The Making of an Indian Company Town: Manufactured Cosmopolitanism, Communal Violence, and Urban Memory in Jamshedpur, India

In 1907, after months of prospecting across India, the little-known and remote hamlet of Sakchi in Singhbhum was chosen by Jamshetji Nusserwanji Tata (1839-1904), founder of the Tata Group, as the location for India’s first indigenously owned iron and steel works. This paper examines the construction of an institutional cultural memory of what would become the planned city of Jamshedpur as an integral part of India’s industrial heritage, steeped in ideas of progress, modernity and cosmopolitanism. The article juxtaposes this cultural memory with the lived experiences and memories of Jamshedpur inhabitants who have witnessed its transformation in response to and beyond the institutional narrative of the ideal steel city. Finally, the article discusses the immediate and long-term impacts of communal riots in 1964 and 1979 and the ways in which this violence is remembered or forgotten. In doing so, the article argues that public and private histories and memories of Jamshedpur intersect, overlap, and negotiate with each other in ways that complicate and contradict a carefully cultivated discourse of model industrial urbanism that has been erected on a foundation of manufactured cosmopolitanism.