CASI Student Blog

In India, the “Sarkaari Naukri” i.e. a government job offers advantages that private sector employment is rarely able to match. Perks include comfortable salaries, pensions, regular raises, guaranteed job security with regular promotions, housing, and most of all – social prestige. It is no surprise that an estimated 220 million people applied for jobs in the Indian government between 2014-2022. However, a shift is taking place inside government agencies in India – fewer vacancies for jobs are being released despite perennial understaffing. A part of the answer lies in the replacement of traditional government jobs with contractual jobs. 

In my first blog post, I unpacked the phenomenon of contractual government employment by speaking to people who worked in these very jobs. Despite being paid lower salaries, and being on short term contracts, I found that most people had stayed in their jobs for a long time. The primary motivation behind this was the hope of becoming a permanent government employee. That one day, the government will “regularize” them and they will be entitled to the salaries, tenure benefits, and social status that comes with having a “Sarkaari Naukri”. As one interviewee put it – “Pakke hone ki aasha rehti hai” (There is a hope of becoming permanent). In blog two of my three part series, I shed light on the experiences of the lucky few who made it. Those who were hired as regular workers in roles that are now being contractualized, and those who made the highly sought after transition from contractual to permanent.

Across the board, permanent employees report very high job satisfaction. “Kaam karne mein bohot maza aata hai”, said Shankar, a member of the administrative staff at the municipal government in Delhi. He joined the agency in 1986 as a permanent member of staff in a role that now hires people on a contractual basis. But when he joined, the concept of a contractual worker did not exist. He talks about how hiring was fairly decentralized, and “even a section officer” could recruit people. As he is due to retire this year, he reflects on his journey and how the profession has changed. He recalls how salaries in the private sector used to be much higher, but the government has caught up to this while ensuring a lower workload for employees. When asked whether contractual staff around him are able to work effectively, he is skeptical and observes that they have to experience high levels of uncertainty and anxiety in their work lives, but he also flags that they sometimes perform better because they face the need to prove themselves. Both Shankar and his colleague report that the biggest advantages to having worked as a tenured employee in the government were the salaries, job security, and the “sammaan” i.e. the respect they receive from people. 

As being directly recruited as a permanent employee is becoming rarer, the most common way to make the jump from contractual to permanent in the municipal government in Delhi is the legal route i.e. filing a court case to be recognized as a permanent government employee. While this path may appear straightforward, it can be a difficult one riddled with delays.  Shyam, a field worker in the health department was recognized as a permanent employee in 2009, after filing a court case for this in 1987, a year after he joined the municipal government. The judgment was the culmination of an arduous process where his case was moved from the Law Department to the Central Administrative Tribunal, and finally to a High Court where a judgment was made. 

In addition to the long timelines, the process can also entail emotional turmoil from being ostracized at work. Kushal, who joined the government as a computer operator in 1996 when the agency was going digital, and the ability to operate a computer was not a common skill. He joined 7 of his colleagues to file a case towards being recognized as permanent employees in 1999, but the judgment was finally made 12 years later. During this time, he reported to have faced pushback from senior officials at the workplace, but his colleagues and him persevered until the High Court ruled in their favour. While long and difficult, the outcome was worth it – not only is he now recognized as a tenured employee with access to pensions and benefits, he received arrears for his full tenure in the government. 

I only had the opportunity to meet one individual who transitioned into a permanent role in the government after serving as contractual staff through a non-legal route. Reena joined the municipal government in 2010 as a contractual Assistant Inspector at the Health department, but she took an exam for an Inspector role in 2014. She was able to make the cut and join her permanent role in 2017, but this was not baked into her previous role – she studied towards the civil services exam that was open to the general public. She also reported that the exam has not taken place since 2014, and hers was the last cohort to join the municipal government as a permanent employee since everyone hired after that has been a contractual worker.

Although rare, instances of people making this transition from contractual to permanent are tracked closely, and shared widely, by the bureaucratic community. News of individual workers who win favourable judgments is shared by their colleagues with everyone they know in other departments, often to understand the viability of this route for their own selves. Even more obsessively tracked are instances of contractual employees being made permanent by legislative action outside of the municipal government, as has been the case in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, and at the Delhi Jal Board. These instances are the outcomes of years of contract workers making formal demands and organizing collectively, but instances of a successful conversion to permanent status are not a common outcome. Despite how rare these events are, rumours remain rife and efforts remain active.

This is the last post in my ‘Salt Heard ‘Round the World’ series, so if you haven’t read the first two, give ‘em a quick scan through before you dive in here!

My time in the British Library has come to an end, and I’m back in Philly, starting in on the long process of sifting through my notes and putting it all together. It’ll be a while before I can sum up what it all means, but the mountain of notes and photographs in front of me as I write this has already made me feel assured that this research trip has been successful beyond my expectations. I’m truly grateful to CASI for the incredible support they’ve given me — this trip represents a significant portion of my dissertation research, and it was only possible through CASI funding. 

Extracting saltpeter from soil. From Denis Diderot’s l’Encyclopédie (1751-1772). Royal Gunpowder Mills Archive.

Now that I’m back, and slowly planning out this project’s next steps, I’m thinking a lot about the world that 19th century industrialization — and Indian saltpeter — made. In my previous posts, I’ve tried to give you a sense of just how essential saltpeter was to the Early Modern world, the world of about 1500 to 1800. It reshaped the way that wars were fought, and the way that states exercised power over each other and over their subjects. It provided both a rationale and a fuel for colonial conquest. In the century and a half that followed, it was key to extracting the coal that powered the factories, furnaces, foundries, trains, steamships, and other engines of the Industrial Revolution. Both on its own and as the primary constituent of gunpowder, saltpeter traveled around the world, linking the pans of Indian producers to the battlefields of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, the emerging centers of global finance, the smoke-filled backrooms of political elites, and the gangs of dust-covered miners prying industrial energy out of Pennsylvania’s native rock.

But gunpowder wouldn’t be king forever. By the end of the 19th century, the centuries-old recipe was beginning to show its age as industrial chemists developed new, more powerful explosive formulas. In 1846, the Swiss professor Christian Friedrich Schönbein began marketing a nitric and sulfuric acid-treated cotton wool called ‘guncotton’ as a cleaner-burning alternative to gunpowder, with more propulsive force. The following year, Italian chemist Ascario Sobrero was performing a series of experiments when a small sample of a chemical he’d synthesized suddenly and violently exploded. Further testing convinced Sobrero that the compound he’d stumbled upon was far too dangerous and unstable to be useful. His warnings, however, did not dissuade his Swedish colleague, Alfred Nobel, from further developing and marketing Sobrero’s discovery — nitroglycerine — as a commercial explosive. 

At first, these early chemical explosives found only limited markets; unlike the venerable gunpowder, compounds like guncotton and nitroglycerine were highly unstable, demanded extremely particular production and storage conditions, and were prone to spectacular accidents. In 1847, a devastating explosion shuttered the UK’s first guncotton factory, less than a year after it opened. In 1864, Alfred Nobel’s brother Emil was among those killed by an accidental blast at the Nobels’ Stockholm nitroglycerine plant. These chemical explosives also burned much faster than traditional gunpowder, and tended to create dangerous overpressure conditions when used as propellants for small arms and artillery. 

By the second half of the 19th century, though, things were changing. In 1867, Nobel introduced dynamite, a far more stable nitroglycerine-based explosive that quickly caught on with the booming mining industries of the American West (although Eastern coal miners continued to prefer gunpowder for decades). 

Making dynamite at a DuPont factory near Gibbstown, New Jersey, c.1895.

After the American Civil War, large manufacturing corporations like DuPont were looking for alternatives to Indian saltpeter. They found abundant supplies of soda (sodium nitrate) in South America, where American economic domination ensured practically unlimited access to cheap nitrates. India’s saltpeter producers, and their British colonizers, were no longer the only game in town.

In the early 1880s, French chemist Paul Vieille developed ‘Poudre B,’ a nitrocellulose-based alternative to gunpowder as a propellant. Because the reactants entirely consumed themselves when detonated, the new powder produced almost no smoke — no lingering clouds to give away a shooter’s position or obscure their view of their target. On top of this, it propelled bullets much faster and further than traditional gunpowder, and had better ballistic capabilities. 

A cordite press at the Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mill. Photo by author.

The French military’s adoption of Vieille’s powder in 1886 touched off an international arms race as global powers in Europe, the Americas, and Asia scrambled either to develop locally-produced alternatives, or to buy commercial smokeless powders from chemical giants like DuPont and Nobel on the bustling international arms market. The British, not to be outdone (certainly not by their longtime Continental rivals), had developed their own smokeless propellant by 1889. Called ‘cordite’ because of its long, thin shape, the new British powder was a mix of nitroglycerine, nitrocellulose, and petroleum jelly. Despite the high heat it generated when fired (resulting in early problems with barrel erosion in British rifles), cordite’s spaghetti-like shape helped slow its burn rate so as to keep chamber pressures to a safe level.

Exactly how these changes affected the Indian saltpeter industry isn’t fully clear, and will require more research. Certainly, the rise of synthetic explosives displaced gunpowder — and therefore saltpeter — from some of their biggest historical roles. However, there is evidence in the documentary record that Indian saltpeter had always seen a wide range of uses beyond these. Producers may well have stayed in business turning out saltpeter for dyes, preservatives, fireworks, or fertilizer. And even with its declining military importance, traditional gunpowder remained in use in fuses and priming charges. As late as WWI, one British cabinet advisor could remark that “not a single round of cordite can be fired without the use of black powder.”

In the US and UK, though, times had undeniably changed. DuPont’s historic mills on Delaware’s Brandywine River had ceased powder production by the end of the 1920s. Likewise, the three remaining British powder works at Faversham — at least one of which had been in operation since at least the mid-17th century — closed in 1934, while Waltham Abbey’s last mill was decommissioned in 1941 after sustaining extensive damage from German bombing.

Today, these three former production centers are public historic sites, where professional and volunteer interpreters tell the story of the gunpowder industry. On my (admittedly few) days outside the Library, I had the chance to visit two of them.

Petering Out: Saltpeter’s Industrial Ruins Epitaph for Harold Godwinson, reputed to be buried at the Abbey Church of Waltham Holy Cross and St Lawrence, Waltham Abbey. Photo by author.

A short train ride north of London is the quaint Essex town of Waltham Abbey. The town center is dominated by the eponymous abbey church, its ragstone walls bequeathed by Harold Godwinson shortly before his fall at Hastings in 1066. Legend has it that the king may even have been buried in Waltham Abbey by his Norman vanquishers (although there’s some dispute about this).

The earliest reference to gunpowder production at Waltham Abbey notes two small, privately-owned operations as of 1665. This was about the time that Indian saltpeter was changing the landscape of English powder production, with English domestic saltpeter manufacture falling below just 5% of the total national consumption. With the saltpeter boom came new industrial roles for gunpowder: by the 1680s, English miners in Staffordshire and Cornwall had adopted the Continental method of ‘shot-blasting’ the rocky matrix to free their ores. 

In the Lea Valley, as elsewhere, many early gunpowder mills were converted from existing grain and oil mills by enterprising proprietors seeking to capitalize on the growing commercial and military market for powder. Where millraces and waterwheels already existed, it was a relatively straightforward proposition to set up simple stamping or rolling equipment for incorporating the charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter (and just as easy to reconvert the mill if the operation failed to turn a profit). 

The remains of a 19th century water-powered press house at Waltham Abbey. Photo by author.

Straightforward, sure…but also risky. By 1662, the prelate of Waltham Abbey had recorded five mill explosions in just seven years. Even if a blast left workers unscathed, it could be financially ruinous for a mill. The result was that many small gunpowder producers folded just as quickly as they cropped up, despite the pressing need for the commodity.

By the mid-1700s, the British government had recognized the benefits of centralizing and professionalizing gunpowder manufacture. In 1760, the crown purchased the Home Works, a private mill at Faversham, in Kent (to the east of London). Faversham became the first ‘Royal Gunpowder Mill,’ producing directly to meet British military demands. Waltham Abbey followed in the late 1780s, and by 1805 Ballincollig in Cork, Ireland had also been acquired by the state.

A ballistic pendulum, an instrument used to test gunpowder quality, at Waltham Abbey. Photo by Author.

Thus, within 50 years, three major national facilities for gunpowder production had been established in the UK. It’s worth noting that such an idea would have been logistically and politically unthinkable without British access to Indian saltpeter. With the East India Company’s control over seemingly unlimited stocks, the British crown, through the Royal Gunpowder Mills, did what states all over the world had dreamed of doing since the 16th century: they rationalized the supply of military explosives. Here was national power, without natural limits.

We’ve seen the results of this military-industrial coup in previous posts. What is striking, though, when one visits Waltham Abbey or Faversham, is not the relentless rise of saltpeter, but rather its precipitous fall.

A boat on the Lee Navigation, the series of canals created beginning in the 14th century to make the Lea River more navigable. Photo by author.

The train ride up to Waltham Abbey follows the historic Lee Navigation, a series of canals built on the natural waterway of the river Lea. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these canals not only turned the waterwheels of the valley’s gunpowder mills; they also served as conduits for the transit of powder to the Thames by boat, a mode of carriage which posed little risk of accidental sparking, and which minimized damage to homes and infrastructure in the event of a catastrophe.

The Royal Mill ceased operations in the summer of 1991, a little over two centuries after it was established. A decade later, the facility reopened to the public as an historic site, managed and interpreted by a nonprofit organization established for the purpose. Today, Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mill is open every Sunday, and periodically for special events. The site is staffed largely by volunteers, many of them retirees. 

Waltham Abbey is decidedly off the London tourist circuit, and on the sunny July Sunday that I visited, I shared the 125 acre park with a smattering of locals instead of the throngs that mobbed the British Museum or the Thames Path. Most visitors seemed at least as interested in the fresh air and copious elbow room as they were in the mill itself. A handful of buildings remain open, some with artifacts and interpretive materials inside for passers-by to find. Near the contemporary visitor center, a late 18th century mixing house and saltpeter refinery host a photographic exhibit on women munitions plant workers during the First World War, and a display allowing visitors a glimpse of worker lives in the 1940s.

A mixing house (right) and saltpeter refinery (left) dating to the late 18th century, shortly after the Royal Gunpowder Mill was established at Waltham Abbey. Beside the open door of the mixing house is a large kettle used for refining saltpeter. Photo by author.

In another building nearby, an exhibit commemorates Waltham Abbey’s role in the development of rocketry. Behind the brightly colored shells of Cold War-era surface-to-air missiles, against a back wall, stands the cutaway drab iron hull of a Congreve rocket. It was at Pollilur, in what is today Tamil Nadu, that the East India Company’s forces first encountered a terrifying new weapon in 1780 while battling the armies of Haider Ali, the sultan of Mysore. The flaming iron shells lacked the range or accuracy of traditional artillery, but proved ruthlessly effective against massed troops, with the added effect of terrifying men and horses and breaking British maneuvers.

Pollilur proved a disaster for the Company, and would be seared into the empire’s memory as one of their most spectacular military defeats in India. The Mysorean rockets evidently made a particularly strong impression: William Congreve began his own rocket experiments at the beginning of the 19th century, working from captured examples from Srirangapatna at the Royal Laboratories at Woolwich. 

Congreve rockets at Woolwich Arsenal. The loops in the iron straps originally held wooden poles for launching and stabilization in flight. Royal Gumpowder Mills Archive.

Congreve’s weapon was manufactured at Waltham Abbey, and went into service against both French and American troops in the early 1810s. As Francis Scott Key spent a long and tense night looking out at Fort McHenry in 1814, wondering whether his countrymen would hold out against the British bombardment until morning, the star-spangled banner he saw was illuminated by the glow of Indian saltpeter trailing Indian-designed rockets.

Few site-goers wander much further afield than this well-kept central hub of the property. Tours beyond this point are led by volunteers in Land Rovers, or the occasional tractor-pulled cart that reminds one of a childhood hayride. Bumping along, you begin to appreciate the size of the site, and the complex history of building, rebuilding, and building over. 

Ironically, it is the most recent buildings — dating mainly from the 1940s, 50s and 60s, when the Mills were repurposed as a chemical, explosive, and rocket propulsion research facility at the height of the Cold War — that are the most decrepit. Much of the 19th century architecture was reinforced with hefty bulwarks of stone and cement, designed to withstand and contain blasts at the most sensitive stages of gunpowder manufacture. The result is that many a Victorian blockhouse remains more or less intact beneath a thick blanket of weedy vegetation, and parts of the site call to mind images of ancient Mesoamerican pyramids peering out through the jungle.

A 19th century press house, Waltham Abbey. Photo by author.

As I wandered the grounds (alone, save for a small band of fallow deer that cautiously eyed me), I struggled to imagine what it must have been like in the mid-19th century, when the mills were a churning behemoth of steam-powered boilers, rollers, presses, and corning equipment. Here had been a facility for making cylinder charcoal; there, a narrow-gauge rail station for transporting powder and components around the sprawling property. Emergency alarm stations, their peeling red paint still brightly showing through the brush, stood silent witness to the bustle — and the periodic tragedy — of work at one of the largest powder-manufacturing operations in the world. 

Limited to just one day at Waltham Abbey, it’s hard to say just how the mills are remembered by locals. It’s no small irony that, despite the singular nature of the place and its centuries of churning out one of the greatest sources of technological and political power in the Early Modern and early Industrial world, the memorialization that was most visible to me as a visitor (besides that of old King Harold) was that which dominates virtually every other small town in the UK: remembrance of the events of the first half of the 20th century. 

The remains of a V-2 rocket motor, recovered from a warhead that broke up near Waltham Abbey in 1945. Photo by author.

In the 1930s, the British government had expressed some anxieties about Waltham Abbey’s vulnerability in the event of a modern war — particularly in light of new and worrying developments in air power. During the Second World War, these fears proved well-founded. German explosives put Waltham Abbey’s last gunpowder mill out of commission in 1941, and four years later, a pair of German V-2 rockets hit the town itself, killing seven and injuring more than 50. These victims are commemorated, both in the mill and in the town.

In Faversham, of the once massive gunpowder industry made up of state and private mills, only a single workshop remains, opened periodically to visitors by volunteers of Faversham’s historical society. Tucked away within a quiet residential community, I spent roughly a half hour searching for it when I went to visit towards the end of my research trip. A roadside sign gestures vaguely towards the “ancient monument” — somewhat amusing language for a 19th century historical curiosity, particularly in a town with roots reaching back to the Roman conquest.

Chart Mills, Faversham. Photo by author.

Inside the Chart Mill’s lone incorporator, laminated paper signs cover the walls, surrounding the cobweb-covered stone wheels of an edge roller. On one wall, the signs are organized into a flowchart, listing the steps for making powder. Across the room, a timeline of the industry recites a long list of dates starting from the 1550s. Outside, the outline of a second, nearly identical building is traced in a few courses of brick, its great circular millstone like a grave marker in the center.

What should be the epitaph on this headstone? In the UK (as in much of the US), shuttered factories and industrial ruination are more than simply remnants of the past: they have a social and political valence. At both Waltham Abbey and Faversham, my questions about gunpowder production elicited memories from volunteers of scientific industries that they had made their own careers in, some military, others civilian. In every case, the feeling of post-industrial loss pulled at the edges of our conversation. 

At the end of the 19th century, some nationalist intellectuals in India — men like Dadabhai Naoroji, who offered critiques the colonial state from within the ranks of its educators and civil servants — were articulating the idea that centuries of European economic domination had completely remade South Asia from a global center of industrial production in the Early Modern period, into a dependent consumer of Western manufactures. This colonial deindustrialization, for them, was one of the most perfidious effects of British rule. While imperial administrators made lofty claims about bringing civilization and modernity to India, they had actually done exactly the opposite, throttling the Subcontinent’s early industrial development in order to secure access to its raw materials for British industry.

How ironic that by the time Naoroji’s Poverty and Un-British Rule in India called attention to India’s long-term deindustrialization under British rule, the seeds of the gunpowder industry’s eventual fall had already taken root. Less than a century later, the North Atlantic countries (the UK among them) would be experiencing their own waves of deindustrialization, with far-reaching consequences for regional economies. 

Small wonder, then, that within the ruins of Britain’s once-mighty powder mills, gunpowder is rewoven (consciously or unconsciously) into a story about increasing financialization, industrial offshoring, and the loss of labor power. Does it matter that gunpowder doesn’t really fit within this story — that its fate was essentially different than that of Welsh coal and Manchester textiles? That it died earlier than these things, and for different historical reasons?

Gunpowder molding house, Waltham Abbey. Photo by Author.

Perhaps there’s more to say. Public history in the North Atlantic world has increasingly begun to reckon with the complicated legacies of the 19th and 20th centuries, including colonization and empire. As institutions like the British Museum are faced with incisive questions about how their star objects came to be there, it may be time to open the conversation about a different, even more literal manifestation of imperial power. 

Saltpeter (as I hope these three posts have helped you understand) has a lot more historical baggage than it usually gets credit for. From the humblest of origins — bacteria, humidity, and the literal detritus of human settlement — it was instrumental in building the modern world. For nearly a millennium, saltpeter was the key to unprecedented human power. It awed in fireworks in celebration of the divine; it brought down mighty fortress walls and built empires; it drove trade across oceans and between continents; it freed the coal that fueled industrial mechanization. Saltpeter underwrote British colonial domination of India. It also underwrote the livelihood of countless small Indian producers, and tied them to the Revolution in industry that was gripping the North Atlantic.

This complexity is exactly what makes the “salt heard ‘round the world” so fascinating, and so worthy of research. Thanks to CASI and to the Penn Museum for supporting my work. And finally, thanks to you for reading — I hope you’ve enjoyed!

Published References

Brown, Stephen R. 2005. A Most Damnable Invention: Dynamite, Nitrates, and the Making of the Modern World. New York: T. Dunne Books.

Buchanan, Brenda J.  2006. “Saltpeter: A Commodity of Empire.” In Gunpowder, Explosives and the State: A Technological History. B. J. Buchanan, ed. London: Routledge. 67-90.

Cressey, David. 2013. Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Frey, James W. 2009. The Indian Saltpeter Trade, the Military Revolution, and the Rise of Britain as a Global Superpower. The Historian 71(3): 507–554.

Khan, Iqtidar Ali. 1981. Early Use of Cannon and Musket in India: A.D. 1442-1526. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 2: 146-164.

Mishra, Brijesh K., and Siddhartha Rastogi. 2017. Colonial Deindustrialisation of India: A Review of Drain Theory. South Asian Survey 24(1): 37–53.

Rice, Richard E. 2006. “Smokeless Powder: Scientific and Institutional Contexts at the End of the Nineteenth Century.” In Gunpowder, Explosives and the State: A Technological History. B. J. Buchanan, ed. London: Routledge. 355-366.

Special thanks to Luke Clawson at the Hagley Museum for his immense knowledge of the history of the American gunpowder industry; and to Mike Hartman of the Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills, and Nigel Winters of the Faversham Society, for sharing their knowledge and passion for the history of these sites.

In my previous blogpost I was on my way to Dharwad, reading a book called ‘Cooperative Movement in India’ by G.R Madan. I was a bit tensed about meeting ‘experts’ on cooperatives in the town, and I had figured that in order to have a fruitful conversation with them, it would be useful for me to have some facts about legislations and policies in place. As I write this final post, my stay in Dharwad is almost coming to an end. And I must say that despite my feelings of unpreparedness, this second phase of my fieldwork turned out to be quite satisfying!

On the day of my arrival to Dharwad, I was to be Professor Gopal Kadekodi’s guest.  Professor Kadekodi is a noted economist who has worked in the fields of common property resources, resource management and valuation, and participatory economic development. Having had a prolific academic career, he has now retired and lives in Dharwad, his native place. His interests did not include cooperatives per se, but he had spoken to the director of the Water and Land Management Institute (WALMI) in Dharwad, Dr. Rajendar Poddar. Dr. Poddar was an agricultural economist and claimed to know quite a bit about cooperatives in Karnataka. Professor Kadekodi had suggested that I first meet him and then ask him for further contacts in the region. The next day, I was ready by 9 a.m in the morning. Unfortunately however, Dr. Poddar suddenly had to make a trip to Bangalore. But he was kind enough to offer a place for me to stay at the WALMI guesthouse.

Established in 1985 by the Government of Karnataka, WALMI is a research and training institute whose main responsibility is the training of engineers who newly join the Department of Irrigation. Additionally, WALMI also works with Water Users Cooperative Societies (WUCS), helping local communities to form and manage them. During my two weeks stay at WALMI, I attended classes and interacted with a batch of irrigation engineers who were undergoing training at the time. I also had long meetings with several trainers and staff at WALMI who helped me understand the work that they do with the WUCS. The most insightful meetings were with Mr. Suresh Kulkarni, a grassroots farmer and trainer who was especially involved in the formation of WUCS. Mr. Kulkarni was kind enough to explain many of the formal aspects of WUCS—the procedure of their formation and registration, their internal organization, rules for democratic conduct and elections, rules and protocols of water sharing and use and so on. He provided me with several documents regarding the same and also showed me the institute’s database which contained information regarding all the WUCS in Karnataka. He has promised me that the next time I visit Dharwad, we could visit some WUCS around the city and interact with farmers.

The main building of the Water and Land Management Institute in Dharwad

However, while my interactions with the staff at WALMI gave me an idea about the rules on paper, my conversations with the irrigation engineers/trainees hinted at a different picture. Over informal conversations, some of them related stories from their field experiences—about what it means to navigate the social and power dynamics of local communities as young public engineers. From them I learnt that many of the intended government plans hardly worked on the ground, that factors such as who had how much power in the village to make decisions about water sharing, were what actually governed the distribution of public irrigation water for farming. I could not pursue these conversations to their full extent within the institute, but I plan to contact some of the engineers once they are out of training to gage their experiences further.

One of the teachers who regularly came to take classes at WALMI was Professor Vitthal Benagi, retired professor and former Vice- Chancellor of the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS). One afternoon Professor Benagi and I had a long conversation about the role that modern scientific knowledge about crops and plant rearing plays in agriculture in India and especially in Karnataka. As Vice-Chancellor of UAS, Prof. Benagi was instrumental in promoting the university’s ‘Farmer’s Knowledge Centre’. He also regularly writes columns in newspapers addressing the problems that farmers face at different stages in the cultivation process. Prof. Benagi suggested that I stay at UAS for a few days and speak with some professors at the departments of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness Management. Interestingly the Department of Agribusiness management was previously called the Department of Agricultural Marketing and Cooperatives. I found this change interesting in itself, and I wonder if it says something about the changing regard for cooperatives in the country.

List of courses in the Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad

At UAS, I met with several professors. Interestingly, the narrative that most of them presented to me was this: Cooperatives were and are an important part of the country’s rural infrastructure. However, due to ‘mismanagement’ and ‘lack of awareness’ among its participants, and due to negligence on part of the government, they are on the decline. Government, activists, scholars should try to gage the ‘problems’ that plague cooperatives and find solutions for them as they are an important grassroots institution.

What I found interesting about such narratives was that they were of a very general nature. During conversations, nobody really brought up examples of actual cooperatives which had shown this trajectory of failure. This makes me wonder how, and for what reason was this narrative constructed in the first place? Does this reflect the actual state of things? In Karnataka, cooperatives often come up in the news. Often the news is regarding how a cooperative organization is using or misusing its platform to further political interests. If this is true, does it mean that cooperatives in Karnataka, while loosing their economic viability, are continuing to remain politically potent? Since this was my first foray into fieldwork for this topic, the nature of the research was exploratory and threw up more questions rather than concrete conclusions. But I am hoping that the questions lead me to further explorations in the course of my PhD!

Early in the morning on the 4th of August, I booked a taxi to go to the Krantivira Sangolli Rayanna Station (KSR), the main railway junction of Bengaluru. I had a 8.45 a.m train to Dharwad. The train, named the Vishvamanava Express, was to reach Dharwad at 6.20 p.m in the evening on the same day. The previous night, Professor Gopal Kadekodi,  who had arranged for my visit to Dharwad, had sent me a message over WhatsApp: “I noted that it is a slow train, with lots of stops. Keep books for reading”. I took Professor Kadekodi’s advice and carried a few books with me. Among them was  one titled ‘Co-operative Movement in India’ by G. R Madan.

Madan’s book is what one would term as a ‘top-down’ account of cooperatives—shorn of any critical analysis, aesthetic descriptions and exciting insights, the book is simply a chronological recollection of government legislations, policy reports and reviews since independence, that came to constitute the institutional infrastructure for cooperatives in India. Not very useful for an anthropologist, some would say! But certain encounters and realizations during my one month stay in Bengaluru had made me come back to Madan’s book, which I had earlier dismissed as a ‘dry read’.

One such encounter was a visit to the State Registrar of Cooperatives in Bangalore, the main government body in Karnataka that overlooks the operation of cooperatives in the state. I went there expecting to speak with someone who could provide me with data about cooperatives in Karnataka—information such as what kinds of cooperatives were predominant in each region or district, what communities were involved in them, and what was their relationship to the total economic activity of a local place. I had thought that after gathering such data, I could begin mapping more specific sites and locations for fieldwork. But what I soon realized was, that unlike say a library or an archive, government institutions such as the one that I visited, are not concerned with a research scholar’s pursuit of source material and information, nor institutionally attuned to address their ‘curiosities’.

When I reached the Registrar of Cooperatives, for instance, I could not figure out at first whom I should speak with to explain my reason for being there. There was no registration desk, or registry for visitors. All I could sense were quizzical glances from personnel and staff who were coming in and out of the entrance to the building. I entered nevertheless and found myself at the head of a long corridor with several doors both to the left and right. A peak inside one of these doors revealed the quintessential image of a government office—stacks, piles, and bundles of files and papers, filling almirahs and towering above the personnel working on their desks. A man standing in the corridor asked me what I was looking for. I introduced myself as a university student who was working on cooperatives in Karnataka. “What kind of cooperatives?” he asked. I started explaining that right now my research was at a preliminary stage, and therefore I had not really narrowed down to a particular kind of cooperative as my object of study. I soon realized that this was not the answer he was looking for. What he wanted was that I point out the particular department under the Registrar that I was interested to visit. When I realized this, I said I was interested in agricultural cooperatives. “You go to the agriculture department. There you meet with Mr. Suresh [name changed]. He will tell you everything”. Saying this, he directed me to go to another room.

When I reached the agriculture department and enquired about Mr. Suresh, the other personnel told me that he had just gone out for lunch but would be back in some time. I waited outside patiently. After about fifteen minutes, a man walking into the office asked me why I was there. “I am a PhD student working on agricultural cooperatives. I am here to meet with Mr. Suresh. I was told he could help me”. I said. “I am Mr. Suresh.” the man replied with some joviality, and led me into his cubicle. His cubicle was right next to that of a female personnel. As I sat down, readying myself to explain my research, the woman asked Mr. Suresh who I was. “She has come to do a project on agricultural cooperatives”, he said. “Ah! They just send all students to speak with you, isn’t it?” the woman laughed. “Yes, yes, that is what they do”, the man replied in a mixed tone of both irritation and pride. Suddenly, I felt less like a ‘serious’ researcher, and more like a school student who was collecting information for a group project!

In fact, when I did tell them about my work, and explained that I was still at an ‘exploratory’ phase of my research, they provided me with some formulaic answers. “See,” the woman explained, “under agricultural cooperatives there are many kinds of cooperatives. We have cooperatives at different levels—primary, district level, state level and national. Then we have both agricultural credit and non-credit cooperatives. So, you need to choose what you want to work on.” It was not that I did not know about these different kinds of cooperatives. But I felt like I lacked information and understanding about each, that would allow me to ask more specific questions and draw out detailed responses. I returned from the department with instructions to ‘choose’ a type of cooperative and to ‘design’ my project more clearly.

Fieldwork is as much about encounters that are disappointing, as they are about encounters that lead to deep insights. In fact, the former can be instructive. What I realized from my visit to the Registrar of Cooperatives was that public institutions have a particular way of producing knowledge, and understanding the world , that may not align with the frameworks of social science and humanities research. Therefore, when one encounters such institutions and knowledge systems, one needs to be equipped to provide the responses that are expected by them, but which at the same time lead to insights that are beneficial for one’s research. As I sat on the train to Dharwad, I realized that research on cooperatives in India was likely to throw up such encounters again and again. The least I could do was to be better prepared for them!

For my final blog of the summer, I wanted to reflect on what brought me back to Aravind and Madurai. As a bioengineering student, I’ve had the chance to study and design medical devices, always considering factors like accessibility, portability, and ease of use. However, these concepts often felt somewhat theoretical in the classroom. At Aravind, I had the opportunity to see how these principles applied in the real world, at the patient level.

Last summer, I was a CASI Aravind intern. When choosing my project for the summer, I hoped to utilize the knowledge I gained as a computer science minor and its intersection with patient care. Thus, I began my work in the IT department with the goal of contributing to the development of a new hospital-specific application. But as it became clear that we lacked data on how many patients could actually use the app, and whether it would promote widespread health access or deepen the digital divide, I shifted my focus to a research study. That’s how my project started—a survey study at the Madurai tertiary eye hospital to understand patients’ access to and attitudes toward mobile health.

Last summer, we conducted an extensive literature review, designed a questionnaire, and refined it after focus group discussions and a pilot study. By the time I had to return home, data collection for the main study had just begun. By January, the data collection was complete, but no one at Aravind had the bandwidth to analyze it. Thanks to CASI, I was fortunate enough to return to Madurai, where I met with my research team daily to analyze our data and successfully draft the first version of the manuscript.

Although the publication process involves several more revisions and peer reviews before the final paper is ready for publication, I’d like to share the abstract below. If you’re interested in providing feedback on the paper based on this abstract, please reach out to me at sleland@seas.upenn.edu. I would greatly appreciate insights from anyone with knowledge in the field, as this is the first paper I’ve written on my own—from conceptualizing the study to drafting the manuscript!

Abstract

Background:

Mobile health (mHealth) technologies have shown potential to revolutionize healthcare delivery in lower-middle-income countries (LMICs), particularly in ophthalmology. However, the success of mHealth interventions depends on patients’ readiness to use such technologies effectively.

Objective:

This study aimed to identify patients’ mHealth readiness by (1) assessing the distribution of smartphone, feature phone, and non-phone users; (2) evaluating patient proficiency in using basic and advanced mobile phone features; and (3) exploring patient attitudes and willingness to adopt mHealth tools.

Methods:

A cross-sectional interview-based survey was conducted at three different care settings of the Aravind Madurai Tertiary Hospital namely free and paying hospitals (FH and PH), and vision centers (VCs). Surveys were administered in Tamil and data capture was done using the REDCap platform during patients’ wait for doctor examinations. Convenience sampling was employed, mitigating interviewer bias through random patient selection. Prior to surveys, focus group discussions were conducted at both hospitals to enhance questionnaire relevance and effectiveness in capturing diverse digital usage patterns. Sampling ensured representativeness based on average patient volume per clinic.

Results: 

Results from 946 patients showed 41% feature phone owners (FPOs), 37% smartphone owners (SPOs), and 21% without phones (NP). Paying hospital patients had 53% SP, free hospital patients 45% FP, and vision center patients 45% NP. Women comprised 80% of NP users. Those over 60 are significantly less likely to be SPOs versus FPOs (OR = 0.10, p < 0.001) and SPOs versus NP users (OR = 0.18, p < 0.001). Any form of schooling demonstrates significant odds ratios for SP ownership versus FP ownership compared to Illiterate (OR = 4.36, p < 0.001; OR = 27.42, p < 0.001) and SP vs NP (OR = 17.45, p < 0.001; OR = 245.62, p < 0.001). An average of 99% of SPOs and FPOs could pick up calls, but far less FPOs can read SMS (15-33%), send SMS (2-8%), or make calls (15-29%) for all three care settings versus SPOs (84-92%). 22% of SPOs sought health-related information online, contrasting with 93% of FP users and 97% of NP users with no internet usage. SPOs (80%) were most comfortable with digital consent forms, while 61% of NP users didn’t understand digital consent. For teleconsultations, 59% of SPOs preferred in-person visits, while the majority of FPOs and NP users preferred in-person consultations only

Conclusions:

This study underscores the importance of tailoring mHealth interventions to the specific needs and capabilities of patient populations in LMICs. The disparities in mobile phone proficiency observed suggest that while mHealth has potential, its implementation must consider local context and patient readiness to maximize its effectiveness. These findings can inform future mHealth strategies aimed at enhancing healthcare accessibility in resource-limited settings.

The anticipation for my upcoming trip to Madurai had been building for weeks. I had spent the past few days traveling with my family, savoring every moment before they headed back to California. As I waved goodbye to them early that morning, I felt a mix of excitement and nervousness about my impending solo adventure to India; it wasn’t until then that the reality of my situation truly sank in. I was going to be completely alone in Madurai for the next two weeks.

It hit the hardest during those quiet moments when my friends and family back home were sound asleep. I found myself truly alone, perhaps for the first time in my life. Even though I spent ten weeks in Madurai last summer, I was with three other Penn students: Eric, Ashna, and Achint –  the “Breaktime Brigaders.” Now, their absence was palpable. Having arrived just days after this year’s cohort of CASI students wrapped up their internship, I also missed the opportunity to hang out with the other Penn students. 

But, as I grappled with my solitude, I began to realize that I wasn’t starting from scratch. Last summer’s experiences had gifted me with an extensive network of people in Madurai. I reached out to Srini, a friend we had made at the gym who was now studying at the University of Maryland. He took me around to his favorite street food vendors, where we tried all varieties of Vada. I also made sure to reach out to Dr. Athul, a retina fellow we met last year. As the days passed, I found myself settling into a rhythm of self-reliance and discovery. This journey was undoubtedly different from my previous summer adventure, but it was no less enriching.

Solitude doesn’t have to mean loneliness. This experience taught me to appreciate my own company, to find strength in vulnerability, and to see the beauty in unexpected connections.

Returning to Madurai after a year feels like stepping back into a familiar story, but with new chapters waiting to be written. The city welcomes me with open arms, the sights and sounds as vivid as I remember. The endless honking of cars, the bikes and scooters weaving effortlessly through the colorful yellow and green autos, and the carts lining the side of the road—it’s all just as it was.

The hostel is the same too. The same security guard nods at me as I walk in, and the receptionist smiles with recognition. The little old lady who cooks the hostel meals is still there, her presence as comforting as the meals she prepares. It’s as if nothing has changed, yet everything is different.

Last year, I was here with Eric, Achint, and Ashna—my fellow Breaktime Brigaders. We were a team, navigating this city and our work at Aravind together. But now, I walk these halls alone, passing by the rooms we once occupied, reminded that this is a new summer with new challenges.

The hospital is a mix of old and new as well. Only one of the doctors we befriended is still here; the others have moved on to complete their fellowships or start new journeys. Even the gym we used to visit every day after work seems like a relic of the past. Newer, nicer gyms have sprung up in its place, as if to remind me that time doesn’t stand still.

Yet, despite these changes, there’s a difference in me too. I’ve returned with a clearer sense of purpose. I know exactly what I came for, and I have a set timeline to accomplish it. The weather, too, seems to reflect this shift. August offers a cooler respite from the blistering 110-degree days of June, with rain almost every evening—a gentle reminder that this summer, while familiar, is uniquely its own.

Rahul has been preparing for SSC exams for 7 months now. He considers his older brother a big influence on his decision to take these exams. “Jab maine unki vardi dekhi toh laga ki haan, yeh karna hai”, he said when asked about what motivated him to start preparing. Rahul is not alone in his quest to secure a government job. An estimated 220 million people applied for jobs in the Indian government between 2014-20221. Government jobs, or “sarkaari naukris” as they are commonly referred to in Hindi, offer advantages that private sector employment in India is rarely able to match – comfortable salaries including pensions, guaranteed job security with regular promotions, housing, the possibility of regular working hours, and social prestige. “Even a peon at a government bank is considered to be more important than someone who works at a private bank”, said Akshat, an aspirant for government jobs.

At the same time, there is a shift taking place in the internal staffing of government institutions. Positions within government institutions are increasingly being filled on a contractual basis where people are hired for a limited period of time, with the possibility of their contract being renewed if work is still available and their performance is satisfactory. This is markedly different from how government jobs are traditionally filled, where someone who makes the cut is guaranteed the full range of benefits that a government job offers with guaranteed tenure until retirement. A prominent example of this is the Agnipath Scheme that was introduced in 2022, and planned to recruit soldiers in the Indian Armed Forces for four year tenures. The Indian Railways, in a response to a question posed in the Parliament, clarified that about 587,968 contractual workers were employed by the agency2. This is about 47% of the 1,252,347 “regular” employees working at the Indian Railways. What it means to be a “sarkaari babu” is evolving.

My goal for this summer was to unpack this phenomenon and understand the causes of this shift and what this means for governance in India. I started by trying to understand the perspectives of contractual employees within government institutions. For this, I reached out to officials who worked at a municipal office in New Delhi, and they kindly agreed to share their experiences with me. 

A municipal government office in New Delhi

The first major takeaway is that these contractual government jobs don’t just take one typical form. Depending on which position is being filled, contract terms and how a person is being hired can vary. At the municipal office for instance, data entry operators were on a 45 day contract with a third party agency that was empanelled by the Delhi Government. This means that they were not even officially employed by the government. On the other hand, entomologists employed at the Health Department in the same municipal body were on 1 year contracts with the Delhi Government. I met officials who were on temporary contracts across levels in the organizational hierarchy and across departments. There were designations where some officials were “regular” hires, while their colleagues who sat in the same rooms and did the same work were on temporary contracts. Despite the diversity in how contracts were structured, many concerns remained similar across the board for those on temporary contracts.

“Yeh mustaidi ki naukri hai” (This is a job that’s about alertness), said Vijay who works as a Data Entry Operator (DEO) at the municipal office. He refers to the 45 day contract period as a major issue in the current setup for DEOs, and points out how there are days between the end of a contract and the beginning of a new one, and one does not get paid for these days. For some other jobs in the municipal office, these unpaid days are adjusted as days off that one can take during the contract period. But for DEOs like Vijay, since their contract is set up through an agency, this is not an option. When asked about whether these days affect work, Sarita tells me that “Kisi ke jaane se kaam nahi rukta” (Work doesn’t stop when someone leaves). DEO contracts are staggered in a way that not all of the contracts end at the same time, and work remains unaffected. In addition to not being paid for days between contracts, payments are often delayed. Frontline workers at the Health Department in the municipal office shared that their salaries have been delayed for over a month, and this delay is likely to reach two months. They know of colleagues who take on loans to simply get by during such periods.

Given the worries around salaries, it is commonplace for officials on temporary contracts to have a side-hustle. Vijay estimated that about half of those he knows at the municipal office on contract have a second source of income while working there. Most often they take on online data entry work, or run small stores or beauty parlors from the vicinity of their homes. Vijay, a frontline worker at the Health Department has worked as a delivery person for Zomato and Swiggy, but his father pressures him to stay on as a municipal worker despite the financial strain of the job.

The health team during a daily inspection

Why is it that despite the various remuneration issues, they stay on at their jobs? For Sarita, having weekends off and a lower workload is a big reason she has stayed on at her DEO job so far. When she was a newbie, everyone around her assigned her work – “Pata nahi hota hai ki kiska kaam karna hai” (I didn’t know who’s work I needed to do). But over time, she has learnt about who’s tasks really need getting done, and which ones she doesn’t have to address. As is the case for many women like her, a government job is also an opportunity to actually work outside the home for Sarita. While she herself doesn’t have a strong preference for a “sarkaari naukri”, her in-laws allow her to work far away from home because it is a job in the government. If the job was not in the government sector, they would tell her “dukaan sambhalo aur ghar sambhaalo” (Manage the shop and manage the household), she says. At her current job, they want her to get promoted and make a higher salary.

Government jobs, even when temporary, offer some the opportunity to seek rents. Piyush has been at the municipal office since 2008, and refers to the “flexibility” of his role and the potential for petty rent-seeking as something that keeps him at his current job as a DEO despite knowing that he should move on to other things. However, having stayed on for this period has given him what he calls “tenure benefits” that have allowed him to provide for his family in spite of not having experienced significant salary hikes or promotions in his 16 years as a temporary worker at the municipal office.

By far the most common reason cited for staying on as a contractual worker was the hope of becoming a permanent employee in the government. While some like Sarita continue to study for qualifying exams for permanent jobs in the government on the side, almost everyone stays in their contractual roles in the hope that their roles are “regularized” and made permanent by the government. “Aaj nahi toh kal pakke ho jayenge” (If not today, then someday we’ll become permanent), said a frontline worker at the Health Department, describing the thought process that keeps people in their roles – “Pakka hone ki aasha rehti hai” (There is a hope of becoming permanent). What keeps this hope alive? Rumors are rife about temporary workers becoming permanent in other departments of the municipal government, other organizations within the Delhi government, and even in other state governments. Each instance of someone making this transition was tracked in detail and shared widely by those who worked in temporary roles.

A local Health Department office in New Delhi

There is occasional talk on the side of the decision-makers, but nothing comes of it. In the days between contracts, DEOs stage dharnas and demonstrations, and try to meet political leaders. “Woh kehte hain ki file aayegi toh sign karenge” (They tell us that if the file comes, they’ll sign it), says Sarita when asked about what comes of these attempts towards permanence. Vijay pointed out that these attempts are not free from retaliation – 32 people who demanded regularization were excluded from the new DEO contracts issued by the agency after they went public with their demands. However, the relatively rare events where elected officials have “regularized” temporary contracts are brought up often. Health Department workers remember that everyone was asked to submit their papers when the Kejriwal government initially came to power, but nothing came of that. “Punjab mein kar diya, toh yahan kyun nahi?” (If they did it in Punjab, then why not here?), one of them asks while reflecting on instances of regularization in other parts of India. 

Many plan to move on to other jobs eventually. Vijay plans to start his own business in the civil construction space, and explains that he won’t be able to hold on to his current job once his business has launched. Rajesh, an entomologist at the Health Department is planning to start his PhD abroad soon. But these instances of people moving on are relatively uncommon among contractual government workers. Despite the challenges and frustrations that officials on temporary contracts face, most of them choose to stay on in their jobs in the hope of being made “permanent” someday. As an official at the Health Department told me “Waise koi kar nahi sakta, aur kar liya toh chhod nahi sakta” (No one can do this job, but if someone does it then they can’t leave).

1. Economy booms but India’s young hanker for government jobs | Reuters ︎
2. Staff Strength and Vacancies in Railways – Rajya Sabha QA ︎

I’ve been procrastinating on making this final blog post: partially because I am a silly little college student who is running around attending to a million things, but also partially because it feels like I am closing off a chapter that I’m not sure I’m ready to leave. I’ve been back in the US for about 3 and a half weeks now, and it has taken me almost no time to assimilate right back into my usual life as if I never left. Maybe this is feeling like a dramatic realization to my frequent traveler and international student friends as I was only out of the country for two months, but to me, those two months were the longest I’ve ever been away from home and an experience that greatly impacted me. I mentioned in my last post that I wanted to give myself some time to process the summer before writing this post, and with rushing back into classes, clubs, work, and a social life, I haven’t given it the time I should, so this post will be a bit of a stream of consciousness as I reflect on this past summer.

It feels like a fever dream to think about the days I was 7000 miles (11000 Kms) away from Philly, catching auto rides, learning about India’s public health system, making new friends, and visiting world wonders. However, as I catch up over quick texts with my friends in India or visit the CASI office to say hello to Juni or run into one of my co-intern friends as I walk around campus, I’m reminded of the people, experiences, and lessons I gained this past summer.

I have tried writing the specifics of it a million times now — typing and deleting this paragraph over and over, and maybe this is a copout response, but I think I truly cannot explain what this summer meant to me. I learned so many things: about the world, India, public health, and myself, but I think the most important thing I learned was to savor every moment. I know that this past summer is just a memory now with photos and stories to remind me of it and no way to relive it. But I also know that I will have a lifetime of memories and adventures, and all I can do is my best to apply this lesson and make the most out of those moments that are still to come.

The default questions at the beginning of the school year are always, “Where were you this summer? What did you do? How was it?,” and my answer has become a scripted two-sentence response of “I was doing research at the Public Health Foundation of India. I loved being in Delhi — it was a fun time!” because it does not feel like something I could properly explain to a passing acquaintance. How do I summarize the cultures I experienced — so similar to what I grew up with yet nothing like I’d ever seen before? How do I tell them how I got to travel the world and have adventure in a way I had never done before but also about the long nights of homesickness where I felt trapped by the oceans that separated me from my loved ones? How do I explain the perspective I gained from seeing the work PHFI and its staff do and the drive it added to my future ambitions? How do I go through my never ending list of amazing friends and connections I made who I will never forget? So, instead, I will continue to say my two-sentence answer while taking all of this with me as I move into the next chapter of my life.

If you’ve read my last post, you’ll know that I’m on a four-week research trip to London (with help from CASI) to learn about the saltpeter industry in colonial southern India.

How fitting that of all the neighborhoods in London, I found a place to stay for my trip in Woolwich — once the site of England’s largest arsenal and gunpowder mill. Began as a facility for building Royal Navy warships for Henry VIII in 1512, Woolwich dockyard, then upriver from London, on the south bank of the Thames, soon proved an ideal location for gunpowder proofing: close enough to the city to be accessible, but remote enough to minimize the danger of accidents.

The saltpeter used in the gunpowder tested at Woolwich during the 16th and early 17th centuries would have come from a variety of sources. Beginning under the Tudor dynasty, the royal government claimed all nitrous soils as state property; so-called ‘saltpetremen,’ under the authority of the king, were licensed to excavate soils from stables, outhouses, cellars, chicken coops, and anywhere else that the raw ingredients for saltpeter might be expected to concentrate. No subject, common or noble, was supposed to be exempt — so critical was saltpeter to the English state in the Early Modern period. The nuisance caused by teams of rough men digging in wine cellars and behind churches was a frequent topic of public ire, and complaints were routinely made to authorities at all levels about the hated saltpetremen. The English government struggled to curb the worst abuses of the saltpetremen while reminding their occasionally unruly subjects that supplying the precious substance was their duty to their king and country.

The former cannon foundry at Woolwich, built in 1711 and in operation into the 1870s. Photo by author.

Even so, domestic sources never amounted to more than a fraction of England’s saltpeter needs. As more and more cannon were cast at Woolwich, and England’s break with the Catholic church earned its kings and queens powerful enemies in a Europe wracked by the religious wars of the Reformation, the kingdom’s need for gunpowder was expanding rapidly. English agents were dispatched to Europe and North Africa to buy saltpeter from whoever would sell it, and at whatever price. The Woolwich powder mill rolled saltpeter from Amsterdam and Moroccan markets as well as English barns.

The routine scarcity of saltpeter meant that European governments often scrounged up all available stocks, leaving little or none for the growing overseas trading companies cropping up to exploit the lucrative trade with South, East, and Southeast Asia and Africa. In the 1620s, the fledgling English East India Company (EIC), following the lead of its Dutch rivals, began sourcing saltpeter for its own use from India, where — apart from significant Mughal refineries at Agra and Ahmedabad — there were also many small local operations scattered through Bihar. In fact, the Company had stumbled into what Europeans would soon come to think of as a virtually infinite source of the precious substance.

“Artillery Square” and a former arsenal building, now converted to event space. Just out of frame here, people walk dogs and enjoy ice cream from nearby vendors. Some of the brand new luxury apartments that now dominate this site can be seen peeking through in the background. Photo by author.

By 1624, the EIC had entered into a contract to supply the government of James I with saltpeter. English ships returning from the Indian Ocean were ballasted with heavy jute sacks full of the stuff — 200 tons or more every year in the 1630s. So valuable was saltpeter during this period that, once taken into Board of Ordnance stores, it was kept in the Tower of London, under the same security as the royal mint and the crown jewels. In 1649 the Council of State, having only just brought the English Civil War to a close and needing to supply English armies fighting in Scotland and Ireland, agreed to buy all of the saltpeter the Company could sell them, at a fixed (but generous) rate. Britain was officially hooked on Indian nitrates.

This windfall of saltpeter radically changed the landscape of Woolwich, as a series of expansions of the arsenal from the 1670s swelled nearby villages with workers and commercial activity. In 1696, the Royal Laboratories were established at Woolwich, giving the arsenal facilities not only for testing explosives, but for manufacturing them.

A row of artillery pieces along the Thames offers a reminder of Woolwich’s history. In the background is one of the surviving arsenal buildings. Photo by author.

The facilities at Woolwich continued to expand in fits of frantic building for centuries, with operations employing 5000 workers by 1815. By the second half of the 19th century, the arsenal was an industrial behemoth, with nearly 70 steam engines powering legions of machines producing artillery, shells, ammunition, carriages and — of course — gunpowder. Operations continued through the two World Wars, with Woolwich suffering heavily under German bombing between 1940 and 1945. Production facilities were officially closed in 1967, after more than 400 years of activity.

A public mural commemorating Woolwich Arsenal’s history adorns the eastbound platform of the train station named for that facility. Photo by author.

The Woolwich arsenal has since been partially redeveloped, with some of the industrial decay of the 1990s swept away in favor of the trendy new high-rise apartments of Royal Arsenal Riverside. Redevelopment has necessitated extensive mitigation of heavily contaminated soils, including the cleaning and treatment of a staggering 240,000 cubic meters (nearly 8.5 million cubic feet) of dirt and gravel. Some of the historic arsenal buildings have been retained, converted to pubs, businesses, and recreational space. Throngs of Londoners, coffees and pastries in hand, join me on my walk every morning to the gleaming new Elizabeth Line rail station —  just a stone’s throw away from the 18th century cannon foundry — as I make my way upriver to the British Library for another day of archival research.

Saltpeter and Global Empire

As I read the correspondences in the India Office Records, the dispatches traded back-and-forth between the Court of Directors in London and the East India Company’s functionaries in Madras and Bombay, It’s becoming increasingly clear that access to Indian saltpeter supplies drove a major expansion of the British explosives industry in both Europe and Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries. At exactly the same moment as Britain’s rulers were consolidating power in the North Atlantic — unifying the British Isles by military force, waging successful campaigns on the Continent against rival powers like the Dutch, Spanish, and French, and expropriating Indigenous land in North America and the Caribbean — the armies of the East India Company were strengthening their hold on South India’s coasts and beyond. Increasing political instability in the Subcontinent drove wars between Indian rulers like the Asaf Jahi Nizams of Hyderabad and Haider Ali of Mysore, with ever more participation by the European companies.

Bound books of correspondence in the records of the Boards of Commissioners for the Affairs of India. Photo by author.

The British security commitment in India also ballooned as Europe’s wars began to spill over into Asia. In 1746, a French force besieged and captured Madras during the War of the Austrian Succession. Two letters from this time, written by the French Captain Paradis to Joseph François Dupleix, governor of Pondicherry (which survive in the UK’s National Archive in Richmond), highlight a serious problem faced by Fort St. George’s new French garrison: the shortage of gunpowder.

Madras was eventually traded back to the British in exchange for territory the latter had captured in eastern Canada. In 1759, during the Seven Years War, French troops tried again to take the British Company’s capital in southern India. Although this second siege was ultimately unsuccessful, the fierce attack once again demonstrated the vulnerability of the Company’s position. Desperate British defenders had expended a huge amount of ammunition holding off enemy troops, with little capacity for resupply due to the French blockade. Only the timely arrival of additional British troops had averted a disastrous exhaustion of supplies.

French correspondence on British East India Company activities in India, late 18th century. Photo by author.

Even into the 1780s, shipping lists sent by the Court of Directors show that large quantities of gunpowder were still being sent to the Indian presidencies from the UK. This resulted in a somewhat perverse situation in which saltpeter was being exported from India to Britain only to be milled into powder and re-imported into the Subcontinent. Aside from the obvious objections, sourcing gunpowder from Britain entailed a significant amount of risk for the Company, since East Indiamen on the high seas were vulnerable to attack by enemy navies or enterprising privateers in times of war. The long, humid maritime voyages also caused the powder to degrade and become unreliable at best, and sometimes even useless.

Sometime in the second half of the 18th century, a small powder works was established at Madras. So far, I’ve found few records of the early history of the facility, but it seems to have been a relatively small and disorganized operation, with accidents uncomfortably common. The Madras gunpowder mill may have originally only been intended to re-manufacture damaged imported powder, but by the beginning of the 1800s, it had become a key part of the presidency’s strategic planning.

In 1802, after a devastating series of accidental blasts had taken the already rickety Madras powder works fully out of commission, the superintendent of manufacture, Lieutenant Benjamin Bishop, successfully lobbied the Madras government and Court of Directors to approve a new mill outside the city. Bishop’s plan called for radical innovations to every stage of gunpowder manufacture, from the roasting of the wood for charcoal to the incorporation of all the ingredients to the drying and storage of the finished product. With sturdy earthen embankments surrounding the buildings, soft woven mats covering the windows and doors (allowing the energy from a blast to dissipate more readily, and allowing quick and easy escape routes for mill workers), and even an ingenious system for drying the powder with indirect heat that could be easily operated and monitored from the outside, the new Madras gunpowder mill was much safer and less accident-prone than the old complex.

Sketch of a fire in a gunpowder storehouse, from a series of correspondence discussing measures to protect Company powder supplies in India from lightning strikes, 1838-41. Photo by author.

When it was built, Bishop’s new powder works was the most modern in India, and was on par with the state of the industry in England itself. By 1808, in fact, the Commandant of the Madras Artillery could confidently boast that the gunpowder made at Madras was superior even to that made at Woolwich. The new mill finally broke the Presidency’s reliance on imported powder. Even the saltpeter for the manufacture was being sourced locally, rather than being shipped in from Bengal, as it had been previously (at freight rates that made Madras’ government grumble about being gouged). Madras’ logistical headache was finally alleviated, and its armies supplied.

Though Mysore, the last major challenge to East India Company domination in the Peninsula, had been defeated in 1799, the violence of the Company’s colonization continued apace. Madras gunpowder made its way to Burma, where British troops fought a brutal campaign of conquest in the mid-1820s. It also kept military storehouses and outposts on the Presidency’s frontier stocked as the Company’s borders were consolidated. The Royal Navy’s Indian Ocean fleets, too, found it convenient to resupply their magazines with Company powder (although they didn’t always share Company officials’ high appraisal of its quality).

The Burmese king Thibaw (r.1878-85) is escorted out of Mandalay for exile in India after the British victory in the Third Anglo-Burmese War. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Ominously, the Company’s gunpowder was increasingly being used against its own Indian troops, as sepoy revolts or “mutinies” at Vellore in 1806 and Barrackpore in 1824 were ruthlessly suppressed. The Company’s vaunted Indian soldiers had made its military domination of India possible in the 18th century; in the first half of the 19th century, though, many sepoys came to feel that their British officers had little respect for their cultural concerns and military traditions, and mutual distrust occasionally erupted into violent clashes.

The British, deeply fearful of losing control of their armies and often spurred by racial hatred of insubordinate Indians, responded mercilessly to this resistance, and moved swiftly to punish those they held responsible. Gunpowder was at the center of an enduring symbol of the colonial state’s brutality during this period: convicted Indian rebels were sentenced to be strapped to the mouths of cannons and literally blown apart, a method of execution meant not only to instill terror but to prevent those killed from receiving proper funeral rites, whether Hindu or Muslim. For those condemned, it was a punishment that not even death could relieve.

Outright conquest was not the only way Madras’ gunpowder was leveraged to build and secure the British empire in South Asia. As Company leaders made agreements and alliances with local Indian rulers, they frequently included the stipulation that the British would supply these princes with an allowance of gunpowder. Couched in terms of ‘tribute,’ these powder rations effectively made the armies of semi-autonomous Indian states fully dependent on the British to maintain their fighting capacity. Letters in the India Office Records from the 1820s and 30s speak to the effectiveness of this strategy, with requests from the Nawab of Arcot and the Raja of Travancore for small supplies of powder for palace guards and salutes for visiting dignitaries, and even a plea from the Raja of Tanjore for gunpowder for fireworks to celebrate the Hindu festival of Dussehra.

Sketch of a powder magazine in India, c.1840. Photo by author.

My research in the British Library is thus revealing the ways in which saltpeter and gunpowder were crucial imperial commodities, and how the development of their industries in South Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries played a central role in shaping the history of colonial rule. As my last post discussed, for saltpeter, these political and military dimensions were only part of the story: with mechanization and industrial intensification in Western Europe and North America increasing throughout the 1800s, coal extraction drew immense quantities of the stuff from the Subcontinent. The trade must have made fortunes for British brokers, and directly linked small Indian producers to the churning Industrial Revolution.

Stay tuned for Part III of this 3-part blog series, as I continue to dig into the saltpeter industry and its global implications in the 19th and early 20th century!

Published References

Bull, Stephen. 1990. Pearls from the Dungheape: English Saltpetre Production, 1590-1640. Journal of the Ordnance Society 2: 5-10.

Burford, Beverly and Julian Watson, editors. 1997 Aspects of the Arsenal: The Royal Arsenal, Woolwich. London: Greenwich Borough Museum.

Cressey, David. 2013. Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Frey, James W. 2009. The Indian Saltpeter Trade, the Military Revolution, and the Rise of Britain as a Global Superpower. The Historian 71(3): 507–554.

Masters, Roy. 2010 The Royal Arsenal, Woolwich. London: The History Press.

McLynn, Frank. 2005 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World. London: Pimlico.

VHE ConstructionN.d. Royal Arsenal, Woolwich. VHE. Available at: https://www.vhe.co.uk/project/56/royal-arsenal-woolwich/