Which one of the following cities on the banks of Ganges declined in importance when the railway link to Bombay started operating?

Correct — C, Mirzapur. Mirzapur, on the Ganga between Allahabad and Varanasi, had grown as a collecting mart — cotton and cotton goods came up from the Deccan by road and bullock cart and were gathered there for onward movement down the river. That business existed because the overland route to a river port was the cheapest way to move Deccan produce. Once the railway ran through to Bombay, cotton went straight to the port by rail and there was no reason to route it through a town on the Ganga at all. Mirzapur lost the trade that had made it, and it is the standard textbook example of an inland mart undone by the railway.

• (a)Benaras — Benaras did not decline. It was a pilgrimage centre and a silk-weaving town whose importance rested on religion and craft rather than on being a transhipment point, and the railway brought it more visitors, not fewer.
• (b)Kanpur — Kanpur moved the other way entirely. It became a major colonial industrial town, with leather and cotton mills serving army contracts, and its growth was helped by the railway rather than harmed by it.
• (d)Patna — Patna remained the administrative and commercial centre of its region through the colonial period. It was not a mart that existed only to feed a river route, so the opening of a rail link to Bombay did not undercut its reason for existing.

The railways reorganised the map of Indian towns. Lines were laid to move raw materials to the three port cities and manufactures back inland, so places that lay on a railway junction or at a port grew, and places whose importance came from an older road or river route lost it. Nineteenth-century urban history in India is largely the story of that redistribution: new railway towns and mill towns rising while river marts and staging posts on the old highways emptied out.

The question is really about why a town exists at all. A town that exists because pilgrims come, or because a craft is made there, or because a government sits there, survives a change in transport. A town that exists only because goods have to be unloaded, stored and reloaded at that spot disappears the moment the goods stop needing to stop. Mirzapur was of the second kind, and the railway to Bombay removed the reason for the halt. The same logic explains the fate of Machhlipatnam and Surat when the port cities of the Company took their trade, and of Dacca when the Bengal cotton weaving collapsed. Applied to the four options, three are towns with an independent reason for being and one is not.

• Mirzapur lies on the Ganga in Uttar Pradesh, between Prayagraj and Varanasi, and was a collecting mart for cotton and cotton goods from the Deccan.
• The railway link to Bombay let Deccan cotton reach the port directly, removing the need to gather it on the Ganga.
• The first passenger railway line in India ran from Bombay to Thane in 1853, and the network expanded rapidly from the 1850s.
• Kanpur grew in the same period as a colonial industrial town built on leather and cotton mills.
• Benaras retained its position through pilgrimage and its silk-weaving industry.

• Choosing Benaras or Patna because they are the better-known towns on the Ganga. Fame is not the same as dependence on a trade route.
• Assuming the railway harmed every inland town. It made Kanpur, and it made many junction towns from nothing.
• Forgetting that Mirzapur's trade came overland from the Deccan; without that link the question makes no sense.

As a which-town-declined item, as a statement set on the effects of the railways, or through the growth of the presidency cities.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  India's first passenger railway line, opened in 1853, ran between

  • (a)Howrah and Hooghly
  • (b)Bombay and Thane
  • (c)Madras and Arcot
  • (d)Delhi and Meerut

  Answer(b) Bombay and Thane — a stretch of about 34 kilometres opened in April 1853.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following towns grew as a colonial industrial centre for leather and cotton in the nineteenth century?

  • (a)Mirzapur
  • (b)Kanpur
  • (c)Murshidabad
  • (d)Machhlipatnam

  Answer(b) Kanpur — its mills supplied army contracts, and the railway helped rather than hurt it.