Today, the study of atmospheric pollution is a relatively exact science. It is possible to detect microscopic particles of less than 2.5 microns in diameter and to show with some accuracy the harm they do to the human heart and lungs. As Awadhendra Sharan reminds us, air pollution is now one of the principal threats to health worldwide: in India alone it accounts for more than 1.2 million premature deaths. There, too, the problem of outdoor pollution from factories, traffic and incinerators is compounded by the indoor pollution caused by using solid fuel for cooking. Imagine, by contrast, the difficulty of determining smoke and dust pollution in Bombay (Mumbai) or Calcutta (Kolkata) in the 1870s when India’s pollution problem was in its infancy and a subjective impression of the lightness or darkness of the smoke issuing from factory chimneys, and for how long, was the only gauge to go by. “I saw the chimney of the defendant’s mill smoking excessively,” wrote Bombay’s aggrieved municipal commissioner in 1876. “It was emitting a dense volume of black smoke. For about a quarter of an hour, or a little less, the chimney was smoking excessively the whole time.” “I have watched chimneys for three years and a half,” he added. “In this case it was an exceedingly dense column of black smoke” (p. 72).

In this excellently detailed and thoroughly researched history of the air pollution problem in colonial India’s two largest cities, Sharan traces the growth of concern about airborne smoke and dust from the 1860s through to the start of the second world war and the measures taken to deal with it. One motivation was aesthetic and experiential. Emissions from industries, led by cotton mills in Bombay and jute factories in Calcutta but augmented by steamships, railway locomotives, and a host of lesser enterprises, caused a marked decline in air quality and a deterioration in urban visibility. For viceroys, governors and officials, as for many Indian residents, this was an “insidious and growing danger,” one which, as Lord Curzon put it, “if unarrested […] will before long destroy one half of the amenities of Calcutta, and […] permanently injure its incomparable beauty and charm” (p. 109). British residents resented the intrusion of industrial soot and factory smoke into their homes and the blighting of their morning rides. There was more than hint of annoyance that India’s premier cities should, incongruous as it seemed to Britons’ idealization of India, be following the smoke-filled path of Black Country Britain. But Indians, too, objected and lodged complaints against offending mills and railroads. The effects of this pollution on health was always an issue but, in Sharan’s view, did not become a dominant concern until the 1930s. In the short term the problem was seen as one of urban governance – how and by whom should the “smoke nuisance” be addressed? – and of how best to manage industrial technology. Engineers rather than health officers were called upon to observe factory smoke, to report on its density and duration, and where necessary to recommend warnings, prosecutions and fines. The economic importance of factories was too great for them to be shut down just because they poured out plumes of black smoke. It was preferable to persuade factory owners and overseers to improve the efficiency of their boilers, though, in a colonial society so given to discrimination, blame also fell on the inferiority of Indian coal or the alleged incompetence of Indian stokers.

Although Sharan does not present it in quite that way, his study adds significantly to the current interest in expertise in the colonial sphere. As the field sidles away from generalized statements about colonial science and medicine, so does the role of the expert – the smoke inspector, the sanitary officer, the chemical examiner, the forestry officer – become a central strand in a much denser and more nuanced narrative of colonial governance and the increasingly complex entanglement of state, science and environment. Likewise, Sharan’s discussion highlights the importance of urban governance and the quest for urban solutions, whether imported from British cities or locally evolved, to address modern, urban, and often highly technical issues. His book also, though perhaps not as fully as one might wish, demonstrates the rise of a new notion of the public, one that is neither simply colonial or exclusively India in composition and outlook. Frederick Grover, an expert brought in from Sheffield to work on Calcutta’s smoke nuisance problem, remarked in his 1904 report, there were only two ways to proceed. One was through “wise legislation” that would not go so far as to hamper local industries; the other was through a “sense of public duty in keeping the atmosphere as clear as possible”. The public, he averred, “have a just claim to such protective measures as can secure improved conditions of life without undue interference with commercial prosperity” (p. XVII).

While stressing that this was a history of incremental change rather than one marked by sudden, radical shifts, Sharan sees the issues of urban smoke and dust – and the negotiations and compromises they entailed – as being worked out in three main stages, with some significant differences in both environmental conditions and ameliorative responses between the two cities. The first phase, from the 1860s to the 1890s, was one of relative amateurism, of strong opinions and weak solutions, and the lack of both scientific precision and qualified agency. In the subsequent phase technical experts like Grover were drafted in, new legislation was enacted (in 1905 for Calcutta, in 1912 for Bombay), and permanent Smoke Nuisance Commissions established. Although these bodies were empowered to fine factories and workshops, and were armed with more technically precise criteria, as Sharan shows they sought to educate, persuade and improve rather than simply punish offenders. By the final phase in the 1920s and 1930s there was increased emphasis (especially in Bombay) in trying to regulate smaller factories and workshops, and an increasing hope that the ultimate solution lay in phasing out coal and coke in favour of electricity and gas. In earlier phases, the factory and the street were critical sites of observation and intervention; by the 1930s, the domestic scene was becoming more important as new technologies of the home – and the advertising and consumerism that accompanied them – rose to prominence.

Dust and Smoke leaves the reader with a sense of relative optimism. It suggests that problems can be addressed and solutions found through negotiation rather than confrontation, that suitable expertise can be found and deployed, that the public ultimately has some say in urban governance, and that technologies can diversify and possibly change for the better. But concluding this pollution story in 1940 as Sharan does leaves major questions unanswered: How and when did things go so horribly wrong? Was there a slackening of controls during the second world war or after independence as India strove for industrial growth? Has the expansion of cities and industries simply outstripped and overridden environmental concerns? At what point does optimism fade and die?