ABSTRACT
In February 1890, the British Medical Journal called the attention of its readers to some disconcerting news it had received about recent events in Banaras. During Prince Albert Victor's visit to that city in January, the municipality had festively inaugurated its new water supply and sewerage projects, with the Prince laying the foundation stone for the waterworks. While appreciating the positive impact both projects were to have on the immediate cleanliness of Banaras and the health of its inhabitants, the article took strong exception to the proposed sewerage scheme:
How are the mighty fallen! […]. [T]he municipality intend[s] to discharge the sewage of the city into the Ganges a few miles below the town. As India has no enactment similar to the English Rivers Pollution Act there is no power to prevent their doing so, nor to prevent other cities in the Gangetic valley following their example, and thus converting the river by the time it reaches Calcutta into a gigantic cesspool […]. [I]t is to be hoped that the Legislature will interfere before what is now only a possible danger of the distant future becomes a serious menace to all towns on the lower Ganges […]. 1
The Banaras sewerage project, which in the eyes of the Journal and its Calcutta informant threatened to convert ‘the noble river’ into a ‘sewer’, and to reduce it ‘to the condition of Father Thames’, 2 was just one among several sewerage projects the North-Western Provinces were planning in the early 1890s. As part of his ambitious agenda on urban sanitary reform, Lieutenant-Governor Sir Auckland Colvin (1887–92) declared the introduction of water supplies and sewerage systems in his major cities a priority. Thus, projects similar to that in Banaras were envisaged for other riparian cities, namely Kanpur, Allahabad, Lucknow and Agra. Before we turn to some of these projects and the controversies they ignited, it is important to sketch the wider contemporary context of colonial policies on public health and urban sanitation in which they were situated.