Infrastructural In/Justice in Mid-Century Bombay.

Waterworks; Sewerage; Colonists

Historians identify the 1850s as the decade in which Bombay went from being a port to becoming a city. I look at how British colonists came to see Bombay as urban in this same period and show how their vision was facilitated by the infrastructure that they then imported—sewers, railways, waterworks, and sanitary reports. Within the pages of Bombay's first two sanitary reports, Henry Conybeare's Report on the Sanitary State and Sanitary Requirements of Bombay (1855) and Andrew Leith's Report on the Sanitary State of the Island of Bombay (1864), we can locate the birth of this urban vision. I argue that Western infrastructure not only structures the way that the colonists see the city, making it visible, but also obfuscates all else. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]