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The history of urbanization in India is almost as old as the history of human civilization. The ancient cities of this country truly reflect the development of each civilization, their prosperity and ultimate decline. The form and structure of these cities reveal the way the challenges posed by the growth demands of the society were responded to at each stage, and how they were made to serve the economic, social, cultural, and political interest of the society.

Our study focuses on the structure of urbanization in India in the pre-colonial period which underwent certain fundamental changes with the advent of British rule during the early 19th century. It has been found in the study that apart from the colonial port cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, most of the urban centers that were developed in the colonial period failed to generate economic activities concomitant with their expansion and therefore lost their significance in the post-independence period.

Although there is no dearth of studies in urban literature that focused on urbanization of Indian cities, most of the studies indicate that socio-economic factors causing rural-urban migration as the main factor behind India’s urbanization in the twentieth century. India’s being part of the far-flung British Empire facilitated large-scale migration of Indians from the mid 19th century into British colonies in Asia and Africa (Patnaik and Chandrasekhar, 1998. Apart from the international migration where the rural poor left their place of origin owing to economic compulsions, internal migration of Indian labour that served the colonial interest mainly shaped India’s urbanization process in 19th and early 20th century. This is reflected in the study on the development of the port cities of India with similar morphological features Kosambi and Brush. The demographic changes in the port city of Madras in late 19th century has also been widely explored in urban literature Lewandowski, 1975. The socio-economic development and demographic changes of Indian cities under British rule (Dip shikha, 2021) and the growth of Indian cities in the past several decades Ray, 2022 have also been majorly highlighted. However, since most of the studies focus on urbanization in the post-colonial era there is a need to understand the development of urbanization and the growth of Indian cities from a historical perspective to fill the gap in existing literature.

Urbanization in the Pre-colonial Period

“The medieval economy of India was essentially feudal”¹ in nature and consisted of a checkerboard of semi-closed, rural based economies. The circuits of interaction between spatial units were formed primarily based on the appropriation of agricultural surplus /or of trade. “The pre-colonial town evolved, expanded or declined in terms of their relationship with these circuits”². Among the factors that contributed to this process must be mentioned the political circumstances favorable to expanding economic activity. The expansion of both long-distance trade within India itself and India’s international trade with a network of Asian and European markets, and, finally, in response to the latter an enormous expansion of all aspects of textiles manufacturing and marketing also largely contributed to the growth of towns and cities in the medieval period.

Apart from the textile industries during this period that displayed the most varied form of labor organization, a second major sector of urban employment was the building industry. The arrival of ‘Saracenic’ architecture represented something more than a change of appearance and design of buildings. With lime mortar as the cementing material and arch, dome and vault providing new devices for roofing, there was in the 14^th century a remarkable spurt in the brick construction in the towns. The extensive ruins of Delhi speak for themselves. It is during this period many forts; mosques, palaces and other public buildings were also built in a large scale.

 By the mid 18^th century, the development of market forces had made deep inroads into the subsistence character of Indian agriculture and the poorer agriculturists depended on traders and money lenders for the supply of seeds and food grains six months in a year (Raychaudhuri T., 1984). The involvement of the farmers with the traders and the traders with farming, the extensive dependence on market-oriented production on advances from buyers and wide prevalence of local markets led to the commercialization of agriculture and simultaneously resulted in the growth of small towns in the pre-colonial period. “The qasabs or townships, of which in Akbar’s time there were said to be 3,200”³, also seem to have grown in this period. It has been established that “there has been a large increase both in the inter-regional and external trade during the Mughal period”⁴. Inter - regional trade, which was far larger than external trade gave birth to regional markets and in case of certain products - such as cotton, silk, and metal - even national markets were created with trading activities. In the process of long-distance trade, some of the towns were able to reap large profits and there was a considerable development of merchant capital, which led to further expansion of trade and handicraft production (Chandra B., 1970). This led to the expansion of several old trading towns and the emergence of new towns. Thus, we can say, urbanism was a distinctive feature of the economic history of medieval India, and urbanization may well have been the most significant historical process of the period from 13^th to the 18^th century.

It has been plausibly postulated that, during the above period, four distinct types of urban centers can be identified at least in northern India. First there were those cities whose prime function was administrative and where other roles, manufacturing or sacral, were of secondary importance. Such were Agra, Delhi, Lahore, and Hyderabad. These cities also served as imperial residences for an extended period. Secondly, there were those cities enjoying a predominantly commercial and manufacturing character, to which might have been attached administrative functions which, nevertheless remained subordinate to their economic functions. Both Patna and Ahmadabad in the Mughal period fall into this category. Thirdly, there were the pilgrimage centers like Banaras and Mathura, where trade and craft activities were drawn to as there was already a concentration of both permanently settled and transient population. Apart from these cities, there were centers that developed and flourished because of some distinct manufacturing techniques, craft skill and local commodity, which ensured their ongoing prosperity (Humbly, 1982). Thus, the first part of the Mughal period appears to have been a veritable golden age of urbanization as there was both the expansion in the size of pre-existing cities and towns and the proliferation of new foundations.

It has been found that the great expansion of commerce during the Mughal period inevitably brought increased wealth to the major urban centers of the country, especially to those cities whose location made them natural entrepots whether by land or sea. It is during this time, “the ports of Surat, Broach and Cambay on the West Coast and Masulipatnam on the east, as well as Patna and Banaras on the Ganges entered upon the period of greatest prosperity”⁵. Since most of the urban centers for their prosperity depended on the political conditions favorable to the steady pursuit of their trades and specialized craft industries, they were disastrously affected by the political instability in the later period. In the urban history of India one can witness that “the flowering of the urban based economy and the urban culture during the reigns of Akbar, Jahangir, and Shajahan, and for much of the reign of Aurangzeb, derived largely from the establishment of political conditions highly advantageous to commerce and to the trading and artisan classes of the cities”⁶.  In fact, the urban centers flourished where the political instability could be held at bay.  A most striking feature of India’s urbanization in the subsequent period shows that “urban growth in the 18^th century was most conspicuous in the port cities (e.g. Calcutta, Madras, Pondichery and Bombay) which came under the control of foreigners and were relatively immune to disorder consequent upon the Mughal political decline. Thus, in general, evidence suggests that so long the Mughal regime flourished, so also did the towns and the cities”⁷.

Urbanization and Colonial Rule in India

The structure of urbanization of medieval India underwent certain fundamental changes with the advent of British rule in India during the early 19^th century. The British conquest of India through the agency of East India Company led to the most drastic changes in the village way of life (Thorner D. and Thorner A., 1962). The most fundamental of these changes was the destruction of the older structure of the village community, partly because of the new land revenue system introduced by the British Government and partly because of the spread of commercial agriculture in the 19^th century. The British government was mainly concerned with securing the largest possible revenue. Hence, “By the middle of the 19^th century three basic land revenue systems had been gradually introduced in the provinces of British India namely the Zamindari, Ryotwary and Mahalwari-all serving the same ends, namely, to conserve for the British colonialist, the feudal exploitation of the Indian peasantry”⁸.

In reality all the three forms of land revenue systems introduced by the colonial rulers carried some features that shook the backbone of the cultivating peasant class. The land revenue systems with several variants introduced in course of the 19^th century, were dominant from 1793 to 1947.The introduction of some of the rights of private property in land, the purchase and sale of Zamindar’s holdings, were explicitly sanctioned by the laws that went against the peasants. Besides this, contrary to the Mughal land revenue system under which land taxes could be paid in crops (Habib I., 1982), now there was rigorous insistence upon prompt and complete payment of the stipulated sums in cash on stipulated dates. In cases of default, the peasants could be evicted. “The new land system made mobile both the land and the peasants and left the way open for the growth of money lenders and absentee landlords”⁹.

“The land and taxation policy of the British government ruined the agricultural economy of the country and its commercial policy thwarted efforts at industrial development”¹⁰. The older rural framework of India weakened, and commercial agriculture grew. By the end of the 18^th century, Britain itself passed through industrial revolution which was consolidated in the first half of the 19^th century. British manufacturers clamoured for raw materials and sought anxiously for good markets to dispose of their finished products. Hence the coastal towns of India were linked with Britain and later in the 1850’s, railways were opened. The railways facilitated the siphoning out the raw materials from India to the world market. Wheat poured out of Punjab, cotton from Bombay, and jute out of Bengal (Thorner D. and Thorner A., 1962). As commercial agriculture and money economy spread, the older practices associated with self-subsisting economy declined. The same railroads that carried away the commercial crops brought back machine-made industrial products to the villages. The flooding of Indian markets by cheap machine-made goods from the metropolitan country from the 1820’s led to the collapse of indigenous handicrafts production and the destruction of Indian artisans and craftsmen.

The destruction of indigenous industries and the pauperization of the peasant class created a situation of falling land-man ratio in the colonial period gave rise to acute underemployment in the rural areas.  Thus, millions of rural unemployed and under employed were forced to go to the cities in looking for job. It was found that “during the course of six decades from 1871 to 1931, the proportion of agricultural labourers to total agricultural population increased from a meagre one seventh to more than one third”¹¹.

The following data give the proportion of agricultural labourers to the total agricultural populations in percent:

Year	1891	1901	1911	1921	1931
Percent	13.0	25.1	22.0	26.2	38.0

Source: Quoted from Agricultural Labourers in Modern India and Pakistan, by S. J Patel, p.4.

With the increased pressure on land and rise in the number of land- less laborer, “India had become by the end of 19^th century and probably even earlier an integrated economy as far as mobility of labor was concerned”¹². The movement was caused at the source by the precarious condition of existence, partly among the land less laborer. Since 1850, a dwindling proportion of the village artisans also had to migrate to the urban centers to find other ways to gain a livelihood. The main flow of population during this period was from north and central India to Bengal and Assam, and to the canal colonies of Punjab, from central and western India to Bombay and from north to south Davis K., 1951. Of these flows, the east west one was the most significant in terms of numbers of men involved. New employment opportunities in plantations, mines and factories stimulated the movement towards the eastern provinces. The Royal Commission on agriculture noted that 75% of the labor employed in 15 sugar mills in Bihar and Orissa during this period was composed of such migratory labour¹³. The agricultural movement towards Bombay also seems to have been stimulated by the growth of factories. “In India though the mobility of labor was the most important contributing factor in the process of urbanization, the level of urbanization however remained low till 1921”¹⁴. The Table 1.1 reveals that, the total population of the country living in urban areas was 10% in 1901. The slow growth of urban population in the subsequent decade was due to the ravages of plague, which led to massive exodus of population from the urban areas.

With the decade 1921-31, urbanization became a noticeable phenomenon in India and the urban population growth rate accelerated with each decade since then. The Second World War further accentuated the process of urbanization in India. Many industries did brisk business during the war period due to the unprecedented demand for goods from England and foreign markets. The rapid industrialization during this period also led to massive migration of people from rural areas to work in the secondary and tertiary sectors of economy. Partition of the country in the following decade again brought mass migration of displaced persons that had a phenomenal impact on India’s urban growth. The migrants from Pakistan mostly settled in the urban areas (Bogue, 1962).

The low level of urbanization process that never showed any tendency to accelerate during the colonial period is also evident from the degree of urbanization in British districts and feudatory states in India as shown in the Table 1.2.

Despite the low level of urbanization, the mobility of labor from the rural sector continued even in the post-colonial period as the agrarian reform policy which was formulated by the Congress Agrarian Reforms committee with the objective of ‘land to the tiller’ was not implemented fully and failed to pave the way for a rapid agricultural development. “The legal provisions did not aim so much at abolishing the intermediary as at preserving his dominant landholding position, provided he undertook to change his form of domination from indirect cultivation through tenants to direct cultivation through hired labour”¹⁵.  This played a most crucial role in speeding up the process of eviction of small peasants and simultaneously increasing the concentration of more and more land in the hand of the landlords.

The process of economic concentration of land holdings in India continued in the next decade. During this period, the so called ‘Green Revolution’ and the adoption of new production techniques, where it had taken place, is recognized to have been largely confined to the top cultivating strata. Vaidyanathan has also elaborated the fact that there is a deceleration in the growth of agricultural output since mid-sixties. According to him “the concern has been further heightened by the stagnation of agricultural output and in turn severely constrained the growth of the rest of the economy”¹⁶. It was further found that Green Revolution only helped the already better off areas to make their economic position still better by initiating a process of an unbalanced growth in the agricultural sector. The rich farmers became richer leaving the poor farmers in despair. So, under such circumstances there was little desire on the part of the small peasants and land less agricultural labourers to remain in the same position for any length of time. In fact, they were forced to a position of wandering from place to place in search of work mainly of non - agricultural nature. The migrants also included petty cultivators who could find a job, which is a little, more profitable than cultivating his tiny holding. These people generally moved towards city centers where work is easier to find (Patel S. J., 1952).

In the colonial situation greater concentration of population occurred in the major colonial port cities (Calcutta, Bombay and Madras). “The other urban centers developed or patronized by the metropolises often failed to generate economic activities concomitant with their expansion since much of their expansion was often related to specific colonial /military/political and other considerations”¹⁷. Even after the decolonization began, many of the cities continued to be the linking centers thereby delaying the process of industrialisation in the country. In fact, these cities were prevented from playing the urbanising role being successfully played by the western cities. So, the post-independence period witnessed an unbalanced urbanization process resulting in concentration of population, industries, expertise, and economic activities along with massive exodus of population from the countryside. Several development economists even argued that because of their colonial heritage or certain accidental factors a large concentration of population in India is seen in a few metropolitan centers. It is believed that whereas the spread of urbanization in India in the 19th century could be attributed to the large-scale emigration of land less agricultural labourers in industrial centers to join industrial pursuits, the modern cities of twentieth and twenty-first century are an extension of the industrial cities of the colonial era, albeit with greater sophistication and technical advancement.

Table 1.1

Decadal Growth of Urban Population of India in Colonial period

Year	% Of urban popln to total popln
1881-1901	9.30
1901-1911	10.00
1911-1921	11.38
1921-1931	12.13
1931-41	13.91
1941-51	17.29

Source: Hoselitz 1962: 15

                                        Table 1.2

Degree Level of urbanizatioU in the Hinterland of Calcutta 1872-1921

Population	1872	1881	1891	1901	1911	1921
above 25,001	3	2	3	4	3	6
10,001-25,000	4	2	2	6	6	4
5,001-10,000	4	5	6	8	6	10
2,001-5,000	12	14	18	16	16	14
1,001-2,000	23	26	23	25	26	28
0-1,000	89	86	83	76	78	73
Total	135	135	135	135	135	135

Source: Based on census of India 1872-1921, Part II, Imperial Tables for population in Towns.

The table indicates that - 1. The level of urbanization was very low. As many as, 50-65% of the districts had a mean city population size between 0-1,000 during the decade under consideration. 2. The number of districts, which showed a comparatively higher level of urbanization, was very small. Only 2-4% of the districts have an MC size of 25,000 and more. 3. Most of the feudatory states had a very low level of urbanization, and 4. The level of urbanization remained stagnant over the decades under consideration.

1. Ahuja S., ‘Urbanization and Changing Social Order’, Mainstream, April 29, 1995, p. 22 2. Raychaudhuri T., ‘The Mid-eighteenth-Century Background’ in The Cambridge Economic History of India vol.2: c. 1757-c. 1970, Ed. by Dharma Kumar, Orient Longman in association with Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 15 3. Chandra B, ‘Karl Marx-His Theories of Societies and Colonial Rule’, Mimeographed, Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, N.D (1970), p. 974. 4. Hambly Gavin R.G., Quoted in ‘Towns and cities’ in The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol 1: c.1200-c.1750, Eds. Dharma Kumar and Tapan Raychaudhuri, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 435. 5. Thorner D. and Thorner A., Land and Labour in India, Asia Publishing house, 1962, p. 52 6. Habib I., ‘Agrarian relations and Land Revenue’, in The Cambridge Economic History of India, Ed by Dharma Kumar and Tapan Raychaudhuri, vol 1, c.1200-c.1750, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 235 7. Davis K., Population of India and Pakistan, University Press, Princeton, 1951,p. (109-110) 8. Patel S.J, Agricultural Labourers in Modern India and Pakistan, Current Book House, Bombay, 1952, p. 124. 9. Kosambi Meera and Brush John.E, Three colonial port cities in India, Geographical Review, Vol.78, No. 1 (Jan, 1988), Taylor and Francis Ltd. 10. Lewandoski Susan.J , Urban growth and Municipal Development in colonial city of Madras, 1860-1900, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No.2 (Feb, 1975), Association of Asian Studies. 11. Dipshikha, Urbanisation in India during British Period (1857-1947), Oct 2020, Routledge Publication. 12. Ray Divyakusum, Post-colonial Indian City-Literature, Policy, Politics and evolution, March 2022, Routledge Publication.

1. Habib I., Characteristics and Process of Urbanization in Colonial India- A Case Study of Calcutta and its Hinterland (1850-1921), p. 47, Ph.D. Thesis, 1979, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
2. Ibid
3. Quoted in ‘Towns and cities’ by Hambly Gavin R.G in The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol 1: c.1200-c.1750, General Editors: Dharma Kumar and Tapan Raychaudhuri, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 442.
4. Habib I., The Agrarian System of Moghul India, Bombay, 1962, p. 190
5. Quoted in ‘Towns and cities’ by Humbly Gavin R.G in The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol 1: c.1200-c.1750, General Editors: Dharma Kumar and Tapan Raychaudhuri, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 442.
6. Ibid
7. Opcit. Hambly, p. 451
8. Kotovsky, Agrarian Reforms in India, translated by K.J. Lambkin, Printed and Published by D.P.Sinha, New Age Printing Press, N.D, 1964, p. 2.
9. Thorner, p. 54.
10. Habib I., p.33.
11. Patel S.J, Agricultural Labourers in Modern India and Pakistan, Current Book House, Bombay, 1952, p. 21.
12. Bagchi A. K., Private Investment in India 1900-1936, Cambridge, At the University Press, 1972, p. 131.
13. Royal Commission on Agriculture, Report, p.576.
14. Habib A., p.37.
15. Patnaik U, Chains of Servitude: Bondage and Slavery in India, Ed. by Utsa Patnaik and Manjari Ding waney, Sangam Books, India Pvt. Ltd, N.D 1985, p. 9.
16. Vaidyanathan A, “Performance and Prospects of Crop Production in India”, EPW, Special Number, August,1977, p. 1355.
17. Farooqui A., ‘Urban Development in a Colonial Situation: Early Nineteenth Century Bombay’, EPW, Oct 5, 1996, p. 2747