India And The Contemporary World Ii Chapter 6 Work, Life And Leisure

The kind of work available to women in London between the nineteenth and the twentieth century were of domestic maids who cooked, cleaned and cared for young children on low wages.

The factors which led to this change:

(i)Ties between members of households loosened, and among the working class the institution of marriage tended to break down.

(i)Women of the upper and middle classes in Britain, on the other hand, faced increasingly higher levels of isolation.

(a) A private landlord: Factory or workshop owners did not house the migrant workers. Instead, individual landowners put up cheap, and usually unsafe, tenements for the new arrivals.

(b)A Police Superintendent: For a Police Superintendent, crime became an object of widespread concern. So the population of criminals was counted, their activities were watched, and their ways of life were investigated. They attempted to discipline the population, imposed high penalties for crime and offered work to those who were considered the ‘deserving poor’.

(c)A leader of a political party: Large masses of people could be drawn into political causes in the city. A large city population was thus both a threat and an opportunity. State authorities went to great lengths to reduce the possibility of rebellion and enhance urban aesthetics, as the example of Paris shows.

Reasons for major expansion of Bombay population in mid-nineteenth century:

(i) Bombay became the capital of the Bombay Presidency in 1819, after the Maratha defeat in the Anglo-Maratha war. The city quickly expanded.

(ii)With the growth of trade in cotton and opium, large communities of traders and bankers as well as artisans and shopkeepers came to settle in Bombay. The establishment of textile mills led to a fresh surge in migration

(iii) Bombay dominated the maritime trade of India till well into the twentieth century. It was also at the junction head of two major railways. 

(iv)The railways encouraged an even higher scale of migration into the city. For instance, famine in the dry regions of Kutch drove large numbers of people into Bombay in 1888-89.

(v)Bombay was at the junction head of two major railways. The railways also encouraged migration into the city.

The forms of entertainment that came up in nineteenth century England to provide leisure activities for the people:

(i)For wealthy Britishers, there had long been an annual ‘London Season’. Several cultural events, such as the opera, the theatre and classical music performances were organised for an elite group of 300-400 families in the late eighteenth century. 

(ii)Meanwhile, working classes met in pubs to have a drink, exchange news and sometimes also to organise for political action. Many new types of large-scale entertainment for the common people came into being, some made possible with money from the state.

(iii)Libraries, art galleries and museums were established in the nineteenth century to provide people with a sense of history and pride in the achievements of the British. 

(iv)Music halls were popular among the lower classes, and, by the early twentieth century, cinema became the great mass entertainment for mixed audiences.

(v)British industrial workers were increasingly encouraged to spend their holidays by the sea, so as to derive the benefits of the sun and bracing winds. 

The social changes in London that led to the need for the underground railway:

(i)Between the two World Wars (1919-39) the responsibility for housing the working classes was accepted by the British state, and a million houses, most of them single-family cottages, were built by local authorities.
 
(ii)The city had extended beyond the range where people could walk to work, and the development of suburbs made new forms of mass transport absolutely necessary. 

(iii)The London underground railway partially solved the housing crisis by carrying large masses of people to and from the city

The development of the underground railway was criticised:

(i)Many felt that the ‘iron monsters’ added to the mess and unhealthiness of the city.

(ii)To make approximately two miles of railway, 900 houses had to be destroyed. Thus the London tube railway led to a massive displacement of the London poor, especially between the two World Wars.

Baron Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine was the chief architect of the new Paris. Haussmanisation stands for the forcible reconstruction of cities to enhance their beauty and impose order. The poor were evicted from the centre of Paris to reduce the possibility of political rebellion and to beautify the city.

Letter to the Editor to support this form of Development:

Straight, broad avenues or boulevards and open spaces were designed, and full-grown trees transplanted. In addition, policemen were employed, night patrols were begun, and bus shelters and tap water introduced. Public works on this scale employed a large number of people: one in five working persons in Paris was in the building trade in the 1860s. Paris became the hub of many new architectural, social and intellectual developments that were very influential right through the twentieth century, even in other parts of the globe.

A variety of steps were taken to clean up London. Attempts were made to decongest localities, green the open spaces, reduce pollution and landscape the city. Large blocks of apartments were built, akin to those in Berlin and New York – cities which had similar housing problems. Rent control was introduced in Britain during the First World War to ease the impact of a severe housing shortage. The congestion in the nineteenth-century industrial city also led to a yearning for clean country air.

(a) Public Life: The widespread use of coal in homes and industries in nineteenthcentury England raised serious problems. In industrial cities such as Leeds, Bradford and Manchester, hundreds of factory chimneys spewed black smoke into the skies. People joked that most inhabitants of these cities grew up believing that the skies were grey and all vegetation was black! Shopkeepers, homeowners and others complained about the black fog that descended on their towns, causing bad tempers, smoke-related illnesses, and dirty clothes. By the 1840s, a few towns such as Derby, Leeds and Manchester had laws to control smoke in the city. Moreover, the Smoke Abatement Acts of 1847 and 1853, as they were called, did not always work to clear the air.

(b) Private Life: Calcutta too had a long history of air pollution. Its inhabitants inhaled grey smoke, particularly in the winter. Since the city was built on marshy land, the resulting fog combined with smoke to generate thick black smog. High levels of pollution were a consequence of the huge population that depended on dung and wood as fuel in their daily life. But the main polluters were the industries and establishments that used steam engines run on coal. Many pleas were made to banish the dirty mills from the city, with no effect. However, in 1863, Calcutta became the first Indian city to get smoke nuisance legislation.

D.

Debganer Martye agaman

A.

Metropolis

C.

Philanthropist

B.

There was no beaking down of social distinctions

A.

along river valleys

C.

Leeds and Manchester were the early industrial cities of England

A.

jobs available there in the textile mills

C.

Industrialisation

D.

675,000

A.

Clothing and Footwear

A.

Women

B.

The city of London needed clerks, shopkeepers, artisans, semi-skilled workers and servants. Therefore, it attracted job-seekers.

A.

1661

B.

1819

C.

Calcutta

D.

Ebenezer Howard

C.

crime

C.

Andrew Mearns

C.

Both (a) and (b)

D.

Individual landowners

B.

He rebuilt Paris

A.

It fully solved the housing crisis by carrying large masses of people to and from the city

C.

green belts

A.

Charles Booth

D.

all of these

A.

D.

The underground railway

D.

It was the movement to get right to vote for every adult

C.

Mumbai

D.

All of these

D.

80%

A.

It was a one room tenement for the poor labourers

B.

Dada Saheb Phalke

Tips: -

M. Imp.

A.

lives of migrants and their encounter with the real pressure of daily life

C.

Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatwadekar

B.

plague epidemic

C.

rapid and unplanned

B.

The Gods visit earth

B.

1898

D.

Paddington to Farrington

C.

Raja Harishchandra

A.

Seven

D.

Ebenezer Howard

D.

10 Jan. 1863

C.

London

B.

A city of dreams

D.

A museum

Durgacharan Ray was a novelist of Bengal. The name of his novel is Debganer Martye.

In the novel, Brahma, the Creator in Hindu mythology, took a train to Calcutta with some other gods.

The seven islands of Bombay were joined into one landmass only over a period of time.

(i)The earliest project began in 1784. The Bombay governor William Hornby approved the building of the great sea wall which prevented the flooding of the low-lying areas of Bombay.

(ii)Since then, there have been several reclamation projects. The need for additional commercial space in the mid-nineteenth century led to the formulation of several plans, both by government and private companies, for the reclamation of more land from the sea.

(iii)Private companies became more interested in taking financial risks. In 1864, the Back Bay Reclamation Company won the right to reclaim the western foreshore from the tip of Malabar Hill to the end of Colaba. Reclamation often meant the levelling of the hills around Bombay.

(iv)As the population continued to increase rapidly in the early twentieth century, every bit of the available area was built over and new areas were reclaimed from the sea.

(v)A successful reclamation project was undertaken by the Bombay Port Trust, which built a dry dock between 1914 and 1918 and used the excavated earth to create the 22-acre Ballard Estate. Subsequently, the famous Marine Drive of Bombay was developed.

The London underground railway started on 10 January 1863 between Paddington and Farrington Street.
The London underground railway partially solved the housing crisis by carrying large masses of people to and from the city.

The problems experienced by people:

(i)High rents forced workers to share homes, either with relatives or caste fellows who were streaming into the city.

(ii)People had to keep the windows of their rooms closed even in humid weather due to the ‘close proximity of filthy gutters, privies, buffalo stables etc.’

(iii)Water was scarce, and people often quarrelled every morning for a turn at the tap.

Those cities were Presidency cities which were multifunctional. They had major ports, warehouses, houses and offices, army camps as well as educational institutions, museums and libraries.

In India Bombay, Calcutta and Madras were Presidential cities.

Bombay had become the capital of the Bombay Presidency in 1819, after the Maratha defeat in the Anglo-Maratha war.

Ebenezer Howard was an architect and a planner who developed the idea of the garden city, a pleasant space full of plants and trees, whose people could live and work. He believed that this would also produce better quality citizens.

The marginal groups:

(i) Many listed as ‘criminals’ in fact were poor people who lived by stealing lead from roofs, food from shops, lumps of coal, and clothes drying on hedges.

(ii) With technological developments, women gradually lost their industrial jobs and were forced to work within the households.

(iii) Large number of children were pushed into low paid work by their parents.

(a) True

(b) True

(c) False

(d) False

(e) True

Durgacharan Ray, in 1880.

Temperance Movement.

Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker.

Chawls.

 Charles Dickens.