Taking early nineteenth-century European travel narratives as its point of entry, this article suggests ways in which the subject of roads in India can be more fully addressed. Rather than regarding them as purely a means of circulation (of goods, ideas and personnel), roads can be interpreted as a manifestation of linear modes of power and, for Europeans and Indians alike under colonial rule, as a salient site of social observation, engagement and friction. Roads constitute an underappreciated site of social interaction – voluntarily, perhaps, as among pilgrims and other travellers, but also, at the other extreme, through the contrived sociability of individuals’ intent on deception and theft. Roads were subject to coercive forms of social interaction as with convicts and famine relief workers obliged to labour on their construction and repair. Roads provided routes to new social locations, but also avenues for political display and ideological intervention and for the articulation of new technologies of social control and state action. Although this article's approach is primarily historical, it suggests ways in which the subject of roads might be of wider interdisciplinary interest and more contemporary significance.
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