Chapter 6
Work, Life and Leisure
Ø Characteristics
of the City
v Cities are the
centres of political power, administrative network, trade and industry,
religious institutions and intellectual activity, and support various social
groups such as artisans, merchants and priests.
v Three historical
processes have shaped modern cities in decisive ways.
ü The rise of
capitalism
ü The
establishment of colonial rule over large parts of the world
ü The development
of democratic ideals.
Ø Industrialisation
and the Rise of the Modern City in England
v The early
industrial cities of Britain such as Leeds and Manchester attracted large
number of migrants to the textile mills set up in the late 18th
century.
v Five major types
of industries employed large number of people. These were
ü Clothing and
footwear
ü Wood and
furniture
ü Metals and
engineering
ü Printing and
stationary
ü
Precious
products such as surgical instruments, watches and objects of precious metal
v During the First
World War (1914-18), London began manufacturing cars and electrical goods. The
number of large factories increased until they accounted for nearly one-third
of all jobs in the city.
Ø Marginal Groups
v Women
ü Lost their
industrial jobs owing to technological developments and were forced to work
within households.
ü A large number
of women used their homes for increasing family income by taking lodgers or
through such activities as tailoring, washing or matchbox making.
ü In the 20th
century, women got employed in wartime industries and offices and withdrew from
domestic service.
v Children
ü Large numbers of
children were pushed into low paid work by their parents, while many became
thieves.
ü
The
Compulsory Education Act of 1870 and the Factory Act of 1902 kept children out
of industrial work.
Ø Housing
v Factories or
workshops did not provide housing to the migrant workers. Instead, individual
landowners put up cheap, and usually unsafe, tenements for the new arrivals.
v The unhygienic
condition of slums highlighted the need of housing for the poor.
v There was
widespread fear of social disorder, especially after the Russian Revolution in
1917. Workers’ mass housing scheme were planned for preventing the London poor
from turning rebellious.
v Attempts were
made for decongesting localities, creating open spaces and reducing pollution.
Large blocks of apartments were also built.
v Rent control was
introduced in Britain during the First World War for easing the impact of
severe housing shortage.
v Between the two
World Wars, 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 the local authorities.
Ø Transport in the
City
v The London
underground railway was introduced. It partially solved the housing crisis by
carrying large masses of people to and from the city.
v 10th
January, 1863: The
first underground railway in the world opened between Paddington and
Farrington Street in London.
v Between the two
World Wars, the London tube railway led to massive displacement of the London
poor.
v Better-planned
suburbs and a good railway network enabled large numbers to live outside
Central London and travel to work.
Ø Social Change in
the City
v In the
Industrial city, ties between household members loosened, increasingly higher
levels of isolation was faced and among the working class and the institution
of marriage tended to break down.
v The city
encouraged a new spirit of individualism among both men and women.
v The public space
increasingly became a male preserve and the domestic sphere was seen as the
proper place for women.
v The 19th
century Chartism Movement was a movement demanding the voting rights for
all adult males.
v The 10-hour
movement demanded
limited hours of work in factories.
v Women also
demanded voting rights and the right to property from 1870s.
Ø Leisure and
Consumption
v Various methods
of recreation were adopted by the working class people in the 19th
century. These included
ü Cultural events
such as opera, theatre and classical music performances.
ü Working classes
met in pubs to have a drink, exchange news and sometimes for organizing
political action.
ü
Libraries,
art galleries and museums provided a glimpse of the British history.
v By the early 20th
century, cinema became the great mass entertainment for mixed audiences.
Ø The City in
Colonial India
v The pace of
urbanisation in India was slow under the colonial rule. In the early 20th
century, no more than 11% of Indians were living in cities.
v Population in
the Presidency towns rose considerably owing to the availability of major
ports, warehouses, homes and offices, army camps, as well as educational
institutions, museums and libraries.
v Bombay: The
Prime City of India
ü Bombay was a
group of seven islands.
ü
1661: The control of Bombay passed into the
British hands after the marriage of Britain’s King Charles II to the
Portuguese princess.
ü Bombay became
the principal Western port for the East India Company. At first, Bombay was the
major outlet for cotton textiles from Gujarat.
ü
It
became an important administrative and industrial centre of Western India.
ü
1819: Bombay became the capital of the Bombay
Presidency after the Maratha defeat in the Anglo-Maratha war.
ü 1854: First cotton
textile mill was established in Bombay
ü 1919-1926: Women formed 23%
of the mill workforce
ü
Late 1930s: Women’s jobs were increasingly taken
over by machines or men
ü With the rapid
and unplanned expansion of the city, the crisis of housing and water supply
became acute by the mid-1950s.
ü More than 70% of
the working people lived in the thickly-populated chawls of Bombay. Chawls
were multi-storeyed old structures.
ü Merchants,
bankers and building contractors owned these chawls. Each chawl
was divided into one-room tenements with no private toilets.
ü Lower castes
were kept out of many chawls and often had to live in shelters made of
corrugated sheets, leaves or bamboo poles.
ü Town planning
emerged from fears of social revolution and the fears about the plague
epidemic.
ü
1898: The City of Bombay Improvement Trust was
established. It focused on clearing poor homes out of the city centre.
v Land Reclamation
in Bombay
ü The need for
additional commercial space in the mid-19th century led to the
formulation of several government and private plans for the reclamation of more
land from sea.
ü 1864: The Back Bay
Reclamation Company won the right of reclaiming the Western foreshore
from the tip of Malabar Hill to the end of Colaba.
ü As population
started growing in the early 19th century, every bit of the
available area was built over and new areas were reclaimed from the sea.
v Bombay as the
City of Dreams: The World of Cinema and Culture
ü
1896: Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatwadekar shot
a scene of a wrestling match in Bombay’s Hanging gardens and it became
India’s first movie.
ü 1913: Dadasaheb Phalke
made Raja Harishchandra
ü By 1925, Bombay became
the film capital of India.
ü Many people in
the film industry were migrants from cities such as Lahore, Madras and
Calcutta.
Ø Cities and the
Challenge of the Environment
v Large quantities
of refuse and waste products polluted air and water, while excessive noise
became a feature of urban life.
v Black fog
engulfed the towns owing to pollution, thereby causing bad temper and
smoke-related illnesses.
v The Smoke
Abatement Acts of 1847 and 1853 did not work to clean the air as smoke was not
easy to monitor or measure.
v By 1840s: Towns such as
Derby, Leeds and Manchester had laws for controlling smoke in the city.
v In Calcutta,
high level of pollution was a consequence of the huge population that depended
on dung and wood as fuel, and also the use of steam engines that ran on coal.
v The railway line
introduced in 1855 introduced a new pollutant-coal from Raniganj.
1863: Calcutta became
the first Indian city to get smoke nuisance legisla.
