East India Company’s Impact on the Subcontinent’s Built Environment

British presence in India over a period of nearly 350 years, from the establishment of the East India Company’s factories at Surat and Machilipatnam at the beginning of the seventeenth century, down to 1947, considerably altered the landscape of the subcontinent, and the ways in which it was documented or imagined. The mapping of the subcontinent went hand in hand with the extension of the EIC’s commercial activities and acquisition of territories gathering momentum in the nineteenth century with the Great Trigonometrical Survey. The Company’s factories, as those of the Portuguese and the Dutch, represented its earliest investment in fixed assets in Asia. The factory was a warehouse-cum-residential complex which over a period of time was fortified, frequently in a surreptitious manner. Indian rulers were wary of allowing European companies to fortify their premises. The showdown with Siraj-ud-Daula in 1756, leading to Plassey, was the outcome of tensions caused partly by the English company’s defiance of directives to desist from erecting fortifications at Fort William. We need to bear in mind that the factories were garrisons as well, initially being an extension on land of the heavily armed ships of the European companies. As Rosie Llewellyn-Jones notes in her Empire Building, ‘it was often seamen—particularly gunners—who were involved in designing the earliest fortified European buildings around the Indian coast. … The gunners advised on the mounting of ordnance on land, and particularly at the factories where corner bastions were built to accommodate the cannons’ (pp. 33-34). The book surveys the transformation of the Indian landscape, and society, from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of Company rule, selecting some significant and hitherto neglected aspects of this history.