The Telegraph from Below: Race, Labour and the Indo-European Telegraph Department 1862–1927

I gave the signal, passed the word for double wages, and down came the Arabs like a volley of grape. Into the water they plunged, and at last seized the looked-for cable. They slipped – they floundered – but kept bravely at work; till a heavy thunderstorm came on, which seemed to shake them in their resolution.¹

In describing the landing of the Indo-European telegraph cable at Faw in 1862, the future British Director of the Indo-European Telegraph Department (IETD), Frederic Goldsmid, offers a glimpse of the labourers building the network and of British attitudes to such work. The collective energy of the ‘Arabs’ is compared to a ‘volley of grape’, mechanistically directed under the discharge of a European as they industriously haul the submarine cable to land until shaken by a thunderstorm. Such oblique descriptions of subalterns and their centrality to telegraph infrastructure are seldom glimpsed in existing work on the subject, which has principally focused on the ‘high’ diplomatic politics of telegraph networks. This paper begins to redress this gap by looking at the IETD from below, analysing workers in the operations, maintenance, security, and expansion of the telegraph network. In doing so, the paper traces the emergence of an official racialized taxonomy for organizing signallers in the Department soon after the IETD was reorganized under the Director General of Telegraphs in India. Despite continuous attempts to control, discipline and shape employees through racialization, the paper argues that these workers were able to influence conditions through collective and individual agency. Rather than understanding imperial telegraph networks as simply a ‘tool of empire’, reading the IETD network from below reveals it as an inescapably hybrid enterprise, embedded in and reliant on local spaces, individuals, and communities.

The IETD was established in 1862 as a department of the Government of Bombay and transferred to the Government of India in 1871. Placed under the Public Works Department in India, the IETD remained an independent bureaucracy with its own internal hierarchy until February 1888, when it was placed under the Director General of Indian Telegraphs for a period of five years until April 1893. This period of reorganization and consolidation also formalized the colonial practice of dividing workers by racial categories. The Department and network were divided into two sections run by the respective Directors of the Persian Gulf Section with its headquarters in Karachi, and the Persian Section with its headquarters in Tehran. They were overseen from London by the Director-in-Chief who in turn answered to the Secretary of State for India. The Persian Gulf Section consisted of both landlines and submarine cables that connected its eastern terminal in Karachi with its western terminal at Faw (Fao), linking the telegraph networks of the Ottoman and British empires. The Persian Section line connected Bushehr (Bushire) in the south to Tehran in the north (see figures 1, 2 and 3).

The extensive reach of the network depended on the IETD tapping and mobilizing local and colonial labour pools. In the IETD files of the Public Work Department, these workers are defined negatively as ‘non-Europeans’. The term reveals how workers were organized through ‘colonial difference’, with the main division between white technical workers and ‘non-European’ subalterns.² In the archive, such workers are usually presented as appendages to ‘Europeans’, or as human components to be organized and disciplined. While ‘non-Europeans’ as an analytic and historical category is fraught with problems in terms of the boundaries that define who is included and excluded, producing a satisfactory term to encompass these broad and diverse communities and forms of work remains difficult. Exemplary of the diversity in the IETD are Armenian Christians, who were primarily from Iran and filled many of the subordinate signalling positions in the IETD’s Persian Section.³ Likewise, Anglo-Indians/Eurasians and Goanese workers filled the lower signalling positions in the Persian Gulf Section. Across the expanding bureaucracy of British India in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, South Asian Hindus, Muslims and Parsis of various classes served in specifically designated administrative, artisanal and technical roles.⁴ In the IETD these communities adopted similar roles, such as Parsi accountants in Karachi and Hindu and Muslim seafarers on the IETD’s cabling ship, the Patrick Stewart. Arabs, Persians, Baluchis, Qashqais and many other mobile and sedentary communities across Iran and the Gulf were employed by the IETD to fill various labour-intensive positions such as lineguards, cleaners and labourers. While the British wished to clearly delineate boundaries between these groups, the traces of paperwork found in the archives of the IETD reveal the ambiguity involved in constructing and maintaining racialized subalterns. Questions over categorization became particularly pressing for ‘mixed races’ like Anglo-Indians, while Armenians, a diasporic and geographically dispersed Christian community, defied neat taxonomies. These workers came from a variety of social and political contexts and classes within their localities. Middle class Parsis operated the Traffic Office in Karachi, while Baluchi peasants patrolled the line in Makran.

Although these communities did not form a coherent or self-conscious collective ‘class’, they were understood by British officials as a racial community of ‘non-Europeans’, a nomenclature that helped draw a sharp distinction against ‘European’ employees. Building on Ranajit Guha’s conception of the ‘subaltern’, I argue that despite collective racialization, this diverse group attempted to forge their own history. This ‘anti-historicist’ category is used throughout the paper not as a means of intervening in the debates within Subaltern Studies, but because it captures collective social, political, economic and ideological relations of subordination of one group to another while also encompassing the subordinate groups’ capacity for autonomy and resistance.⁵ Despite critiques of ‘subaltern’ as an all-embracing flattener of class difference,⁶ its capaciousness presents an opportunity to trace the entanglements within these communities and unpick the various social, economic and ideological pressures that helped produce these racial taxonomies.

Shifting perspective to subalterns in the IETD is important because it challenges assumptions about the revolutionary technological capacity of imperial telegraph networks. Although subalterns dominated the lower rungs of the imperial telegraph departments, historians of telegraphy have failed to produce any significant accounts of their contributions.⁷ Early histories of imperial telegraphy focussed on British colonial ‘pioneers’.⁸ Subsequent influential work by Daniel Headrick shifted attention from ‘pioneers’ to the imperial state but retained the ‘top-down’ perspective, conceptualizing the telegraph as an exogenous ‘tool of empire’ and obscuring the agency of colonized and subaltern users and workers.⁹ Despite this, Headrick’s approach remains popular with historians and has spurred more recent studies on the contribution of telegraphy in shaping geopolitical and bureaucratic spaces and practices.¹⁰ Other historians have sought to expand analytical frames by investigating the dematerialization of information and transnational commercial and media connections.¹¹ While these studies offer alternative perspectives, they typically retain a top-down Eurocentric approach that overlooks the centrality of subaltern labour. This continued omission has contributed to the conceptualization of imperial telegraphy through the terms of its propaganda: as a Victorian internet and ethereal ‘high’ technology that connected disparate European communities and spaces and strengthened imperial power.¹²

Yet, even during its zenith, imperial telegraphy had its critics. Most notably, Mahatma Gandhi, who during his time as publisher of Indian Opinion in Durban, and later in Hind Swaraj, argued that expanding telegraph networks were both the transmitter and symptom of the ills of ‘modern civilization’.¹³ Durban during this period was a bustling port city of ‘enforced cosmopolitanism’ and one of many conduits of communication and circulation of news and peoples across the Indian Ocean.¹⁴ Although not directly connected to Durban or other Indian Ocean ports, the IETD and its workers were one part of an expansive network of imperial infrastructure connecting India to its frontiers. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to address in detail the circulations these networks facilitated, it’s important to acknowledge the IETD as part of such circulations across the maritime and coastal frontiers of India. Alongside colonial officials and members of the public, writers, activists, and critics such as Gandhi operated with and against these technologies of circulation.

To investigate the centrality of subaltern workers to the IETD, I follow the labour that the IETD depended on across three domains: operations, maintenance and security. Each section looks at the role subalterns played in the network, excavating micro-histories of individual workers while surveying the emergence of racialized trends and forms of labour control across the Department. Building on a sizable body of work of English, global and infrastructural ‘history from below’, I tie local micro-histories of subaltern workers to the telegraph, an infrastructure often conceptualized as a non-local large technical system. This paper moves beyond a recuperative history of subaltern telegraph workers by highlighting the resistance that shaped both their working conditions and the network more broadly, despite the emergence and adaptation of official taxonomies of racialized labour.

The discussion is divided into three sections to reflect the main contributions of subalterns. The first section analyses the importance of Armenian and Anglo-Indian communities as operators of the telegraph and as intermediaries and brokers. The section argues that while the agency of Armenian and Anglo-Indian workers was bounded by imperial hierarchies and racist assumptions, their demonstrable force from below helped shape the IETD. Section two explores the role played by subaltern seafarers and so-called ‘menials’, whose labour as lascars, sweepers, servants and peons was vital to the maintenance of the telegraph network. These workers did not view the telegraph as an infrastructure silently operating in the background, but as a central part of their labour.¹⁵ Section three explores the security of the telegraph by investigating the work and lives of lineguards and ghulāms. Despite attempts to mould them into racially essentialized and disciplined security workers, these subalterns continually shaped their own work. By looking at the role of individual workers, the section demonstrates the limited reach of the IETD in creating a disciplined workforce. The paper concludes by outlining the expansion of the network during and after the First World War. It connects this expansion with the work of subalterns and draws on the research presented in the previous sections to conclude that the IETD telegraph was a hybrid infrastructure embedded in local spaces, communities, and labour. It argues that to understand the effects of the telegraph – its power and the limits to that power – the hybridity of the network must be grasped.

OPERATIONS

Armenians and Anglo-Indians made up the bulk of subaltern signallers in the IETD. Their importance, however, was not limited to their operation work, but extended to their embeddedness in local social and political structures. Imperial telegraphic communication was reliant upon Armenians and Anglo-Indians, whose expertise was invaluable to the Department, but who were nonetheless increasingly racialized. From 1889 the IETD began the amalgamation of staff in the Persian Section and the Persian Gulf Section.¹⁶ Colonel Henry Archibald Mallock, the first Director General of the combined IETD and Indian Telegraph Department (ITD), oversaw the unification as a means of combatting the ‘inelasticity’ of signalling staff working across Sections during labour shortages.¹⁷ While the Persian Section had introduced an informal two-tier system of ‘European’ signallers working the international wires and ‘Armenian’ signallers working the local wires, Mallock made this racial division of signallers across the entire IETD official with the creation of the Local Service and General Service.¹⁸ The Local Service operated the local connections between stations and was primarily worked by Armenians and Anglo-Indians, while the General Service was responsible for international wires and worked by ‘Europeans’ on higher pay. This racial segregation of signalling duties was inspired by the ITD.¹⁹ In India, Anglo-Indians and Europeans operated the international wires of the General Signalling establishment, while Indian Hindus and Muslims operated the subsidiary Local Service.²⁰ The IETD also took inspiration from ‘private telegraph companies and all the Cable Companies in the East’ who ‘depend principally on European signallers’.²¹ Mirroring the general service of the ITD, Directors of the IETD called for an expansion of the General Service, which was increasingly becoming an exclusive racial reserve for Europeans.²²

Racist assumptions underpinned the implementation of the division of labour between the General and Local Services. For example, in 1890, the Director of the Persian Section stated that their ‘race’ and ‘education’ made Armenians ‘incapable of becoming [good signallers]’.²³ Despite such views, the needs of an expanding network and a shortage of ‘European’ signallers meant that Armenians were recruited in increasing numbers. In 1890, the IETD attempted to formalize the supply of Armenians by contacting Dr Robert Bruce, a Scottish missionary who had built a Christian school in Isfahan to provide and train young Armenian boys for the Department.²⁴ Having inspected the school, the Director of the Persian Section complained to the Director General that the Armenians educated by Dr Bruce were of inferior quality, lacking in both discipline and skill, in contrast to those educated in the British Indian education system. He suggested that young Armenians from India should be recruited instead, or that Armenians from Iran should be sent to India for education.²⁵ Alternatively, the Director of the Persian Gulf Section suggested that Armenians ‘of other nationalities residing in Baghdad, Moosul, and Busreh… at present employed in the Turkish telegraphs would readily come forward to join the local service.’²⁶ Because of cost and lack of Departmental recruitment capacity, these proposals – Bruce’s supply of Armenians, or mass employment from India and the Ottoman network – were not adopted. Instead, the IETD drew from local communities, utilizing staff already employed in stations to recruit family members. The family names of Malcolm, Carapit, and David across multiple stations demonstrate that an informal familial network helped recruit and sustain the Local Service in the Persian Section.

In the IETD’s Tehran, Shiraz, and Isfahan stations, Armenians dominated the lower Local Service positions. Armenians were crucial intermediaries in places like Isfahan, where the telegraph station was in the Armenian suburb of New Julfa,²⁷ and Tehran, the seat of Qajar power. Contrary to British assumptions about their incapacity to operate the international wires, Armenians became an attractive prospect for the Department precisely because of their capacity to operate across multiple spatial and cultural registers.²⁸ It’s unsurprising, then, that the IETD increasingly relied upon this transnational group to operate and mediate its web of expanding connections. As a result of their perceived usefulness and European labour shortages, the number of Armenians in the Department grew throughout the late nineteenth century. In 1901 the Tehran office employed thirteen General Service signallers and only three Armenian Local service signallers. By 1904 the same office still employed thirteen General Service signallers, but had expanded to six Armenian Local Service signallers and four Armenian desk clerks.²⁹ In 1908 the Persian Section employed a total of twenty Armenian Local Service signallers. By 1910 the number had risen to thirty, and for the first time just over half of all Persian Section signalling staff were Armenian.³⁰

As the British considered Armenians as culturally closer than other communities in Iran because of their Christianity, the Department used them as ‘cross-cultural brokers’ to connect the IETD to local potentates. In fostering such connections, language skills and cultural knowledge were crucial. Regional languages were often supplemented by Armenians’ knowledge of French and English, acquired at missionary schools.³¹ Armenians’ literal role of translating and articulating communication between communities and states lubricated operations for the Department. Beyond linking the IETD with local power, Armenians also facilitated communication between the Shah, his ministers, and the Department. Armenians, explained a Director of the Persian Section, were ‘at the beck and call of the Assistant Superintendent…[acting] as a go between for carrying orders from the Shah or his Ministers’.³²

To take one example: Stephen Peter Aganoor, an Armenian appointed as munshi (secretary/assistant) in 1868, became an interpreter and accountant for the IETD in 1871 on a monthly salary of Rs 100 and a treasurer allowance of 50 qirāns.³³ His career is exemplary of the intermediary role of Armenians in the Department. Aganoor linked the Department directly to the prince-governor of Isfahan, and his influence at the court was said to have produced ‘consideration and respect for the Department’.³⁴ The Director of the Persian Section went as far as to claim that Aganoor was ‘the best man’ for connecting the IETD to the prince-governor. However, praise of Aganoor was given in the context of accusations within the Department of his supposed ‘weakness of character’, as a result of which ‘little or no attention’ was paid to his representations.³⁵ Although the allegations eventually led to his replacement as local intermediary,³⁶ Aganoor’s role as interpreter demonstrates the importance of subalterns at the centre of diplomatic channels and the specific role Armenians played as mediators between British and Iranian officials. Beyond their role translating or mediating relations, Armenians themselves became important nodes, connecting the Shah with his Governors and linking internal communication within the Iranian state.

As a religious minority and Persian subjects, Armenians could operate comfortably in local languages and registers, while also presenting themselves as enterprising Christians loyal to the British. A Director of the Persian Section hyperbolically argued that Armenians could access spaces that European workers could not, and as ‘native of the country’, in times of unrest, could ‘come and go when a European would probably be murdered if he showed himself in the streets.’³⁷ While this statement reflects imperial security anxieties more than empirical evidence, it points to the value placed in Armenians as intermediaries able to traverse both imperial and local spaces and institutions. Despite their role as valuable interlocuters, Armenians did not receive commensurate salaries. Though many Armenians served in the Department for decades, they were generally ‘not eligible for promotion above 3^rd grade’.³⁸ This glass ceiling, which meant that Armenians could work as clerks but not hold management positions as Assistant-Superintendents or higher, was justified by assumptions that their minority status influenced their ‘moral character’.³⁹ Arshak Malcolm, who joined the service in 1866 on Rs 60, managed to be the exception to the rule, reaching 2^nd grade in 1888 as clerk-in-charge of the station in the small southern market town of Borazjan.⁴⁰ His promotion was a partial recognition of the ‘political’ work he conducted on behalf of the IETD in a region where central government control remained weak as local Khans engaged in power struggles.⁴¹ This work involved protecting the landline by negotiating with competing factions in and around the town. Malcolm was praised for his ‘intrepid bearing’, which ‘saved him from being attacked on more than one occasion’. Moreover, ‘his influence over the native inhabitants of the district of Burasjoon’ was praised as having ‘often saved the telegraph line from…damage’.⁴²

Like Armenians, Anglo-Indians primarily worked in the Persian Gulf Section Local Service.⁴³ In India they were relied on as mediators between the British state and their indigenous subjects. After the Indian uprisings of 1857, Anglo-Indians maintained a near monopoly on the subordinate and upper subordinate ranks within the railway and telegraph Departments in India. This was encouraged by legislation stating that Anglo-Indian and Domiciled European employment should not fall below two-thirds of total employment in the Indian Telegraph Department.⁴⁴ Anglo-Indians were designated by the IETD as capable of selected European skills, such as operating complex machinery like telegraph keys for signalling in the Local Service, whilst their Indian heritage granted them climatic toleration of the hot and remote stations of the Gulf. These ethnoclimatological assumptions, based on a racist science that linked ethnicities to certain climates, were used to reinforce a geo-racial division of labour. In the Persian Section this division was made between ‘Europeans’ and Armenians; it was argued that ‘Europeans’ should be employed in the ‘intensely cold place[s]’ of Qom, Abadeh and Dehbid, while the ‘warm locality[s]’ of Kashan, Isfahan, Kazerun and Borazjan were more suitable for Armenians.⁴⁵ The Persian Gulf Section, with its stations located on the arid shores of the Gulf, employed virtually no Armenians and instead relied on Anglo-Indians. In turn, Anglo-Indians were excluded from the Persian Section because it was assumed that they were ‘in stamina and habits quite unfit for the hardships of the Persian Highlands’,⁴⁶ due to ‘their physique, their nationality…and the sedentary habits they have acquired in the cable stations of the Gulf.’⁴⁷ Such discourse mirrored imperial assumptions that naturalized race for the individual as inherently bodily and proscribed particular forms of work for certain communities.

Racial divisions between the General and Local services in the IETD mirrored the gendering of telegraph labour in Britain during the same period, in which single needle instruments, and metropolitan and domestic wires, were feminized to promote female labour in certain ‘low skill’ jobs, in the wake of strike action by male signallers. Echoing concerns regarding Anglo-Indians’ ‘stamina’ and the Iranian interior, commentators in Britain emphasized the delicacy of female telegraphists’ fingers working on the domestic lines with their ‘finer sense of touch’, and the acute sensitivity of the female nervous system ‘to the management of others’ needs and dialogues’.⁴⁸ It was claimed that a stronger ‘masculine’ press on keys was required, along with an exclusively masculine knowledge of politics, finance and international affairs, to operate international wires, with the result that international lines were exclusively operated by male signallers until 1914.⁴⁹ The gendering and racialization of workers was a means of addressing labour shortages while preserving hierarchies of control over those who were the subjects of imperial rule. Although racialized forms of labour division had existed from the Department’s inception, the IETD came to rely more deeply on racialized signallers with the establishment of the Local and General Service in 1889. These developments mirror innovations made by the ITD, which, unsurprisingly, were adopted by the IETD when the Department was subsumed under the Director General of Telegraphs in India between 1888 and 1893.

The IETD’s reliance on racialized groups made it vulnerable to collective organized action by the very groups they sought to control. The combination of a reliance on certain communities and a desire to find increasingly cheap labour also produced tensions in the Department between subaltern groups. By 1914 the Persian Gulf Section had substantially increased the number of subalterns by expanding the recruitment of Goanese Indians in subordinate roles.⁵⁰ This led to declining prospects for Anglo-Indians, as cheaper Goanese labour was brought in to suppress wages and fill empty positions. M. De P. Webb, President of the Anglo-Indian Empire League, attempted to push back against the Department by petitioning the Director of the Persian Gulf Section.⁵¹ In Sind, Webb wrote, the Persian Gulf Section was the largest employer for Anglo-Indians. He complained that while the General Service had been closed off to Anglo-Indians for some time, they were now being squeezed out of the Local Service by Goanese.⁵² This pressure on Anglo-Indian staff meant that the community was finding it ‘more and more difficult to find employment for their children’. Webb concluded his petition by asking for increased pay for the Local Service and ‘that the General Service be again thrown open’ to the Anglo-Indian community.⁵³ As Webb’s petition demonstrates, the Anglo-Indian community in Sind were partly reliant on the Department for employment. They had become embedded in its labour system and operations. Although Webb’s demands were not immediately met, the petition forced the Department to acknowledge the fact that the IETD ‘no longer attracts Anglo-Indians’ because of poor prospects.⁵⁴ More broadly, the petition expresses the antagonisms that could develop between subaltern groups and across imperial space. While officials sought to shape subaltern labour from above, communities like Anglo-Indians could also marshal their own resources through petitions to push back against such desires. The role of Armenians and Anglo-Indians shows not only their centrality to operations but also the embeddedness of the telegraph network in local labour and political structures.

Focusing on Anglo-Indian and Armenian workers at the bottom of the IETD’s signalling hierarchy, telegraphic communication appears less as an external force and more as a technology reliant upon local expertise and shaped by local interests. However, local expertise, interests and agency were limited and shaped by more powerful forces, such as regulations, financial incentives and racist assumptions from above.

MAINTENANCE

While Anglo-Indian and Armenian signallers and translators linked the IETD to local space, servants and peons of the Department formed connections between operators inside stations.⁵⁵ These workers were used to facilitate infrastructural space while maintaining the network and staff through cleaning and cooking. All telegraph stations in the network employed at least one peon or watchman, and most employed a sweeper, batteryman, coxswain and bheestie (water-carrier). Bushehr station employed a hamal (male house servant and valet), a messenger, and a mali (gardener).⁵⁶ Accounts, medical superintendents, Store and Director’s Offices all employed ferashes (servants). Cooks and bheesties provided everyday sustenance for employees, while sweepers and batterymen maintained the material and mechanical devices and spaces by making sure the central power source was functioning and dirt did not impede the flows and connections on which the telegraph relied.

Although source material on these workers is limited, correspondence between signallers and their superiors offers an insight into the important roles played by servants and peons, and to the difficulties caused by absent, or unsatisfactory ‘menials’. For example, the superintendent at the small telegraph station of Pasni urged the Department to increase the wages of menials to attract employment, as the station experienced ‘a great difficulty without a sweeper’.⁵⁷ At Faw, a peon was blamed for leaving a faulty lamp unattended and causing a fire.⁵⁸ At Bushehr, a clerk was blamed by his colleague for ‘not sending the peon’ to alert him that he was late for his shift.⁵⁹ Despite menials’ crucial role in connecting and maintaining signalling space, personnel and equipment, they often only appear in the archives as culprits blamed for technical and communication failures.

Figure 4 offers a rare visual example of the role of menials. The image, taken in Karachi telegraph station in 1917, shows signallers sitting at their desks looking at the camera or sorting through paperwork while two South Asian menials, possibly peons or messengers, stand for the camera ready to receive orders. The photograph demonstrates the co-dependence between ‘low and slow’ and ‘high and fast’ technologies of messenger boys and Morse Keys.⁶⁰ Mechanical devices and large technical systems worked in tandem with micro technologies of individual human labour. While marginalized in the colonial archive, the image offers a glimpse of the indispensability of such labour to the network. In connecting and maintaining communications, so-called menial work did more than merely complement technological infrastructure. Across stations, menials became a type of human infrastructure, although their maintenance and sustenance of networks was rarely acknowledged by commentators and users of the public facing telegraph services. In many ways, this human infrastructure was even less visible to public users than the material infrastructure that it maintained, precisely because it was presented as antithetical to the promises of seamless connectivity and dematerialized communication. Menials not only maintained the literal nuts and bolts of the network, but they also sustained its internal social networks by facilitating communication between employees. Through their continued practices of connecting, watching over and maintaining infrastructural space, these workers ensured that operations within stations could continue.

While the Department attempted to organize the lower rungs of its workforce as an invisible component silently operating in the background, menials pushed against these attempts by leveraging their crucial work for improved conditions. In 1927 the Department received a petition from the ferashes of Tehran station. The petition called for the reestablishment of ‘Eidi’, an extra payment of one month’s salary over the Nowruz holiday (Persian new year). They complained that the custom had not only been in place in the Department until relatively recently and suddenly withdrawn, but that the British Legation, the Imperial Bank of Persia, and the Indo-European Telegraph Company all gave their ferashes Eidi.⁶¹ While the request by ferashes in Tehran was declined by the Department, a year earlier the ferashes at Panjgur station successfully petitioned for an increase in pay against rising food prices.⁶² Regardless of their success, the petitions demonstrate that workers at the bottom of the IETD’s hierarchy were able to fight for improved conditions and influence the Department. Despite their designation by officials as human infrastructure, these workers were able to push back in unintended ways against the organizing hand of the IETD.

The vital role of subaltern labour is also evident in the IETD’s maritime operations. The IETD cable ship, the Patrick Stewart, was responsible for the relaying and repair of the network’s continuously degrading submarine cables. Aboard the ship, the everyday maintenance work of cables done by subalterns offers an insight into the network’s state of continuous repair, and the vast spread of different tasks needed for its maintenance. The highly mobile yet enclosed world of the ship enforced a segregated and disciplinary internal space while it traversed the Gulf maintaining submarine cables. Like many similar contemporary ships, the Patrick Stewart was a highly disciplinary and racialized space for its South Asian crew. Maintenance of the telegraph was ordered around the racial stratification of its workforce, which was reflected in unequal spatial and salary arrangements onboard. The quarters and washrooms of the South Asian crew were as far away from the captain’s cabin as possible, next to the hen coops and ladders to the lower deck where many would have toiled in the dark underbelly of the ship. Racialized difference was also imposed through different pay, with lascars paid around one-fifth to one-third of what their European shipmates received.⁶³ This was often reduced further by bribes paid to a serang, or head of lascars, as part of wider practices of recruitment controlled by ‘indigenous recruiters’ who contracted relatives and debtors as a form of patronage and control.⁶⁴

The Patrick Stewart employed a majority of sixty-seven South Asian workers, who were assigned physically intense labour such as stoking the boilers, cooking, and stewarding (see figure 5).⁶⁵ The maintenance of cables relied on a stratified racial hierarchy supported by a large number of subaltern labourers. This organization meant that the physical work, and its consequential effects on the body involved in maintaining the ship and carrying out the splicing and hauling of submarine cables, was primarily borne by these workers. Medical records offer an insight into the impact that maintaining infrastructure had on the body. The life and career of the serang aboard the Patrick Stewart, who served on the ship from 1871 until 1891, Ameen Mohideen, is an example. Ameen started off as a 2^nd class lascar on Rs 16 a month, then was promoted to serang on Rs 35. He was forced to retire after twenty years of service due to irreducible inguinal hernia, which resulted in ‘protrusion of the gut’, and gave him ‘great abdominal pains accompanied with vomiting’ and preventing him from defecating.⁶⁶ This injury is often the result of strenuous activity, and was almost certainly exacerbated, if not caused by, repetitive lifting. Ameen’s terrible injury was the consequence of physical entanglement in the operations of maintenance. The ‘revolutionary’ technology of telegraphy was only possible through the reproduction of physically difficult and repetitive tasks that often had a serious impact on the health of subalterns. Ameen Mohideen’s injuries demonstrate that telegraphy did not come to encompass Gandhi’s fear that technology misused ‘atrophied the limbs of man’, but instead exacted a heavy physical toll on those maintaining the network.⁶⁷

Below deck and out of sight of British officials, subaltern ship labourers were very much in sight of each other, with crews forming bonds of debt and kinship.⁶⁸ Like menials on land, subalterns aboard the cable ship exercised forms of agency at work. While space and pay became the sites through which labour was racially divided, the micro-management of subalterns at sea was effectively outsourced to serangs, who brought valuable linguistic and seafaring skills which gave them a degree of control over operations. Moreover, they maintained a certain level of religious, financial, and physical control over their subordinates, making them possible ‘alternative centres of authority’, and in some cases leaders of mutinies.⁶⁹ On the Patrick Stewart, no mutinies were recorded, but serangs did have their own ‘gang of lascars’ that worked under their supervision. Even within the highly disciplined space of imperial ships, subalterns were able to carve out degrees of control and agency.

Maintenance work in the IETD not only maintained the material infrastructure of the telegraph network, but also reproduced the Department’s social hierarchy.⁷⁰ Workers fixing and maintaining telegraph infrastructure were imagined and organized to operate as human machinery below deck and inside stations. Yet analysing their scattered traces across archives shows us their importance to the telegraph network, along with the physical toll such work had on the body, and their agency in demanding improved conditions. Focusing on maintenance workers also shows the limitations, as much as the strength, of the IETD in its attempts to enforce uniform discipline.

SECURITY: GHULĀMS, LINEGUARDS, ARTIFICERS AND JEMADARS

Patterns of subcontracting and agency were not restricted to subalterns on cable-ships and in telegraph stations; they were also found in the security work conducted across the network’s landlines. Ghulāms, lineguards and jemadars formed the backbone of security and daily labour operations in the IETD. They were employed to patrol sections of telegraph line, to survey for damage and vandalism, and to appear as a visible presence of the Department in remote areas. Although these workers have traditionally been presented as safeguarding areas of telegraph infrastructure,⁷¹ their work was in fact multifaceted, intended to symbolize power whilst also carrying out maintenance work in remote locations. Although it was convenient for the Department to represent security staff as an efficient and successful security apparatus, on the ground these employees worked around dangerous and unrealistic expectations.

The use of lineguards and jemadars by the IETD was most prominent in Makran, a coastal region that straddled British and Qajar administered frontier territory in southern Baluchistan. The telegraph line in Makran was under the control of the Persian Gulf Section. It was divided into two subdivisions, the Jask Line Establishment (Jask Sub-Division) and the Gwadar Line Establishment (Gwadar Sub-Division), which were managed by the Superintendents of the respective stations. The Establishments were tasked with oversight of the line between the two stations in a region designated as ‘turbulent’, due to the numerous nomadic and semi-settled communities of predominantly Baluchi peoples who remained outside formal state authority. During and in the aftermath of its construction in the 1860s, security on the line was provided almost entirely by these nomadic and semi-nomadic communities, who were paid subsidies by the IETD for the line’s protection. The subcontracting of security overcame the impracticalities of levying and garrisoning a costly body of British troops. Reliance on local manpower for security was believed to minimize risk to British personnel and finance, while binding potential adversaries to British interests through financial rewards and punishments. By 1880 this system had become to some degree formalized, with the Director of the Persian Gulf Section directly appointed by India to take over subsidy payments to the Chiefs.⁷²

In 1882 the Superintendent of Jask was tasked with increasing the number of security personnel employed directly by the Department to create a cheaper, more reliable cohort of men. Codes of conduct and disciplinary rules for security personnel were created alongside the employment of a jemadar of lineguards, an Assistant Artificer and six temporary lineguards employed for nine months of the year and divided between the two Establishments. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the number of security personnel directly recruited by the IETD grew. For example, the Gwadar Sub-Division in 1903 employed sixty-eight men for security under the authority of a British Assistant Superintendent.⁷³ By 1907 this had risen to 102.⁷⁴ Increasing reliance on internal security reveals an expanded attempt to control subaltern security workers through direct employment and internal disciplinary regimes.⁷⁵ Alongside their new embedded security role, the lineguards were expected to undertake ‘petty works’, replacing ‘coolies’ who were often sourced from India and whose transportation was expensive and cumbersome.⁷⁶ As with the initial construction of the network, the reliance on local casualized labour meant that the lineguards often doubled up as labourers. Within the Persian Gulf Section, three artificers were organized under the ‘Lower Subordinate Establishment’. Many were skilled engineers and craftsmen tasked with leading groups of labourers to fix faulty and damaged portions of the line.

Like lineguards, ghulāms (servants/mounted messengers or couriers) were widely employed in the Persian Section in central Iran.⁷⁷ These men were mainly mounted on horses to tackle the mountainous Iranian interior, while lineguards of Mekran had camels or went by foot. The IETD considered the ghulāms’ positions ‘peculiar’ and dangerous, as they were ‘required to leave their stations and repair the line whenever interrupted, whether the road be infested with robbers or not.’⁷⁸ Like the Anglo-Indians and Armenians, recruitment for this difficult job was based on essentialized notions of racial characteristics that reflected both the difficulty of finding willing recruits and wider imperial racist stereotypes. The Assistant Superintendent of the Isfahan Sub-Division complained that while the Indian telegraph network could rely on ‘well trained and intelligent nature[d] staff’, the IETD was compelled to use labourers ‘from the Bazar [sic] as they are required’. Ghulāms, he claimed, were ‘absolutely wanting in intelligence, interest in the task and acumen’ and not to be trusted.⁷⁹ They were, nevertheless, crucial. Although many ghulāms were praised for their work, racial assumptions meant that they were deemed unable to operate or fix complex machinery, and thus considered unworthy of technical training. Breaking down the racial essences of ghulāms, the Director of the PS wrote that in the northern sub-section, ‘men of Turkish extraction’, most likely Qashqai, were recruited, who were ‘more or less stupid, though also hardy and courageous’.⁸⁰ Telegraph stations also relied on security by subaltern workers. In the Jask telegraph compound, seven Chowkidar police guards were recruited,⁸¹ while in 1870 in Gwadar during disturbances against the local governor, fifty Karachi rural police and 100 guards were sent to protect the telegraph station.⁸²

Inspections by British clerks became a way for the IETD to monitor their embedded lineguards working in remote areas of Makran. In 1895, following a spate of thefts of bolts and clamps from telegraph posts, the Director of the Persian Gulf Section wrote to his superior to reassure him that the lineguards had been given instructions ‘to keep a stricter watch over the clamps’ on the telegraph poles securing them to the ground.⁸³ A ‘surprise’ inspection of the Jask-Chahbahar section when the lineguards least expected it, in the hot season of July, August and September, was ordered. The inspection, carried out by a British superintendent, was designed ‘to ascertain which of the lineguards neglected their work when no inspection by a European officer was expected’⁸⁴ – an implicit recognition that indigenous labour was self-interested, and calculating. The results of the inspection were disappointing: the superintendent did not meet a single lineguard on his return journey. The lineguard Shukkan of Sirgan ‘was said to have gone to Gaih to pick dates leaving his son Dooda aged 15 in charge but with no camel’. Another, Murad Humees, ‘was said to be at Bal and absent since June leaving Shle Riza a Biluch in charge but latter was not living near his post’. Dhaie of Gabreg ‘was said to be at Yak Buni had been absent for some time and had left a Biluch named Morad in charge. Latter was not only deaf but an idiot’.⁸⁵ The report suggests that lineguard duties were often performed alongside seasonal agricultural work, and frequently offered to relatives. As a result of the report, Murad Humees of Swag was dismissed for being absent and Dhaie of Gabreg was fined.⁸⁶ The superintendent’s report offers an insight into how the line was ‘secured’ on the ground, and how the IETD sought to monitor and discipline lineguards, but it also demonstrates the agency of lineguards in moulding, or avoiding their work altogether. Skiving lineguards were a partial product of the unrealistic and dangerous expectations of patrol. During summer in Makran temperatures reaching 120 °F (48.89 °C) in the shade of trees were reported. Good water was scarce and ‘only obtainable at the stations’. Even the IETD British inspector admitted that their target of patrolling the expected routes every two days was ‘impossible…without camels or men breaking down’.⁸⁷

Such expectations demonstrate the degree to which ‘European’ management remained distant from the network on the ground and its practicalities and (im)possibilities. Beyond this, however, discourses by officials about the work of security personnel show that the network depended on people whom some contemporaries felt were unsuited or unwilling to do the work required. This paradox reveals that the management of ‘problematic’ labourers was as important to the functioning of the network as the technology and engineering underpinning its function. While the Department attempted to control labour through inspections and schedules, lineguards shaped their own work to fit their needs by not showing up or subcontracting. For all the imbalances inherent in the encounter between subalterns and IETD officials, the Department was unsuccessful in its attempts to produce a highly disciplined indigenous labour force. Additionally, its reliance on local labour gave these workers a degree of leverage to shape conditions of work and the network itself.

Despite this, subalterns in the IETD failed to formulate any collective demands that moved beyond communitarian identities. As such, the IETD never experienced mass strikes or a united labour opposition. This may appear particularly surprising when considering the growing labour militancy across British India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁸⁸ While workers in the Indian Telegraph Department (ITD) were able to coordinate a national strike in India in 1908 that included ‘European, Eurasian, and … Bengali clerks’,⁸⁹ IETD workers failed to produce any comparable cross-racial strike, even during the years it was subsumed into the ITD. In contrast to the IETD, organizers in the ITD were able to draw on a larger body of workers who mobilized within an Indian nationalist context. Workers in the IETD remained racially, socially, and religiously fragmented within different contexts across the Gulf and Iran. The transnational setup of the Department meant that the IETD lacked the unity of an emerging national space like India. Racial taxonomies in the IETD did not prevent strikes, as evident with the ITD; however, they did produce/reproduce specific ‘races’ with interests, sometimes in antagonism with other subaltern groups. Crucial, and unique to Iran and the Gulf, was the perception by British officials of the region as an expanded securitized frontier zone of British India.⁹⁰ The perceived threat of rival imperial encroachment by British Indian officials in the age of ‘high imperialism’ resulted in the IETD taking on an increasingly military character, which in turn made it difficult for network-wide worker solidarity to develop, as a martial culture solidified hierarchies between military and ex-military ‘European’ officials and subalterns. As a result, workers of different ‘races’ and classes formed interest groups whose agencies and demands rarely moved beyond local contexts and specific demands.

CONCLUSION: INFORMATION AND WAR

As the IETD grew in size and scope, subalterns were increasingly employed to run vital parts of the network. Organizing and running much of this expansion were clerks in the Accounts Branch, Traffic Office and Store Establishment who were almost entirely South Asian in the Persian Gulf Sector, and Armenian in the Persian Sector.⁹¹ Following the Indian Army’s invasion of Ottoman Mesopotamia in 1914, the Persian Gulf Sector became the main informational artery linking the new theatre of war to India. By 1914 the Traffic Office in Karachi was dealing not only with a rapidly growing volume of departmental traffic from an expanded network, but also with complex and sensitive military communications from the Mesopotamia Field Force.⁹² After the war, the movement of troops and the governance of the Mandate of Iraq from India meant that traffic increased rather than abated. The expansion and maintenance of this informational network was only possible because of the thousands of subalterns whose continued labour had laid the foundations for the operation and eventual expansion of the telegraph network. From this perspective, much of what we have come to understand as the foundations of the communication revolution was dependent on subalterns, just as the prosecution of ‘the Great War’ in Mesopotamia depended on the labour of colonial soldiers.⁹³

Reflecting on the role of technology, or ‘machinery’ as it was termed in 1924, Gandhi wrote, ‘Today machinery merely helps a few to ride on the backs of millions’.⁹⁴ Yet the study of subaltern labour in the IETD demonstrates that even at the centre of the empire’s communication network, subalterns were able to push back against imperial control. In reappraising imperial telegraphy through subaltern workers, the pioneers of networks appear much more eclectic and diverse than has traditionally been understood. Subaltern telegraph labour viewed from below begins to look less like Goldsmid’s description of a directed ‘volley of grape’ and more like collective and individual agents who were essential to the telegraph network, shaping its conditions and outcomes. Rather than a purely transnational, ethereal, and exogenous European ‘tool of empire’, subaltern labour demonstrates that while it may have been managed from afar, on the ground it was embedded in local spaces, materials, and peoples.

Footnotes