SAH Conference

In April, I presented my paper “Shivaji Bridge’s Construction Workers: Redressing Archival Absence” at the 78th Annual International SAH Conference held in Atlanta, in the session ‘Colonial Public Works: Architecture Beyond Labor Subalternity’. The presentation drew attention to the invisibilised labor behind large-scale colonial works, and the politics of omission in architectural documentation.

Between 1920 and 1923 workers built an arched stone masonry bridge in the Indo-Saracenic revival style in the heart of the city of Poona (Pune) in western British India. I read the colonial archival record between the lines to argue that the contractor, if not the workers, influenced decision making in the substitution of building materials, changes in methods of execution, and the responses to unexpected incidents on the building site.

While the PWD’s bureaucracy including contracts, specifications, and work slips have been seen as tools that brought pre-existing labour processes under the control of capital, their close scrutiny reveals the incompleteness and failure of this process. In other words, though the workers are not explicitly present in the archive, the bridge file's content can be traced back to workers' agency, reflecting the incomplete control of capital over labour or–in Marx's terms–processes of 'formal' rather than 'real' subsumption of labour. The Indian contractor then, emerges as a figure who not merely passed on instructions from the PWD to the workers but also, on several occasions, advocated for a reliance on workers know-how rather than the specified solutions, and defended their remunerative demands.