions of this doctrine were readily apparent. In "On Liberty," for example, John Stuart Mill employed the analogy of a child's growth to explain his political theories, arguing that these notions applied only "to human beings in the maturity of their faculties." "For the same reason," he argued, "we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage," a category in which he placed most of the world's population.^[12] In "Representative Government" he insisted that commitments to parochial and primordial identities characteristic outside the West render a people incapable of self-government:

One of the strongest hindrances to improvement, up to an advanced state, is an inveterate spirit of locality. Portions of mankind, in many other respects capable of, and prepared for freedom, may be unqualified for amalgamating into even the smallest nation. Not only may jealousies and antipathies repel them from one another, and bar all possibility of voluntary union, but they may not have acquired any of the feelings or habits which make the union real. . . They may, like the citizens of an-

cient community, or those of an Asiatic village, have considerable practice in exercising their faculties on village or town interests. . . and may yet have but slender sympathies with anything beyond, and no habit or capacity of dealing with interests common to many such communities. I am not aware that history furnishes any example in which a number of these political atoms and corpuscles have coalesced into a body, except through previous subjugation to a central authority common to all.^[13]

In the minds of most liberal thinkers, of course, Britain was a society that either verged on or had reached adulthood. Its people possessed, they reasoned, virtually all the qualities that guaranteed liberty and good government: a keen interest in the affairs of government, a preoccupation with maintaining their freedoms against intrusions by the state, a special concern with the public welfare and "improvement," and perhaps above all, a shared national ethos. In a passage that echoed the political grammar of Mill, Hobhouse would attribute an almost mystical homogeneity and consciousness to the British people:

The British nation is a unity with a life of its own. But the country is constituted by certain ties that bind together all British subjects, which ties are in the last resort feelings and ideas, sentiments of patriotism, of kinship, of common pride, and a thousand more subtle sentiments that bind together men who speak a common language, have behind them a common history, and understand one another as they understand no one else. The British nation is not a mysterious entity over and above the forty millions of living souls who dwell under common law. Its life is their life, its well-being or ill-fortune their well-being or ill-fortune. Thus the common good to which each man's rights are subordinate is a good in which each man has a share.^[14]

Thus in British political thinking the British public and the British nation were not just a collection of individuals who happened to live on a few islands off the northern coast of Europe; they were a people with a special ethic, a people who had reached an advanced stage of consciousness and who therefore required advanced forms of government. Through such reasoning, it eventually became possible for the liberal intellectuals to conclude that Britain deserved universal suffrage without necessarily damaging elitist qualifications about the applicability of democratic forms of representative government elsewhere in the world.

Colonial Discourse

Colonial understandings of India were highly colored by this public discourse. Rather than developing modes of expression that appreciated the richness and complexities of South Asia, the British grounded

many of their judgments about the subcontinent in an alien vocabulary with little foundation in any Indian discourse of politics. Almost inevitably, as a result, they measured India against their idealized conception of Britain and then found their colony wanting.^[15] India, agreed Englishmen of widely differing political perspectives, was not-a-nation and its population was not-a-people or not-a-public. Writing in an administrative manual, the late nineteenth-century imperial ideologue John Strachey proclaimed: "There is not and never was any country of India . . . possessing according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious; no Indian nation, no 'people of India' of which we hear so much."^[16] In 1910, twenty-five years after the founding of the Indian National Congress, the journalist Valentine Chirol asserted: "That a movement confined to a mere fraction of the population of India has no title to be called a 'national' movement would scarcely need to be argued, even if the variegated jumble of races and peoples, castes and creeds that make up the population of India were not in itself an antithesis to all that the word 'national' implies"^[17] The Labor politician Ramsay McDonald could reiterate India's deficiencies as late as 1920: "Here [in England] public opinion touches and emanates from the whole people; its sections represent conflicts in views of national ends.. . . [In India] the mental state of the great masses does not amount to a public opinion, because it is concerned with the small local interests of a population whose world is its village."^[18] To a very considerable extent, these comparative assessments reflected a consensus in Euro-American thinking about Asia that was little questioned until well into the twentieth century and has not been thoroughly challenged even today.

What the colonial rulers generally saw in India was a heterogeneous agglomeration of distinct peoples living beside each other but not having any common identity that would make true self-government possible. In a statement that implicitly delegitimized diversity at the same time it claimed to represent the true character of South Asian society, Lord Dufferin, the viceroy of India during the mid-1880s, argued, "This population is composed of a large number of different nationalities, professing various religions, practising diverse rites, speaking different languages, while many of them are still further separated from one another by discordant prejudices, by conflicting sources of usages, and even antagonistic material interests."^[19] Pseudoscientific racism, which informed much of late nineteenth-century British thinking about Indians, suggested that there were a variety of "races" on the subcontinent, each with its distinct racial characteristics: "martial" races, especially capable of military activity; "feminine" races, weak, enfeebled, and spineless, but clever at learning and administration; even "criminal tribes" hereditarily prone to criminal activity.^[20]

From this starting point, some imperial thinkers drew a series of fanciful conclusions about the character of political leadership on the subcontinent, conclusions that stemmed as much from the logic of public discourse as from any appreciation of South Asian realities: Indians are a diverse people with parochial and primordial commitments; India is thus at a low level of political evolution; peoples in backward societies are not prepared to make informed personal judgments about politics but accept unthinkingly the authority of hereditary elites; Indians are thus under the sway of aristocratic figures who control their followers by virtue of their hereditary status. Hence they could arrive at such understandings as those expressed by Viceroy Lord Lytton in 1876: "Politically speaking, the Indian peasantry is an inert mass. If it ever moves at all, it will move in obedience not to its British benefactors, but to its native chiefs and princes, however tyrannical they may be."^[21]

A truly popular and independent government, according to such theories, was impossible on the subcontinent as long as no overriding public or national allegiances existed and as long as Indians failed to develop the independence of thought that representative institutions required. Wrote Ramsay McDonald: "An ignorant people are a subject people, whatever the form of government may be. At the moment, and under existing conditions, 'popular' representation in India would not indicate Indian opinion, but would give rise to practices that would subvert that opinion."^[22] Without the creation of a public accustomed to critical thinking, many believed (to the extent they were even able to conceive of the possibility) that true self-government would release all restraints over self-seeking behavior in politics, foster corruption and nepotism, unleash conflicts between regional and religious groups held together now by the British presence, and inevitably result in some form of tyrannical rulership. Usually these assumptions led to the belief that some sort of benevolent despotism was inevitable and that it was better that this despotism be British than Indian. Members of the colonial elite believed that they alone possessed the impartiality, the sense of "fair play," the dedication to justice and duty, to keep the Indians from each others' throats and to run the administration of the country smoothly.

Yet at the same time, civil servants in India itself had to recognize that maintaining the Raj required the collaboration of powerful elite groupings. The foreign ruling group in India formed only a tiny portion (less than .1 percent) of the population of the subcontinent. British administrators tended to conceive of Indian society as impenetrable, something they could never be part of, something they could never perfectly comprehend on their own. Reliance on "native" informants and leaderships with roots in local society was essential. But this in turn necessitated a logic to make sense of the place of these figures within

the colonial order. Two distinct theories arose, though these theories in practice often existed side by side in the thinking of district officers without great dissonance. Both were rooted in British understandings, not only of India, but also of the British past.^[23]

In the first theory, great stress was placed on the need to rely on the "natural leaders" of society, the hereditary headmen to whom Indians supposedly maintained a docile obedience. Particularly after the Mutiny of 1857—which many attributed to careless displacement of rulers like the Nawab of Avadh—it became imperative in the minds of many civil administrators to gain the support of those thought to be traditional leaders of society.^[24] Bernard Cohn has analyzed brilliantly how the British designed special rituals at the imperial level in order to secure the allegiance of Indian princes and chieftains.^[25] At the level of the district, civil administrators made municipal appointments, organized durbars (public ceremonies), and awarded titles in the effort to wed "men of local influence" to colonial rule. Often this meant labeling certain magnates—usually men thought to be the headmen of particular religious groupings—as the local aristocracy or notability. These natural leaders were to represent their distinct communities in dealings with the ruling group.

The theory of natural leadership tended to be most closely associated with imperialists espousing the most racialist positions, that is, those who assumed that Indians were biologically or culturally incapable of ever developing the wider allegiances and political capabilities necessary for self-government. It located Indian society in a backward stage of historical evolution, awkwardly analogous to the time when English society had in theory been controlled by its aristocracy. It generally implied, however, that India was somehow stuck permanently in that stage.

Advocates of the second theory generally agreed that Indians lacked the sense of public spiritedness needed for self-government, but insisted that, with time, some could be "trained" or "educated" to assume responsible positions in public affairs. This perspective became increasingly attractive during the later nineteenth century as colonial rulers became more committed to the ideology of improvement and turned to the municipalities and district local boards in order to raise funds for building sanitary works, roads, and schools. A certain sector among the ruling group—often referred to as the liberal imperialists—came to insist that the civilizing mission of imperial rule required the gradual devolution of responsibility to capable Indians who, in some cases, would be elected by small constituencies of property holders. In effect, the new local bodies granted Indians the power to tax themselves to raise money for reforms that their rulers wanted. But the exponents of

reform saw a higher mission in advocating devolution; the new institutions were to be schools of political education in which South Asians would acquire knowledge of appropriate political behavior and teach their countrymen the skills needed to manage their own affairs. J. B. Peile, proposing a new local self-government act before the Bombay Legislative Council in 1884, argued:

Much has to be learnt before there can be a really popular movement to occupy the ground that is opened out by these measures. In reaching that consummation, we shall now transfer some of our responsibility to the men of "the party of progress and reform" and they must decentralize as well as the Government. We should not be satisfied if political education were to stop short at a small class marked out . . . from the masses . . . We look to them to ensure their success by exerting themselves with a singleness of mind to set before their fellow citizens an example of disinterested and enlightened administration by private citizens. It may not seem a very lofty employment to teach the people . . . of country towns how to manage local conservancy, primary schools and dispensaries, but it is the underlying growth of social organization which is really important, and I think it is not unworthy of the best abilities and the highest ambition to build up in one's people with unpretentiousness and patient assiduity, the first foundations of a national spirit.^[26]

The evolutionary underpinnings of this outlook could not have been clearer. India, with proper guidance, could be prompted slowly along the same path of development taken by Britain. While Indians now lacked a conception of the public good, they could slowly develop a civic consciousness if given proper nurturance by their rulers with the cooperation of indigenous leaderships. At the time Peile made this statement, nearly all members of the colonial ruling group would have agreed with him that this process had not yet gone beyond the germination stage. Thus, according to the metaphor of human growth, if the British public was seen to have entered adulthood, Indians were as yet preschoolers. But the very fact of announcing that new stages lay ahead held out to elite Indians an alternative to the idiom of natural leadership—the notion of public leadership. These two, seemingly antagonistic, modes of representing oneself in politics became competing possibilities among Indians attempting to create places for themselves in the colonial order.

In the late nineteenth century, even the foremost British advocates of devolution did not imagine that political education could take place without continued colonial guidance. Always the rulers of India would be present to pull back on the reins of reform if the process got out of hand. Most administrators insisted that the experiment of selfgovernment always needed to be tempered by a concern for the wel-

fare of religious minorities. As the devolution of power proceeded, many worried about the fate of Muslims and other supposedly backward communities in a polity that would come to be dominated by high-status Hindus and tried to establish safeguards that would ensure the representation of these minorities. In local self-governing institutions where the principle of election was adopted, a system of nominations usually guaranteed the continued presence of religious minorities and other groups in need of protection.^[27] But such policies were themselves heavily influenced by colonial understandings of the subcontinent which lumped together one extremely diverse set of people, the Hindus (hardly an indigenous category), and considered them a dominant community while labeling another, almost equally diverse, people, the Muslims, a minority and a backward community. The creation of each of these categories made possible the emergence of spokesmen who would claim to represent the entire body of their coreligionists.^[28] Thus there was a major contradiction in the rhetoric of the Raj: on one hand, it encouraged Indians to develop universal loyalties and criticized them for parochialism and communalism; on the other, it undercut the development of loyalties to public and nation by building in incentives to identify with religion and caste. This contradiction was never fully resolved, even at the end of the Raj. For twentieth-century Indian nationalists, the policies seemed firm evidence that the British had followed a deliberate policy of divide and rule.

Neither liberal nor imperial assumptions were uniform or unchanging. In Britain factional and class groups continuously struggled to implement their own understandings of the key principles of the public sphere, inevitably producing new permutations and transformations in the terms of political debate. In India the ruling group—itself heterogeneous—regularly faced situations that called for reinterpretation in the language of politics. When Indians became extensively involved in the process of shaping the meanings of imported political principles, this process rapidly accelerated. Still, by the 1880s, the essential categories, symbols, and vocabulary of colonial discourse had become established. To paraphrase Ashis Nandy, colonialism had begun to spawn a culture in which the ruled were constantly tempted to pursue their own struggles for justice and power within discursive and psychological limits set by the rulers.^[29]

Conclusion

It was within languages provided by the colonial rulers—the public idiom and the idiom of community—that much of Surat's politics came to be conducted. Only those who could control public and colonial dis-

course could hope to influence their rulers' perceptions and to find a place within the British Raj. These elites drew upon a limited number of keywords and phrases that carried particular potency for the ruling group—natural leader, loyalty, public, nation, representation, political education, devolution of power, Muslim backwardness, improvement, and moral and material progress. They devised forms of political participation that reflected this vocabulary. The appropriation of colonial discourse does not indicate that the British had successfully imposed a foreign culture on those they ruled. Surti elites did not accept the same meanings of these words, phrases, and models as the British. Rather, they transformed these meanings, in the process creating a new culture of politics—or to be more precise, several different new political subcultures. But in doing so, they became implicated in languages that essentially confirmed the inferiority of India and the domination, both cultural and political, of Britain.

Seven
The Notables and Public Culture

The public sphere in Surat owes its origins not to a newly emergent bourgeoisie or to those who had been educated in the English language, but to a category of persons we might call the notables of Surat, since that was a term occasionally used in referring to them. These men were quite diverse in their social backgrounds and their constituencies in the city, and in the basis of their local authority. What they held in common was that all served as intermediaries between the Anglo-Indian ruling group and the population of the city and that all were perceived by the British as men who possessed a special local influence, an influence of a primordial or natural character. Such colonial perceptions made it possible for the notables to achieve positions of considerable weight among the small circle of European officials actually resident in the city.

It was these men who first began to appropriate a British civic idiom and to forge a new style of politics centering on the concepts of the public and the public good. They became involved in municipal government, they engaged in public philanthropy, they participated in imperial ritual life, and they made recourse to pressure-group politics. But their accommodation to the social and political norms of their rulers by no means reflected an abandonment of preexisting preoccupations or a total embrace of Western principle. Indeed, the incipient public culture was consistent with the essentially conservative impulses of local magnates—the development of stable social relationships with political overlords, the protection of familial reputations, and the defense of their moral communities. The language of civic politics became a new vehicle for cultivating deferential ties with the ruling group, for advancing claims to political power, and, ultimately, for

safeguarding their groups from the potential intrusions of the colonial order. In essence the notables sacrificed control over the outer arena of politics to preserve control over the areas of local life they themselves deemed most critical.

The Notables

The set of families we can identify as the notability of Surat had emerged even before colonial rule formally began in 1800. In order to extend its trade and influence in Surat, the East India Company had established alliances with a diverse group—commercial magnates, religious headmen, and even members of the Mughal elite. As the company transformed itself from a commercial body into a territorial power, it continued to rely on many of these same men and their descendants. The colonial administration, of course, also hired hundreds of Indians as officials, clerks, village headmen, and police in Surat district, but these employees were rarely believed to have the status in urban society necessary to maintain local order and to gain the acquiescence of the larger population to British rule. Consequently, civil servants sought the support of commercial magnates, members of the Muslim gentry, and spiritual headmen whom they identified as the men of local influence.^[1]

Nineteenth-century British administrators tended to think of Surti society as composed largely of four communities defined by religious belief: the Hindu-Jains (generally treated as a single community), the Parsis, the Muslims, and the Daudi Bohras. Within these groupings, they believed, were figures who held the unswerving support of their coreligionists as a result of traditional family status or the supposedly hereditary headmanship of important communal bodies. Civil servants regarded these people as having a natural quality of leadership that was local, personal, and usually inherited, men analogous in the British mind to the aristocracy of England.^[2] The process of identifying men who met these criteria excluded other important leaderships in the city—for example, the sheth s of occupational mahajan s and the leaders of caste panchayat s—from access to district officers. Petty traders, artisans, and other subordinate groups were in effect deprived of all direct means of reaching the highest civil servants; they had to go instead through the urban patriciate unofficially defined by the British. Such channels of approach were apparent even in moments of protest. In 1844 demonstrations against increases in the salt tax began when a large crowd of lower- and middle-caste background pelted the homes of several of the most prominent notables with stones to compel them to bring its grievances before the district magistrate.^[3]

By midcentury, perhaps a dozen local families had successfully gained recognition as natural leaders in British eyes. In times of stress the district administration relied upon this small notability to help keep the peace. During the salt-tax riots, for instance, the district officer attempted to restore order by contacting Sayyid Ali Edrus, leader of the Muslims; the da'i, headman of the Bohras; the Maharaj of Mota Mandir and several sheth s, including the Mahajan Sheth, as representatives of the Hindus; and an unidentified Parsi leader, probably a member of the Modi family.^[4] During the Mutiny of 1857, when the British feared an uprising of local Muslims, they again called upon the head of the Edrus family to calm his coreligionists.^[5] The apparent success of these methods in meeting local crises seemed to the government a confirmation of its approach. The notable families established a special relationship with the highest civil servants that most were able to sustain up to World War I.

Despite the hereditary element in the British conception of natural leadership, some movement into and out of the notability did occur out of necessity. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Bakza, the Nawab of Surat, and the Nawab of Bela families among the Muslims—families that had not played a critical intermediary role early in the century—and newly wealthy Hindu and Jain sheth s such as the pearl merchants Naginchand Jhaverchand and Hirachand Motichand entered the elite ranks. Yet British civil servants still considered the authority of these persons to have a certain traditional quality, either because of the long-standing status of the family or because of its extensive involvement in religious patronage.

Relations between these notables and their rulers were marked by relatively low levels of strain during the early decades of the nineteenth century. The officials of the new empire made minimal demands on Indian urban centers in this period, regarding cities more as arenas of commerce and as stable centers from which the government could stretch its tentacles into the countryside than as major sources of revenue in and of themselves. Motivated by a desire to foster free trade throughout its dominion, the government eliminated most of the duties on commerce imposed by the nawab s and steered away from new taxation that might foster social discontent (the increase in the salt tax being one major exception).^[6] In 1808 a commissioner appointed to consider the advisability of a local house tax recommended that it not be instituted, arguing that it would be interpreted by Hindus as "a personal intrusion, from which their religious prejudices shrink" and that Muslims, who feared being "confounded with other castes," would regard the measure as an "alarm no less serious to their pride." His superior in Bombay agreed, starting that "under existing circumstances . . .

nothing should be hazarded to give the smallest umbrage to the nations."^[7] Town dwellers thus escaped the relentless pressures that the company exerted on Indian peasants. As a result, the rulers rarely placed their collaborators in local society in situations where their authority would be seriously called into question.

Around midcentury, however, the colonial state began to be more insistent in its demands on the local citizenry. Pursuing the goal of progress, a goal essentially defined from outside the city, the civil administration established a host of policies that threatened important areas of local life and culture. But rather than forcing the notables into open defiance, these policies had the paradoxical effect of driving local magnates closer to their rulers. Public culture was one product of this interaction.

Progress and the Civic Order

South Asian urban centers began to assume a more central place in the fiscal calculations of the Raj as a result of new financial pressures in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, inflation, shifts in the silver/gold ratio, and growing military costs placed new strains on the imperial budget.^[8] On the other, a variety of imperial interest groups pressured the government of India to increase its expenditures. Manchester's calls for the development of irrigation, roads, and railways to stimulate trade carried increasing weight, not only with officials directly under the industrialists' sway but also among those concerned with improving the imperial balance of payments. Military strategists pushed for better internal communications and an end to the unsanitary conditions that threatened the health of the Indian army.^[9] At the same time lobbyists both inside and outside the government were beginning to insist that the Indian peasantry was unable to bear any greater burden. Increasingly the civil administration turned to India's towns to take up the slack.

The official view of the role of cities thus underwent a slow transfiguration. Urban places were no longer just headquarters for revenue establishments or staging points in the export of agricultural produce; rather, they were to become a significant part of the taxation structure and critical centers for launching India's development. Officials began to consider the application of Victorian notions of civic improvement to Indian towns. They urged the adoption of land surveys and bylaws to control unsanitary practices and to regulate the use of urban space. They formulated plans to improve urban health, the flow of commerce, police services, and education. They thought of providing cities with roads and bridges, public parks and water foun-

tains, clock towers and drainage systems, libraries and schools. All these schemes cost money, and since the Raj was unwilling to strain its own budget further, it now sought funding from local sources. In most Indian cities, municipalities were established to develop civic services and to tax the citizenry.^[10]

In Surat this emerging agenda made stable ruler-subject relations more difficult. The new civic ideals essentially issued from above; the city's inhabitants initially had little interest in the services that the civil administration believed they required. With time, some local demand for primary schools, the construction and repair of roads, and flood protection did develop, but even then, many residents resented paying for projects that benefited neighborhoods other than their own.^[11] Sanitary reforms—the most expensive of municipal efforts—won little acceptance in the town. Few residents subscribed to the germ theory of disease causation, which, after all, had only begun to inform sanitary efforts in England itself. There was thus little felt need for cleaner sources of water, drainage works, and disinfection projects.^[12]

At the same time, progress posed many potential dangers to existing patterns of trade and culture. In the effort to construct a cleaner, less disorderly city more acceptable to the Victorian mind, the state entered or threatened to enter wide areas of social life that had never before been its domain. The municipality began to enact bylaws regulating construction, unsanitary conditions, "offensive and dangerous trades," and the use of land, laws which in theory applied to all, regardless of social rank. A land survey fixing urban property rights defined large areas of the city as public space not to be used for private purposes. This distinction between public and private space was new for the Surtis, who had generally built their shops and homes on whatever free land was available. Resistance to the survey prolonged its completion for more than a decade.^[13] Now too citizens had to be concerned with how they disposed of waste waters and garbage, since a violation of the bylaws could land them in municipal court, a potentially costly and embarrassing experience.

A few reforms undertaken by the local body touched city dwellers in their most culturally sensitive spots. Surat's commissioners—unlike those in some other Indian cities—wisely avoided embarking on projects that involved altering or destroying temples, mosques, and other sacred spots.^[14] Nevertheless the municipality flirted dangerously with regulating Muslim burial places, placing restrictions on caste feasts and enacting regulations to prevent cattle and dogs' roaming the streets. During epidemics, the local body compelled residents to allow untouchable sweepers into their homes to carry out disinfection campaigns, upsetting high-caste Hindus.^[15] All of these efforts met with op-

position, often expressed in everyday acts of noncompliance that effectively thwarted imperial purposes. Observing these signs of resistance, Theodore Hope, collector of Surat and president of the municipality during its most extensive period of reform, reported to his superiors in 1871: "Municipal government can never be a popular government in the sense that it is liked by the people because the very raison d'etre of the Municipality is a perpetual war with those problems which are normal with the mass of the population, and are either followed or looked on with favour by too many of the upper classes."^[16] No doubt he would have found many in the city who would have agreed that such a war indeed existed, though most residents would have blamed this conflict on the unprecedented intrusion of government into the inner sphere of Surti concerns.

The most broadly hated imperial measures, not surprisingly, were new taxes. Between the 1850s and World War I, the burden on the Surti ratepayer increased many times over. But it was not just the amount of taxation that fostered resentment; it was the shape this taxation took. Civil administrators sought to shift the burden of taxation away from town duties—the traditional source of urban revenues—to direct forms of taxation. Householders in the city tended to view direct taxes as potentially damaging to their abru since such cesses generally involved detailed assessments of their property or income that could become public and since the amount of taxation was fixed according to impersonal scales which did not take into account the status of the payer.^[17] While direct taxation produced protest widely all over India, perhaps no city was so consistent in resisting it as Surat.^[18] When the provincial government imposed an income tax in 1860, traders called a citywide business stoppage.^[19] A license tax on local businesses in 1878 provoked several days of rioting.^[20] On every occasion when the municipality considered raising direct taxes—the cesspool tax in the 1870s, the house tax in the early 1890s, the water rate in the late 1890s, and the sanitary cess in the early 1900s—it found itself facing determined, though often unorganized, resistance.^[21] The house-tax movement, which involved nearly the whole tax-paying population and which lasted for four years, almost undermined an ambitious government scheme to provide Surat with a new waterworks.^[22]

Thus the colonial preoccupation with improvement operated at cross purposes with core concerns of merchants and other local groups, endangering areas of indigenous life traditionally beyond the purview of the state. As under the Mughals, rule by outsiders again began to create insecurity for the city's residents. The source of this insecurity, however, was now less the behavior of members of a ruling nobility than the laws and regulations of the new administration.

In the past, local leaderships had attempted to resist threats posed by alien overlords as well as to enhance their own status within the inner political arenas of the city by seeking to forge personal bonds with members of the ruling group. But the demise of the contest state and the development of a bureaucratic ethos at the highest level of government rendered the formation of clientage ties through gift giving and engagement in a durbar-style politics increasingly difficult. Motivated by a sense of mission and by feelings of cultural superiority, members of the colonial elite fashioned a distinct Anglo-Indian society that seemingly left little room for complex personal relationships with their subjects. British officers radically disjoined their private lives, where they interacted mainly with English men and women, from their professional lives, where they had dealings with their Indian subordinates. In the former sphere there emerged a distinctly British set of rites—polo, tennis, ballroom dancing, and social drinking—fashioned on English upper-class models and centered on exclusively European social clubs. Regulations prohibiting officials' attending "complimentary entertainments of a formal and public character" blocked Indians from creating social occasions of their own that would include the governing elite. In their workplaces, civil servants were to dispense their justice with impartiality and without regard to friendships or ties of affection; it became inappropriate for any official to maintain his own personal hangers-on. High-ranking civil servants came to regard presents as bribes which could not be accepted, and the maturing empire no longer required or sought financing from wealthy merchants. While gifts offered secretly may have remained important to currying favor with lower-ranking officials, they could no longer serve as a public expression of an affective tie with a powerful person.

Yet despite these changes, local elites found that ties across the social boundary between the ruler and the ruled were still possible. A number of notable families successfully accommodated themselves to the new political environment by fashioning a style of interaction with their overlords rooted in the imperial ethic of improvement itself. They took on public roles—roles defined by an identification with the interests of the city and the empire as a whole—and involved themselves in municipal affairs, philanthropy, imperial ritual, and political pressure groups, all forms of civic expression that civil servants regarded as meritorious. As they adopted public discourse from their political overlords, the notables bestowed a legitimacy upon the enterprise of improvement and upon the empire itself, but they also established reciprocal moral associations with the overlords that renewed their political leverage. In essence, they continued a long-established pattern of cultivating deferential political relationships by using the language of their alien rulers.

The particular adaptation of Surat's natural leaders to public discourse clearly bore the stamp of its creation under colonial circumstance. The new civic culture was a curious configuration that reflected the many contradictory expectations placed upon the notability. According to these expectations, figures with little English education believed to be hereditary leaders of local groupings and guardians of traditional values were to become agents of progress and political education, representatives of the people, and the advocates of universal principles such as the public good. These same figures, whose local authority rested upon their reputations within precolonial social formations, were to put themselves at the vanguard of an effort to bring about civic improvement, an effort consistently opposed by most urban people. Finally, a public sphere that in nineteenth-century political thinking was to be an autonomous arena where criticisms of the state could be made, was to be created by the most important collaborators with British rule in local society. To reconcile these apparently contradictory goals, the notables produced a novel style of political action, one which formally accepted the legitimacy of the colonial rulers and of the modernizing impulse but at the same time served to blunt the impact of reform, at least for the city's most prosperous groups.^[23] examine four manifestations of this public culture: the municipality, philanthropy, ritual, and pressure-group politics.

The Municipality

The municipality was the most important area in which notables generated identities as public leaders. Surat's municipality was one of fourteen started up in Bombay Presidency in the years after the passage of the Government of India Act XXVI of 1850, which allowed local bodies to be established by the choice of a city's inhabitants. Allocated to these bodies were the functions of conservancy, road repairs, street lighting, and the framing of bylaws, and the power to levy indirect taxes on local commerce.^[24] In reality, the Surtis as a whole were never consulted in the formation of the municipal council—only a few prominent householders with particularly close ties to the Collector of Surat District. Until the 1880s, the collector always occupied the municipal presidency; council meetings took place in his office or even at his residence until an old Muslim caravansery was converted into Surat's first municipal building in 1867.^[25]

The responsibilities of Surat's first municipality, incorporated in 1852, were small, consisting largely of lighting and cleaning the streets. It met its expenses by levying a surcharge on alcohol production at the local distillery and a duty on sugar imported into the city. During the

next four decades, its functions expanded to include constructing roads and bridges, digging drainage channels alongside the city streets, cleaning thousands of household latrines, and developing flood-protection works, a public water supply, and a number of smaller conservancy projects. Over the same period it came to employ more than one hundred workers. By 1910 the municipality's annual expenditures amounted to a little more than fourlakh rupees, still no more than the annual business of some of the city's wealthiest sheth s.

For the first thirty years, the collector nominated all the councillors. The first council consisted of twelve influential men, who, with one exception, were either government employees or acknowledged leaders of the city's four recognized religious communities. Besides the collector, members included two prominent Hindu sheth s, the heads of the Bakshi and Edrus families from among the Muslims, the head of the Modi family and Khan Bahadur Ardasir Dhanjishah (a high-ranking government officer) from among the Parsis, and an influential Bohra sheth. Its most reknowned member was Durgaram Manchharam Dave, an educational officer in the state of Rajkot and founder of the Manav Dharma Sabha, one of Gujarat's first religious reform associations. The number of councillors later expanded to thirty during the 1860s and 1870s, most of whom were government servants or leading figures from the four communities.

In 1883, spurred by local self-government reforms of the Liberal viceroy, Lord Ripon, the provincial administration introduced the principle of election in Surat. A small electorate, limited by property ownership, tax payment, and educational qualifications, gained the right to choose fifteen of the thirty councillors. The following chapter will discuss how English-educated politicians from outside the ranks of the natural leaders were able to take advantage of the electoral system and enter the municipality. But government nominations of the remaining fifteen seats continued to ensure places for high-ranking administrators and urban notables. Since most of the elected councillors were Hindu, the administration restricted its nominations largely to the Parsi, Muslim, and Bohra communities. Members of several old elite families, including the Modi, Edrus, Bakshi, Nawab of Surat, Nawab of Bela, and Ahmedbhai Rahemtulla (a Bohra sheth ), regularly won appointments, effectively perpetuating their political influence from generation to generation. When the head of one of these families died, it was common for the district collectorate simply to appoint his heir to his place on the council

The civil servants of the Raj reminded their nominees regularly that the performance of municipal duties and espousal of urban reform were virtues of the highest order. Speaking before the council in 1871,

Theodore Hope promised, "The harder you work, . . . the more power Government will give to you . . .. You will be united in feeling and interest with your present rulers, equal in rights and privileges to all other citizens of the British Empire, and invested with that full share in administration which is the birthright of all under the British Constitution, and which the Government now only waits for yourselves in order to concede."^[26] Frederick Lely, district collector and president of the municipality when it approved the city's waterworks scheme, sermonized less magnanimously in an address before the council in 1894, "You have to prove that you can, like men of the West, lay down a thoughtful policy and follow it with resolution. . .. The habit of sacrificing present advantages for the attainment of a distant object or for the benefit of generations yet unborn is the essence of national greatness."^[27] Lely clearly expected the councillors to leave behind private interests and parochial allegiances to pursue the larger good of the city. "What we desire in a municipal commissioner," he lectured on another occasion, "is that (1) he form his opinions with care, with impartiality and knowledge; (2) that having formed his opinion, he declare it boldly without fear of displeasure from caste fellows, relations or neighbours."^[28]

The notables who won nomination to the municipality regularly demonstrated a commitment to colonial reforms through their presence on the local body and through their public support for government-sponsored programs. Nominees invariably stood by the civil administration in council votes, backing the collector even when the measures were manifestly unpopular. Even the most controversial measure to come before the municipal commissioners, the house-tax scheme of the early 1890s, won the support of all the government's nominees. The overt and unwavering backing for government led some local critics to accuse nominees such as Mir Gulam Baba Khan, the Nawab of Surat and briefly president of the municipality, of behaving sycophantically and of introducing a "party spirit" into the local body.^[29] British officers, on the other hand, regarded those same men as having the highest civic character. In 1888 the district collector commended Mir Gulam Baba Khan for having "always taken up his position in front of any movement regarding the improvement of the town," arguing that the nawab' s status as the city's most prominent citizen had made possible a series of "progressive" measures.^[30]

The natural leaders of Surat were also called upon to handle sensitive negotiations between the municipality and members of their religious communities. When the government decided in 1869 to restrict the sale of meat to three markets regulated by the council, it asked Sayyid Hussain Edrus and Mirza Sultan Ali Beg to win over the city's

Muslim butchers.^[31] In 1904 the collector sought the support of Naginchand Jhaverchand, a prominent Jain pearl merchant, in his effort to persuade the Golas to accept an ambitious municipal scheme to rebuild their neighborhood in accordance with Western planning ideals.^[32] A whole committee of notables was established in 1898, when, because of an outbreak of plague, the municipality needed to disinfect thousands of homes.^[33] On each occasion, British civil servants genuinely feared that serious resistance to the municipality's efforts might have developed if not for these local intermediaries.

By taking on municipal responsibilities, Surat's notables reinforced their identities as important persons who were in fundamental agreement with the purposes of empire. Civic action bolstered the special ties of Surti leaderships with British civil servants. Toward the end of his tenure as municipal president, Theodore Hope described his relations with council members in almost emotional terms: "There is not one of you with whom I am not on terms of intimacy and friendship."^[34] Such affective links, established through years of public service on the council, often led to expanded political clout and, in the long term, to titles and places of prominence in the collector's annual durbar. The members on the Plague Vigilance Committee of 1898, for instance, were all rewarded with certificates of merit presented at the durbar of 1900. The most prominent figures on the committee, Bakshi Mir Sadruddin Khan, Moulvi Abdul Kadar Bakza, Barjorji Nasserwanji Vakil, and Hirachand Motichand Jhaveri, later were awarded titles for their public service.^[35]

The natural leaders performed important services in the course of their municipal work, but much of their participation in council affairs was as much an act of public submission to the rulers of India as it was a wholesale embrace of the civic ideals professed by Hope and Lely. Some councillors simply did not know English, the language in which most municipal meetings were conducted, and had little understanding of the mystifying details of municipal regulation. Attendance was generally sporadic, and many sessions of the council or its various subcommittees had to be adjourned for lack of a quorum. Councillors often seemed less concerned with pursuing the details of schemes of improvement in the council than with establishing a reputation for commitment to reform sufficient to win government approbation, as one local journalist acknowledged when he wrote: "That public spirit which is proof against all seductions of glory and renown, official favour and titles, is wanting in this official-ridden country."^[36]

Most commissioners departed from the pure civic model by employing their formal authority to advance and protect personal and group concerns. That members of Indian municipalities controlled the distri-

bution of jobs, the sale of public lands, the location of public facilities, and permission to construct new buildings has been acknowledged in a number of recent works.^[37] Less well recognized is that councillors often used their positions to weaken the impact of colonial reforms on themselves and their social groups. Though powerless to influence the general direction of policy, they could obstruct the passage of particular measures by raising legal technicalities, repeatedly referring matters to committees, or failing to attend meetings. Commissioners with appointments as honorary magistrates on municipal courts could influence the enforcement of bylaws. The rare councillor who worked to enforce the letter of the law quickly found himself estranged from local society.^[38] The majority who did not often enhanced their reputations as community patrons. Open support for the government in municipal votes thus never precluded acting on behalf of one's kinspeople and community in the application of municipal policy. In short, few notables made the distinction between public and private activity as sharply as their rulers would have wished.

Councillors could also affect the ultimate shape of policies proposed by British officers. Both nominated and elected members, for instance, often softened the burden of urban taxation by voting for revenueraising measures less likely to affect themselves and their constituencies. Though the government constantly attempted to substitute direct for indirect taxes, Indian members of the council effectively blocked these efforts for many years by raising objections in committee and municipal sessions. They also ensured that those direct taxation schemes that were adopted worked to the benefit of their own social strata. The amount of the sanitary tax, a cess raised to pay for the costs of cleaning latrines, was the same for households with no latrines as it was for those with three or four latrines.^[39] The house-tax schedule was also very regressive. According to one critic, "Those who inhabit better houses pay a smaller percentage [relative to the value of their homes] than those who occupy scarcely habitable huts with walls of bamboo plastered with cow dung and mud. A grandee like the Nawab or Bakshi pays much less than a poor widow living in a home in no way decent."^[40] The council even passed a resolution that exemptions could be granted on grounds of poverty, a move that theoretically benefited those least able to pay but that in practice was used by wealthy citizens best able to present a case before the appropriate committees.^[41]

Thus municipal policy, which on paper was to be administered with an even hand, was often applied with a flexibility that took into account different local statuses and concerns. There is no reason to suspect a deliberate duplicity on the part of nominated members of the council; British civil servants, as we have seen, were convinced of the sincerity

of some notables' commitment to progress. It might be more correct to suggest that nominees possessed contradictory consciousnesses. They conceded their commitment to the broader agenda of reform in exchange for a degree of control over the workings of the municipality, using their position to deflect potentially threatening improvements. Civil administrators of the Raj were well aware that the behavior of the notables did not match their own ideals, but in their eagerness to gain allies in their overall urban program, they usually accepted this negotiated form of involvement in municipal activity.

Less tangibly, associations with government officials on the local body allowed some notables to perpetuate statuses outside the municipality altogether. Through their participation in councils, Parsi notables, Hindu-Jain and Bohra sheth s, and Mughal gentry sustained government recognition as representatives of their religious communities, recognition that helped them to maintain their influence within their own collectivities. For example, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the head of the Modi family, a regular member of the council, attempted repeatedly to gain official acknowledgment of his claim to be the davar, or headman, of the Parsi community, a claim other Parsis disputed. The government of India ultimately recognized the davar ship as a title hereditarily enjoyed by the family, making possible the family's continued preeminence in a wide range of Parsi affairs.^[42] The participation of Bohra sheth s in the council may have helped gain colonial recognition of the community's distinctness from the Muslims and of the special position of the da'i as leader of the group, both of which came to be challenged regularly in the courts during the second half of the century. It is, of course, difficult to document precisely how the involvement of these men in the municipality affected British decision makers, but it would be senseless to perpetuate the colonial myth that civil servants of the Raj rendered their judgments in the courts and government offices impartially.

For the old Mughal gentry, council activities provided an opportunity to rebuild social statuses they had once enjoyed as the former rulers of the city—but now as leaders of the Muslim community. The heads of several immigrant Muslim families, including the Edrus, Bakshi, Nawab of Surat, and Nawab of Bela families, regularly assisted the local body in its dealing with their coreligionists. After the elective system was introduced, the Sunni notability became particularly vocal in staking claims to community leadership. Repeatedly pointing to the failure of non-Bohra Muslims to win elections, they pleaded for more Muslim nominations.^[43] Local authorities, eager to accommodate appeals for communal balance and to gain loyal councillors who would support their civic program, regularly nominated members of the gen-

try to the local body. As councillors, they acted to protect a distinctly Muslim sphere of concerns, such as Muslim graveyards and Muslim schools, from municipal regulation, in some cases weakening the local body's ability to enforce its bylaws uniformly or to develop overarching educational institutions.

For Surti notables, therefore, the pattern of accommodation to municipal affairs reflected an attempt to reconcile the sometimes contradictory demands of public and natural leader. In subscribing to a new civic ethos and thereby developing special ties with British civil servants, they were often able to advance concerns rooted in the inner arenas of politics. Though different magnates tended to develop different ways of resolving this tension, each cultural outcome reflected a compromise between two largely distinct moral idioms, one indigenous, the other of alien origins.

Philanthropy

The bilingualism of urban notables was even more apparent in their diverse "portfolios" of gift giving. During the late nineteenth century philanthropy began to emerge as a particularly important means of establishing an identity as a person worthy of imperial recognition. For urban sheth s philanthropy became a way to translate portions of their capital—the resource they possessed in greatest abundance—into authoritative relations with the British rulers at a time when tribute had become stigmatized as bribery. Influential local men began donating to public causes—education; health care; the building of public facilities like clock towers, water fountains, and public gardens; and relief efforts in times of plague, famine, or flood—in quite significant quantities after the 1860s. Public munificence often gained magnates access to the colonial rulers that might have otherwise been blocked. But they rarely abandoned older forms of gift giving, particularly religious patronage, which had long been important to their local status.

During late nineteenth-century colonial rule, few acts were more likely to win the approbation of British civil servants than philanthropy. Victorian values placed a high premium on private efforts to improve human welfare. "For most Englishmen," David Owen has written, "the hundreds of charitable institutions [in Britain] represented one of the glories of the British tradition and stood as a monument to the superiority of voluntary actions over state intervention."^[44] British officers in India's districts, hoping to promote an ethos which they believed had contributed to the advancement of their own civilization, sometimes came to regard the stimulation of private benevolence by wealthy merchants and landlords as a part of their official duties. In Surat around

midcentury, civil servants began to urge wealthy citizens to donate to a great variety of public projects. A few approached the problem with proselytizing zeal, hoping to divert some of the money spent on religious festivals, offerings to deities, and marriage ceremonies into channels they regarded as more productive. In 1910 the district collector, attempting to persuade residents to donate to a school fund in memory of Edward VII, reasoned: "Far better it is to lay out your riches on such lasting objects than to waste them on fireworks, in music and other extravagances, and yet I am assured that the annual expenditures in the city on fireworks alone is probably as great as will be required for the memorial we propose."^[45] Obviously, the collector, like most of his countrymen, failed to recognize or accept the importance of "extravagances" in establishing merchants' local reputations.

During the last four decades of the nineteenth century, a small number of prominent sheth s and other magnates, perhaps about two dozen in all, began to respond to such pleas and to contribute large sums to philanthropic causes, often establishing positions of considerable influence. Unlike tribute, philanthropic activity could never become a direct exchange with ruling authorities that might be rewarded immediately with some personal boon. Yet those who became extensively involved in the new forms of gift giving achieved recognition in colonial circles as persons with a special concern for the public good, and this recognition could yield greater political leverage and greater status. Officials acknowledged magnates with records of secular munificence as advanced members of their communities with a special role to play in the political education of the city's residents. Prominent philanthropists were consulted on important affairs of the city, such as maintaining law and order and enforcing municipal regulations. A few were nominated as municipal councillors and as honorary magistrates. Finally, philanthropy became an important path to honors from the administration and to a certain degree of solidarity with British officials. The government acknowledged donors by erecting plaques of honor on public buildings, reserving special places for philanthropists at the local durbar, inviting them to occasional "at-home" parties held at the collector's residence, and most significantly, granting titles to those with the most substantial records of civic munificence. At times officials openly used the lure of honors to persuade the rich to contribute to hospitals, schools, libraries, and veterinary dispensaries.

The importance of philanthropy as an investment in future good relations with the colonial elite and government honors is well illustrated by the case of Naginchand Jhaverchand Jhaveri. A wealthy pearl dealer, Naginchand moved to Surat from Bombay during the plague of 1897. He helped finance government-sponsored relief efforts when the plague spread to Surat and later when famine struck in 1899–1900.

Then, in 1903, on the occasion of his son's wedding, he offered the government 25,000 rupees for a public library and meeting hall. He later donated 10,000 more rupees for the project, half of it for the purchase of books in the name of Sir George Clark, the governor of Bombay.^[46] This later act may suggest that he viewed his philanthropic activities as a form of personal tribute to his political overlords.

By the first years of the twentieth century, British civil servants stationed in Surat began to recognize Naginchand as a leading member of the Hindu and Jain community and consulted him regularly on urban affairs. Though he was never a member of the municipality, district officers sought his advice on a wide range of urban problems over the next decade. In 1906, in perhaps the crowning event of his career, the government awarded him the title of Rao Bahadur, largely as a reward for his public charity. The collector held an evening party in his home and later a special durbar to honor Naginchand.^[47] Bestowal of the title set off a chain reaction of celebrations among pearl merchants and other Jains. In Bombay the leaders of the Jhaveri Mahajan (jewelers' guild), the Jain club, and several other associations held a dinner at which addresses were read praising Naginchand for his award and suggesting that he had won prestige for both himself and the whole community.^[48] Seven years later, referring to the title conferred by the government, the district collector called for contributions to public charities by asking rhetorically whether "in any of his great transactions and investments in pearls or anything else, our wealthy citizen Rao Bahadur Naginchand Jhaverchand has ever got a better return on his capital or a safer investment than that which he secured when he built and gave us this hall and library."^[49] Interestingly, the collector mentioned the potential improvement in one's abru —he used the Gujarati term in an English speech—as one of the major rewards that would accrue to philanthropists.

British officers were not usually quite so explicit in acknowledging the concrete returns to munificence, yet philanthropic activity did often go hand in hand with political sway and imperial honors. Hirachand Motichand Jhaveri, also a Jain pearl merchant, became a major organizer of and contributor to a cheap grain fund sponsored by the government during the famine of 1899 as well as a patron and trustee of many other public causes. He enjoyed considerable influence with a series of district collectors, which he used to attain such benefits for his community as exemptions of Jain pilgrims from travel restrictions during periods of plague, water connections for the panjrapol, and immunity for the same institution from certain forms of municipal taxation. He won appointment as an honorary magistrate on the municipal court and, in 1901, was awarded a Rao Saheb ship in recognition of his philanthropic record.^[50] Ishwardas Jagjivandas Store, a cotton merchant who

served with Hirachand on the grain fund and was a patron of a number of schools and colleges, became an honorary magistrate and a very influential municipal councillor and later won the title of Sardar.^[51]

By 1914 there had emerged in Surat a handful of magnates like Naginchand, Hirachand, and Store, who, as a result of their charitable activity, had achieved considerable recognition for a highly developed sense of civic responsibility. Yet any cultural change that occurred was a partial one, reflecting an accommodation to the value system of the ruling group tempered by pre-existing values. Despite the commitment they had shown to the public good and progress through their munificence, the great philanthropists often remained deeply conservative in other ways, carefully maintaining their abru among fellow traders and coreligionists. They dressed simply, practiced vegetarianism, observed pollution rules, and performed regular seva to their deities. They had in no sense become marginal men who had cut themselves off from their own social groups to participate wholly in an alien culture.

Most contributors to secular charities espoused by the British continued older forms of religious gift giving, usually on a far larger scale. Naginchand Jhaverchand devoted much larger sums to restoring temples, holding caste feasts, supporting Jain religious festivals and panjrapol s, and purchasing Jain literature than to the causes that won him his title. In Surat he constructed a major Jain temple, hiring artisans from Agra and Jaipur.^[52] Hirachand Motichand also rendered service to a number of Jain temples and the city panjrapol as a donor and trustee.^[53] Ishwardas Jagjivandas gained considerable recognition as a devout Vaishnava by acting as trustee and patron of Hindu shrines.^[54] Ironically, those who were most prominent in spending money for purposes civil administrators regarded as wasteful were often in the forefront of the charitable causes the British most fervently espoused.^[55] The greater the sheth, the greater the diversity in his portfolio of charitable activity.

In some cases, wealthy men chose charities that were valued highly by both the colonial elite and members of their own social groups. Naginchand Jhaverchand, for instance, made sure that the library he had built would be used as a center for the dissemination of religious literature.^[56] The heavy emphasis on educational patronage among Hindu and Jain sheth s was partially the result of the growing demand for schooling among upper-caste residents eager to gain employment in the civil administration, the post office, or the railways. Education became accepted as a core community interest. As one speaker at a meeting to honor patrons of education put it, "It is our dharma to promote education."^[57] Perhaps the three most generous Hindu or Jain contribu-

tors to Surti public causes before 1920, Premchand Raichand, Tapidas Varajdas, and Maganlal Thakordas Modi (all natives of Surat who had migrated to Bombay for business reasons but who maintained extensive social ties and commercial links with the smaller city), each made donations of hundreds of thousands of rupees to local schools or colleges. Certainly the approbation that these individuals later received was well deserved, but it makes little sense to regard them as persons whose views were far "in advance" of the rest of their locality. Their generosity won them much recognition within an already receptive community.

Officials found it easiest to stimulate local munificence when mercantile traditions coincided with government objectives. In times of fire, famine, or flood, wealthy residents rushed forward to contribute to relief efforts organized by colonial officers, expressing their concern for human and animal life and winning official recognition for their benevolence. During the famine of 1899–1900, Ishwardas Jagjivandas Store and Hirachand Motichand Jhaveri responded to the district collector by helping to establish a cheap grain fund to feed the thousands of refugees from the countryside. Merchants living in Surat and Bombay, genuinely concerned about the tremendous suffering caused by the famine but also worried about the potential for urban unrest if prices continued to escalate, donated thousands of rupees to this fund.^[58] Store, Hirachand, and several other contributors later received titles and letters of commendation for their efforts. The same men, however, could prove rather apathetic about giving to other causes espoused by the British, such as sanitary works, hospitals, and public gardens.

A similar pattern of selectivity was present among the Muslim notability. During the 1860s and 1870s the Sunni gentry had contributed heavily to public charities. Soon, however, they began to devote more and more of their surplus capital to causes that were ostensibly Muslim. But even here there was a bifurcation between gift giving that could win the patronage of colonial rulers and that directed toward maintaining status among immigrant Muslims. Funding Muslim education seems to have fallen more in the first category. As members of the Nawab of Surat, Nawab of Bela, Edrus, and a few other prominent Muslim families sought to establish themselves as advocates for their coreligionists, a supposedly backward community, they gave increasingly to Muslim educational funds, largely through the local chapters of the Anjuman-e-Islam and the Mohamedan Union.^[59] In general, these efforts made more of an impression on the British than on the towns' other Muslims, who were mostly traders, artisans, and laborers with little interest in the cause of secular education. But the same families also provided monies in far larger quantities to mosques, shrines, and Muslim religious festivals, which bolstered their status

among their coreligionists. To a few local journalists critical of the Mughal gentry, this diversity in gift giving was evidence of hypocrisy. One article in the Gujarat Mitra accused the Muslim aristocratic grandees of having "spent thousands in encouraging their people in all their superstitious and fanatical practices" and using "more money in degrading their people than in elevating them."^[60] Obviously such comments were colored by a secular chauvinism that must be treated with some skepticism. Nevertheless, they reflect two important facts: first, Muslim notables made symbolic investments in two different audiences, and second, the indigenous audience was often more important than the colonial. The journalist—himself either a Hindu or a Parsi—apparently failed to notice that such bilingualism in giving was a characteristic of all important notables in Surat, not just the Muslim gentry.

Parsi magnates engaged in nearly the full range of public causes advocated by the rulers of India, perhaps because their community's traditions of social spending jibed more closely with British conceptions.^[61] Municipal records contain much evidence of Parsi donations, great and small, to public projects, including drinking fountains, educational institutions, hospitals, dispensaries, and even an ill-fated waterworks scheme.^[62] The most munificent of local Parsis, Barjorji Maherwanji Frasier, contributed large sums to develop the Victoria Gardens near the city square and a public promenade by the riverside during the 1860s and 1870s. He is best remembered for financing the city's clock tower on the main road from the city square to the railroad station.^[63] Even in this gift, Frasier exhibited a concern with perpetuating his family's name. In a letter to the collector, he required that the municipality acknowledge his act with a letter of commendation, to name the tower after his father, to place a plaque to this effect on the structure, to promise to keep the tower in good condition, and if city improvements later made its removal necessary, to reconstruct the tower on another site with its plaque intact.^[64]

The emergence of philanthropy does suggest a significant reformulation in the values and identity of some wealthy citizens of Surat. Through participation in new forms of benevolence, a few notables were able to win recognition as leaders of their communities, men devoted to the development of their city and loyal subjects of empire. But adjustments to Western philanthropic notions were always tempered by notions of personal dignity embedded in the local collectivities where the notables assumed leading positions.

Civic-Imperial Ritual

A feature of the developing public culture that has received especially little attention from historians is the place of civic and imperial ritual. Rituals were not, as many postcolonial scholars have tended to assume,

just empty sideshows to the "real" politics of the municipality and local pressure groups. Rather they were a central feature in the notability's political life. Here local elites gave dramatic confirmation of their identities as public leaders as well as of their subordination to the colonial rulers. Between 1885 and 1914, a period for which much evidence is available, the "native gentlemen" took part in a variety of occasions recognized by the British rulers as symbolically significant: visits by governors and viceroys, durbars, the opening of public buildings, parties in the house of the district collector, imperial victory celebrations, coronations, birthdays of the empress or emperor, and memorial services on the deaths of leading imperial personalities. These events received pages and pages of coverage in local newspapers—far more than any other kind of news story. Local citizens and the municipality devoted large sums of money to these ceremonies. To ignore such occasions is to impose the antiritualistic sentiments of contemporary intellectuals on the past as well as to miss the significance of deference as a mode of political expression.

The nature of the ritual interaction between local elites and their rulers in the mature phase of British colonialism differed markedly from that under precolonial polities. Under Mughal rule ritual time and work time, ritual space and work space, were largely conflated. A merchant entering the local durbar in order to present a petition found himself in the midst of an ongoing ceremony designed to focus attention on the members of the nobility present. According to one English traveler, "The governor comes to his seat attended every morning with 300 foot with firearms, three elephants in their clothing, . . . forty horses mounted, four and twenty banners of state; besides a large retinue of the Cazy's [judge] who is always present to assist him in law points. Moreover, he has loud trumpets . . . with thundering kettledrums."^[65] The merchant, in presenting his appeal, became part of this ceremony. He waited his turn among the petitioners, and he offered his gift in an appropriately submissive manner before making his request. The nobleman rendered his decision with a demeanor befitting his status and his sense of self-importance, often in the form of a favor or boon. The ritual transaction thus was conducted largely in a personal idiom; through it, a relationship between patron and client was established.

Late nineteenth-century British administrators, aware that durbars and other forms of political ceremony had played a great role in precolonial South Asia, tended to assume the intrinsic susceptibility of their subjects to pomp and pageantry, not recognizing that the ritual involvement of Indians had itself been an adaptation to Mughal domination. The British hoped to draw upon Mughal ritual forms in strengthening the legitimacy of their empire and in inculcating certain

civic values. In localities such as Surat, district officers arranged many ceremonial observances, all designed to cement the ties of the population to the Raj.

Changes in the administrative and social ethos of the ruling group, however, made any exact reproduction of Mughal ceremony impossible. Civil administrators were anxious to prevent focusing ritual attention on individual imperial officials. Many no doubt believed that Indians regarded the British officer as a paternalistic figure, the ma-bap (mother and father) of the people living in his district. But such a view was considered a peculiar characteristic of the "natives" and was not to be encouraged in official policy. In theory, the civil servant was to act as an impersonal agent of a distant government whose authority derived less from his personal qualities and his ability to dispense favors than from the office he occupied and the principles of British rule which he supposedly applied with an even hand. This conception rendered inappropriate ostentatious display like the blowing of trumpets or beating of drums at the district offices during working hours, activity which would be wasteful of time and which would draw attention to the official rather than to his office. Ritual time was self-consciously disjoined from work time, ritual space from work space. Ceremonial observances were generally held in public places away from the collector's offices, yet not on the property of any individual. By the early twentieth century, the railroad station, the municipality, Naginchand Jhaverchand hall, and the Victoria Gardens became the chief venues of imperial rites. The government of India set out extensive regulations preventing officials from accepting gifts or any ritual submissions which might confer upon them a personal authority. The new ritual forms also excluded the presentations of most kinds of petitions and memorials. In accordance with the more bureaucratic conception of ritual, expressions of the private concerns of particular persons were inappropriate to public ceremony.

The civil servants hoped now to depoliticize and depersonalize ritual and direct it toward the cultivation of broader commitments that would bolster British authority. Often the chief focus of the ceremonial observance would be some imperial officer—the collector, a visiting governor or viceroy, or the empress or emperor. Yet in colonial theories operating at the district level, these men were not so much the personal objects of the ritual as figures who embodied the broader sentiments considered by the British to be of the noblest quality. Most critical of these was "loyalty"—an identification with the British Empire as a whole. The ruling group conceived of loyalty as a special feature which distinguished British rule from that of its predecessors in India—and, indeed, from all imperial ventures in human history. In an address to

the municipal councillors after the death of Edward VII in 1910, the collector grew eloquent on the subject:

Even the most solidly designed structure must crash and totter if not held together by the most indispensable cement of Empire; I mean the unwavering loyalty of all good and enlightened subjects. For most of you here in India separated by race and by many thousands of miles, it can not be so much a sense of personal loyalty, of personal knowledge of the King Emperor, as to us who come from the heart of the Empire to assist in the administration of its provinces. For you loyalty means a sense of pride and of common interest in the harmonious and progressive growth of a great worldwide union of nations and states. Disloyalty means the disruption and separation of these into jarring and warring units of nations and communities occupied in internecine strife. . . . How often in the past have empires not so knit together by that sense been thrown into chaos and disaster by sudden removal of the Head? We have reason to realize the political value of loyalty; and to meet here to express it. . . .

The king is dead. Long live the king.^[66]

Most rituals also called for identification with the city and with the welfare of its inhabitants. Few observances, no matter how grand the occasion, went by without some attempt—an address by the municipality, a speech by the collector, the opening of a school—to stimulate civic pride and concern with urban improvement on the part of those in attendance.

By participating in civic-imperial ceremony, Surat's notables acknowledged the two critical principles of loyalty and public spiritedness while paying homage to some important imperial personage. Late colonial rituals became a new vehicle for rendering deference to the imperial overlords and for demonstrating that the notables shared a common ethical ground with their rulers. In rituals public leaders marked themselves off as 'advanced members' of their society, who had a genuine concern with the moral and material development of Surat. Implicitly their involvement confirmed that their aspirations to material and symbolic resources were indeed legitimate within the ethical framework of the Raj. Thus if attempts at the mystification of power were implicit in imperial rites, they were taking place at two levels. Not only was the British ruling group seeking to capture important symbols of power for itself and to socialize Indians into adopting imperial norms, but members of the local elite were communicating to the British that they adhered to these norms and were therefore entitled to all the privileges and influences associated with public leadership. But in both senses imperial ceremony was an important vehicle of colonial hegemony. Here I examine three different aspects of ceremonial life in Surat before World War I.

Imperial Visits

Perhaps the most exciting imperial celebrations in Surat were the visits of governors and viceroys. Such visits occurred fairly often after 1885, roughly every year or two. Usually an imperial visit was part of a larger tour planned by the high-ranking official as an effort to get in touch with his subjects. The provincial government typically informed the city several weeks in advance of the official's arrival. Representatives of local public institutions such as schools, orphanages, and local health societies would quickly begin to prepare, hoping to win the honor of a stop in the dignitary's tour around the city. Since such occasions were often the only opportunity for Surti leaderships to bypass the district establishment and to appeal directly to the highest officials in the land, the opportunity of playing host for such a stop was often enthusiastically sought. By the time the dignitary arrived in Surat, every hour of his program had been planned.

The visit always began with a ceremony of welcome at the railway station. Thousands of Surtis surrounded the station, curious to see the illustrious visitor. However, only about three dozen—princes from surrounding native states, government officials, representatives of the four religious communities, and members of the municipality—were on the platform at the time of arrival. Each was expected to wear elaborate dress supposedly typifying his community. When the dignitary disembarked, the district collector introduced these notables one by one, each in turn shaking the visitor's hand. Often there would be a garland ceremony as well. In most cases, a group of city policemen fired a salute, and local bands played imperial anthems. The governor or viceroy was then escorted around the city in procession to important sites, hearing addresses, opening public buildings, and perhaps visiting the original English factory, considered to be the site of the first English presence in India.^[67]

Though there was considerable variation in the program from visit to visit, one regular feature was an address by the municipality. The local body had usually spent several thousand rupees making ready for this ceremony. Councillors regarded the address as a critical form of political action in material as well as symbolic terms since it provided an occasion to plead directly for expanded provincial grants to fund the construction of local public works. A special platform was built for the ceremony, on which leading Surtis, arranged by rank in the local list of darbari s, would sit alongside government officials. Members of the council had places just below the platform in front of an audience of perhaps several hundred householders, symbolizing their hierarchical position as leaders of the city but inferiors to the imperial personage. The address was not simply a speech but also a gift offered in a highly

formal fashion in return for the honor of the dignitary's presence. The vice president, generally the council's leading Indian member in the years before 1911, read the address while all the councillors stood at attention. Then he placed the address, printed on a piece of silk cloth, in a sandalwood box carved by local artisans and presented it to the visitor.^[68]

In the address the councillors stressed their identification with the city as a historic entity, their concern with civic reform, and their loyalty to the empire. The text of the address, invariably printed in local newspapers, followed a fairly stylized format. First, it would welcome the visitor, sometimes "in the name of the citizens of every caste and creed" of Surat. In the next paragraphs, the address discussed the history of the city. Common themes here were Surat's past as a trading center, its claim to be the "cradle of the British Empire in India" (because of the first English factory), and its fall (due to the rise of Bombay and the silting of the Tapi River). The address then enumerated the municipality's efforts to improve sanitation, education, and roads before appealing for more funds to help the local body meet the costs of future projects. The document ended with an expression of the councillors' loyalty to the empire and prayers for the long life of the empress or emperor. The last sentence of an address to Lord Curzon in 1900 is typical: "We desire to convey to your Excellence the assurance of our deep loyalty and sincere devotion to our August Sovereign Her Most Gracious Majesty the Empress of India and we also take this opportunity to convey through your Excellency to Her Majesty our congratulations on the success of the British Arms in South Africa and we heartily wish this success may lead to a speedy and lasting peace."^[69]

The dignitary, who received a copy of the speech in advance, responded point by point immediately after the vice president had finished his presentation. In most cases he would express his pleasure at visiting Surat (reiterating his special interest in seeing the "birthplace" of the British Empire), encourage the municipality to continue its efforts to improve the city, promise consideration of appropriately framed proposals for municipal projects or urge the council to develop new revenues to pay for projected plans, and thank the councillors for their welcome and their manifestations of loyalty. By receiving and responding to addresses, the dignitary singled out members of the local body as special leaders of their city and honored them for their continuing interest in the welfare of Surat's inhabitants, all in a context surrounded with the special mystique of empire.

Addresses thus served to reinforce two sets of unequal relationships simultaneously. First, by submitting themselves to an important representative of empire, the city's leaders confirmed their own subordina-

tion to the Anglo-Indian officials who ruled over them. At the same time they asserted their own claims to civic leadership, claims based upon both their loyalty and their concern with the welfare of the city's inhabitants and the cause of urban reform.

Durbars

Like addresses, durbars were a privileged opportunity for those recognized by district administrators as local leaders to separate themselves from the larger population and to share in the aura of the Raj. Local durbars took place on particularly important imperial occasions such as the coronation of 1903 and King George's visit to the Delhi Durbar in 1911, but also when the civil administration held celebrations in honor of citizens who had been granted titles by the government. Around 1905 the district administration began to hold an annual durbar in Surat at Divali time. On each of these occasions the collector's office carefully planned the program of events. Particularly crucial was the drawing up of the list of darbari s, which would determine who would be invited to sit on the platform with the government officials and how close each would sit to the collector.

In comparison with municipal addresses, the form of local durbars was fairly flexible and changed over time. The greatest of these occasions, such as the local Delhi Durbar celebration in 1911, were accompanied by elaborate activities, including processions of municipal school children, giving sweets to these children, handing out awards to prize students, distributing food to the poor, displaying fireworks, and illuminating important public buildings. These grander aspects were generally missing in the annual affairs. Yet in the central event—the durbar itself—there were important elements that remained relatively constant. Usually the observance opened with the arrival of the collector, who was welcomed by a salute from an armed guard or the playing of a bugle. He gave a speech emphasizing some civic issue—the value of public service, the virtues of philanthropy, the observance of law and order, or even the need for the municipality to replace indirect taxes with direct levies. At the durbar of 1902, Collector Sladen spoke in honor of the valuable work of two new titleholders, the Parsi municipal councillor, Khan Bahadur Barjorji Nasserwanji Vakil, and the Jain merchant, Rao Bahadur Hirachand Motichand, particularly praising their extensive activities during the plague of 1898.^[70] An observance in 1911 included a lecture on fiscal responsibility directed to the municipal councillors as well as announcements concerning the upcoming local celebration of the Delhi Durbar.^[71]

The participation of the notables in such ceremonies was generally more one of gesture and demeanor than of words. They sat through

the ceremony silently in their positions of privilege, with a solemnity befitting the occasion and their personal status, perhaps shaking the collector's hand at the event's end. Their acceptance of the seating arrangements on the dais, where the central seats were reserved for highranking civil servants, implied not only a position of honor in the city but also recognition of the authority of the Raj.

Exceptions to this pattern of unspoken communication occurred when titles were awarded. Each recipient was expected to respond to the collector's commendation. These speeches observed a common tone, one of great humility. Barjorji Vakil, in his speech in 1902, insisted that he had only done his duty during the plague, praised the help he received from a series of British officers during his public career, acknowledged the support of others on the plague committee and municipal council, and affirmed his desire to prove himself worthy of the honor by continued loyal service.^[72] Umedram Ranchhordas, a retired government officer awarded a Rao Bahadur ship, was even more self-effacing in a ceremony held in his honor in 1894. He opened his speech by stating, "It is my duty to thank in the first place the benign British government, which has been graciously pleased in recognition of my humble services to confer on me the distinction." He went on to express his appreciation for the help of British officers during his lifetime: "I shall not be so ungrateful as to believe or to let it be understood that I could have performed one tenth of the work that fell to my lot had I not received support and encouragement from my immediate superiors and the appreciation and commendation of Government from time to time."^[73] The modest tone of the statements made on such an occasion of exceptional honor was an expected behavior. The speaker's humility served as confirmation that he embodied the qualities of the ideal public servant who toiled selflessly for the good of the city and the empire. By stressing his loyalty and the importance of support from his superiors, the titleholder also confirmed British authority. In short, the speeches at durbars were at once a subtle form of claiming status and a means of expressing deference to British rulers.

Notable-Planned Rites

In such carefully orchestrated occasions as the municipal address and the durbar, it is often difficult to assess the commitment of local leaderships to the occasion. But evidence of considerable elite enthusiasm is clearly present in the less-planned observances that surrounded such events. On many occasions prominent local men went far beyond the government's minimal expectations and made special contributions—for instance, by mobilizing their coreligionists for the ceremony, by fixing expensive illuminations on their homes, or by hanging banners

with slogans such as "Long Live Emperor Edward VII" or "God Save the King" outside their houses. In a few instances, the notables were responsible for organizing the entire ritual occasion. In 1900, Nawab Mir Muzaffar Hussein Khan invited the citizens of Surat to his palace for the purpose of expressing thanksgiving for the British victory in the Boer War. Leading members of all the communities in the city attended. Numerous speeches were given, each of which, reported the Gujarat Mitra, "breathed a spirit of intense loyalty to the crown of Her Gracious Majesty." At the end of the gathering, those present offered a prayer to "God almighty to bless British Arms and the British flag." One participant even suggested establishing a committee to raise funds for widows and orphans of the soldiers who had died in defense of the empire. Attendees sang "God Save the Queen" and raised three cheers each for the Empress Victoria, Lord Roberts (commander of British forces in South Africa), and the British flag. A journalist commented afterward that the event confirmed Surat's traditional claim to be the "cradle of the British Empire in India," since the city had organized its own celebration before Bombay, which usually took the lead in public affairs.^[74]

There were even instances when the enthusiasm of local elites in celebration of empire went beyond the bounds of imperial propriety. One such case took place in 1901, when leading residents arranged a series of events to honor the departing collector, Mr. Weir. First, several neighborhood groups organized festivities for Weir and his wife in their own localities. A few citizens invited the couple into their homes for tea, coffee, and refreshments. Later that evening, the municipality organized an evening party for the collector at the home of a Muslim sheth, to which all the Europeans of the city and their wives were invited. After entertainment—playing European songs on the piano—Khan Bahadur Moulvi Abdul Kader Bakza and others made speeches praising Weir for his efforts during the plague of 1897 and the famine of 1899–1900. The following day there was a huge gathering in Victoria Gardens, with school children in parade, athletic demonstrations, and band music. Then residents escorted the collector through the streets of the city to the railway station with representatives of local groups stopping his carriage repeatedly to garland him. When Weir arrived in Bombay, a group of Surti sheth s presented another address to Weir at a party in Madhav Bagh.^[75]

Local newspapers reported these activities as special, joyous celebrations honoring a popular official. But civil servants in Bombay regarded the festivities more grimly. In the General Department, officials suggested that the events had violated administrative regulations prohibiting government servants from "receiving addresses and testimoni-

als" and from attending "complimentary entertainments of a formal and public character." The various parties in Surat, one memo reported, "may be said to be of a private character," but the "demonstration held in the Victoria Gardens appears to have been of a public character. A fund of Rs 1,100 was collected for the occasion. There were sports and tamashas and bands, and the school children carrying flags marched in procession." Others questioned whether even the parties were entirely of a private character, since they were held "under the auspices" of the city's most prominent citizens; obviously the specter of Indians' crossing over into social rites that were usually exclusively European struck some officials as posing a danger to the civil service's reputation of objectivity. The procession to the station drew the sharpest criticisms. One outraged administrator commented that the collector's carriage and its entourage seemed "to have partaken of the nature of a royal progress."^[76] Weir embarrassedly defended himself by claiming that the various parties he had attended "were not of a public nature" and that "the demonstrations on the road to the railway station were unpremeditated and were distasteful to myself and if the train had not been an hour late in arriving would have caused us to miss the train."^[77]

Because these ceremonies were planned by indigenous elites, they provide an especially interesting opportunity to suggest how Surti understandings of their ritual activity might have differed from those of their rulers. Prominent local residents certainly acknowledged the importance of loyalty and civic consciousness in ritual, but they sometimes injected expressions of personal deference that violated British standards of appropriateness. Ritual occasions were chances to express and build bonds of clientship with the colonial authorities. Thus, to give a "royal" celebration to a district officer or to conflate the "public" and the "private" in the observance of a ceremonial occasion hardly seemed problematic. Certainly by combining elements involved in the durbar, the imperial visit, and the European social party, the "native gentlemen" of Surat had given their own twists of meaning to forms of ritual expression initially designed by their rulers.

The personal and community stake involved in imperial observances was quite great. In ritual, status was confirmed, and honor lost or won. Even the seating arrangements made by the district establishment could become the subject of intense local contests. In 1877, Hindus and Jains protested that the Modi, the representative of the Parsi community, had been given a seat of greater prominence than the Nagarsheth, their community head, at a durbar, forcing the government to move the Nagarsheth to a more honorable position.^[78] Local newspapers regularly offered comments and complaints about the adequacy of seating

arrangements at ceremonies or the completeness of the collector's list of darbaris.^[79]

Those who took leading roles in ritual confirmed their positions as natural leaders of local religious groupings as they expressed their identification with city and empire. On Edward VII's birthday in 1909, the Anjuman-e-Islam, composed mainly of the old Mughal gentry, sent a delegation to the collector's house to congratulate him on behalf of the Muslim community; the Nagarsheth presided over a puja (a ceremony of worship) on the banks of the Tapi, in which Hindus and Jains wished the emperor well; and the da'i of the Bohras and the Modi of the Parsis sent telegrams from their communities to the viceroy.^[80] In such instances, the magnates employed a double language: they simultaneously made statements in the idiom of empire and the idiom of community. British civil servants certainly had no objection to what they seemed to view as a quaint injection of indigenous elements into the larger ceremony.

It may be that ritual activities assumed special importance primarily because the expression of loyalty called no principle of great indigenous concern into doubt. During an era in which deference had not yet been seriously challenged by Indian nationalists, elites who publicly participated in imperial ceremony did not endanger their own local authority. Nonetheless the notables sometimes needed to take steps to ensure that involvement in imperial ceremony would not harm their reputations. In the at-home parties at the residence of the collector, organizers had to make separate provisions in the refreshments for members of each community present so that commensal rules would not be violated through attendance. A few even refused to adopt the ritual dress expected for imperial observances. At his own durbar in 1900, Hirachand Motichand, the Jain pearl merchant, stunned those present by opting for a simple white dhoti and red turban, perhaps because he did not wish to be stigmatized for wearing the rather ostentatious dress and headdress expected of a representative of his community. In general, the notables were able to participate in such a way that they did not offend their patrons, but also did not endanger their status within their communities. Involvement in such events was by no means a sign that they had merged their identities with the alien ruling group.^[81]

By taking part in civic and imperial observances, local elites actively contributed to the construction of British authority; they openly demonstrated their commitment to the Raj and to the principles for which the Raj stood. They were not merely passive participants in a ritual order foisted on them by their rulers but often introduced elements into ceremonies that the British did not intend, thus giving civic and

imperial ceremony a distinctively Anglo-Indian shape. As a result, while urban ritual took its form from the rulers, it drew much of its content from the Surtis.

Notables and Pressure-Group Politics

A final civic identity potentially open to the city's notability was as representatives of public opinion. The idiom of pressure-group politics offered to local leaders a means of making their concerns and the concerns of their followings felt in imperial circles. While they usually lacked formal schooling in English, the notables quickly acquired an ability to couch their arguments for justice in a form meaningful to the district and provincial officers. But the elite of Surat engaged in public meetings and public associations only warily, always trying to avoid a confrontational posture that might lead them to be cast as dangerous and seditious men. Thus, even as the magnates opposed certain colonial policies, they struggled to maintain a posture of deference and humility.

An example of the delicacy with which the idiom of public politics was balanced against the need to maintain ties of dependency upon government officials comes from a movement against the license tax, which had been imposed on all local businesses in 1878. For local merchants, this tax was an especially objectionable measure because it required them to supply detailed information about their firms' operations, thus potentially violating the secrecy upon which their reputations were based. After the provincial government sanctioned the measure, there was a quick response from the business community. The Nagarsheth and the Mahajan Sheth—men recognized as the chief headmen of the Hindu-Jains—issued a notice calling for a public meeting to draft a petition to protest the measure. The two sheth s insisted that provincial authorities had erred in levying the tax without consulting the people and that the measure would impose a great strain on the "poor" traders of the city at a time of great inflation. In effect they translated the community's concerns with abru into the terms of extraparliamentary justice, calling upon British assumptions that there should be no taxation without representation and that the merchants' poverty should militate against an increase in their payments. At the public meeting, the leading merchants decided that the city's shopkeepers should close their stores in protest. Key figures among the Parsis and Bohras lent their support to the resolution.

When the collector asked many of these same figures to attempt to induce the business community to reopen its shops, however, they stated their agreement with this request and stated that the shops

would be opened shortly. Nonetheless, the shops did not reopen. The struggle soon took a violent turn. A riot broke out in outlying neighborhoods, in which European officers and several Indian policemen were attacked. Uncertain of their best course, the leading merchants continued to take an ambivalent position. To use the words of the district magistrate, they "either held aloof, or made professions of assistance but did nothing and urgently pressed that the enactment in question might be allowed to remain a dead letter pending a reference to Government." The great sheth s clearly were reluctant to cut themselves off from their community by supporting government measures wholeheartedly, but they were also hesitant to sacrifice their ties with the government by defiantly acting as advocates of the people. They made use of the idiom of public politics for a brief period but refrained from pushing this idiom as far as it might go. Gradually they withdrew their backing from the movement, and the effort collapsed.^[82]

Involvement of the notables in organizations that criticized government policy on a regular basis was limited. The formation of voluntary associations claiming to represent the people was largely the work of English-educated professionals, not the local magnates. In 1896 Frederick Lely reported that the notability's participation in the Indian National Congress was negligible. Leading Muslims were as "staunch to the cause of order as if they were Englishmen," he claimed, and "all the Hindus of weight, without, so far as I know, any exception, resolutely hold aloof from political agitation."^[83] The absence of the natural leaders in local voluntary associations allowed British officials to dismiss these institutions as weak and nonrepresentative. Discussing a petition of the Praja Hit Vardhak Sabha (Society for the Advancement of the People's Welfare), the assistant collector remarked that the organization "does not seem to rank among its members any very influential persons."^[84] Notable reluctance to associate with public associations weakened as these organizations gained stature during the first decade of the twentieth century, but their participation remained confined to associations that had won a certain respectability in imperial circles. After 1906, the Surat District Association, a local branch of the Indian National Congress, included among its membership a number of Hindu and Jain sheth s such as Naginchand Jhaverchand and Ishwardas Jagjivandas Store. Even so, these merchants remained in the background, providing financial support but rarely becoming conspicuous in any public agitation.

A form of a collective assembly called a public meeting did become an aspect of notable political activity during the second half of the nineteenth century. But most of these meetings were not gatherings of irate citizens against their government; rather they were solemn rituals

closely controlled by their elite organizers to avoid the potential for disloyal expression. Often the purpose of the meeting was to convey congratulations or grief at some event of imperial significance or to express mild dissatisfaction with some specific policy. The head of the Modi family, as head of the Parsis; the Nawab of Surat or the head of the Edrus family, as representative of the Muslims; and the Nagarsheth or the Mahajan Sheth, as leaders of the Hindu-Jains, called meetings by affixing their signatures to a printed announcement. When Nawab Mir Muzaffar Hussein Khan was so presumptuous as to call a meeting on his own in 1893, Hindus and Parsis complained that he had insulted their communities by violating customary practice.^[85] For the most part, Surat's magnates drew on the language of constitutional justice to a limited extent and in a manner compatible with their desire to maintain stable links with their rulers and their statuses as natural leaders. The notables did little to generate a public autonomous of the state and willing to offer regular criticisms of colonial policy.

The language of public politics, however, was not the only alien idiom with which pressure could be placed upon the rulers; notables also launched claims to political justice within colonial discourse, appealing to the promises of the Raj that it would work to preserve the traditional customs of the Indians. Often they directly invoked the principles of Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1858, which had guaranteed that the British would "refrain from all interference with the religious belief or worship of our subjects" and had confirmed that "due regard" would be paid "to the ancient rights, usages, and customs of India."^[86] Invoking these guarantees served to defend elite concerns about not putting deferential relationships with the overlords at risk. In 1891, for instance, a meeting of the Hindu Mahajan contested the passage of the Age of Consent Bill by the Imperial Legislative Council by insisting that the government uphold its own ideals of religious tolerance. This bill clearly had produced strong feelings among the city's merchants. Some suggested that a doctor's examination might be needed to determine whether a girl was old enough to be married, thus endangering family honor. The mahajan "humbly" urged the viceroy to reconsider the measure, claiming that the bill violated religious sentiments and ancient customs protected by Victoria's proclamation. After acknowledging the "blessings" that had been bestowed on a "weak" people by their beneficent government, the petitioners spelled out the harm to the community traditions that would result if the measure remained law, though they also argued that the people, not the government, were the rightful arbiter of what religious customs they would follow.^[87] Three years later leaders of the Parsi Panchayat invoked similar claims to justice when they called upon the government to extend flood protective works to

include an agiyari (Parsi temple) at the edge of the city. If flood protection were not provided, they complained, "no earthly compensation would avail to restore the wounded feelings of the Parsi community. . .. Such desecration of an old standing place of worship is calculated to hurt seriously the religious feelings of not only the Parsis of Surat but of all Indians in general."^[88] In both cases the notables hoped to induce government to reconsider a position by defining the issue as one of religion and "custom." In each instance, a local leader questioned a government policy, but he couched these criticisms within a deferential conception of ruler-subject relations. Indeed, by suggesting that the policy violated avowed British values, he effectively confirmed imperial principle.

Members of the Mughal gentry likewise began to assert claims to special government attention as leaders of a religious community during this same period. The Muslim leadership went further than notables in other communities by organizing pressure groups such as the Anjuman-e-Islam and the Mohamedan Union to represent its concerns. While claiming to speak for the Muslims of the city as a whole, these two organizations were quite narrow in their composition. The affairs of the Anjuman-e-Islam were dominated totally by a few gentry families and by a Muslim sheth who had made a fortune in Mauritius, Haji Ibrahim Turava. The head of the Edrus family enjoyed the position of president of the Anjuman hereditarily, the head of the Bakza family the secretaryship. The Mohamedan Union, organized mainly to promote education for Muslims, had an identical membership, though the district collector served as its president.^[89] Members made little attempt to draw in the larger Muslim population of the city. A critic with the Gujarat Mitra once snidely referred to the Anjuman as a "few officebearing aristocrats who care to know very little about what takes place outside the four walls of the palaces in which they dwell," and suggested that one of their gatherings "was, in fact, a drawing-room meeting . . . consisting of the President, a couple of secretaries, and a few friends who had been invited to smoke a hookah for the evening."^[90] Though these comments no doubt reflected personal resentment of the political influence of the Anjuman's leaders, they also contained some element of truth. Muslim associational politics had not extended beyond the handful of Surti families who claimed descent from the old rulers of India. When there were no pressing issues affecting this gentry's status, the Muslim organizations fell into extended periods of inactivity.

The gentry employed the Anjuman as a forum for sending deputations to government and for drawing up occasional addresses and petitions. Though submissive in tone, their memorials developed distinc-

tively Muslim claims to imperial favor. An address given in 1890 to Lord Harris, governor of Bombay, assured the dignitary that "we stand second to none in our loyalty and devotion to the British crown." It made a case for the "backwardness" of the city's Muslims, suggesting that some of the old nobility were now "on the verge of ruin" and that the Muslims' state was "deplorable and pitiful". It pleaded for British support for Muslim education and for more Muslim nominations to the municipal and provincial councils. Clearly the petitioners framed their own claims to justice in part through reference to the Britishers' self-perception as guardians of the weak and impoverished communities.^[91]

All these appeals, like the merchant petitions to the East India Company a century earlier, were both deferential and demanding. Sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, each set of petitioners acknowledged their subordination and dependence as a legitimate state of affairs, but each insisted that the Raj, by virtue of the "magnanimous" principles that entitled it to rule over the subcontinent, had special obligations to its subjects it could not fail to honor. In each case as well, appeals for justice went hand in hand with the process of defining self. Through attempts to defend their concerns by invoking religious principle, notable petitioners reinforced their images as natural leaders. They insisted that their concerns expressed the interests of a whole religious community and that they were the only authoritative spokespersons for that community. Such attempts to gain the ear of high-level administrators contributed to the consolidation of their identities as "representative men" whom the overlords could not afford to ignore.

Conclusion

Notable participation in the outer domain of politics thus reflects both continuities and discontinuities from previous eras. As in the precolonial period, local magnates appropriated a political idiom from an alien ruling group in order to make sense of their involvement in and contacts with the state. They fashioned deferential relations through their rhetorical and ritual activity, bestowing upon the Anglo-Indian civil servants authority as political overlords while establishing their own moral claims to patronage and justice. The specific language of magnate-ruler interaction, however, had changed significantly. The politics of the Mughal courts had given way to the municipal council and the pressure group; the politics of tribute to that of philanthropy. Underlying these changes was a gradual shift away from the personal idiom of Mughal and company rule to a political style centering on civic commitments.

At this point, it might be useful to restate the argument of this chapter in terms of the more theoretical language set out in the opening

sections of this study. Five main propositions about change in political culture can be deduced from the rather descriptive discussion above.

First, the emerging civic culture created by the notables reflected the successful consolidation of British cultural hegemony. In their various public actions, Surti leaderships effectively gave consent to the larger distribution of power within colonial India and accepted values espoused by the colonizers as the key principles governing certain spheres of activity. Hegemony was indicated in the deference the notables communicated to the representatives of empire and more specifically in their adoption of public and colonial discourse from their rulers. The four manifestations of public culture discussed here all carried with them implicit assumptions about what were legitimate forms of political authority and what were valid principles of political justice. For the notables, idioms derived from the rulers created new boundaries of appropriate self-expression, discouraging the formulation of alternative political orders at a time when serious discontent had emerged. The politics of ruler-subject relations had thus become lodged within a larger world system of ideas.

Second, the hegemony of colonial rule which the notables accepted and indeed helped to construct served important needs of the local magnates. The fundamental problem which local elites faced in the nineteenth century, as throughout the city's history, was that an alien ruling group, with social and cultural preoccupations that diverged radically from those of city dwellers, exercised a near-monopoly over the means of coercion. The colonial agenda of improvement posed a potential and continuing threat to the autonomy of the indigenous sphere and to the viability of local leaderships. The notables coped with uncertainty through a politics of deference. In acknowledging imperial supremacy, they achieved recognition of their own claims to political power and justice within the Raj. Submissiveness—expressed in terms the British considered appropriate—continued to be a means of converting power relations into moral relations. Because local elites actively contributed to the authority of colonial rule and because public culture served certain notable purposes, it would be mistaken to insist that hegemony was imposed from above or that notable consciousness was a false consciousness.

Third, the hegemony reflected in public culture was a negotiated and partial one. Notables worked within the limitations of colonially derived discourse, but they interpreted its symbols and terminology in light of their own preoccupations. They called upon the ruling group to honor obligations to the values it had espoused. They injected elements of personal deference into a public discourse theoretically

founded upon impersonal principles of justice. In some cases they used their political influence to accomplish ends that were antithetical to colonial purpose, such as the enhancement of their personal reputations and the protection of the indigenous domain from further intrusions by government. Often these efforts were quite effective. Despite statements from the colonizers that the improving ethic involved being at war with normal practice, urban reform proceeded in piecemeal fashion, leaving much of the autonomy of the inner spheres of local politics intact and the control of local leaderships within those spheres only partially eroded. Thus we can continue to picture local magnates of the early twentieth century as participating in two cultural domains, a public sphere and an indigenous one, each characterized by its own languages. For most Surtis, the inner arena remained the more critical of the two.

Fourth, the negotiated versions of colonial ideology were multiple. Four distinct subcultures, each associated with a particular religious community, took shape: the Muslim, the Bohra, the Parsi, and the Hindu-Jain. The character of these subcultures was a product of the interaction between two forces, the conceptions of public and natural leadership derived from colonial thinking and the ongoing efforts of local elites to construct a culture that fit their needs.

Finally, the cultural accommodation of the Surtis was an elite accommodation. Until the 1880s, the notables had a near monopoly over the idioms of public politics and access to the colonial rulers. Others without appropriate bilingual skills were shut out from access to the district and provincial authorities except insofar as they aligned themselves with notable leaderships. In effect the magnates managed to isolate the concerns of the urban underclass from the civic arena. Their efforts to act as patrons for their communities, to offer piecemeal, everyday resistance to specific imperial policies, and to sustain patterns of religious giving—all acts grounded in precolonial idioms of politics—bolstered their own authority but also ensured that plebeian society remained distant from the public sphere and that no truly counterhegemonic culture emerged from below.

The position of the city's notables, however, was a vulnerable one. The contradictions between their civic roles and their roles as natural leaders, between their status as political dependents of the government officials and as representatives of public opinion, between their roles as agents of reform and as authority figures in precolonial social formations that resisted the agenda of progress, were readily apparent to Surtis with a more complete command over public discourse. The emergence of persons with substantial secular schooling and exposure

to English political traditions during the 1880s presented a real challenge to the notables' privileged position as intermediaries. The English-educated politicians were able to use their mastery over the idiom of public politics to outflank and undermine the power of the notables in the civic arena. In the course of this challenge, the new elite reshaped the basic form of public culture, fashioning for the first time the contours of a liberal representative polity.

Eight
The English-educated Elite and Public Leadership

In 1880 the foundations of the British Raj in Surat rested largely upon informal ties between a foreign administrative elite and the men the administrators accepted as leaders of the city's religious communities. By 1914, on the eve of World War I, notables no longer controlled the key mediating roles in the city. Lawyers, doctors, and other Englisheducated professionals, most of whom could not have achieved recognition as headmen of local social groups, had captured the municipality and positions as the most significant advisers of the British officials.

To a great extent, the members of this English-educated "elite" acquired privileged places in the political system of Raj because they were able to present themselves and to cast their appeals for justice in terms that were especially compelling to the colonial rulers.^[1]   Drawing upon models of British municipal and parliamentary politics, they projected a self-image as leaders of a public that cut across the boundaries of Surat's ethnic groupings. They called upon the officials of the empire to uphold and honor principles held most dear in the culture of England itself, principles such as progress, the public good, the will of the people, and patriotism. They fashioned new institutional forms grounded in the experience of British history—voluntary associations, educational societies, cooperative unions, and the press—from which they could make claims to the attention of government. Even those members of the ruling group reluctant to concede the existence of public opinion or a conception of the public good among Indians were forced to consider these appeals lodged in the most prestigious of all British political idioms. At the same time, groups and leaderships deeper in Surti society, eager to influence colonial policy and con-

cerned to defend themselves against potentially threatening imperial initiatives, came to rely on these persons who possessed such a special ability to communicate in the strange language of the civil servants.

Recourse to the language of public politics allowed members of the English-educated elite to exercise a much greater assertiveness in their politics than the notables ever had. Gradually they broke with the deferential style that had constrained the notability, offering in its place a more contentious, litigious manner of conducting politics. They discovered in civic discourse a vehicle for prodding, questioning, even confronting the district establishment. But even as they adopted more aggressive political styles, they became confined in a new conceptual straitjacket. In attempting to influence colonial decision making, they conceded that local politics would be played out within an alien language that confirmed the myth of Western superiority and that stripped Indian cultures of much of their dignity. Their rhetoric implicitly acknowledged the colonial view that India was behind Britain in its evolutionary development and that it could prepare to assume a greater role in self-government only gradually; they may have disputed with each other and with their rulers where on the linear scale of history their city and their country should be ranked, but they acknowledged the scale itself. They also accepted the notion that large sections of the Indian population were incapable of full-fledged participation in the creation of a new political order and that certain indigenous notions, such as dharma and abru, had little place in shaping civic policy. Much of their rhetoric implied an acceptance of British rule and the necessity for a continued colonial role in arbitrating Indian political conflict. In short, they forced political discussion and debate in the city to shift to a new terrain, but they did so in a way that reshaped rather than undermined colonial hegemony. The language that they developed inhibited the formulation of a more thoroughgoing critique of the political order that might have informed a sustained, collective resistance to the Raj.

The self-image of public leader was primarily one that defined a relationship wih the rulers of India, not with residents of the city. Public discourse, which denigrated or treated as irrelevant the principles by which most Surtis gave meaning to their own lives, was hardly an effective vehicle for gaining the support of the larger population. Yet leadership in the civic arena required the local politician to muster at least the tacit backing of urban householders, particularly at election time. Members of the English-educated elite achieved this end less by transforming public discourse into a more populist form than by resorting to a second set of languages rooted in the subcultures of specific local communities, especially that of the Brahman- Vaniyas. Rather than de-

veloping their own constituencies, in fact, they often relied on powerful urban magnates with substantial local followings, particularly Hindu and Jain sheth s. They were in effect political bilinguals, who could communicate in at least two rhetorical modes and move at least partially within the cultural spheres of both the ruler and the ruled. Their bilingualism blocked most residents from access to the civic arena, where critical decisions about local life were increasingly being made.

Origins of the English-Educated Elite

Surat's emergent public leadership was composed of men drawn from diverse caste and religious backgrounds. They shared their relatively high status, their English education, and their positions as brokers in the city's politics. Most of those who rose to influence in the civic arena of politics by the early twentieth century were either Brahmans, Kayasthas, or Parsis. Many came from families with proud heritages of administrative work, literary genius, and reforming zeal. Nagar Brahmans, the most prestigious of all urban castes in Gujarat, had staffed government bureaucracies in the region for centuries. By the early nineteenth century some Nagars had assumed positions of importance in the colonial government and in the administrations of a number of princely states in Gujarat and Saurashtra. The Nagars of Surat were among the earliest to take up the new professions after midcentury.^[2] Anavil Brahmans, by contrast, had been tied more closely to agrarian society. In precolonial times a few had functioned as desai s, semi-official revenue agents analogous to the zamindars of northern India. Under colonial rule, a number of Anavil families remained powerful in the countryside as controllers of land and credit, but others parlayed their wealth and influence into remunerative careers in government, law, and education in centers like Surat and Bombay.^[3] The Parsis, as we have seen, developed close ties to the British as early as the seventeenth century, when some became important agents of the East India Company. After the center of company activity shifted to Bombay, thousands migrated southward to the growing port city. Of those that remained in Surat, the most influential left business for positions in the early colonial administration.^[4] In addition to those from these service groupings were a few men from the "business communities," especially Hindu and Jain Vaniyas, who had always had some representatives working in administrative fields and who gradually moved into the new professions that required English education over the course of the nineteenth century.^[5]

While all members of the new civic elite came from high-status communities, very few could have won recognition as natural leaders.

Though there was no necessary separation between the notability and those who played the most prominent roles in local public organizations after the 1880s, the overlap was quite small. Since, to the British, natural leadership was defined in part by hereditary qualities, it was difficult for those outside a restricted set of families to acquire such recognition. The notion of public leadership—historically based on the challenges of commoners to aristocratic authority—was potentially open to a much broader range of persons. In practice, however, the new elite was only marginally wider than the notability, since only persons with very high levels of English education could fully command the vocabulary and grammar necessary to enter its ranks.

Before the late nineteenth century, knowledge of English was monopolized by a few families who could arrange private tutors for their promising offspring. Only after the founding of the Irish Presbyterian Mission School and the Surat High School in the 1840s did the path to institutions of higher learning begin to widen. By the 1880s Surat was sending a handful of students each year to liberal arts colleges such as Elphinstone College, Wilson College, and the University of Bombay (all in Bombay), or Fergusson College in Poona, and to professional schools such as the Grant Medical College and the Government Law College in Bombay. There they established links with future political leaders of the presidency, built new ties, and became exposed to British political theory.^[6]

English schools and colleges undoubtedly provided critical socializing for the boys and young men who attended them. Exposed to an education in which praise of British practice and criticism of Indian custom were common, many went out into their society ready to implement reform. Yet it should not be assumed that contact with Western ideas alone was responsible for transforming their ways of thinking. What is missing from most studies of English education is a consideration of the social context of learning, particularly of the relations of power involved. In their schools students learned to win the approval of (or to annoy) teachers, principals, and upperclassmen as they competed for grades and prizes in academic and athletic competitions and appropriated skills that could lead to success in the larger colonial world. Many sought acknowledgment as youth of promise from powerful Englishmen or prominent Indian politicians in the presidency cities. Success in these efforts involved developing a mastery over idioms meaningful to these reference groups and persons. Students also tended to be selective about which Western ideas they appropriated as their own. Though they often adopted the language of public politics in an almost pure form, Surti politicians rarely chose to emulate European familial norms, to abandon their castes, or to convert to Chris-

tianity, despite extensive exposure to the social and religious criticisms of English reformers and missionaries. They accommodated themselves most strongly to the British values that seemed relevant in the most critical arenas of colonial politics. The model of Western education and Indian response fails both to recognize the importance of domination to the adoption of ostensibly Western notions and to account for the discrimination students displayed in absorbing foreign concepts. A fuller understanding of value transformation in Indian schools requires recognition that education is itself a political process that involves power, negotiation, and sometimes resistance.^[7]

A full investigation of the processes of educational socialization, however, lies outside the scope of this work. For the immediate purposes of this study it is sufficient to view schools as the first in a series of heavily politicized contexts in which young Indian men learned to generate new cultural meanings and as places where they acquired a practical competence in specialized skills they could put to use in later activities: control over the English language, a command over the canon of European political philosophy, familiarity with the traditions of British local and parliamentary politics, an understanding of law, and proficiency in debate and drafting petitions. Outside the walls of their classrooms, of course, they also were exposed to models of political action already in use by prominent Indian leaders in the presidency cities.

Those who returned to Surat for careers discovered that the knowledge acquired during their schooling stood them in good stead in local society. Lawyers, doctors, journalists, and engineers all found themselves in demand, not simply in their professional fields but also as spokesmen for local groups that wished to influence government policy. When the principle of election was established for half the positions on the city's municipality in 1883, English-educated men easily sought and won positions as councillors. Over the next thirty years the vast majority of elected members on the municipality were drawn from the professions.^[8]

With the introduction of the elective principle, many local magnates began to withdraw from direct participation in the municipal arena and turned to English-educated professionals to represent their interests in civic politics. Some Hindu and Jain sheth s were already beginning to find themselves ill-equipped to deal with the sophisticated and mystifying system of municipal law, the ritualized rules of procedure at work in council meetings, and the rhetoric of political rights and responsibilities to which councillors needed to appeal in effectively pressing their cases. A few may have feared losing face among their peers by engaging in an activity that was now under the constant scrutiny of the press. Support for persons more skilled in the language of the foreign rulers

thus had considerable advantages over direct immersion in municipal politics.

Lawyers, doctors, and journalists also came to be indispensable in generating pressure on the council from outside. Effective campaigns against local regulations required specialized knowledge of the procedures for filing objections in municipal, provincial, and imperial offices as well as a command over the applicable principles of British justice. Educated men often developed a wide repertoire of constitutional tactics. When the municipality decided to institute a house tax to fund a major waterworks during the early 1890s, Hardevram Haridas, a leading figure in the Indian National Congress, submitted dozens of objections to the measure, forcing the council to consider each one by one. Once this strategy was exhausted, he organized several petition drives against the measure, the largest gathering many thousand signatures. Eventually this effort failed too, but Hardevram was not done; he filed seventeen thousand separate cases in local courts on behalf of Surat's citizens. These efforts effectively delayed the plan nearly four years and made government hesitant to impose further taxation for some time afterward.^[9] The building of a drainage system needed to carry waste out of the city was delayed for five decades. In the meantime much of the hugely increased volume of water supplied by the new waterworks seeped into the ground, creating conditions far more unsanitary than before.

The municipality was not the only point of contact between the Raj and the city's population, but its politics exemplified the general problems posed by the changing nature of colonial rule during the later nineteenth century. The growing importance of legislatures, law, and bureaucratic principles of rule made it increasingly difficult for unschooled residents to negotiate effectively with government. Symbolic specialists—that is, the English-educated politicians—came to assume greater significance as brokers in many areas. Slowly they expanded the scope of their activity, establishing new institutions and a new style of communicating with the ruling group.

The English-Educated Elite and Public Culture

The function of a broker was hardly a new one in the politics of urban India. In fact, one major interpretation of English-educated politicians—that of the Cambridge school—has tended to view such persons as playing the traditional role of publicist to powerful patrons, albeit in new political arenas established by the British.^[10] This interpretation recognizes the considerable backing that public figures of the time of-

ten had from powerful magnates within their society and the continuity of some specific publicist-patron relationships over many decades. However, it downplays the fact that English-educated men were defining their sociopolitical identities in a largely new way. In Surat, beginning about 1880, a handful of people who sought to influence colonial policy began to fashion a collective identity as public leaders—that is, as ones who cared about the welfare of the entire urban citizenry, who represented the interests of the people, and who identified with India as a nation. As public leaders, they became involved not only in pursuing the concerns of their patrons in the municipality and other colonial institutions but also in expanding civic life to include more schools for the city's boys and girls, cooperative credit societies to provide loans to farmers of the surrounding countryside, and public associations that could pressure the government in the name of the urban citizenry. One might say they created a broker culture distinct from that of their indigenous patrons, a culture that in effect became their own preserve. The larger population, unable to capture the nuances of expression key to participation in the civic arena, was essentially denied access to it.

Members of the English-educated elite developed their self-image in the course of their politics, shaping their cultural world through encounters with the colonial rulers. Whether seeking government patronage or opposing imperial policies, they cared greatly what the civil servants of the Raj thought about them and consistently sought official recognition of their place in urban politics and their claims to justice. In framing presentations of themselves as public leaders, the English-educated men indicated that their political roles were not confined to the narrow loyalties of caste and religion but embraced the interests of the city as a whole. Implicitly acknowledging the social evolutionary theories of Europe, which posited a universal tendency for societies to move from collectivities organized along local and primordial lines to nationalities built around universalistic loyalties, they suggested that their own emergence marked a new stage in Surat's political development. If, according to the viceroy Lord Ripon, power was to be slowly devolved upon a small group of enlightened Indians, then they, the English-educated reasoned, were the persons who should assume the responsibilities of self-government and the political education of their fellow city dwellers.

The notion of public leadership, as the emergent elite used it, carried three meanings which overlapped imperfectly. First, there was the reformist dimension, which suggested the concern with the public good and agreement with the imperial rulers' expressed goal of transforming India into a modern, industrial society. Second was the popular di-

mension, which involved advocacy of the interests of the people or the public—an undifferentiated collectivity that cut across the descentbased social groupings of the city. Finally, there was the national dimension, which stressed identification with India as a nation and with emerging nationalist organizations. Each of these dimensions was critical to the elite's self-image, but one or more of these dimensions might be stressed according to the particular context in which an individual was putting forth his claims. Each was also to some extent open to interpretation. In part, the politics of English-educated politicians were an ongoing struggle to construct the meaning of public leadership along these three dimensions and to win colonial acceptance of their constructions.

Much in the rhetorical and institutional behavior of English-educated politicians might seem unremarkable to a Western or modern Indian audience. But we need to recognize that there was a time in Surat when the language of public politics was largely novel and foreign. In order to capture its novelty, the reader might try to enter the perspective of Surat's underclasses, who must have regarded civic politics as an esoteric cult—one to whose sacred incantations they were not privy—that determined access to the alien ruling group. Only by imagining the "otherness" in the language of public politics can we avoid the assumption that there was anything natural or inevitable about its formation and grasp how the particular context of power conditioned the creation of the liberal political order.

The Reformist Dimension

Every educated politician in Surat saw himself as a public reformer. As men committed to the "common good" and to "progress," members of the new elite participated in institutions whose declared purpose was the reform and improvement of Surat and India. They proclaimed an identification with the welfare of the city and a concern with the education, industrialization, agricultural development, and improved sanitation of India. They shared with British officials the view that India should be led along the same path of civic and economic development as England. Implicit in such a stance was a claim to be persons of advanced views who were entitled to great political powers. The identity of reformer usually involved consciously setting oneself against the bulk of Surat's residents, who were commonly depicted as too ignorant or too motivated by parochial interests to perceive the long-term good of the city.

Before the twentieth century, municipal activity was the main arena in which English-educated politicians could achieve recognition as "dis-

interested public servants." Some became champions of sanitary improvement, road construction, and primary education. In a few cases, their reforming zeal led directly to great local unpopularity. Indeed some members of the elite felt they served their city best by resisting popular pressures and by pressing forward with the agenda of progress. Between 1892 and 1894, the majority of Surat's municipal councillors, including nine of the fifteen elected members, supported the government's house-tax scheme despite formidable opposition in the city. Frederick Lely, the district collector, commended this stalwart commitment to reform, writing his superiors that the municipality, "in adopting the scheme of taxation now under consideration and steadfastly adhering to it in the face of much opposition, has evinced a laudable public spirit and has acted in the true interests of the people and trade of Surat in a manner which deserves recognition of Government."^[11] Several of the councillors were later rewarded with titles and other honors for their support of Lely during this critical period.

Outside the municipality, English-educated politicians manifested their commitment to progress by founding or participating in institutions designed to stimulate the development of their city. The most prominent of these were educational organizations. During the late nineteenth century, membership on managing committees of local schools was common for Surat's professional men. Such committees ran the affairs of such educational institutions as Raichand Dipchand Girls' School, Union High School, and Tapidas and Tulsidas Varajdas High School, often soliciting the necessary funds to run the institutions from local sheth s. Perhaps the most ambitious enterprise in the city before World War I was the Sarvajanik Education Society, founded in 1912 by Chunilal Shah. Shah modeled the society after the Deccan Education Society, which had been founded by the Maharastrian nationalist Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and actively sought volunteer teachers, as had its Poona counterpart. The society managed several schools in the city and district, including a middle school for local girls and Sarvajanik College (later Maganlal Thakordas Balmukandas College). Prominent municipal councillors and other English-educated figures served on the board of directors from the beginning. Surti cotton merchants living in Bombay provided most of the funds.^[12]

The Surat District Cooperative Union, begun in 1908, only four years after passage of the Cooperative Credit Societies Bill by the Imperial Legislative Council, also solidified the emerging elite's claims to civic leadership. As I. J. Catanach has shown, colonial administrators at the turn of the century were paying increasing attention to what they viewed as the stranglehold of rural moneylenders over the Indian peasant and sought to promote cooperative societies as alternative sources

of credit. The civil servants in charge of this effort in Bombay relied largely on Indian nonofficials to organize and develop societies in the districts. Often positions of leadership in cooperative organizations were assumed by ex-officers of the revenue department eager to launch political careers in their localities or to win imperial honors and other forms of government recognition.^[13] In Surat the most important figures behind the cooperative movement were two retired government officials, Bamanji Modi and Khandubhai Desai. The former became chairman of the union, the latter its honorary manager. Within three years after the organization's founding in 1908, it controlled a network of thirty-eight societies in the district and had a working capital of about 200,000 rupees. This may have barely made a dent in the credit needs of the peasantry of South Gujarat, who as yet had developed little contact with the union's leaders. But those who led the organization demonstrated their concern with promoting the welfare of the rural population. Work for the Union won Modi a Khan Bahadur ship and Desai a Rao Bahadur ship.^[14]

In becoming staunch advocates of progress, however, public leaders were not acting as lackeys of the British and their causes. Reforming zeal often was a rhetorical platform for launching challenges to existing policies and making claims to resources and rewards controlled by the government. English-educated politicians regularly questioned whether the colonial administration was living up to its avowed ideals of improvement in practice, asserting that they knew better how the public good could be served. Members of the press came to regard an aggressive—yet still loyal—criticism of government on these grounds as a solemn civic duty and frequently took the provincial administration to task for shortcomings in its modernizing efforts. In a 1901 article, the editors of Gujarat Mitra called for greater provincial support for Surat's municipality, arguing that the Bombay administration had "not hitherto, done anything of special note to help the training of the population," and had a responsibility to support the local body which it could not deny.^[15] Municipal addresses to visiting imperial dignitaries increasingly became occasions to press Surat's need for public funds. Sandwiched between statements of loyalty in a 1911 address to Sir George Clarke, governor of Bombay, were affirmations of the city's record in promoting reform and mild jabs at the provincial administration for its niggardliness in funding municipal schools:

Government recognizes, by its grants in aid of education, that it [education] is a matter not of local but of imperial concern, and we claim a larger degree of sympathy and help in carrying out this work. While our expenditure has grown by leaps and bounds, and while we have been opening new schools, the grant given to us has remained stationary for

years. We claim increased assistance from Government, not that we may lighten our burden, but that we may increase and improve the educational facilities of the city.^[16]

In confirming a commitment to improvement, educated politicians also asserted entitlement to greater political influence and public acknowledgment from the Raj. The announcement of the imperial honors lists invariably raised the ire of urban reformers who felt that their public work had not been sufficiently recognized. Journalists charged the administration with unfairness in failing to honor those men who had worked most diligently on municipalities and other civic organizations. The honors list of 1898 prompted them to complain: "Recognition of disinterested public service now includes members of Government and a few native chiefs and princes. It is these two classes that appear in usual numbers in the honours list from year to year. Those who silently work towards the good of the country at great personal sacrifice are seldom rewarded for their services."^[17] An insistence that Surat's leaders had performed their civic duties well in the past was also essential to any call for greater self-governing privileges. Urging that the proportion of elective seats on the municipality be increased from one-half to two-thirds and that the council be given the right to choose its own president, the Praja Hit Vardhak Sabha asserted in 1889 that:

Our city has made substantial progress and our citizens have been taking an ever increasing interest in Local Self-Government, and have shown sufficient qualifications and capacities for the same. . . . The capacities and qualifications of our citizens for local self-government have been officially recognized from time to time.. . . Our Municipality has earnestly tried their utmost to give a practical shape to several of the most costly but important sanitary improvements recently recommended by Government.. . . These circumstances, we humbly venture to submit,. . . make out a sufficiently strong case in favour of our city, entitling it to additional privileges.^[18]

Such statements are evidence of the willingness of English-educated men to measure the government against its avowed commitment to progress and political education as they staked out the importance of their own civic roles. While holding the administration to principles inherent in the ideology of imperialism, they refined and made more resolute their self-images as leaders with a major contribution to make to their city and to the empire. The confirmation of civic identities and the upholding of public principle were thus inextricably tied to the political processes of contending for power, status, and funding within the Raj.

But even as they disputed colonial policy, the English-educated implicitly accepted an improving ethic that ran counter to the concerns of most city dwellers. Public discourse did not allow unequivocal expressions of opposition to the alien and often threatening municipal ideals. One might counter specific proposals by using a variety of rationales— costliness, interference with religious practice, or poor planning—but direct attacks on the larger ethic of improvement were absolutely inappropriate in civic politics. Arguments couched in the rhetoric of reform during this period also consistently stopped short of outright challenge to British rule. In raising doubts about specific policies, politicians rarely questioned the sincerity of government, only its wisdom in making specific decisions without consulting local "men of advanced views." The language of improvement during the late nineteenth century thus set severe limitations on the ability to conceive and express alternative political possibilities.

This is not to say that there was no indigenous component in the conception of reform. A number of high-caste concerns found a place in public culture, but they were now rationalized in the new idiom of progress. Some city leaders, for instance, actively promoted abstinence from alcohol consumption, in effect reinforcing the efforts of Hindu saints who had long emphasized the polluting character of alcohol. Members of the new elite, however, referred to temperance as part of a larger package of reforms designed to regenerate India, along with measures to stimulate industry, agriculture, and education, and organized public conferences and associations to this end.^[19] Orphanage conferences and cow-protection societies certainly reflected Hindu fears that orphans might be converted to Christianity and traditional anxieties about the cow, but English-educated politicians presented these organizations as part of a larger effort to promote human welfare. The stated goals of an association founded in 1903 to protect the cattle of Gujarat were to improve the "backward state of agriculture" and the "depressed state of the peasantry," rationales that might have seemed quite odd to most city dwellers, who revered the cow.^[20] Thus, advocacy of reform did not simply reflect the influence of imperial thinking; it sometimes indicated an attempt to build a system of meanings consonant with powerful and persistent Hindu and Jain values. The rhetoric employed in talking about such issues within the civic arena, however, had often been stripped of any evidence of this indigenous contribution.

The Popular Dimension

The vocabulary of progress and reform was not the only scale along which members of the English-educated elite weighed government policy nor the only standard by which they shaped their roles in the city's

politics. Equally important to their developing identity was a sense of being spokesmen of the public or the people. During the course of their education they had read Locke, Mill, and Bentham, studied the English system of local self-government, and steeped themselves in the history of constitutional development. They found that presenting themselves as representatives of the people was a powerful means of approaching the ruling group, particularly when their objectives ran counter to the administration's. In projecting their own image of the shape of public opinion, they could at best hope to influence imperial policy and to gain recognition of their claims to authority, at worst to compel their rulers' attention and force the civil servants onto a rhetorical defensive.

What constituted the public, however, was very much contested. At the very least, the term suggested a collectivity of right-minded persons whose concerns were wider than those of narrow interest groups, castes, or religious groups and who were thus entitled to share in the rights and responsibilities of self-government. Beyond this point, the term could take on two divergent senses. For some, the public was a few men who, because of their education, held advanced views. For others, it was a much larger cross-section of society, such as the male taxpayers of the city (about twenty thousand in number). No one in Surat, however, suggested that the public meant anything as broad as the entire urban population; nontaxpayers and most women were always excluded. However the term was used, invoking public opinion suggested an exclusive claim to speak for the citizenry. Contending that one spoke for the people implied that one's rivals could not.

Representatives of public opinion generated their claims to embody the general will by running press campaigns, holding public meetings, and organizing public associations. In the petition campaign against the house tax mentioned earlier, Hardevram Haridas and his supporters used all three methods to suggest that public opinion opposed the measure, translating the deep resentments of urban dwellers into terms of political justice meaningful to the small number of foreign officers and judges with the power to overturn the municipality's decision. They organized public meetings in various municipal wards to demonstrate the depth of popular opposition and to collect large numbers of signatures on petitions to be sent to Bombay. A letter from a "public meeting of the inhabitants of Gopipura Ward" asserted that "the public of Surat have in unmistakable terms protested against this measure" and suggested that the municipality "should retreat with honour, [and] regain the confidence of the people which they have lost and pacify people in a right liberal manner".^[21] Those who sponsored and supported the tax, they charged, were trying "to dishonour the tradition of the British Rule by disregarding vox populi."^[22] Local newspapers stressed the

same themes. Native Opinion stated that "when we find the inhabitants of all the twelve different wards assembling in constitutional meetings, one after another, and condemning the measure in most unequivocal terms, coupled with three thousand and odd written objections—some of them very learned and elaborate—sent to the municipality, none should venture to say that the feeling . . . is not genuine."^[23] The Gujarat Mitra insisted that the government and municipality were forcing the issue on the citizenry, which knew its own interests best: "If our people are able to pay rates, they will willingly accept all municipal services which conduce to the betterment of their health. If they are unable to do so, it will be cruel kindness to force water and drainage works quite of European magnificence on them."^[24]

Though the movement eventually failed, skillful use of the idiom of public politics clearly discomfitted the defenders of the house tax, who found themselves forced to refute their opponents' contentions in the same language. Frederick Lely repeatedly argued in his memos that the struggle's leaders showed a lamentable lack of civic spirit.^[25] In 1899 he wrote, "My six years' experience of the Surat Municipality was a continuous battle with a small set of men whose one conception of public duty was to block everything progressive by some verbal impediment in the law" (emphasis added).^[26] Here, obviously, were attempts to undercut the assertions of the movement's leaders by calling on the reformist dimension of public leadership. But he also attempted to deflate the representativeness of the petition and press campaigns. Lely wrote to the government of Bombay in 1892 and 1893 that the agitation was "more or less fictitious"^[27] and that a large number of signatures were "got up" in a series of public meetings by one person (Hardevram Haridas).^[28] In other letters he charged that all but several hundred of the 6,300 petitions submitted were in the handwriting of a few individuals.^[29] Another British civil servant asserted that "the proposals have been supported by a large majority of the [municipal] Commissioners, and it is reasonable to suppose that this majority represents the more enlightened and influential portion of the ratepayers."^[30]

Much of the debate over the house tax thus came down to a battle over what it meant to be a leader of the public and who the public actually were. Both parties implicitly agreed that the term represented the ultimate source of legitimacy, yet its precise definition was up for grabs. Different understandings could be evoked for different ends. While the notion of the public was certainly drawn from outside India, it was given meaning in the context of everyday political struggles at the local level.

Lely's claims notwithstanding, the house tax was clearly an issue that engaged the feelings of numerous property owners, both small and

large, in the city. In most cases, however, English-educated politicians claimed to represent the people even when the larger population clearly was not concerned. Most Surtis identified themselves primarily with families, neighborhoods, or descent-based groupings, not as constituents of wards whose boundaries had been drawn by the municipality or as members of a undifferentiated public. Perceived assaults on familial reputations or community integrity raised popular ire—not the notion that government had failed to consult the will of the people. More often than not, public meetings were channels used by members of the small elite in pursuing their own concerns and those of their magnate patrons in very specific contexts. Views expressed at such gatherings hardly represented a cross-section of city dwellers. Many were in fact prearranged rites orchestrated by their organizers to draft a petition to the government or the municipality. Each resolution would be moved and seconded, backed by short speeches, then approved unanimously. Speakers had been chosen in advance, and dissenters rarely appeared to express their opinions. When rival factions in the city disagreed on some matter, they generally organized their own separate meetings of the public. The rules of procedure from one meeting suggest that opposing views were not tolerated:

1. That no one except those set down as movers, seconders and supporters of the proposition will be allowed to address the meeting except with permission of the Chair previously obtained in writing.

2. That no one will be allowed to move an amendment to the proposition unless it is put down in writing, and duly seconded and is permitted by the Chair. But no amendment will be permitted to be moved which is subversive of the principle involved in the same.

3. That the ruling of the Chair must be implicitly obeyed.

4. That those who will not abide by the rulings of the Chair will be on the first instance, requested to resume their seats, if they become recalcitrant they will be requested to leave the meetings, if they persist in disobeying the Chair they will be removed from the meeting.^[31]

Thus, discussion and debate, which were extremely important in the theory of Western liberal democracy, found little place in public meetings in Surat. Local actors established their own procedures for identifying public opinion, but these procedures actively prevented opening public life to the underclasses of Surat, who in any case were undoubtedly perplexed by the strange rituals of nominating chairs, proposing and seconding propositions, shouting "shame" or "hear, hear" in response to speakers' arguments, and voting for resolutions that arose in these meetings. The control exercised over public meetings by a small number of men gave limited scope for the percolation into civic politics of ideas, causes, and vocabulary from below.

Public associations also failed to take up the grievances of the city's diverse peoples. Instead they were a medium employed by Englisheducated politicians to address the administration. Many were ephemeral entities organized to petition the government on a specific issue. In 1909, for example, a Ratepayers' Association formed to urge the government to extend the municipal franchise simply disappeared from Surat after its campaign failed.^[32] The three most important associations in Surat before World War I were the Praja Samaj (People's Society) of the early 1870s, the Praja Hit Vardhak Sabha (Society for the Advancement of the People's Welfare) of the 1880s, and the Surat District Association, which formed in 1908. The first two revolved largely around the personalities of Durgaram Mehta and Ukabhai Prabhudas, respectively. Both organizations enjoyed a brief flurry of activity but died out after a few years.^[33]

In comparison to these two bodies, the Surat District Association enjoyed a rather healthy existence. Organized by local "moderate" members of the Indian National Congress, its president was Khandubhai Desai, honorary organizer of the Surat District Cooperative Union. In 1909, near the peak of its activity, it had sixty-one members. Of these, twenty-eight were in the educated professions, twenty-five were businessmen, and five were landholders. Though artisans were the largest occupational bloc in the population of the city, only one participant was listed as a "weaving master." Most of the members were Jains or highcaste Hindus. There were also eight Parsis but only two Muslims, both Daudi Bohra traders.^[34] The leaders of the association were Englisheducated men. For the most part, the association's concerns were of relevance only to the educated politicians and their patrons. Municipal matters, particularly questions of self-governing powers, overwhelmingly dominated its affairs. In 1909, the organization engaged in frenzied opposition to the proposal to extend the municipal franchise. But after the franchise battle, it fell into a semimoribund state. It was revived periodically to take up specific local body and imperial issues, though it never produced sustained political activity or gained significant popular support. At no time did the association have regular workers to take up daily affairs or regular methods for collecting funds.

The Gujarat Mitra repeatedly lamented the short lifespan of public activities in the city by quoting the adage "Surtis are bold at the beginning, but later their enthusiasm wanes."^[35] But the editors missed the major reason for the spasmodic character of public life: public meetings and associations were to a great extent channels utilized by the tiny elite of English-educated professionals in approaching the government, but they had little relevance to the majority of Surtis, who conducted their day-to-day politics in idioms that were almost completely distinct.

Rather than conceiving of public leaders as their representatives, ordinary residents of the city more likely viewed the educated politician as a sort of ritual specialist able to master the special ceremonies needed to manage the colonizers or as a patron who provided his clients with certain essential services. The new politicians had adapted British traditions of political organization to establish the legitimacy of their actions and roles. They felt little need to bring the larger population of the city into the new arena of politics that they were creating. The public of Surat thus remained a very limited group of persons, and public politics remained confined to a very few issues.

The National Dimension

Like advocacy of reform and representation of the people, identification with the Indian nation constituted a claim to acceptability in British terms. As we have seen, the colonial rulers viewed their "nationhood" as a special marker of their advanced level of development as a people. They regarded the fact that the people of South Asia did not identify with the entity they had create—India—as a sign of cultural inferiority, as evidence in fact that continued colonial rule was necessary. Even Britishers sympathetic to the quest of educated South Asians for greater political rights, such as Alexander Octavian Hume, shared the assumption that self-governing responsibilities could come only as Indians forged a national identity. In imagining themselves to be part of a common community along with other peoples who shared their common subjection to British rule in South Asia, elite figures in Surat sought to subvert colonial judgments that denied them full personhood and to gain access to the political privileges and influence to which those that had reached a relatively high stage of consciousness were theoretically entitled.^[36] In short, the effort to forge a solidarity with other South Asians was heavily conditioned by a colonial discourse that privileged those possessing a national identity against those who did not.

Throughout the once-colonized world, the notion of nationalism today unambiguously connotes not only an identification with the nation but also the desire for independence from foreign domination. But in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Surat, nationalism by no means always precluded loyalty to the British Empire. All members of the Englisheducated elite attended and participated in imperial ceremonies, occasions that required public expressions of loyalty. Some participated in organizations committed to cementing the bond between the Indian nation and the British Empire. In the early twentieth century Rao Bahadur Lallubhai Pranvallabhdas Parekh founded a counter organization to the Indian National Congress, the National Indian Association,

whose avowed purpose, according to its members, was to increase understanding between Indians and Englishmen. In one typical meeting, members of the association gave lectures on the benefits of the British Empire and passed resolutions to promote reform and greater cooperation with the rulers. To modern observers, such an institution smacks of sycophancy, yet its members no doubt conceived of themselves as nation builders, regarding close cooperation with the empire as the best way of promoting their country's development. They did help foster a sense of Indianness in the city, albeit within a very narrow elite group.^[37]

Involvement in the Indian National Congress was somewhat limited before 1905, although a number of Surtis participated in the organization from its inception. During the late 1880s the Praja Hit Vardhak Sabha chose delegates to the Congress, including several municipal councillors.^[38] A few local journalists maintained a regular association with the national body. In addition to attending annual meetings of the nationalist organization, they organized addresses for visiting Congress leaders, such as those honoring Dadabhai Naoroji, Alexander Octavian Hume, and Pherozeshah Mehta.^[39] The politicians of Bombay and Poona tended to view Surat as a backwater of Congress activity, and few people with positions of prominence in civic politics were willing to risk the displeasure of English civil servants by taking a stridently activist role in the affairs of the national organization.

After 1905, however, the local scene changed dramatically. Suddenly almost all participants in Surat's new civic life chose to align themselves with the Congress. In anticipation of the Morley-Minto reforms, which would give municipalities a stronger voice in choosing members of the provincial legislature, Congress moderates from Bombay, such as Pherozeshah Mehta, began to pursue close ties with Surat's city councillors more vigorously.^[40] Then the city received the honor of being host to the sessions of the 1906 Bombay Provincial Congress and the 1907 meetings of the Indian National Congress itself. The Surat District Association was founded as a branch of the Congress about the time of the historic Surat meetings, partly as an attempt to restrain a small group of "extremists" aligned with Lokamanya Tilak that had just emerged in the city, partly out of a concern with influencing the shape of reform initiatives from the center. Stimulated by the example of the antipartition movement in Bengal, several local leaders also tried to encourage the development of swadeshi (native) industries in the city. By the onset of World War I, nationalism, Congress membership, and public leadership had become inextricably bound together.^[41] But it generally came without a larger questioning of adherence to empire. To be a member of the new elite meant to be both loyal to the British

and imbued with national pride, supportive of imperial intentions to reform Indian society and critical of government policies on behalf of a people who seemingly disapproved of the agenda of improvement.

The English-Educated and Competing Urban Leaderships

As the idiom of public politics assumed central significance in elite selfrepresentations to the colonial rulers, it became an increasingly important ground of contention between rival political figures. While striving for political recognition, English-educated men constantly sought to establish their claims to authority against others. In this process, they sharpened their moral notions and refined their self-conception as public leaders.

Collectively urban professionals acquired positions in the local political system at the expense of the natural leaders. As early as the 1880s, English-educated men began to challenge the right of the notables to enjoy privileged access to the ruling group. As their self-confidence grew, their assaults on notable authority intensified. Appealing to British historical theories that suggest a universal tendency for societies to move from social stages in which leadership was based upon hereditary qualities to those in which it was founded upon public capabilities, members of the emergent elite began to attack the notion that any individual was "naturally" entitled to local ascendancy. Each of the dimensions of public leadership—the reformist, the popular, and the national—was invoked in this challenge.

The English-educated politicians believed, first of all, that their interest in the common welfare and their diligence in promoting reform entitled them to special consideration in official circles. In their outlook, they represented the enlightened sections of society who were laying the foundations of self-government in the city. They objected that men they regarded as backward, superstitious, and unproductive often held more influence with the rulers than themselves. Articles in the Gujarat Mitra frequently condemned specific notables for lack of public spirit. They lashed out at Hindu sheth s for wasteful expenditures on caste feasts and religious festivals.^[42] They ridiculed the Modis, the city's leading Parsi family, for their claims to descent from ancient Persian kings.^[43] They challenged the old Mughal gentry for its ostentatious ways of life, encouragement of religious "fanaticism," and lack of concern with the welfare of the ordinary Muslim.

Similar attacks were made on the patriotism of the notables. Local journalists questioned the natural leaders for sycophancy in their relations to the British and for their hesitancy in supporting affairs of the

Indian National Congress. In 1893, the editor of Gujarat Mitra, suggesting that nationalism and public spiritedness were inescapably linked, bitterly criticized the notables for nonattendance at the presentation of an address to Alexander Hume: "The Rao Bahadurs and Khan Bahadurs, our Rao Sahebs and Khan Sahebs, our Raises [notables] and shetias and all our titled heads and the so-called leaders of society showed their appreciation for the public good as represented by the meeting, by their strange and unaccountable absence."^[44]

While challenges to notable power frequently took place along the reformist and nationalist dimensions of public leadership, it was the question of who should act as spokesman for the people that proved to be the most critical battleground. In the late nineteenth century, a trio of notables, usually the heads of the Edrus (or Nawab of Surat), the Modi, and Nagarsheth families, each acting as representative of his religious community, had controlled the right to call all public meetings on the basis of hereditary authority. In the first decade of the twentieth century, English-educated men began to question "the monopoly of the three signatures," both in the press and in the streets. Public meetings held on such diverse issues as the situation of Indians in South Africa, the death of the Parsi leader Jamshedji Jijibhai, and the building of an overbridge at the railway station provided opportunities to strike out at the prevailing practice. The Surat District Association issued a direct challenge in January 1909, when it called its own meeting, in opposition to that called by several notables, to discuss the Morley-Minto reforms.The Gujarat Mitra passionately defended the action:

Such a laughable and lamentable custom as having public meetings called only upon the signatures of certain individuals does not exist anywhere, and in times like this, those who assert such autocratic claims invite criticism and unfavorable comment. We are happy to see that such a leading citizen of the city . . . as Zain el-Edrus has shown proper understanding of the issue. By participating in the public meeting called by the secretaries of the District Association he has demonstrated that the right to call public meetings does not belong to certain individuals but to public bodies, leading householders of the various communities and all alike . . .. In the future, the tyranny of the three signatures will come to an end, people will be happy with the practice of collectively calling public meetings for public business and there will be no occasions for raising such divisive criticisms.^[45]

In challenging the notability, members of the English-educated elite eventually were able to capture the ethical high ground as interpreted by the colonial rulers. In 1888 the district collector had dismissed the Praja Hit Vardhak Sabha, the city's leading public association at the time, as an unrepresentative "coterie of Vakils and schoolboys." "The

more influential townspeople [i.e., the notables]," he insisted, "laugh at it."^[46] By the early twentieth century, however, the British regularly consulted and listened to men from the Surat District Association and other public organizations. In part the success of the urban professionals lay in their ability to wear down their rulers through their constant appeal to British logic and in their capacity for exposing the contradictions in the notables' various political roles. After all, colonial thinking regarded aristocratic leaderships as reflecting an earlier (and therefore more backward) stage in the march of political progress. Given the moral hierarchy explicit in the linear conception of history, political aspirants who could mount claims to embody forms of representation further along the evolutionary scale were in an excellent position to oust those who clung to the theory of natural leadership. As the new politicians developed a reputation for commitment to urban improvement through their participation in public institutions such as the municipality, civil servants found it increasingly difficult to deny them an important collaborative role in the empire. Just before the war, the government expanded the number of elective positions on the municipality to give greater scope in decision making to the urban professionals. The collector altered the form of the annual durbar as well, allowing representatives of the public to raise questions about policy.^[47]

The notables were ill-equipped to defend themselves against the rhetorical onslaught of the new public leaders. Prominent Hindu and Jain sheth s slowly withdrew from direct contacts with colonial officials. Parsi, Muslim, and Bohra notables, by contrast, began to cast themselves as defenders of minority communities threatened by the Hindu majority, discarding in part claims based upon the hereditary qualities of their families.

As the natural leaders gradually lost their lines of approach to the government, struggles between contending factions of urban professionals assumed greater significance. New claimants for power arose continually from the ranks of the English-educated during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, threatening the position of those who had already established themselves as brokers. Conflicts developed between "in" and "out" groups, with members of each faction often drawing upon the same vocabulary and discursive principles. While attempting to convince the colonial elite of the legitimacy of their positions compared with their opponents', members of each contending party strengthened their identities as public leaders.

A single, especially well-documented case provides an excellent example of how conflicts between segments of the English-educated elite could lead to consensus in the vocabulary of political claims in Surat. Around the time of the Indian National Congress meetings of 1907,

followers of the Maharashtrian leader Tilak emerged in the city, led by a young lawyer, Dahyabhai Desai. These individuals, called extremists by their opponents, differed little from "moderates" such as Chandrashankar Bhimanand, Thakkoram Kapilram Mehta, and Chunilal Gandhi in caste or educational background, though they tended to be younger men who had not yet achieved the same success in their careers or attained the same influence in public institutions like the Surat District Association or the municipality. They were highly influenced by developments taking place in the larger nation in the years immediately before this: the arrogant posture of Lord Curzon toward Indian nationalism, the antipartition movement in Bengal and its call for the boycott of British goods, and the campaigns of Tilak in Bombay and Poona. The most obvious ground of their conflict with the moderates was the issue of who best represented the nation, a question that assumed special significance once Surat had been fixed as the site of the 1907 Congress sessions. In the months leading up to the meetings, both moderates and extremists sponsored talks by prominent Congress leaders in attempts to capture local support for their national programs. M. M. Rayaji, an extremist leader, founded a newspaper in the city, Shakti, from which he launched sharp attacks on both government and the moderates. His newspaper apparently drew upon the rhetoric of Bengali and Maharashtrian nationalism in its columns, but unfortunately no copies of the paper seem to have survived.

Evidence of the language surrounding more local issues, however, is available. When the government announced in 1909 that it would consider making changes in the municipal constitution, the extremists issued a challenge to the moderates, arguing that the franchise requirement should be lowered from 9 rupees to 4 rupees tax per year (thus increasing the number of voters from about five thousand to about ten thousand) and that the general ward, in which only government servants and other well-educated people could vote, should be eliminated. A question of self-interest was at stake: significant reform of the franchise would perhaps allow the Desai-led group to win a larger number of seats on the council. The moderates, on the other hand, feared that they might lose their dominant position among elected councillors if the changes took effect.

The battle between the two factions centered not only on the spoils of office but also on which group could rightfully claim urban leadership. In pressing its case, each held public meetings and organized public associations to convince the government of the depth of feeling on its side. Members of the Bhimanand faction claimed to be public leaders because they represented a broad group of the "respectable" men of the city;^[48] the Desai group emphasized crowd size, insisting that

fifteen hundred citizens had attended one of their meetings in favor of franchise reform, far more than were present at their opponents' gatherings.^[49] Each attempted to persuade the civil administration that its rival was a narrow interest group rather than true leaders of the public. Bhimanand and his supporters charged that the "extremists" were "trying to earn cheap popularity by mixing questions of octroi and General Ward for purposes of their own" and that attendance figures at extremist meetings were inflated:

An idea will be easily formed as to how far these people could be said to have represented the public at large and still less the voters of the General Ward, whose interest is at stake. In this meeting of the 8th of August, one of the extremists presided. The legitimate attendance was very poor and meager. As it was an evening of Adhik Shravan, a religious month when Hindus flock out in large numbers for offering homage to the idols in the temples . . . they [the worshipers] were attracted to join the crowd to witness the meeting. No respectable gentry accepted their invitation and attended the meeting. If they had it at any other place there would have been an audience of hardly 50 persons at the most, and that, too, of those drawn from these few discontented grain dealers and retail cloth merchants [who objected to new octroi duties on their trades] and those few extremists.^[50]

The extremists, on the other hand, charged that those who opposed the constitutional changes were a small, self-interested coterie:

They are . . . a few Municipal Councillors (who naturally think that the increase in number of voters means increased danger to their seats as well as greater trouble and worry to get them) backed up by some of their private friends and passed as independent movements of different public bodies. The general public is very keen on this point and strongly resents the conduct of these councillors who have, in doing what they have done . . .  acted against ordinary principles of public morality and have misused the trust put in them by their electors. . . . They are not in accordance with the opinions of the public of Surat or any considerable portion of it.^[51]

Underlying these attacks, of course, were differing constructions of the public. For the moderates the "respectable" character of those in attendance was no less important than the size of the audience. In the extremist position, on the other hand, numbers were the chief determinant of representativeness.

Both factions also invoked the reformist dimension of public leadership. The moderates stressed that representatives of the general ward had been among the most progressive commissioners, playing the role of "the instructed few"—that is, an enlightened group of citizens with

an especially strong commitment to the interest of their city—and they quoted John Stuart Mill that such leadership was necessary to the process of educating an unschooled populace in self-government.^[52] The extremists charged that the general ward had inhibited the development of the city, creating "vexatious divisions among the voters" and giving "undue representation to particular sections of the inhabitants who had less interest in the city than other people."^[53] They further insisted that the purpose of political education was best served by extending the responsibilities of voting to larger numbers of people.

The British and Indian civil servants who ultimately decided the fate of the municipal franchise question could not ignore the rationale used by either party. The colonial rulers themselves were implicated in their own rhetoric and had to frame their own judgments of right and wrong in the same language of public politics. Available records suggest that it was not an easy decision for the ruling group to make, in part because the notion of public leadership was ambiguous and changing, in part because no mechanism was in place to determine what the larger population of Surat, who had no real voice in civic politics, really thought. After receiving the petitions, the district collector wrote his superiors that the citizens seemed to be generally against retention of the general ward (thus resorting to the concept's popular dimension). But he also noted that the councillors "who have sat on the general ward have on the average stood above the rest of the councillors for activity and ability" (thus invoking the reformist dimension).^[54] He recommended a compromise solution: that the franchise be expanded but that the general ward remain intact. Higher-level officials, swayed more completely by the moderates' arguments, decided that neither change should be made since the representatives of the urban population—that is, the current municipal councillors—had overwhelmingly rejected the franchise measures. The interesting point about this decision-making process is that members of the ruling group felt compelled by the rhetoric of both sides to assess who had the better claim to public leadership; notions of natural leadership were entirely left out of discussion. Thus, as Surti politicians began to employ public discourse more exclusively, the colonial rulers were compelled to follow suit. In effect, the English-educated men had redefined the ground on which local political battles could be fought.

Looked at from another perspective, however, it was the contending Indian factions who had made the greater concessions. Implicit in the rhetoric of both sides were assumptions ultimately derived from the alien language of public politics. All parties agreed that the "public" of Surat needed to be "represented" by an elite with special training and a special civic commitment. Each set of actors accepted the evolutionary theory of societal development. Beyond question in this debate was the

notion that Indian cities should be judged by a linear model of history in which Britain was portrayed as having reached the pinnacle of development. The conflict centered mainly on where at that particular moment Surat was along the line of progress, that is, on the extent to which a genuine public leadership and a real public opinion had developed locally. While the political rivals disagreed about the degree of progress Surat had made, they all accepted that Indians were behind the British and that only the colonial rulers could legitimately make the ultimate determination about what kind of representation Surtis should have. Through the act of petitioning the government, extremist and moderate alike acknowledged their subordination to the Raj. The dispute was thus essentially confined to a ground that did not challenge the authority of the men who ruled India or the ultimate principles on which this rule was based.

The struggle over the municipal franchise exemplified the extent to which the idiom of public politics had gained ascendancy in the politics of the city. Both sides in this conflict employed essentially the same terms and the same principles of argumentation, though each interpreted these terms and principles in its own way. By the beginning of World War I, the three dimensions of public leadership had become the orthodox standards by which claims to authority in the city were generated and assessed.

Thus, by the early twentieth century, those in Surat with an English-language education had transformed themselves into a relatively coherent elite with a common vocabulary for assessing their political role. Members of this elite had fashioned their identities in terms meaningful to the British and Indian civil servants they wished to influence. In shaping their place in the urban polity, however, they had not simply bought an alien value system wholesale; they interpreted the meanings of key words such as public, the people, and political education in accordance with preexisting cultural sentiments, with their concerns in particular political conflicts, and perhaps with their own idiosyncratic understandings of borrowed terms and theories. Out of this process developed a public culture that was British in form but to which Surtis had given much substance.

The English-Educated Elite and Surti Society

While English-educated politicians were able to expand their roles as intermediaries between colonial authorities and residents of the city, they had by no means achieved positions of domination in their own society. The arena of public politics in which they moved was still an extremely narrow one. Educational organizations and cooperative soci-

eties managed limited resources compared with the vast capital controlled by the city's sheth s. Public meetings and public associations were usually confined to small numbers of elite individuals. The development of a metropolitan economy had not seriously disturbed the urban social structure since residents had re-created previous patterns of economic relations in adapting to the changing circumstances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Elsewhere in Surti society, older forms of leadership and social organization had reproduced themselves. Outside the elite, few residents considered themselves part of an undifferentiated urban citizenry committed to participate in the life of public associations; few made their political judgments based upon considerations of the public good. To reach the larger body of city dwellers, the English-educated politicians employed a political idiom distinct from that they used in the civic arena.

The precise contours of this second idiom are difficult to discern since it was so rarely recorded in documents. The language of public politics often demanded encoded form—petitions, resolutions, editorials, and the records of legal proceedings. This was not true, however, of the new politicians' symbolic actions outside the civic sphere; in fact success in public politics may have required that they prevent these actions, so often based upon values contradictory to public principle, from entering into the written record. Yet two features of this idiom do emerge in existing sources: it implicitly recognized the status of the commercial sheth s as leaders of the Brahman- Vaniya community, and it stressed the importance of bonds of "affection"—caste, kinship, friendship, and patron-client ties.

For the most part, urban professionals did not threaten the position of magnates in the inner arenas of Surti politics, only their roles as intermediaries between local society and the British. The new politicians generally discovered that maintaining their power required accommodation to preexisting leaderships in the city, the most important of whom were Hindu and Jain sheth s. The faction led by Dahyabhai Desai discussed in the previous section—the extremists—acquired a following in the city largely by acting as advocates of grain and cloth merchants, who were upset at the imposition of new town duties on food and piece-goods imports. Desai's followers and the traders formed a Grain and Cloth Merchants' Association to pressure the municipality into reconsidering its octroi policy. Inside the skeleton of the association, however, indigenous forms of organization persisted. The two groups of traders essentially coincided with their occupational mahajan s, each led by its own headmen. The Mahajan Sheth, acknowledged leader of the Hindu Vaniyas in Surat, chaired assemblies of the merchants when they came together to discuss their grievances.^[55] Nothing in the available evidence suggests that the extremists attempted to usurp the func-

tions of the mercantile leaderships in the traders' organizations; instead, they seem to have recognized that the strength of their movement depended on the prominent place of the sheth s. Desai and his colleagues furnished not internal leadership but a knowledge of municipal laws and rhetorical skills lacked by the commercial magnates. On one occasion in 1909, when the traders came before the collector to appeal their case without their educated allies, they failed to be even remotely persuasive. The Gujarat Mitra commented snidely at the time: "The discussion on this subject lacked naturally the strength of facts and figures, coming as it did from a section of the people not enlightened enough to argue logically."^[56]

When elections approached, candidates for municipal office conducted their campaigns through highly personalized networks, often headed by sheth s and other important local figures, rather than resort to pamphleteering and public speeches. Before elections, candidates regularly visited voters in their homes, careful to employ terms of deference such as "Bhai Saheb" or "Sheth Saheb."^[57] On the day of the election, the candidate or his agent often escorted voters to the polls in his own horse carriage. Because of the limited franchise requirements, canvassing and campaigning on such an intimate basis was quite simple. The percentage of the population allowed voting privileges grew only from 2 percent in the 1880s to a little more than 5 percent before World War I;^[58] a typical ward thus contained fewer than four hundred voters. Since the most important qualifications for voting were property assessments and tax payments to the municipality, most of this electorate was of high status and relatively well-to-do.^[59] Even so, only a small percentage of those qualified to vote did so, since most ward elections had been prearranged by influential figures in the ward before the polling day. In reality few seats were genuinely contested. Election figures of 1895 are fairly typical in this respect.^[60]

Even when real contests developed, candidates relied heavily on election agents, usually men of considerable stature within the ward. Unsuccessful candidates in some cases later complained that powerful local men had canvassed for their opponents, exercising personal influence and neighborhood ties to sway voters.^[61] One aspirant for municipal office in 1885 charged that his rival had even relied on a highranking government employee as his agent and that this person had invited some voters to his home to ask for votes and visited others house-to-house.^[62] Some councillors developed relations with particular magnates that persisted from election to election. The Chokhawala family, substantial grain merchants of Navapura, acted as agents for the extremist lawyer Kasanji Kunvarji Desai on a number of occasions, eventually contributing to his success in the council elections of 1914.^[63]

Besides relying on acknowledged neighborhood leaders, the English-educated used a variety of techniques grounded in indigenous principle to gain support. Some styled themselves as sheth s, serving as patrons of constituents and helping out friends and relatives. Others became involved in temple building or other charitable activities accepted within their constituencies as meritorious.^[64] Competitors for elections regularly drew upon kin and caste ties in achieving election victories^[65] or "private friends" in organizing ostensibly public movements,^[66] as their opponents were always eager to point out to the ruling group but rarely willing to acknowledge in their own activities. British complaints about corruption on the part of some councillors may suggest that primary relations and group memberships often overrode public commitments or at least that local leaders saw no conflict between the two sets of loyalties.^[67] Most public figures grounded their politics in two distinct idioms, one largely of civic politics and the other primarily of the inner arena of high-caste society.^[68]

In dealing with the tight-knit communities of artisans and petty traders, councillors and English-educated politicians relied upon the headmen of the castes and other neighborhood leaders. When plague was suspected among the Ghanchis during the late 1890s, the municipality sent a lawyer to meet the patels of the community. The headmen were persuaded to fine all those who hid cases of the disease, much as they might have done if they had been enforcing the groups' own moral codes.^[69] When the municipality resolved to renovate large sections of Navapura Golwad to improve sanitary conditions in 1904, it carried on negotiations with the Gola headmen through Naginchand Jhaverchand.^[70] Developing a constituency in these areas of the city clearly involved cultivating ties with preexisting leaders rather than directly generating one's own following. Here again, the civic elite had to adapt itself to the realities of local social organization and indigenous

cultural meanings rather than employ the largely alien system of public discourse.

From the perspective of the city's underclass groups, the emerging public culture was one that gave them little voice. In effect, the rise of a representative political system in Surat kept most residents at arm's length from civic politics, since entry into this arena required specialized linguistic capabilities. Constitutional advance was driven by the continuous bargaining of elites with the colonizers rather than by popular demands for political "rights" and "freedoms." Effective elite control over expression in meetings and associations limited the diffusion of civic discourse deeper into Surti society, choking any potential for the emergence of a plebeian public sphere. Subaltern resistance of course continued in the form of tax avoidance, noncompliance with municipal regulation, and "corruption," activities which were often effective in checking state demands but which did not contribute to the shaping of formal political structure. Within a civic order increasingly based upon liberal principle, most urban groups found themselves powerless except insofar as they aligned themselves with spokesmen who had mastered English and the idioms of public discussion and debate. The development and reproduction of vertical networks of patronage was an almost inevitable result. Thus the factional alignments of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian politics were no mere carryover from traditional Indian social structures; they were a product of a state system where a tiny group of educated figures monopolized the critical symbolic skills needed to approach alien rulers.

Conclusion

Despite a general shift in elite political styles from the deferential to the contentious, the politics of Surat during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained within the framework of a colonially constructed hegemony. Public leaders fought their battles in the civic domain within limits set, however unconsciously, by a discourse appropriated from the colonizers. The underclasses gave meaning to their politics, even to resistance against colonial objectives, in principles located largely outside this discourse but did not muster alternative conceptions of the larger polity capable of informing a conscious rejection of the political order. The distance between the inner and outer arenas of local politics was mediated by the few English-educated politicians capable of expressing themselves in multiple political idioms. Their bilingual approach promoted a politics of factionalism that constrained the capacity of residents to confront the domination of either the colonial rulers or the emerging elite.

The equilibrium which had been achieved at the onset of World War I was, however, a very shaky one. Conflicting tensions were present that could undermine the tentative stability. On the one hand, the idiom of public politics eventually created a need on the part of urban leaders to reach out to wider and wider constituencies. In order to substantiate claims to represent public opinion, a politician had to be able to point to a group of persons who clearly backed his position, and new aspirants to power thus needed to tap the emotions and dissatisfactions of local residents to be successful. On the other hand, the pressure for urban reform continued to be a source of danger to merchant and artisan life and culture. If for some reason the civil servants decided to pursue progress more resolutely, the underclasses might aggressively seek new leaders capable of taking on the Raj. During and immediately after the war years, both processes began to accelerate. Many older politicians, unable to adjust their political styles, were suddenly rendered obsolete by the rising new figures who claimed to represent the people better. But whether these competitors could themselves break outside the confines of public discourse was another question.

Nine
World War I and the Crisis in Urban Authority

At the beginning of World War I most residents of Surat would have considered the civic arena far less significant than the internal politics of their communities. True, the majority of householders in the city paid taxes to the municipality and the province and were affected in some way or other by intrusive council bylaws and government regulation. A few even obtained employment from the local body. But the activities of the government, the municipality, and voluntary associations had not become so extensive as to propel most Surtis into public politics on a sustained basis. The civic arena and its discourse remained largely the domain of a small, English-educated elite and, to a lesser extent, of various urban notables. Through participation on municipal committees and other public institutions, these elite figures cushioned the impact of colonial reform for the rest of the population, making possible the preservation of some autonomy in the inner arenas of local life. At times when government measures appeared to threaten their integrity or their pocketbooks, residents temporarily aligned themselves with the new politicians in protest. For the most part, however, Surtis continued to focus their attention on the moral communities where their livelihoods were determined and their identities and reputations forged.

World War I went far toward altering this situation. Though the war took place thousands of miles away and few residents participated in its battles, the conflict in Europe greatly affected local society. The imperatives of the war effort and the wartime sense of urgency led the Raj to adopt measures—at both the provincial and municipal levels—that disrupted areas of local life residents of the city and their leaders had previously reserved to themselves. The inability of local leaderships to defend their communities against a series of wartime problems produced a crisis of authority in the inner domain of politics. Notables unwilling

to loosen their bonds with British officials now found those ties more a liability than an advantage. Given the collapse of many older leaderships and the growing intrusion of government into local social practice, it became increasingly necessary that Surtis attach themselves to those in the civic arena able to place immediate pressure upon the Raj.

As a result of wartime conditions, a faction within the Englisheducated elite was able to gain effective control of the most important civic institutions in Surat. More militant than their predecessors, the members of this faction—all of whom belonged to the All-India Home Rule League—gave local shape to an aggressive movement against colonial policies. Appealing to householders' general sense of dissatisfaction during a period of crisis, the home rulers captured positions of power in the municipality and Surat District Association.

Despite these achievements, however, the home rulers were, by their own criteria, unsuccessful. They hoped to develop sustained popular followings in the city and to impart to local residents a political education—that is, an understanding of and experience in public politics. Yet during the war years, direct participation in municipal affairs, public associations, and other forms of public life expanded only slowly. To a great extent, the failures of the league can be attributed to an inability to conceive of political alternatives that stemmed from the very language of its political actions. The home rulers stayed largely within the old discourse of civic politics. They asserted their authority primarily along the three yardsticks of public leadership used by their predecessors in the civic arena and employed rhetoric steeped in the evolutionary assumptions of British liberalism. They remained attached to a constitutional framework to which most local residents had shown only limited commitment. So while the home rulers were effective in forcing the colonial rulers and their factional opponents into more defensive postures, they proved unable to address local concerns in terms meaningful or inspiring to the Surtis. Few residents outside the civic elite found the home rule appeal sufficiently compelling to enter the public sphere and challenge the colonial government in a sustained fashion.

The Economic Crisis

For Surat at least, the crisis of World War I began at its very outset. News of the outbreak of conflict in Europe immediately created an atmosphere of panic among local traders. Sources of credit quickly dried up in the city, bringing commerce to a virtual standstill.^[1] All three banks financed by local capital went bankrupt.^[2] The sharafs, who had always provided the bulk of local credit needs, became reluctant to lend money at any rate. As a result of the general unavailability of credit,

traders in cotton and grain were unable to make their purchases, causing exports of agricultural produce from the region to come to an abrupt halt.^[3] All three of Surat's mills went into liquidation.^[4] In the local manufactures a depression soon set in. Even Naginchand Jhaverchand, once the king of pearls, had to close his business and retire.^[5]

The crisis continued after the initial period of instability, particularly for those engaged in small-scale industries. Since the luxury manufactures were hardly a priority for the colonial rulers, the needs of these industries were often sacrificed to military contingencies. Pearl merchants had to deal with new duties on imported pearls, then with tight controls over the export of finished necklaces.^[6] Owing to import restrictions on precious metals, jari traders faced skyrocketing prices for gold and silver, crucial materials used in jari production.^[7] The situation was as serious in the silk industry, where high prices for imported dyes drove up the prices of silk goods and greatly reduced sales.^[8] Artisans throughout the city struggled to make ends meet.^[9] Surat's dependence on the production and sale of luxury goods, which had made possible the survival of the urban economy before the war, now rendered the city especially vulnerable to economic collapse.

After 1917 the city's problems were compounded by rapidly rising prices. The inflation of the later war years was a direct outgrowth of conscious government policies designed to meet exigencies of the war effort. The imperial administration, concerned with obtaining railway wagons for military transport, placed serious restrictions on the commercial use of the railways, causing shortages in most essential commodities imported into the city. The price of salt, kerosene, ghee, firewood, milk, vegetables, and grain all escalated sharply.^[10] In just one week during 1918 the price of juvar (a barley-like grain) rose 50 percent.^[11] The cost of wheat once rose more than 15 percent over a few days.^[12] The burden of escalating prices fell most heavily on out-of-work artisans, traders with limited goods to sell, and middle-income residents living on fixed salaries.^[13]

Some enterprising merchants undoubtedly benefited from these uncertain conditions and were able to amass large profits. A few made fortunes through speculation in cotton futures in unofficial markets on the outskirts of the city. Others hoarded grain in hopes of profiting from the steady inflation.^[14] The war called for a new type of trader, one less bound by the older concerns of local sheths with reputation and trust.

Yet even for the most successful businessmen, the period was a time of considerable frustration. During the war the imperial administration introduced a host of economic policies designed to ease the government's financial difficulties, to improve the flow of goods for export,

and to alleviate inflationary pressures. These measures established novel restrictions on local commerce. Authorities in the Bombay government established price controls over a wide range of commodities, including fuel and piece goods.^[15] District officials controlled the use of railway wagons, at times allocating passes only to those merchants who agreed to accept low profits.^[16] The government also clamped down on cotton speculation and adulteration and raided clandestine speculation operations.^[17] Not surprisingly, many of the politically radical merchants of the postwar period were men who had participated successfully in the burgeoning cotton and grain trades and who bristled at the new obstacles the government now placed in the path to further profits.

On top of new commercial controls came new taxation. As A. D. D. Gordon has argued, the war years were a watershed for the merchants of the Bombay Presidency, in which businessmen moved from a peripheral position in the imperial revenue structure to a central one. Faced with difficulties in meeting its expanding costs, the provincial government increased the income tax and imposed a "super tax" on the higher income brackets. In the presidency as a whole, the level of income taxation—almost exclusively an urban tax—increased nearly ten times between 1915 and 1921.^[18] In Surat the amount of income tax paid by local merchants at least doubled between 1916 and 1918, then continued to accelerate afterward.^[19] Perhaps more upsetting than the amount of the income tax demanded, however, were the new tax forms, which required local traders to reveal detailed information about their business practices and personal wealth. Since merchants acquired credit largely on the basis of their reputations, many felt threatened by having to divulge facts which had previously been secret.^[20] On top of all this came government's pleas for war loan subscriptions, to which Hindu and Jain merchants offered a silent resistance.

The fact that Surat's wartime crisis was a product of government policy could have escaped no householder, no matter how ill-versed in colonial statistics. The British administration had now entered the lives of the citizenry in an unprecedented manner, imposing controls that affected most city dwellers' livelihoods and personal statuses. The Surtis' need to involve themselves in the civic arena, where the new policies could be most effectively confronted, became increasingly urgent.

The Crisis of Municipal Policy

The policies of Surat's municipality only intensified the severity of the crisis. The period of 1914–19 was one in which the Bombay government tightened its hold over municipalities. Just before the war, the

thirty years. The government changed voting procedures to allow greater secrecy, increased the number of elected councillors from fifteen to twenty (out of a total of thirty), and granted the council the right to choose its own president. But officials worried that granting these new powers would lead to rampant corruption, factionalism, fiscal chaos, and a decline of public services, all at a time when provincial government was financially ill-prepared to rescue municipalities from disaster. Thus, as Bombay extended constitutional reforms with one hand, it imposed new controls over local self-government with the other. As a result government actually strengthened its ability to shape municipal policy.^[21] Freed increasingly from the need to be responsive to local sentiment, the municipal bureaucracy entered into areas of urban life previously beyond its purview.

The expansion of municipal activity actually began before the war, when the local body, pressured by Bombay, passed a set of bylaws designed to improve sanitary conditions. In 1913 an officer of the provincial government, a Mr. Orr, had drafted standard bylaws for all cities in the presidency. The Bombay administration then tried to compel all its municipalities to adopt the model rules. At first, Surat's councillors approved only a few of Orr's eighty-six provisions, arguing that the rejected bylaws were unsuited to local conditions. The district collector and the provincial government eventually pressured the council to make nearly sixty of Orr's rules into law.^[22]

These new bylaws reflected imperial interests and objectives, not the needs or preoccupations of the city's residents. The urban planner Patrick Geddes, who visited Surat in 1914, objected that the regulations concerning house and shop alignments had been blindly adopted from Western models and served no local purpose.^[23] British officials acknowledged the unpopularity of the measures, one stating in typically colonial language that the rules were "a good deal in advance of public opinion on the subject."^[24] Residents were vociferous in expressing their objections, repeatedly filing complaints with the municipality. One petition opposed new drainage restrictions, arguing that "the right to discharge the overflow of their privies into the streets is a long established right of all citizens."^[25] Others challenged rules regulating the storage of tar and resin, requiring the registration of births and deaths, and banning caste feasts on city streets that lasted longer than two hours.^[26]

Especially repugnant were the new building regulations. The bylaws required that buildings in the city take up no more than half the total space available for construction; they also regulated the height of new structures and the amount of ventilation. In essence, residents were suddenly unable to use as they wished substantial amounts of land

which they controlled and for which they had obtained title certifying ownership. As the collector observed, this rule was "the point at which the public interest comes in contact with the private profit of landholders in a city like Surat." He failed to notice that the regulation caused serious difficulties for small householders and traders, who needed all their land for their houses or shops and who were often too poor to provide the required ventilation. Dozens of objections to the rules poured into the council from local householders; builders complained at what they considered to be arbitrary restrictions. Nevertheless the municipality adopted the stringent building code under heavy pressure from the provincial capital.^[27]

In the past council bylaws had often proven impossible to implement. Municipal committees, municipal officials, and honorary magistrates had frequently turned a blind eye to the enforcement of regulations—sometimes, one imagines, either as favors to kinsmen and friends or in return for small payments. But provincial officials were now willing to provide considerable administrative muscle to back up regulations. They recommended the appointment of a municipal commissioner whose authority to enforce bylaws and supervise public projects could not be checked by the councillors. Surat's collector backed the suggestion, arguing that such a step was "not only merely desirable but imperatively necessary in the interests of the public at large," and insisting that factionalism, absenteeism, inefficiency, and corruption had all intensified since his own responsibilities as president and chief executive officer had been curtailed.^[28] He stressed that issues such as modern school buildings and extensive drainage works were pressing, and a "capable executive officer" was essential if these matters were to be handled in a "businesslike fashion."^[29] The Bombay government proved receptive to such arguments. It appointed H. Denning, an officer of the Indian Civil Service, as municipal commissioner.

Denning's appointment struck at the roots of informal patronage networks that many councillors had built around themselves. The council retained its legislative functions, particularly control over the budget, but the various subcommittees which had held power in the implementation of law were stripped of their executive functions. Only two committees remained. City dwellers soon found it extremely difficult to bring pressure to bear on an officer of the Indian Civil Service. Denning was intent on enforcing the letter of the new bylaws, not caring whether he was popular. In his first year in office, cases in municipal courts went from 510 to 1,748; the number of fines assessed increased from 441 to 1,570; and the amount realized in fines from 601 rupees to 3,371 rupees.^[30] A number of builders were successfully pros-

ecuted. After 1916 these figures dropped because, as the collector put it, "The public are beginning to realize the regulations are meant to be observed."^[31] Yet residents continued to resent the strict enforcement of the new rules. In some areas, Denning observed, "owners of property seek by every subterfuge to evade the operation of the laws."^[32] Small acts of opposition continued against municipal regulations, but the presence of a strong executive officer certainly weakened the effectiveness of all but the most subtle forms of everyday resistance.

While he was able to carry out the enforcement of municipal regulations with special vigor, the commissioner proved unable to provide the city with new civic services. Since imperial finance had dried up during the war, local bodies could no longer obtain the grants they needed to begin any significant new public projects. Surat was unable to build new schools or provide new sanitary facilities. The system of local government by commissioner thus never fulfilled the promises that British officials had made in justifying its imposition.

Urban reform, however, had always been more an imperial than a popular concern. In words grounded in the colonial language of improvement, Denning himself concluded, "The public has little or no objection to crowded schools or dirty streets or primitive arrangements for lighting. It has, on the other hand, a deep-rooted objection to increased taxation, and the elected councillors are not allowed to forget this point."^[33] Unfortunately for local householders (and the councillors), municipal taxes had to be raised substantially to maintain services at old levels. Moreover, the municipal body generally chose to increase direct taxation, the form most despised by Surtis. With one swift gesture, the commissioner ordered a revision of house-tax evaluations that raised house-tax revenues over 20 percent. More than two thousand residents filed objections to their appraisals, forcing the local body to appoint a special magistrate for several months to hear the cases.^[34] Water-rate collections and rates for cesspool cleaning also rose,^[35] while new bureaucratic procedures made it increasingly difficult for traders to obtain refunds from their octroi duties when they reexported goods from the city.^[36] Given the unsettled conditions in the Surti economy and the rising level of income taxes, the increased burden of municipal taxation was considerable.

Thus government, whether imperial or municipal, pressed upon the Surtis in new ways during World War I: taxing, regulating, and controlling. For most residents, contact with the colonial administration was more regular and more unpleasant than ever before. Increasingly, the actions of individuals in the municipality and in public associations assumed new relevance for residents of the city.

The Crisis of Authority: The Inner Domain of Politics

The crisis brought about by imperial and municipal policy in turn led to a crisis of authority in the inner arenas of Surat's politics. Unsettled wartime conditions produced dislocation in a wide range of local political structures, accelerating old tensions and generating new ones. Among high-caste Hindus and Jains, the disruption of authority relations was particularly acute. World War I marked the abrupt end of the Samast Vanik Mahajan, the decline of numerous other critical institutions, and radical contraction of the domain once controlled by sheths. By the end of the war Hindu commercial magnates had ceased to act as intermediaries between their social groups and the administration. The arena controlled by English-educated politicians assumed a new significance for high-status residents.

Several processes, all set in motion by the war, produced uncertainty for entrenched merchant families. First, economic instability led directly to the dissolution of some of the city's great commercial firms. The most notable example was the pearl merchant, Naginchand Jhaverchand, who ceased to play any important political role after his business went bankrupt.^[37] There was no doubt a corresponding upward mobility of new commercial families at the time that partially counteracted these trends. For example, Dahyabhai Sundarji Desai, an Anavil Brahman from the village of Abrama, made a small fortune in cotton during the war. By 1918 he had become the leader of the cotton merchants' mahajan.^[38] But such people were not able to assume the authority of the older sheths immediately. They did not belong to families of great repute in the city or have long records of patronizing Vaishnava Hinduism or Jainism. Because of their nouveau riche status, they also could not hope to win British recognition as natural leaders.

Second, Surat's municipality became more important politically during the war years. On the one hand, the local body confronted the Surtis in new ways. On the other, the municipality seized the initiative in countering some features of the crisis. In previous periods of inflation, such as the 1899 famine, the Samast Vanik Mahajan had pressured grain merchants to refrain from exporting foodstuffs. During the war, however, it was the municipality that took steps to cope with rising prices.^[39] In 1918 members of the council sent Denning to Bombay to obtain a greater allotment of railway wagons so that more grain could be imported into the city. He returned with commitments for a substantial increase in Surat's quotas. Late in the war period, the local body also opened cheap grain and fuel shops, offering prices well below market rates.^[40] These steps served to check serious grain shortages and to avert the potential for grain riots. Noting the municipality's assump-

tion of moral and political roles once played by the mahajan, the Gujarat Mitra asked in one of its columns, "Is the mahajan really necessary?"^[41]

Third, a few sheths who had served as hinge figures between their community and the colonial administration lost credibility as a result of their inability to break their bonds with British officials. These sheths, sometimes title holders and often proud of their close ties with government, were unwilling to antagonize the administration by leading militant movements. A protest against the new income taxes epitomized their difficulties in confronting government effectively. In 1918 a number of commercial magnates, following the lead of cloth merchants in Ahmedabad and Bombay, held a meeting of more than two thousand traders to oppose the new taxes.^[42] Leadership of the movement was assumed by such notables as the Mahajan Sheth, the Nagarsheth, and Ishwardas Jagjivandas Store, all men who had won medals or titles and whom the British accepted as local headmen. Drawing upon wellestablished traditions of merchant resistance through collective noncooperation, the traders resolved to refuse to fill out their forms or to submit their taxes.

The notable leaders of the movement, however, tried to make certain that their activities were not seen as a direct challenge to the British. Throughout their protests, they maintained a meek and deferential posture, repeatedly stressing their loyalty and their dependence on their ruler's will. One likened the traders to cattle dependent on a benevolent master. Store insisted in one speech, "We are loyal subjects of our government and the government is our mabap [mother-father], we make our pleas just as a child asks its mabap [for food and water] when it is hungry and thirsty." The traders deliberately distanced themselves from the growing home rule agitation.^[43] Even so, the government was not willing to hear the merchants' pleas. When it decided to prosecute Store and several other magnates for not paying their taxes, the great merchants quickly capitulated, submitted their forms, and paid their taxes, leaving the disgruntled traders without leadership. Store's abandonment of the movement left his prestige severely damaged. Even the moderate newspaper Gujarat Mitra criticized the influential sheth for abandoning his followers at a critical moment.^[44]

All in all, the position of the old sheths eroded because mercantile leaderships were ill-equipped to deal with the various crises posed by the war. In the past a sheth's authority had been based on his ability to enhance the collective integrity of his community, but now most magnates proved unable to protect the interests and honor of the highcaste population. The politics of the inner domain alone were no longer sufficient to address the Brahman-Vaniyas' most vital concerns. And the sheths' older methods of approaching government—through deferential relations with individual civil servants—no longer worked

in the wartime environment, when pressures from outside India introduced new inflexibility into colonial practice.

The diminution of older leaderships manifested itself most dramatically in high-caste institutions which had long been under the control of prominent sheths. In many of these institutions, struggles for power developed as new figures rose to challenge established power holders. These men often successfully challenged the position of the older sheths, but generally they failed to establish their own authority. Conflict was usually couched in precolonial political idioms, centering primarily on issues deemed critical to community integrity— purification procedures, overseas travel, marriage, and commensality. But a new element injected itself into some of these disputes: the representativeness of the older leadership.

The most important institution shaken by factional battles was the Samast Vanik Mahajan, which was torn asunder and rendered impotent by conflicts over how to preserve Vaishnava Hinduism in the unstable wartime environment. Around 1914, a few families belonging to the Dasha Modh Adalja Vanik jnati announced that they had become followers of the Aga Khan, the leader of the Khoja Muslims. When some of these families, headed by a trader named Bhagubhai Dahyabhai, wished to return to the Vaniya fold a short time later, the mahajan agreed to allow them back if they performed a purification ceremony. The organization's leaders, however, failed to arrive at a formula for the purificatory rite. A few sheths clearly felt that the ex-converts should not be allowed to return to the community.^[45] Unable to reach a decision, the mahajan called a gathering of all the Vaniyas to settle the matter. In this meeting, a split quickly developed. One group, led by Jasantrao Veragiwala, demanded that the Vaniyas come to a decision by public vote. Ishwardas Jagjivandas Store, a member of the old leadership, countered that vote taking violated the mahajan's traditions. After much noisy disagreement, Store, the Mahajan Sheth, and several other important magnates walked out. The new party remained, claiming control of the mahajan and choosing Veragiwala as its sheth. The meeting then passed a resolution that the ex-converts be allowed back into the organization after they performed certain ritual procedures before a priest of the mahajan. The offending families quickly did so and signed a public apology.^[46]

In the following weeks, the two factions carried on a vigorous debate in Surat over whose organization was the real mahajan. The older party distributed a handbill questioning the legitimacy of the decision-making procedure adopted by Veragiwala and his followers and objecting to the purification procedures accepted at the meeting. Bhagubhai Dwarkadas, whose family had enjoyed the leadership of the mahajan over the past several generations, provocatively signed this handbill

"Mahajan Sheth." Veragiwala responded by printing a series of notices in local newspapers. There he claimed that participants in the mahajan gathering had expressed their independent opinions with "courage and mature consideration," argued that the purification procedures had been proper, and insisted that Dwarkadas could no longer claim headmanship of the mahajan.^[47] He warned that if his decisions were not accepted, the mahajan might fall into permanent factionalism, which would spell its death.

This contention proved prophetic: after 1916 neither party was able to establish its leadership among the Vaniyas. Members of the older faction refused to acknowledge the purificatory rite undergone by the ex-Agakhanis. In 1919 Dwarkadas and his followers issued an edict prohibiting vahevar with the entire jnati of the Dasha Modh Adaljas and with other persons who had eaten with the short-term converts.^[48] Most Vaniya groupings simply ignored this ruling. The Dasha Lad Vaniyas old mahajan and to carry on social intercourse with whichever Vaniya jnatis they pleased.^[49] The new group, however, was equally unsuccessful in establishing its legitimacy. Veragiwala and his followers hesitated to hold the feast that would formally receive the former Agakhanis back into the Vaniya community, apparently because they feared that the ex-converts had not sincerely given up the Khoja faith.^[50] The new mahajan thus became moribund almost as quickly as it had formed.^[51] By the end of the war, both organizations had effectively disappeared from Surti politics.

The collapse of the mahajan removed a major focus of local political life. But the crisis of authority spread far beyond this single institution. Upstarts challenged powerful sheths in a number of high-status jnatis, often undermining the very basis of group organization. The Visha Lad Vaniyas divided over the question of widow remarriage, at one point carrying their conflict into the courts at considerable expense to both parties. In 1919 some Visha Lads asked the maharaj of Mota Mandir, the most important Vaishnava religious leader in the city, to arbitrate between the two parties. The maharaj at first refused but consented after obtaining a promise from both factions to honor his decision. But after he had rendered a decision disallowing the new party from holding marriages, the challengers rejected his decision and announced that they would no longer conduct vahevar with the old faction.^[52] Similar disputes also broke out among Kayasth jnatis over commensal rules^[53] and among Nagar Brahman groupings over foreign travel.^[54]

The same processes were at work among Jains. The Visha Oshaval Jains fought over purification ceremonies to be given children of remarried women and to women brought from outside traditional mar-

riage circles. In the temporary absence of their sheth, the Visha Oshavals appointed a committee of twelve members to discuss the matter. But the committee went on to consider a number of other subjects, including whether the old sheth enjoyed permanent authority over the jnati.^[55] This produced tremendous internal discord. The Jain Sangh also became incapacitated by factionalism during the early war years.^[56] Though the two sides in the conflict eventually resolved their differences, the sangh found itself unable any longer to enforce its rulings in the disputes of various subcastes.^[57] After 1920, it had become nearly as inert as the Hindus' mahajan.

Not all high-caste organizations were embroiled in such turmoil, and not all dissension led to the disintegration of the inner arena's most important social institutions. Most occupational mahajans and some jnati organizations remained major foci of activity for their members. But the domain controlled by the old sheths was undoubtedly shrinking. Internal conflicts often entered the courts, where they were subject to the arbitration of outsiders, thus damaging the reputation of all contending parties. This crisis in leadership thus contributed further to highcaste residents' feelings of insecurity about their abru at a time when their statuses and livelihoods were already seriously threatened by administrative changes. The need for new forms of leadership capable of coping with the city's crisis became increasingly serious.

Low- and middle-status Hindus, on the other hand, may have escaped these disruptive processes. Existing evidence suggests that the patels of the puras continued to exercise great influence over their members for decades after World War I, and panchayats continued to play important roles in regulating occupational and social morality among such groups as the Kanbis, Khatris, Golas, and Ghanchis.^[58] The headmen of these organizations, of course, had never built close ties with the administration and thus were never in a position where they were forced to choose between their groups' concerns and patron-client bonds with the British. More important, the war had not undermined the critical importance of the jnati to economic organization for artisans and petty traders; one might speculate that the depressed economic conditions induced many members of these communities to rely more heavily on protective services provided by caste panchayats. Thus the crisis of authority in the inner arenas was confined largely to high-caste society.

The Crisis of Authority: The Civic Arena

In the civic arena, the wartime crisis also intensified local tensions, as competing factional groupings fought for control of the municipality and local public associations. These struggles for power, however, did

not have the debilitating effects of the conflicts in institutions like the mahajan. Instead, they produced a heightening of the importance of public politics.

Competition among members of the English-educated elite between 1914 and 1919 reinforced rather than transformed the principles and terminology governing the civic domain. The home rulers—who emerged as the chief contenders for civic power—radicalized local politics by trying to mobilize Surti householders into a mass movement that challenged British authority. This challenge stretched public discourse to new limits, but it failed to break outside its bounds. Ultimately the creation of novel forms of political language would have required a degree of psychological autonomy from colonial structures that the home rulers were never able to muster. Like the more moderate politicians who had preceded them, they sought to influence civil administrators through bargaining with the colonial rulers and by working within colonial institutions. Neither they nor their rivals could make the leap in imagination necessary to cut loose from public rhetoric, their primary means of bringing pressure to bear on the civil servants of the Raj. Both groups competed for recognition as public leaders and asserted the justice of their claims along the lines of British extraparliamentary principle. Each struggled to establish that it knew how to promote the city's development, that it represented the people, and that its members were Surat's true nationalists. Each accepted the colonial mythology that there was a single path of societal evolution. This inability to formulate a political language which would make public culture sensible and emotive for the larger body of city dwellers resulted in the failure of both to develop sustained followings in Surat's population despite the general crisis of the war years and the growing vacuum in urban authority.

The nuclei of the two groups that competed for power in municipal-national politics came from the moderate and extremist factions already discussed in the previous chapter. In 1915 the moderates still controlled the municipal council and the Surat District Association. Their leader was Thakkoram Kapilram Mehta, a Nagar Brahman lawyer who was president of both institutions. Mehta was firmly committed to the development of modern urban services in Surat and had won great praise in administrative circles for his energy in pursuing civic reform. British officials considered him loyal, dependable, and capable. Mehta's followers constituted a majority of the elected councillors and even included a few government nominees.

In social background, the extremists were quite similar to the moderates. They came from high-caste Hindu or Jain families and had acquired considerable English education. Their leaders were Dahyabhai Desai, an Anavil Brahman lawyer, and Prasannavadan Desai, a land-

lord and the son of a prominent Nagar Brahman lawyer. Like the moderates, they aspired to recognition as public leaders. A few had won positions on the municipal council by espousing the cause of local grain and cloth merchants upset with the imposition of new octroi duties, and many had been involved in earlier campaigns to change the municipal franchise. Though shut off from the upper echelons of power in the Surat District Association, most were members.

The appointment of the municipal commissioner in 1915 was the chief spark reigniting conflict between the two factions. After the government nominated Denning in 1915, Dahyabhai, Prasannavadan, and their followers rose in protest. The commissioner's activities cut into the influence they enjoyed on municipal committees and threatened the interests of Surtis such as the grain and cloth merchants, whose support they had cultivated for years. The Mehta group, on the other hand, obviously wishing to retain its strong ties with government, supported the appointment. Over the next four years, the issue of the commissioner's appointment was debated hotly in the council, in public meeting halls, and in the press.

At first the debate was chiefly over the issue of whether the appointment would promote or inhibit the development of municipal services in Surat. The moderates insisted that a strong executive hand was essential for the improvement of the city's roads, sanitation, and education. Thakkoram Kapilram was at the forefront of local efforts to ensure the commissioner's appointment, at one point winning the plaudits of the district collector for "displaying a somewhat rare and very commendable public spirit."^[59] His opponents offered a very different opinion of what constituted the public good. In petitions to the governor of Bombay, they argued that the government had never fully demonstrated the necessity of the appointment and that the high salary of an ICS officer was likely to divert funds from essential civic projects.

Your Excellency's petitioners respectfully submit that Municipality is not wanting in capable men; but it is in need of large funds for the working of several useful and necessary schemes—such as drainage, school buildings, playgrounds and others. The hands of the Municipality are practically stayed by the financial requirements which should be largely and generally supplemented by Government if good schemes are to be carried out. The appointment of the Commissioner, therefore, will entail an additional burden on the Municipal finances, and will seriously hamper it in undertaking any necessary work without further burden on the already overtaxed people of the city.^[60]

The Desais' followers carried on their campaign with vigor, sending petitions to Bombay and sponsoring resolutions in the council. As municipal elections approached in 1917, they became increasingly deter-

mined to prove that the people of Surat were behind them and set themselves up as candidates for seats in the general ward and in seven of the twelve regular wards. These elections were conducted in an environment of excitement quite novel to Surti campaigns. Some contenders printed handbills representing their views on municipal issues and denouncing the positions and records of their opponents. Tension grew as the time of voting approached. On election day, minor scuffles broke out around the polling offices as agents scurried to win votes. There were rumors that some candidates had imported voters from outside the city. It was also the first election in which women could vote, provision even having been made for females living in seclusion to cast their ballots by proxy. ^[61]

In the general ward—composed largely of educated professionals, government servants, and pensioners—the key issue was clearly that of the municipal commissioner. Here Prasannavadan, Dahyabhai, and a more lukewarm opponent of the commissioner, Chhanmukhram Mehta, campaigned against Thakkoram Kapilram for the ward's three seats. Prasannavadan was particularly active in pursuing votes. He called meetings of his potential constituents to discuss municipal questions and, according to supportive journalists at the Bombay Chronicle, "to revive and raise the character of the public life of Surat and to educate the electorate."^[62] At these meetings he addressed a wide range of municipal measures, but he was most vigorous in his attacks on the commissioner system, asserting that "official control had degenerated into official interference" and that "expert opinion without necessary preliminary study of local conditions was responsible for the confusion and waste in municipal administration."^[63]

Such attacks undoubtedly had appeal for voters disgruntled with the commissioner's activities. Even the three opponents of Thakkoram Kapilram were surprised by their success. All three were elected, and Thakkoram was forced to accept government nomination in order to retain his council seat. Members of the extremist group also won in many of the regular wards. Once in office, they were able to remove Thakkoram from the presidency. They threw their support behind a compromise candidate, a Parsi lawyer named Jamshedji Antia, under the condition that Dahyabhai Desai be selected vice president. They also gained control of the two municipal subcommittees.

By capitalizing on widespread popular dissatisfaction with the commissioner and by employing new election tactics, Thakkoram's opponents had swept into power in the local body. A closer glance at the campaign outside the general ward, however, reveals that the elections had not marked a complete transition to a mass politics of handbills and public meetings or a total shift to an appeal rooted in civic and

constitutional principle. Since, owing to taxpaying qualifications, no ward contained more than a few hundred voters, candidates could and did build their followings along the lines of affective relationships such as caste, kin, friendship, and patron-client bonds.^[64] Most continued to depend upon influential and moneyed men to act as agents in their wards. On election day these agents shuttled voters to polling places in their cars, ensuring that supporters would cast their ballots. Candidates also cultivated personal obligations by constructing pavilions in front of the polling offices, where voters were seated and given betel leaf, cigarettes, and refreshments. In some wards, very local concerns were the key. In Sonifalia, for example, a ward with a high Jain population, the campaign centered on whether the incumbent had advocated use of a lethal chamber for the destruction of stray dogs.^[65] A few of the commissioner's opponents, such as Kanaiyalal Desai (later the leader of the local Congress), were defeated by candidates with stronger connections in the wards.

Outside the core wards of high-caste voters, few candidates made clear their position on the commissioner system. Many relied on constituencies controlled by leaders of the dominant community in the ward. Despite the new excitement surrounding the campaign, seven of the seventeen elected seats in the regular wards were filled in uncontested campaigns. Jamshedji Antia, for instance, won an uncontested election in Nanpura, an area of town dominated by the Parsis. Tayyebbhai Maskati, a Bohra sheth who had not taken sides in the conflict, easily won his seat in Begampura, a largely Bohra ward. In Mahidharpura, where the voting population was overwhelmingly Kanbi by caste, a Jain candidate was simply overwhelmed by the two Kanbi candidates, one of whom came from a family that had filled the ward seat for nearly two decades. Even before the election, the Gujarat Mitra, which supported Mehta, had expressed its consternation about the role community sentiment, "personal influence," and "collusion" were playing at the expense of the public good.^[66] Though the paper was obviously attempting to make a case for its own candidate, it clearly pointed to factors other than civic issues that would play a role in determining the outcome of the election. Thakkoram would later claim that the commissioner system had been irrelevant outside the general ward.^[67]

The election campaign of 1917 thus illustrates the extent to which bilingualism still characterized the political style of most participants in the civic arena. Inside the municipal council and in the local press, the dominant form of political expression remained public discourse, yet in most of the city's neighborhoods, the language of civic expression was often overwhelmed by appeals based on personal ties and obligation.

The ability to employ multiple idioms remained essential to the development of political influence. But at the same time, bilingualism perpetuated the reliance of most members of the citizenry on the communication specialists versed in the political traditions of the rulers. Though the public sphere expanded in its significance, it was still a limited domain in which only a tiny proportion of Surtis fully engaged.

Despite the mix of appeals they had employed in achieving their local ascendancy, the extremists and their allies were now in a position to claim a popular mandate for their campaign against the commissioner. Once in office, they pressed their case that the changes in the municipal government ran counter to the ultimate principles of justice in the liberal tradition—public opinion, freedom, and political education. In 1918, several months after the election, the municipal councillors passed a resolution condemning the appointment, which they forwarded to the Bombay government. This resolution argued that the system of government by commissioner was "autocratic" and failed to reflect the "will of the locality." It tended to "destroy the zeal of the councillors in municipal affairs by reducing them to a mere debating body, dealing thus a death blow to the object of giving political education to the citizens." In perhaps their most telling rhetorical stroke, they linked their cause to British anti-German feeling, stating that the presence of a strong executive officer on the municipality "Prussianized the system of local self-government" and was "repulsive to the principle of local self-government as practised in England." The councillors claimed the prerogative to run municipal affairs without outside interference: "Being British subjects, and having received English education under the British system, we have imbibed the spirit and principles of free British institutions and we claim as British subjects, the British spirit of freedom in our self-governing bodies."^[68] In short they insisted that their own schooling and commitment to public life provided firm evidence that Surat had developed politically far along the scale of progress and that the introduction of the commissioner system thus ran counter to the imperial principle that authority should be devolved to Indians.

The moderates cast their case in essentially the same language, though they presented a very different image of local sentiment on the commissioner system and a very different interpretation of how self-government and devolution bore upon the issue. After the elections of 1917, a person signing his name as "T" (almost certainly Thakkoram Kapilram Mehta) wrote a series of letters to the Gujarat Mitra claiming that the polling results should not be taken as a mandate against the commissioner.^[69] He questioned whether even the defeat in the general ward was a true reflection of public opinion, offering his own, more elit-

ist understanding of the concept: "The true test of cultivated and enlightened opinion is not the number of votes but the weight and position of persons recording the votes. . . . No sane men will maintain that the opinion of Dr. Steele [the minister at the Irish Presbyterian Church, who undoubtedly voted for Thakkoram] shall have the same weight as that of a police naik or a mill jobber or a clerk in an office drawing twenty rupees."^[70] Later, "T" challenged the assertion that the commissioner system violated British principles of self-government, arguing that even in England central government exerted considerable control over local bodies.^[71] His supporters on the Gujarat Mitra suggested that a strong executive was very much in accordance with the spirit of devolution, arguing in one article that "the system of civic administration by Municipal Commissioners in large mofussil cities was an attempt to place gradually on a level with modern cities municipal government in those places, to lift them out from a position of control and subordination that they occupied for two generations to be placed in a state of dignified independence consistent with time and the march of education."^[72]

Thus, while disagreeing over the value of the commissioner system, both sides operated within the same political discourse. Each offered its own evaluation of whether public opinion was behind the commissioner and whether the system was in accordance with British traditions of local self-government. Both arguments hinged on an interpretation of where Surat stood in the march of political education and what policies best served this process. For the English-educated politicians of Surat, wartime conflicts had reconfirmed rather than undermined the centrality of the language of public politics in the civic arena.

The Politics of Home Rule

Until 1917 neither set of actors in these conflicts had seriously invoked the third dimension of public discourse—the nationalist dimension. Members of both factions considered themselves true patriots, but neither tried to dispute the claims of the other to represent the Indian nation. The Desais' followers had long maintained loose ties with the Tilak-led nationalists of Maharashtra; a few reactivated these as the debate over the municipal commissioner intensified. As early as 1915, V. I. Pandit, a local lawyer, attended the Bombay Provincial Conference organized by N. C. Kelkar, a close associate of Tilak, and introduced a resolution against the appointment of commissioners in mofussil municipalities.^[73] Still, during the early years of the war, national politics remained on the back burner, holding little relevance in the local struggle for control of the civic arena.

Outside Surat, however, the Indian political scene was changing. In several major presidency centers, nationalist politicians opposed to the moderate Congress leadership and eager to pressure the British into granting very serious concessions of power to Indians formed a new organization: the All-India Home Rule League. This organization, modeled loosely on the Irish Home Rule League, defined its goal as home rule for India and proposed to educate the people of the subcontinent to demand this end. In Bombay two rival branches had formed by 1916. One was organized by Tilak's Maharashtrian followers; the other, led by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Jamnadas Dwarkadas, Shankarlal Banker, and Benjamin Horniman, followed Annie Besant, an English-woman who had achieved great recognition as a theosophist and a spokesperson for India's rights. This second branch developed much closer ties with the Gujaratis of Bombay and the mofussil.^[74] Banker and Besant began to organize chapters of the Home Rule League in upcountry centers. With the help of K. V. Vora, a local Nagar Brahman doctor and a theosophist, they founded Surat's first branch in September 1916.^[75]

At first few local politicians expressed interest in the league. The city's chapter had only six members in its early months, none of them prominent in the municipality or in local public associations. As late as July 1917, the district magistrate confidently asserted, "I doubt whether any one of any standing will accept the post of President of the local branch of the League, which remains vacant."^[76] Despite their past support for Tilak, the Desais and their followers were for the time being unwilling to take a step that many British officials were likely to view as seditious.

Yet almost immediately after the extremists won control of the local municipality, they did an about-face and joined the league to the man. Dahyabhai Desai became president of the local chapter, Vora its secretary. The chapter resolved to undertake a campaign "to train the people on public opinion regarding Home Rule."^[77] It began to hold frequent public meetings and to invite leading Congress figures to give speeches in the city in order to cultivate popular support for home rule, calling over fifty meetings in 1918 alone.^[78] The organization's leaders also attempted to reach out to rural areas, hoping to stimulate interest in home rule among the peasantry of South Gujarat. Seemingly, victory in the municipal elections gave Desais' followers confidence to associate themselves with a more assertive nationalism. Some hoped that the home rule movement would enable them to pressure government more effectively on issues related to the upcoming Montagu-Chelmsford reforms. Dahyabhai Desai clearly had ambitions to move into the legislative council in Bombay, whose expansion in size and responsibility was clearly imminent.

By early 1919 Surat's home rulers had assumed the mantle of national leadership in the city. The league reported 1,325 members in the city, while 68 offshoots in the district recorded an additional 2,342 members. The Surat District Association, which only a few years earlier had 62 members, was swamped by the new recruits to congress activities. In August 1918 Thakkoram Kapilram Mehta and Shavakshah Khasukhan, the chief editor of Gujarat Mitra, resigned their posts as president and secretary, respectively.^[79] This left the Desais and their followers with firm control over both of the most important nationalist organizations in the city. Isolated from the congress, Thakkoram and his followers became increasingly identified as servile dependents of the British, people who lacked patriotic spirit. Nationalism, which had once been merely an expression of identification with India as a whole, now clearly became associated with the demand for home rule.

Between 1917 and 1919, the home rulers set about mobilizing—or, in their word, "educating"—the citizenry on the question of home rule. Here, however, they achieved only mixed success. Some of their activities, such as the visits of national congress leaders, produced considerable local enthusiasm. When Lokamanya Tilak visited Surat in November 1917, thousands of residents went to the station to greet him. There he was garlanded repeatedly by members of the Home Rule League before volunteers carrying league banners escorted him along with Dahyabhai Desai in a procession through the streets. Storekeepers had prepared decorations of their wares for the visit and hung them in front of their shops. League sympathizers had draped banners over their homes acclaiming Tilak's visit: "Long Live Tilak Maharaj," "Vande Mataram," and "Swaraj Is My Birthright" (Tilak's famous saying). One set of banners juxtaposed—in what seems today a truly fantastic combination of political imagery—the pictures of King George, the emperor of British India, with that of Shivaji, the seventeenth-century Maratha warrior.

After the initial ceremony at the station, the procession stopped frequently so that leaders of various neighborhood groups could garland the famous nationalist. Later in the evening Tilak spoke at a meeting organized by the local home rule chapter on the public grounds behind the Princess Theatre. Nearly ten thousand people were in attendance. The dais from which Tilak spoke was bedecked with nationalist inscriptions and a placard showing Tilak and Annie Besant standing before the houses of Parliament appealing to Britannia. Volunteers and members of the Home Rule League stood in a place of honor. After a brief address, Tilak spoke in favor of home rule and praised the efforts of the local chapter to awaken the local population. The visit of Annie Besant several months later was of a similar character, also attracting a large attendance.^[80]

The effectiveness of such ceremony lay not so much in its novel characteristics as in its ability to inject nationalist elements into the already established form of imperial ritual. When compared with the visits of imperial dignitaries described earlier, much of the day's observances involved efforts of the home rulers at symbolic substitution— that is, the replacement of imperial content with national. The prominent visiting congress leader assumed the place of the governor or viceroy; the president of the Home Rule League took the place of the collector as chief welcomer representing the city; the league replaced the municipal council as chief sponsor of the visit and as the chief local public body singled out by the dignitary for honor; and nationalist slogans replaced wishes for the emperor's or empress's health. The use of the phrase "long live" and the presence of George V's picture in nationalist banners suggest that imperial models still exerted a powerful influence over the home rulers' conception of political authority. Nationalist ritual marked an attempt to construct the legitimacy of nationalist leaders—both at the local and all-India level—by placing these figures on an equal plane with those of the imperial hierarchy.

From the numbers present and the enthusiasm reported even in moderate newspapers, the visits of Tilak and Besant appear to have been successful in accomplishing the home rulers' immediate end of generating a large turnout. Yet just as huge crowds at viceregal visits should not be taken as a sign of fervent popular allegiance to empire before the war, the attendance of substantial segments of the urban population at ceremonies honoring prominent Congress leaders is not firm evidence of a general commitment of city dwellers to national politics during the war. The desire of the Surtis to view a renowned yet distant authority figure was perhaps as significant in the size of the crowd as commitment to home rule. Once the great Congress leaders departed, the home rulers proved unable to generate sustained popular support. Few listed on membership rolls participated regularly in league affairs. Attendance at meetings of the local league averaged from one to two hundred. When the league attempted to raise money for Annie Besant's scheme of national education, it could collect only 1,000 rupees, less than one-half of 1 percent of the amount the government had raised in war loans from the city.^[81] National politics remained the preserve of a tiny, though growing, number of high-caste educated residents.

The home rulers were not able to build truly popular constituencies in part because they did not directly address the concerns of the city's traders and artisans. They capitalized on deeply rooted but as yet unfocused dissatisfactions with government policy, particularly with the activities of the municipal commissioner, but they seldom spoke in a lan-

guage that evoked the moral indignation or addressed the identity of the city's underclasses. The home rulers saw justice and injustice largely through the filter of constitutionalism, addressing in their meetings issues such as the upcoming Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, local selfgovernment, restrictions on the press, the imprisonment of national leaders, and congress campaigns in other areas of India.^[82] A typical resolution, passed after the order restricting the movements of Gandhi during the Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 had been withdrawn, asserted: "In the opinion of this league, the actions of the Bihar government withdrawing the notice issued against Mr. M. K. Gandhi under section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code is quite in keeping with the best traditions of British rule and justice and this League therefore expresses its satisfaction for the prompt action taken."^[83]

This was public discourse in almost pure, unadulterated form, virtually without any resonance in local culture. For the most part, only those predisposed to nationalism or to an interest in constitutional questions could be aroused by such stale legalistic language. The campaign against the municipal commissioner, too, had focused largely on the legitimacy of the appointment on constitutional grounds rather than on the incursions of the officer into the householder's domain. The home rulers did not question the government policies most responsible for the local crisis, such as import-export regulations, controls over railway wagon use, and bylaws passed by the municipality. When the new income-tax regulations of 1918 stirred resistance by thousands of local merchants, most members of the league simply ignored the protest, thus missing a major opportunity to channel local dissatisfactions in a nationalist direction. Their general silence on these kinds of issues stemmed from an inability to perceive any relationship between their own conception of political justice and the concerns of the mercantile community. For the most part, they seem to have accepted the British policies in question as essential to urban reform and as necessary in light of the empire's wartime difficulties.

The home rulers did little to cultivate a new political appeal that might have captured the enthusiasm of the Surtis. They drew largely upon a national symbolism that had evolved outside Gujarat. Their speeches emphasized general congress themes such as the need for home rule, national education, and swadeshi. They often opened their meetings with chants of "Vande Mataram," the Bengali slogan that had become part of the Congress repertoire. In some cases, borrowing from the wider Congress appeal verged on the absurd. During Tilak's visit, for instance, volunteers carried banners praising Shivaji, a figure of great symbolic importance in the region of Maharashtra from which Tilak came, but who was remembered best in Surat for his repeated raids on the city's merchants.^[84] The bulk of the political vocabulary

used by home rulers, however, derived ultimately from British political traditions. They did not employ powerful symbols from any of the subcultures of urban Gujarat.

One speaker at a local home rule meeting in 1917 characterized the problem of the league by admitting that he "was fully alive to the fact that after all the people who ask for Home Rule for India were only a microscopic minority."^[85] His solution for this problem, however,as that the home rulers needed to be more assiduous in educating the public; that is, they needed to develop more propaganda along the lines that already existed—not that they needed to switch the terms of the debate altogether. In essence, the home rulers were asking the local populace to undergo a conversion, to make a leap of faith from viewing the world through the language of dharma and abru to seeing it through a civic discourse imbued with Western evolutionary assumptions. Most local residents found such a leap impossible to make. When residents were addressed more effectively, as in the election campaign of 1917, it was partly through the idiom of affective ties and deference, an idiom that essentially preserved the distance of the city dwellers from the civic arena as it cultivated their support.

Despite the apparent assertiveness of their call for home rule and their critiques of British policy, the home rulers were committed to a political-symbolic order that had been framed by their predecessors in civic politics. They sought to expand their public roles in imperial institutions such as the municipality and the provincial legislative council and in public associations where they could draw the rulers' attention to their concerns. This commitment made it difficult for them to conceive of political principles outside the terms that had long been in use within the civic arena. They sought to persuade the civil servants of the Raj that they understood how British concepts of justice applied to India better than the officials themselves. They hoped to prove the genuineness of their allegiance to the empire and to demonstrate that their rulers were wrong in regarding them as seditious. As one visiting speaker put it, "To demand and achieve Home Rule for India was to do the greatest service for the Empire. India with Home Rule would not only be a jewel in the British Crown, an ornament in the Imperial Exhibition, but also a tower of real strength to the whole Empire both in times of peace and war."^[86] Even the most ambitious goal they expressed—the establishment of home rule—seemed to involve the insertion of Indians in slots now held by the British rather than the creation of a new sort of political system. The home rulers felt that they were entitled to these slots by their education and advanced views. Operating under the constraints of bargaining with their rulers, they found it difficult to create new political models more evocative to the Surtis.

The eagerness of the home rulers to affirm their loyalty and com-

mitment to reform led them to take steps that ultimately undermined their position. The most critical of these was their endorsement in 1919 of an ambitious scheme to establish compulsory primary education for all children under twelve. In adopting this scheme, Surat became the first municipal body to adopt universal and compulsory education on the subcontinent. For moderates and extremists alike, the measure proved to be a source of great pride, a sign that Surat might soon attain European levels of education. The law was not, however, popular with most residents. Artisans and petty traders resented attempts to force their boys and girls into schools, since children often performed useful functions in small factories and shops.^[87] Once the law was put into effect, attendance officers had to hound many middle- and low-caste families into sending their children to schools.^[88] Some Muslims expressed fears that the requirement that girls attend school would disrupt the system of purdah, while others complained that no provision had been made to fund the teaching of the Quran and Islamic subjects. Even after provision was made for religious education, many Muslim parents refused to send their children to municipal Urdu schools. Most merchant and service families, by contrast, resented the measure because their children were already enrolled in the city's primary schools, and they would now have to pay an additional cess of 20 pice per rupee (roughly 10 percent) of their direct tax payment without obtaining any additional service.^[89] Thus the home rulers' insistence on proving their special capacity for spurring urban development led them to support a regulation that deepened the residents' sense of alienation from the municipality. The popular dissatisfactions arising from the primary education scheme rendered the home rulers increasingly vulnerable to attacks from the newly rising group of Gandhi's followers.

The home rulers also remained committed to participation in the ritual and institutional structures of colonial rule. When Gandhian politicians later asked residents to refrain from participating in imperial ceremony, to boycott provincial assemblies, and to work to destroy the Surat municipal council from within, the home rulers were paralyzed, torn between their commitment to the nation and their belief that selfgoverning structures were necessary for the development of their city and country and unable to react to Gandhi's renunciatory idiom. As we shall see in the following chapter, most retired from the civic arena convinced that madness had overtaken local politics.

Conclusion

Despite the seeming militancy of the league campaign, the home rulers operated under many of the same mental constraints as their predecessors in public politics. To a great extent, they were trapped in the lan-

guage of their own attacks on colonial policy. They criticized the British for inhibiting Surat's movement toward a more ideal moral-political order, but their image of what was ideal stemmed primarily from their conception of what was British. Thus, though they conceived of themselves as proponents of freedom and self-rule, they were themselves subject to the colonial hegemony. The very process of negotiating with Anglo-Indian civil servants drew them into a discourse of alien origins. The scope that constitutional language allowed for debate and criticism, for self-advancement without the appearance of subordination, may be partial explanation for its ability to capture the imagination of local elites. But it had little appeal for Surat's underclasses, who remained baffled by the strange rituals at work in the municipal council and public meetings, and who continued to express their resistance outside the domain of civic politics altogether.

For most residents of Surat, the crisis of World War I persisted. Local householders were potentially ready to follow leaders who could more directly evoke their own values and preoccupations, so when the followers of Gandhi rose to power after 1919, the Surtis quickly rallied to their support. Unlike the home rulers, the Gandhians created a novel language, rooted in Gujarati principles of morality, that possessed a strong potential for appeal to local Hindus and Jains. They inspired the city's inhabitants, creating new allegiances among them and mobilizing them to reject the colonial system.