Mumbai Fables Page 5
The king of the opium trade, however, was Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, whose name is ubiquitous in the city’s public spaces. Few remember that the man whose name graces the famous art school Sir J. J. School of Art and the popular Sir J. J. Hospital earned his exalted place through drug trafficking. Nor is it often mentioned that the opium traffic was part of Britain’s illustrious “civilizing mission” to uplift the natives through the taste of free trade. Jejeebhoy certainly enjoyed the taste of it. Born to a poor artisan family in Bombay in 1783, his rags-to-riches story is the stuff that has made up the Island City’s mythic life as the city of gold. He grew up in Navsari, Gujarat, and returned to Bombay at the age of sixteen, after losing both parents in quick succession. For three years he worked at his uncle’s shop, counting and selling empty bottles. He made his first trip to China in 1800 as an accounts clerk for another Parsi merchant.11 On his second voyage, he traveled as his uncle’s partner. In 1805 his fourth voyage aboard the Brunswick was eventful. The French captured the ship in July on its way to China. After several months of adventures aboard the ship as it sailed to Ceylon (Sri Lanka,) Malagasy (Madagascar), and the Cape of Good Hope, Jejeebhoy finally made his way back to Calcutta in December on a Danish vessel. This misadventure cost him dearly—the French confiscated his cargo and robbed him of his belongings—but it had one profitable outcome. Aboard the Brunswick, he met the ship’s assistant surgeon, William Jardine, who, in partnership with James Matheson, would go on to found Jardine Matheson and Company in 1832. As this firm quickly became the dominant force in Canton, its principal supplier of opium turned out to be none other than Jardine’s fellow captive on the Brunswick. Jejeebhoy had not let captivity and financial loss dampen his enthusiasm for the China trade. He made one final trip to Canton in 1807. Seven years later, he acquired the first of his fleet of seven ships and began chartering several more to service his expanding business. His wanderlust and determination paid off. The orphan from Navsari had become a merchant prince. As his biographer remarks, the “rolling stone had gathered golden moss!”12
Jamsetjee was far from being the lone profiteer from the lucrative opium trade. The commerce was vast, and many drank from the deep well of the drug trade profits—Europeans, Parsis, Hindu Banias and Marwaris, and Konkani Muslims. Among the largest dealers were names that, like Jejeebhoy, still adorn public spaces and buildings in Bombay—the Wadias, the Cowasjis, Motichund Aminchund, Khemchund Motichund, and others. These men combined their interlocking interests in cotton, opium, banking, brokerage, and shipping to become great merchant princes of the city. Their drive in pursuing commercial opportunities and the fortunes that they amassed helped to establish Bombay’s image as a place of untold wealth. In fact, they owed their wealth to Bombay’s particular colonial history.
Unlike Bengal and Madras, the territories of western India were not under the control of the East India Company until well into the nineteenth century, thus offering Indian merchants an opening. This also suited the British, who depended on indigenous merchants for their needs in the isolated fort town of Bombay and for servicing cotton and opium exports to China. By the mid-nineteenth century, Bombay had developed into a thriving port city. Its population rose from 162,000 in 1826 to 566,000 in 1849.13 However, the conditions for Indian merchants were changing. The British shipping interests, enjoying official patronage and access to dominant international networks of finance, edged out the indigenous shipowners. With a similar advantage, the British managing agencies also narrowed the opportunities for Indian merchants in the China trade. Ever resourceful, Indian capital sought alternative opportunities. It turned to cotton mills.
Parsi merchants began exporting cotton to Lancashire in the early nineteenth century. Jamsetjee had reportedly made huge profits in this trade during the Napoleonic Wars.14 However, Lancashire preferred the long-stapled American supply to the short-stapled Indian variety. The big break came during the American Civil War in the 1860s when, starved of supplies, Lancashire turned to Indian raw cotton. “The produce of all the great cotton fields of India,” wrote Sir Richard Temple, “found its way to Bombay in order to be exported to England with all possible dispatch, while the high prices ruled and the blockade of the South American ports lasted.”15 According to one estimate, this sudden turn in fortune added £70 to £75 million to Bombay’s wealth.16
Joint-stock companies, banks, insurance firms, and financial schemes proliferated to ride the sudden tidal wave of wealth. A speculative flame enveloped the city as brokers tried to gain an advantage by attempting to obtain intelligence on the latest prices in Liverpool. While Europeans gathered in the stock exchange, Indian brokers with no fixed offices milled around at the junction of Meadows Street and Rampart Row, seeking shade under fig trees or “paper umbrellas of the Chinese type.”17 Stoking the fire was Premchund Roychund, a successful Bania merchant whose skills in high finance had won him close ties with the city’s leading European businessmen and access to predictions in the Liverpool cotton market.18 Using these to his advantage, Roychund established agencies in cotton-growing districts and amassed a fortune. He stimulated such speculation in shares that he earned the title of “Supreme Pontiff of Speculation.”19
But the boom was short-lived. The cessation of the American Civil War brought cotton prices crashing down. The wild fluctuations only underlined the difficulty Indian cotton traders faced. As in the China trade, Indian cotton-export merchants had to cope with the entry of well-financed European agency houses with better market information and access to insurance facilities. Their entry forced Indian capital to play a subordinate role. The nimble Parsi merchants responded by establishing cotton mills. As Raj Chandavarkar points out, this was not a case of linear progression from trade to industry but a defensive reaction by their subordination to the larger and more resourceful expatriate capital.20 Cotton mills offered the advantages of diversification. When raw cotton prices turned unfavorable, the cotton traders could easily switch to the manufacture of yarn for export to China, deploying the raw cotton stock according to market conditions. Supplies became readily available with the opening of the railways in the 1850s and their extension in the following decades, connecting Bombay to the cotton-growing areas of the Deccan.
Once again it was a Parsi, Kavasji Nanabhai Davar, who established the first cotton-spinning mill in 1854. His Bombay Weaving and Spinning Company was a joint-stock firm, with its one hundred shares owned largely by Parsi merchants. Soon afterward, Manakji Nasarvanji Petit, a successful China trader, established the Oriental Spinning and Weaving Company. Other Parsi merchants followed—Byramjee Jejeebhoy, Mancherji Naoroji Banaji, the Camas, and the Wadias. Though dominant, the Parsis were not alone. The Bhatia magnate Varjivandas Madhavdas was another notable player. So was the family of David Sassoon, the Baghdadi Jew, who, fleeing persecution in Baghdad, arrived in Bombay via Persia in 1832. He rose very quickly up the ranks of Bombay’s mercantile elite, establishing a countinghouse and warehouse. Advancing money to other traders and trading in commodities, he soon became a force in the China trade. As his business prospered, he became an equal to the leading Parsi merchants. His son, Abdullah, known later as Sir Albert Sassoon, established a cotton-weaving and spinning mill and built the Sassoon Docks in 1875, then the largest in the city. Later he moved to England, earned a baronet, and married into the Rothschild family.
The Sassoons profited from the rapid growth of the cotton industry in Bombay. The number of mills grew from 1854, when the first mill was founded, to 28 by 1875, when they employed over 13,000 workers. Two decades later, there were 70 mills employing nearly 76,000 workers, and by 1925, there were 82 mills with 148,000 workers.21 The growth was largely due to the demand in the China yarn market. In response, the Bombay mills expanded their yarn output. Spinning forged ahead, but looms lagged behind. This was also because, under the colonial government, India was one of the most open markets for cotton textiles. Faced with the competition from Lancashire in the domestic woven-goods market, B
ombay took refuge in the China market for yarn. This lopsided growth was not its only weakness. As Chandavarkar astutely suggests, the industry as a whole rested on shaky foundations.22 He argues that the inception of cotton mills did not represent a structural transformation in the Indian economy. Rather, it was a defensive measure to spread the risks in view of the growing stranglehold of European firms in trade. This meant that the industry operated under several constraints. The narrow industrialization of the economy limited the purchasing power of the domestic market, exposing cotton mills to the fluctuations in international trade. The limited industrial base also meant that the mills were dependent on the import of expensive machinery from overseas.
2.3. Raw cotton for Bombay mills. Courtesy: British Library Board, photo 364/12 (42).
The upshot of the constraints under which the cotton industry developed was that it depended on the supply of cheap labor for profitability. Thousands of migrants from the immediate hinterland and beyond flocked to the city. Most came from the Deccan and Konkan areas, particularly the Ratnagiri District. Migrants from the United Provinces began to swell the workers’ ranks in the 1880s, and their number increased substantially in the twentieth century.23 The flow of rural migrants was not due to any fundamental structural transformation in the countryside. It was not as if large numbers of peasants were suddenly thrown off the land and became an agricultural proletariat. Rather, the slow but relentless demographic and commercial pressure on the countryside drove many to the city to seek a livelihood to supplement the family income in the village. The presence of this cheap pool of labor allowed the mill owners to employ as much as 28 percent of the labor force in Bombay on a daily basis.24 The use of casual labor on such a scale was not conducive to developing a skilled and stable workforce, but it permitted the owners to adjust their production according to market fluctuations. Of course, workers paid the price for this flexibility, another sordid secret of Bombay’s rise as an industrial city.
By the early twentieth century, the city’s population was nearly a million, of whom only a quarter had been born in the city.25 The mills, located in central Bombay, employed only 18 percent of the population, but the share of industrial employment as a whole was over 30 percent.26 Many more worked as general laborers and domestic servants and in trades such as petty grocers, peddlers, hawkers, tailors, cobblers, and barbers. Religious and linguistic diversity marked this teeming immigrant population. The Hindus were dominant, constituting 65 percent of the population in 1901, and Muslims made up 20 percent, followed by smaller percentages of Christians, Zoroastrians, Jains, and Jews.27 The gross figures on religion, however, conceal the city’s true diversity, for religious communities were made up of different linguistic groups. Slightly more than 50 percent of the population spoke Marathi, 27 percent were Gujarati speakers, and nearly 15 percent spoke Hindi and Urdu, followed by smaller proportions of other language groups.28
This dazzling mélange of communities and tongues imparted an image of openness and promise to Bombay. The city teemed with industrialists, merchants, bankers, brokers, shipping agents, shopkeepers, artisans, clerks, mill hands, dockworkers, and casual laborers. The mills and dockyards hummed with activity, and the jangle of money filled the air in company offices and bazaars. With the toil and sweat of immigrant workers, the city’s businessmen amassed great fortunes. Bombay became the city of gold.
STEALING LAND, COLONIZING SPACE
With the city rising as a hub of colonial trade and industry, its physical shape changed. Lands and seas were colonized to accommodate a growing urban society. Municipal administration and modern transportation produced a new map of the city, which burst out beyond the Fort. The British celebrated Bombay’s rise as a modern city by dressing the new public buildings in Gothic Revival architecture, thus underscoring the imperial genealogy of its modernity.
The Portuguese had mooted the idea of reclaiming lands submerged under the sea, but this process began in earnest only under the East India Company. Under the governorship of William Hornby, the British constructed an embankment on Worli Creek. Completed in 1784, the Hornby Vellard protected the low-lying areas of the island from flooding during high tide and opened the way for subsequent reclamations. By 1838 these reclamations, the filling of breaches and the construction of bunds and roadways, had joined the seven islets into a single island. The boom in the cotton trade in the 1860s in response to the American Civil War produced a commercial delirium that unleashed a mania of reclamation projects. Speculative companies sprang into existence, and the government swung into action to advance Bombay’s eastern and western foreshores, which, until 1860, according to James Maclean’s Guide to Bombay, “was one foul cesspool, sewers discharging on the road, rocks used only for the purposes of nature.”29 The bottom fell out of the cotton boom with the end of the American Civil War in 1865, but the city was transformed by the reclamation ventures. Swamps were drained, ditches and tanks were filled, and the ocean was beaten back. By 1872 reclamations had added four million square yards to the city, increasing the island’s area from eighteen to twenty-two square miles.30
Vital to the expansion and transformation of urban space was the governorship of Bartle Frere from 1862 to 1867. Frere’s reign was short, but he was an energetic imperialist and urban planner whose ambitious plans for Bombay’s development had long-lasting effects. He began by ordering the demolition of the rampart walls as soon as he took office. The order recognized the fact that the city had outgrown its origins as a garrison town. The fortifications no longer served any purpose, and the only function that the ditches performed was to store stagnant and foul water that bred disease. Thus, following Frere’s order, the Apollo, Bazaar, and Church Gates were demolished. The walls were leveled, and trenches were filled. The integration of the Fort with the rest of the island sent land values soaring, encouraging further reclamations. Swamps were drained, tanks and quarries were sealed, and flats were raised to the level of roads. These measures opened up lands for mills and workers’ chawls, or tenements. Simultaneously, the government built new roads, widened old ones, and completed the construction of overbridges.31
“A new Bombay arose, phoenix like from the debris of the old fort,” write Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra.32 They point to the Elphinstone (now Horniman) Circle as the first remarkable piece of new urban form to emerge. It was built on the site of the Bombay Green, a large open space in the old town. The plan for converting this space into a circle had originated before Frere’s tenure, but it was he who sanctioned its development. The land was bought by the municipality, which sold it at a profit as building lots to English mercantile firms, who then developed the garbage-strewn open space into a striking garden complex. When completed in 1872, the complex incorporated the neoclassical Town Hall. It consisted of a circular central garden surrounded by architecturally unified buildings with uniform facades and covered arcades at the ground level.
The razing of the ramparts also opened up the Esplanade, the vast open space outside the walls that had hitherto provided the military with a clear firing range from the Fort. Once freed from the military’s claim, the government allotted the land for building lots and wide roads. The large unbroken stretch was divided into four maidans—Azad and Cross in the north, Oval and Cooperage in the south. During the next few decades, a succession of public buildings extending from south to north rose up along the maidans. Frere had called for the construction of such buildings to enhance the image of the colonial government and to exercise its authority more effectively.33 Once constructed, these Gothic Revival buildings confidently looked outward to the Arabian Sea and assertively staged the city as an imperial spectacle.
2.4. View of Elphinstone Circle from Town Hall. Courtesy: British Library Board, photo 2/3 (7)
Much has changed in and around the southern core of the city, but Gothic buildings from the late nineteenth century still stand at attention as you walk up the old Esplanade.34 The Gothic parade begins with the elephantine Sec
retariat, designed by General Henry St Clair Wilkins. Housing the administration until the 1950s, its Venetian Gothic style expressed the remoteness of colonial power. Next come the Bombay University buildings, set in neatly manicured lawns. They include the university library in yellow sandstone topped by the soaring Rajabai Clock Tower. The clock tower, which invokes London’s Big Ben, was built with funds donated by Premchund Roychund, the wealthy nineteenth-century cotton merchant and broker, and is named after his mother. This is followed by the High Court, its weighty authority cast in a fortresslike structure (though curiously a one-eyed monkey holding the scales of justice stands on one of the pillars). The Public Works Office and the Bombay, Baroda, and Central Indian Railway headquarters, designed in what is called Oriental Gothic, complete the Gothic procession. However, the desire to dress the colonial space in Gothic garb is evident elsewhere too. You can spot it in the towers and onion domes of the Bombay Municipal Corporation Building. It is also evident in the arcaded walkways on Hornby Road (now Dadabhai Naoroji Road) that leads up to Victoria Terminus, the high point of Bombay Gothic. Designed by F. W. Stevens, this lavish knot of towers, domes, spires, cornices, and gargoyles was completed in 1888.
2.5. The Gothic parade. Courtesy: British Library Board, photo 807/1(2).
Built at the intersection of major roads with the docks and harbor behind it, Victoria Terminus encapsulated the essence of Bombay’s transformation. As a major railway station, it expressed the city’s industrial and commercial underpinnings. This was underscored by a series of sculptures placed on the exterior—Commerce, Agriculture, and Engineering. The figure of Progress atop the central dome, carrying a copper gilt flaming torch in her right hand and a winged wheel in her left, clearly proclaims the underlying ideology.35 While projecting the colonizing power of capitalist commerce and industry, the richly sculptured Gothic architecture of Victoria Terminus also expressed British colonial power over the city.