Mumbai Fables Read online

  But looks can be deceiving. Legends abound that the vanquished king lives on. While the city sleeps, he rises from the grave of history to defend himself. Night after night, he slips out of the museum and rides on his horse to engage Shivaji in duels. Their battles take them all over the city, fighting for neighborhood after neighborhood. They clash swords astride their horses and on foot, but always to a stalemate. When morning breaks, Shivaji returns to his triumphant Gateway home and King Edward to the museum, both vowing to resume their duel.

  Colonialism has been dispatched to the museum, and the postcolonial present summons Shivaji, Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Dadabhai Naoroji, and other regional and national icons to provide a different cultural significance to the city’s topography. But all this effort at erasing history cannot expunge Mumbai’s colonial past. Like King Edward, the colonial past refuses to be consigned to the museum. To begin with, the physical form of the city invites reflections on its colonial origin. Mumbai, it is said, stands on lands reclaimed from the Arabian Sea, as if the city had some prior claims on what lay buried underwater. In fact, the Island City occupies lands stolen from the sea. The deluge of July 2005 was a brutal reminder of the fact that the city represents the colonization of nature by culture. But this is not all there is to Mumbai’s parasitical foundation.

  The city’s built environment also bears the marks of its colonial birth and development. In a country with settlements going back several millennia, Mumbai boasts of no ancient monument—no fort, palace, temple, or mosque—from the deep past. The monuments from the era of European trade and conquest are another matter; they bear testimony to Mumbai’s doubly colonial history, pointing out that the seizure of lands from the sea for the urban settlement went hand in hand with the conquest of the territory and the people by European colonialism.

  The period of Portuguese conquest is visible in the Roman Catholic churches scattered across the city. The signs of the Portuguese past, however, are mere footnotes to the massive presence of British colonialism, which is evident, most of all, in the Fort area of South Bombay. Here, a Portuguese-era gateway and sundial survive, but their presence is dwarfed by the outlines of the British-built colonial city. They outgrew the Fort, a castle surrounded by rampart walls that the East India Company constructed after they took over the Bombay islands from the Portuguese in 1688. To accommodate the growing settlement, the British tore down the rampart walls in 1862, starting a building boom in the late nineteenth century. In today’s map you can easily distinguish the outlines of the colonial city that grew out of the Fort.

  At its center is the imposing neoclassical Town Hall, housing the Asiatic Society Library, which leads westward to the circular Horniman (formerly Elphinstone) Circle garden and buildings complex, and then on to Hutatma Chowk (formerly Flora Fountain), Veer Nariman Road (formerly Churchgate Street), and the Arabian Sea. Close to the Town Hall stands the old Customs House, which, along with the dockyard wall on Bhagat Singh Road (formerly Dockyard Road), calls to mind the era of European trade and conquest. Farther south and just beyond where the Fort walls once stood is the Gateway of India, built on the eastern waterfront to commemorate the visit of the Prince of Wales to the city in 1911. Farther south are the Colaba Causeway and Sassoon Docks, which represent the city’s growth beyond the Fort walls, as do the cluster of Gothic Revival structures along the Maidan, and the arcaded commercial strip on Dadabhai Naoroji Road leading north to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) and Crawford Market. Also in the north, on the eastern waterfront and beyond the old fort ramparts, is the Ballard Estate, a majestic European-style early-twentieth-century business district.

  2.1. The Fort and its environs. Courtesy: Tsering W. Shawa

  These signs of the colonial past, however, lack their gloss. The once-thriving ports on the eastern waterfront have lost much of their business to the port on the mainland. The cotton mills that sprang to life in the late nineteenth century, turning Bombay into an industrial city, are now frozen in silence. The Fort area no longer has the orderly urban form that it once enjoyed. Hawkers occupy the arcaded walkways. Riotous signboards cover the face of ornamented buildings. The pressure from heritage activists has succeeded to some extent in restoring the original structures and facades, but the colonial past appears without its aura. Indeed, the keystone heads embellishing the cleaned-up and restored archways draw attention only to their being out of time. The absent statue of King Edward VII in Kala Ghoda points to the ruination of colonial mastery. The parade of Gothic Revival architecture in South Bombay appears out of joint. In their afterlives, the colonial monuments and remnants exist without the halo that once gave them power.

  Undoubtedly, Mumbai has changed. Portuguese rule ended long ago, and the British left in 1947. With Europeans gone, the city is now under Indian control. By Indianizing street and building names, by officially renaming Bombay Mumbai, the postcolonial present suggests that colonial control is over. Charting transformations primarily in terms of native-versus-alien rule, however, is to miss the histories lodged in the city’s doubly parasitical birth and development. It assumes that the colonial past can be bleached out of Mumbai’s historical existence as a metropolis and neatly appropriated by the postcolonial era. But the Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal’s eloquent rage, his searing accusation that the city is a slut, one that enchants only to deceive, draws attention to a deeper meaning of colonial oppression, one that did not end with the British departure. He exhorts us to revisit the Island City’s past to disclose Mumbai’s history as culture’s triumph over nature; to see that its life as an emblem of cosmopolitan modernity is also an account of oppression and exploitation. His vengeful fury obliges us to ask: How did colonization come to represent the triumph of human artifice? What was involved in turning seven islets on the Arabian Sea into the modern Island City? How were its enchantments produced? What were the horrors that they concealed? With Dhasal’s accusing finger as my guide, I set out to unearth this story of conquest and exploitation, of urban horror and oppression, in Mumbai’s heroic narrative as a modern city.

  THE CONQUEST OF THE ISLAND OF LOVE

  The story begins in 1498. On May 20 Vasco da Gama landed in Calicut on the southwestern coast of India, seeking Christians and spices. The ruler, the zamorin of Calicut, rebuffed him. Undeterred, Gama returned for two more voyages. Thus began the era of European trade and conquest that would unite East and West and bring Bombay into the colonial world. The Portuguese spearheaded this venture, following Gama’s historic voyage with repeated assaults on the western shores of the subcontinent. Francisco de Almeida, the first Portuguese viceroy, carried out a raid on Bombay in 1509, seizing cattle and killing local residents. The next two decades witnessed repeated raids on Bombay that thrust the Portuguese into hostilities with the chieftains of Gujarat’s Muslim ruler, who claimed authority over these territories. Nuno da Cunha, the Portuguese governor-general of India, assaulted Bassein in 1532 with a fleet of one hundred vessels. Accompanied and blessed by Franciscan monks, Cunha led his soldiers into battle and seized the Bassein fort. He celebrated the victory in a mosque with fifty casks of wine and biscuits, tarts, beef, boiled ham, and cheese. Impressed with Portuguese power and hoping to enlist their aid against Mughal incursions, the Gujarat sultan conceded defeat and signed a treaty surrendering authority over Bassein, its dependent territories, and its seas to the king of Portugal.

  The new rulers built their headquarters at Bassein, from where they ruled Bombay, which was then seven separate islets—Colaba, Old Woman’s Island, Bombaim or Bom Bahia, Mazagaon, Parel, Worli, and Mahim. People on the islands lived by fishing, rice and coconut farming, and trading. They worshiped a number of different goddesses; among them was Mumba, the goddess from whose name the names Bombay and Mumbai are derived. The islands were covered with groves, and game was plentiful. The Portuguese called their newly acquired possession a ilha da boa vida, or the island of good life.

  Writing in 1900, Gerson da Cunha,
an early historian of Bombay, speculated that this idyllic image was the source of the mythical Island of Love in the Lusiads, the great sixteenth-century Portuguese epic poem. Composed by Luíz Vaz de Camões, “the Portuguese Virgil,” the poem is an ode to the voyages made by his compatriots. In the epic, the Island of Love appears as a magical place created by Venus with the assistance of Cupid and the Nereids for the reception of mariners. On this miraculous island, beautiful nymphs await the heroic but weary seaman to rejuvenate them after their arduous oceanic journeys around the world.

  Like others, Cunha acknowledges that the magical island is an allegory and that it is not located in the Indian seas. Yet, he speculates that Camões’s imagination may well have drawn from the charming descriptions of the island penned by others, including his friend Garcia da Orta, the distinguished botanist. If this fictional image had a material reference, he argues, it must have been Bombay, not St. Helena, Angevida, or Zanzibar, as others have suggested. “Here was an island, as if floating on water in the midst of a beautiful group of islands, not peopled perhaps by the Nymphs, the Nereids and Naiads, but by winsome Kôlis of the Negrito type, with the sea all around, and rivers, springs, trees, and mountains in the adjacent islands.”2

  2.2. Seven Islands. Source: S. M. Edwardes, The Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island, vol. 1 (Bombay: Times Press, 1909)

  Whether or not the island of good life was the source of the imagined paradise that Venus created, the Portuguese painted it in pastoral, soothing colors. They coveted the life of plenitude offered by its abundant rice, game, and fish. The conquerors rewarded their distinguished servants by leasing them fiefs, but there was no substantial immigration from Portugal. A century after the conquest, only eleven Portuguese families lived on the islands. Among the local population, the majority were Kolis, who subsisted primarily by fishing and farming. Garcia da Orta also mentions the Kunbis, who lived by agriculture; the Malis (gardeners); the Prabhus, who worked as accountants and merchants; the Bhandaris, who acted as peons; the Banias and the Parsis; and the lower-caste Deres or Farazes, “who eat everything, even dead things,” and were “despised and hated by all.”3 There was also a small group of Muslims called the Naitias, whose Arab and Persian ancestors had married Hindu women on the Konkan Coast.

  Conquest did not transform economic life; people continued to farm and fish. But the winds of change were unmistakable, and they blew with the force of religious fanaticism. Vasco da Gama is reported to have proclaimed that he had come in search of Christians and spices. The first order of business, then, was proselytization. The Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Jesuits fanned out on the islands, destroying temples and mosques and building churches. The Franciscans built the church of St. Michael at Mahim. The Jesuits followed suit with the church of St. Andrew in Bandra. Churches in Sion, Dadar, Mazagaon, and Parel followed as the two orders vied with each other to spread Christianity. They were considerably strengthened by the king of Portugal’s order in 1549 that civil authorities support the church. With its coffers overflowing, ecclesiastical power soared. It used this power to build churches and monasteries with forced labor and compelled many Kolis, Prabhus, Bhandaris, and Mahars to convert.

  The Jesuits were especially zealous. They not only forced the Prabhus to convert but also used them as their subordinate agents to oppress the Brahmans.4 The Brahmans posed a threat because they were suspected of inciting the converts to return to their ancestral faith. The Portuguese saw the Brahman endorsement of the annual ritual of bathing in the river to purify the soul as a deliberate provocation. According to their records, the Jesuits retaliated by planting crosses all along the river.5 To avoid the crosses, the Brahmans retreated to an isolated lake. Incensed, the Jesuits sent musketeers and horsemen accompanied by civil authorities to disperse the bathers. Everyone fled, except for an ascetic covered in tiger skin. Speaking in Portuguese, he claimed that he was only emulating St. John the Baptist. The tables had turned. The Hindu convert to Christianity had ended up converting Christianity to Hinduism. The Jesuits were furious. They responded by demolishing the temple by the lake, smashing the idols, and slaughtering a cow, sprinkling its polluting blood in the water.

  Subsequent history has written over this legacy of forced conversion and coerced labor but has not erased it completely. The traces of this legacy can be found in the presence of a small but noticeable Roman Catholic community, churches, and Portuguese street and neighborhood names. They remind us that although the Portuguese pioneered the European maritime route to India, their main concern was Christianity. While they searched for Christians, others voyaged on the sea route they had charted to seek the riches of the East. In 1583 the first English traders set foot on the western shores of the subcontinent. Three decades later, the East India Company established a foothold in Surat. From there, they eyed the natural advantages of Bombay as a naval base. Joined by the Dutch, they attacked Bombay in 1626, torching the manor house that was originally built by Garcia da Orta.

  Bombay’s modern birth occurred in this crucible of European overseas conquest. The Portuguese contributed, by first seizing the “island of good life” and then gifting it as a dowry to the English when Catherine of Braganza married Charles II in 1661. Seven years later, when the Crown leased Bombay to the East India Company, conquest was rewritten as lawful possession. Now that the Portuguese were history, a new chapter opened in Bombay’s modern life—its growth as a port city under the company.

  BLACK GOLD AND KING COTTON

  Under the British, Bombay developed its reputation as a city of commerce, a dynamic trading and banking center serviced by merchants belonging to different communities. It is a well-deserved reputation, and one that rings true even today despite the recent rise in communal tension. Go to any bazaar in the city, and you will find a medley of castes and communities eagerly transacting business. But the sordid origins of this mercantile cosmopolitanism involved ruthless profiteering from opium, cotton, and labor.

  Soon after acquiring the island, the East India Company’s first order of business was to build Bombay Castle on the site where Garcia da Orta’s Manor House had once stood. A few decades after the company shifted its headquarters from Surat to Bombay in 1686 to escape the bruising Maratha attacks, the Fort became a well-defended walled town. It had fortified gates, a bastion that could mount several cannons, a marine force to defend the dockyard, and St. Thomas Church, where the Europeans could pray. The British nurtured the fortified town as a commercial center by encouraging merchants from Gujarat to migrate to their settlement. Among these, none were more prominent than the Parsis.6 The Zoroastrians had never been traders; after fleeing from Persia in the eighth century to escape Muslim persecution, they settled as agriculturists in Gujarat. The network of European trade, however, drew them into the world of commerce. They developed close ties to the company in Surat, acting as interpreters and agents, provisioning and building ships for the Europeans. When the company shifted its headquarters to Bombay, they followed and quickly became the most important and wealthy mercantile community. They were not alone. Hindu and Jain merchants of the Bania caste and Muslims of the Bohra, Khoja, and Memon communities from Gujarat flocked to exploit the opportunities that the new colonial settlement offered. The merchants settled in separate enclaves in the Bazaar Gate area at the northern end of the Fort, which developed as the “native” town, a mix of houses and bazaars. The British lived in the south, with the east-west axis of Churchgate Street forming the boundary between Europeans and Indians.

  Bombay flourished with the influx of immigrants, with many settling beyond the walls of the crowded fortified town. However, it remained a remote British outpost for much of the eighteenth century. It was poorly connected with the mainland to the east, which remained under Maratha sway until the early nineteenth century. It experienced exponential growth only after the abolition of the East India Company’s monopoly in 1813, which sparked a rapid rise in trade. Close on its heels came the victory over th
e Marathas in 1818, which brought much of western India under company rule and opened up central India to British control. With private European traders now trawling for Eastern riches, and vast new territories opened for exploitation, Bombay’s growth prospects improved dramatically.

  The turn in fortunes came with the growing trade in opium to China. Since the late eighteenth century, the company had developed a system of opium cultivation in eastern India under its monopoly. It would auction the produce in Calcutta for transportation to China, where it was sold to pay for Chinese tea and silk. Encouraged by the growing trade, private merchants circumvented company monopoly and procured opium from Malwa in central India, shipping it from Daman, a port held by the Portuguese. The British countered by encouraging traders to bring the Malwa opium to Bombay.

  The city’s merchants seized the opportunity. Attracted by the high profit margins, they took to the opium trade with great vigor. According to a historian, early Victorian Bombay became an “opium city.”7 By the 1820s the city surpassed Calcutta in bullion remittances from China.8 Revenue from opium strengthened the colonial government’s monetary reserves, paid for part of the costs of the empire, and filled the coffers of Bombay’s mercantile communities. The Parsis took the lead. They already had a close relationship with the company as brokers, interpreters, distillers, and shipbuilders, and they enjoyed close business ties with European firms.9 They had also established a presence in China. The Readymoney family’s involvement with the China trade, for example, began as early as 1756. They owned several ships and amassed great wealth, acquiring their surname on account of their readiness to advance money.10 Similarly, the Camas and the Wadias also developed a long-standing presence in the China trade.