Mumbai Fables Read online

  2.6. Victoria Terminus and the Municipal Corporation. Courtesy: Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra, Bombay: The Cities Within (Bombay: India Book House, 1995).

  The transformation that began with Frere’s demolition of the Fort’s walls was contemporaneous with Baron Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris and the construction of the Ringstrasse in Vienna.36 As in Europe, the construction program created the new spatial complex of the modern city of Bombay. However, there was one major difference. Bombay was a colonial city. This meant that its urban projects epitomized and represented their colonial conditions. Industrialization, built on the backs of cheap labor and appallingly inadequate housing and public infrastructure facilities, went hand in hand with grand building projects. The preindustrial Gothic buildings functioned not so much to screen the shaky industrial edifice as to project it in the image of a European city. Architectural styles and sculptural designs fashioned from ransacking the European past were not merely decorative but expressions of colonial urbanism. The imperial spectacle they produced was no myth, no mere illusion to be set against the reality of the city. On the contrary, Elphinstone Circle and the Gothic buildings, together with British street names, intersections marked by statues, and fountains commemorating European figures and cultural symbols staged the modern city as a colonial city. No wonder, a Briton remarked in 1899, that Bombay was “a proud and comely city,” a place where “the Briton feels himself a greater man.”37

  2.7. The Island City in 1909. Source: S. M. Edwardes, The Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island, vol. 2 (Bombay: Times Press, 1909).

  The European city in the colony in which the Britons took pride radiated the alluring images of European civilization and civic consciousness. Its residents were expected to earn their livelihood in docks, mills, and assorted capitalist institutions and to function under the colonial authority encased in Gothic Revival architecture. They were to settle their disputes in British courts, study in Western-style schools and colleges, travel on new roadways and railways, write letters delivered by the postal system, stroll in its arcaded walkways, relax and play sports on the maidans, and value the public space of fountains and squares marked by the statues of imperial figures. There was never any doubt that entry into this urban order was conditional on the acceptance of colonial authority, that alien power and culture underpinned the public space of avenues, parks, educational institutions, and learned societies. There was also little likelihood that the poor could live the ideal of colonial urbanism, but then this ideal was staged as the pedagogic model that the natives were expected to learn from and emulate.

  The indigenous elites were quick to learn from the colonial model, none more rapidly and completely than the Parsis. Even as they zealously maintained their religion and identity, their homes were furnished in European style, they dressed in English clothes, their education was Western, and cricket, golf, tennis, and bridge became their pastimes. Identifying with the British, they also bought into the colonial urban ideal. They contributed handsomely to various charities and donated funds for several public institutions. The evidence of their philanthropic investment in the city is visible all over Bombay today; several neighborhoods, squares, statues, and public buildings are named after the nineteenth-century Parsi families—Sir J. J. School of Art, J. J. Hospital, Petit Library, Jehangir Art Gallery, and many others. Equally prominent in contributing to this imaginary were the Sassoons, who used their wealth to fund a number of charitable projects. They founded synagogues and established the Sassoon Mechanics Institute—rechristened in 1938 as the David Sassoon Library and Reading Room—to foster the knowledge of mechanical models and architectural design. Today, a regular flow of patrons can be seen in the library, consulting its impressive rare book collection and enjoying a cool retreat from the scorching summer sun in its splendid Venetian Gothic building. Evidently less appreciated is the considerable contribution the family made to the erection of the colossal King Edward statue at Kala Ghoda, which few even know about.

  This imperial city of Gothic architecture and European culture was built upon and enabled another form of colonization—the colonization of nature. As the breaches were filled, embankments were built, lands were reclaimed, roadways and tramways were laid, buildings and mills were constructed, and new urban institutions arose, the physical space was treated as an abstract object that could be manipulated and reshaped at will. This involved the repression of the existing meanings of particular cultural significance that people attached to specific spaces.

  The story of this colonization of meanings can be gleaned from Govind Narayan Madgavkar’s Marathi text Mumbaichi Varnan.38 Written in 1863, his eyewitness account of Bombay as it was undergoing far-reaching transformations is the first full description of the city in any language. Writing of the construction of the Worli embankment, Madgavkar recounts an oral tradition preserved in a bakhar, the traditional chronicle. According to the bakhar, the embankment kept collapsing during its construction. The Indian engineer who was entrusted with the task of supervising the construction had a dream in which the goddesses Mahalaxmi, Mahakali, and Mahasaraswati appeared. They commanded him to retrieve their idols, which lay buried in the seabed, and install them in a temple. When the engineer followed the divine orders, building the Mahalaxmi temple, the goddesses blessed the construction of the embankment.39 Such stories appear frequently in Madgavkar’s text. Sometimes, as in the case of the Worli embankment, they relate to reclaimed land; at other times to temples, shrines, and particular neighborhoods. He declares the legends fanciful and unverifiable by the standards of historiography, but recounts them nevertheless while offering an admiring description of the city’s progress under the British. It is as if the existing meanings of land and neighborhoods, subordinated and reduced to rubble by the onward march of colonial modernity, rise up as ghosts to extract a revenge on the rationalist chronicler’s text of progress.

  URBAN PICTURES

  Since Max Weber, it is customary to view modern life as disenchanted, freed of gods and myth. But what was colonial Bombay if not enchanted? The physical, social, and political geography forged by colonization in the double sense became its “natural” landscape. To its inhabitants, the city looked, felt, and smelled like a new environment. It was different from the towns and urban life that most immigrants had encountered elsewhere. The modern city’s infrastructure, technology, institutions, neighborhoods, society, and daily life presented a novel sight and experience. The newness of its “second nature,” the everyday reality that its institutions and the built environment had forged, became objects of wonder and reflection. Bombay’s rapidly changing visual landscape fostered a form of urban writing that described the city in terms of images. This phenomenon was similar to the flânerie that Walter Benjamin wrote about so compellingly in his reflections on Charles Baudelaire and in the fragmentary observations contained in his Arcades.40 Writers in Bombay also depicted the city as a collection of pictures, reading its buildings, streets, traffic, and social groups as visual signatures of “second nature.” They portrayed Bombay at the level of the everyday, identifying the existence of the modern city in the portraits of its daily routines. But they acted less as realist witnesses and more as mythmakers. Offering the observer’s view of the cityscape rather than the subjective experience of the urban dweller, they produced hyperbolic and extravagant descriptions, presenting Bombay as a happening place. There is a guidebook quality to their writings.

  Consider, for example, Sir Dinshaw Wacha’s (1844–1936) Shells from the Sands of Bombay, which contains his recollections of the city between 1860 and 1875 and a survey of Bombay’s history.41 Born in the city and educated at Elphinstone College, Wacha lived through the period of Bombay’s expansion and building boom. He worked as an accountant in the mills and became one of the most prominent Parsi politicians of his time. He was a founding member of the Indian National Congress, serving as its president in 1901, and a member of the Bombay and Imperial Legislative Councils. A m
oderate nationalist who deeply appreciated the British presence, he was knighted in 1917.

  Wacha was also a prolific writer, whose works register the deep impression left by the urban form of Bombay that the British and Indian elites had assembled. He described in great detail and with palpable affection the founding of the mint, post office, police, civil and criminal courts, railways, telegraph, mills, trading houses, chamber of commerce, and Western educational institutions. These institutions have become so much of an accepted part of our world that it is now difficult to appreciate the spell cast by their newness during his time. For him, the modern city of sanitary works and piped water supply unfolding before his eyes was an object of wonder. He even penned a book of over four hundred pages on the history of the Bombay Municipal Corporation.42

  Referring to the introduction of the railways and telegraph, “two marvels of applied science discovered by the occidental mind and implanted on the Oriental soil,” he wrote: “Let the reader stretch his imagination and ruminate on the condition of semi-darkness which was prevalent in all India.”43 Describing the development of the postal system, he called it a “glorious evolution.” He noted the introduction of undreamed-of facilities—money orders, post savings banks, postal insurance, and the postcard. “And yet one’s appetite grows on what it feeds. Here we are in the year of grace 1920, clamoring for a bi-weekly mail and still further improvements and facilities.”44 The construction of wet docks and the pioneering role the Sassoons played in building the Sassoon Docks merited fulsome praise.45 Open sewers and drains received severe strictures.46 As one reads his breathless praise and stern criticisms, it becomes clear that the urban form forged by colonial modernization had become firmly lodged in his consciousness.

  But Wacha was no mere chronicler of Britain’s work in India. He wrote as an urbanite, deeply conscious of his city as a distinct form of social existence. As much as he admired the changes the British introduced, his primary concern was their impact on the city. Watching Bombay transform before his eyes convinced him it was no longer just a colonial outpost but also a dynamic city that had assumed a life of its own. Though developed and shaped by alien rule, it had a vitality and an identity derived from commerce. It was an upstart city, a parvenu, whose buildings lacked the stately dignity that only the possession of a deep past could provide.47 So strongly rooted was the city in the worship of commerce that its temples and mosques inspired neither reverence nor awe, neither beauty nor joy.48 Instead, Bombay was defined by its newness.

  The consciousness of newness was reflected not only in Wacha’s rapturous attention to the establishment of the railways, docks, and municipal government but also in his readings of the signs of modern urban life. He wrote, for example, of “air eating” by the Parsis on the maidan, a wide expanse of green that stretched beyond the fort walls.49 Here, groups of young and old, “but almost all of the sterner sex,” could be seen sitting on China mats in circles. In the middle a large lantern or an oil lamp would shed its light on the “air-eating” group. The men on mats played cards or chess and engaged in the “goube-mouche of the day, replete with town gossip and light criticism on men and things happening during the day.” Another group could be seen listening with keen curiosity and bated breath to the thrilling legends of ancient Persian heroes read by a Parsi priest or layperson well versed in Gujarati and Persian. While adults amused themselves in these activities, “boys and girls, in their silk frocks, and quaint caps of kinkob from Surat, or embroidered in Berlin wool, would carry on their gambols all innocent in their happiness.” Vendors, also Parsi, would move from group to group, selling sugarcane by “calling out ‘Ganderi, goolab ganderi”’ (Sugarcane, rosy sugarcane).

  We should not think of Wacha’s remembrances of evenings on the maidan and the brisk trade in English toys as a compendium of meaningless facts. The quotidian, Henri Lefebvre writes, is where people are born, live, and die. “They live well or ill; but they live in everyday life.”50 The routines and objects of daily life are forms in which society is produced and reproduced. It was precisely the existence of the city as society at the level of the everyday that Wacha sought to capture in the images of daily occurrences on the maidan. The descriptions of China mats, silk frocks, and caps were not mere decorative flourishes but visual signs in which he read the city’s existence. He identified these signs in the public spaces of the city, reading maidans, streets, shops, theaters—including places of “vulgar entertainment by the popular classes”—and eating establishments as visible expressions of the changing city. The meticulous cataloging of objects and places served to portray an order behind the surface of seeming flux and clutter.

  The rapturous representation of the kaleidoscopic but orderly city was also a prominent strain in Govind Narayan Madgavkar’s description of Bombay. Presenting his account of the city as an eyewitness portrayal of a visitor, he noted with wonder the sight of the dazzling range of communities that lived in the city. Offering an early portrait of Bombay as a cosmopolitan city, he wrote that just “the Marathi language comes in thirty or forty dialects” and estimated that there were about a hundred fifty varieties of Hindus. “Then there are other communities—Parsis, Muslims, Jews, Arabs, . . . etc. In addition, the English, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Turks, Germans, Armenians, Chinese and such other hat-wearers are visible in all directions.”51 He reported a man from Konkan dumbstruck by the sight of the city. “Amazing! Your Mumbai is just like Paradise. If one doesn’t visit Mumbai at least once in a lifetime, life is not worth having lived.”52 Hari Narayan Apte’s 1889 novel described a woman’s expression of awe and wonder at the scale and style of buildings, the mills, “the chimneys touching the sky,” and the sheer size of the city. “I had imagined Bombay only as a city far greater than Poona. . . . But the reality was incredible. What carriages! What tramways! O no! All was quite unimaginable.”53

  The visual medley and the intense stimuli in the crowded bazaars of Indian neighborhoods were captivating. Madgavkar wrote enthusiastically about the neighborhood of Dongri and Bhendi Bazaar, where Muslim merchants of the Kutchi, Memon, Khoja, and Bohra communities predominated. “One can experience many unique sights and sounds in these areas—a profusion of workshops—splendid shops—closely packed houses—crowds of people—goods of all kinds being transported—the jangling of pole-slings—noisy vehicles, shouts and screams of labourers—and a variety of goods being transported in carts.”54 He represents the bazaars in Kalbadevi, Bhuleshwar, Null, and elsewhere as a richly embroidered urban tapestry—shops of businessmen and moneylenders, someone selling sweets while others hawk cloth, an oil mill here and a stable there, shops with Chinese bangles and trinkets made of lac, a soda-water factory, vendors selling Kashmiri shawls, jewelers, and perfume sellers.

  Such readings and celebrations of the buildings, bazaars, streets, alleys, and crowds offered the idling flaneur’s observation of urban variety. Absent from them was the depiction of the perplexing, disquieting experience of the modern city. This task was left to the writers on crime. Walter Benjamin suggested that the detective shares with the flaneur an attention to minute visual details.55 While the literary observer is fascinated by aesthetic concerns, and the detective is driven by the motive to solve crimes, both gather and read visual details as codes that unlock the meaning of their respective stories. One can witness this feature in a book published in 1896, detailing the work of Sardar Mir Abdul Ali, a police detective.56 Its author, Naoroji M. Dumasia, was a reporter for the newspaper Bombay Gazette. This is not surprising, for newspapers were, after all, in the forefront of fashioning the observations of the everyday life of the city.

  Dumasia opens a section entitled “Criminal Life in Bombay” by describing the Island City as a thriving metropolis, “the gateway of all sorts of adventurous people who visit the country.” He follows this with a caution: “As we pass through the busy bazaars of Bombay, and look upon its teeming masses of people of every nation, we little dream of the crime that exists, of the
various kinds of villainy that are continually being practiced there.” The experience of being swindled and cheated is common. “What stranger to Bombay, or indeed any other Indian town, has not discovered after, perhaps, he has gone home chuckling with the idea that he has driven an excellent bargain, that he has after all been tricked by the wily Borah, who sleepy though he may appear as he lazily smokes his hookah by his shop floor, serenely indifferent to all that is going around him, is much more wide-awake than he looks.”57

  In Dumasia’s account, the city was deceptive; its complexity and appearance concealed what went on under the surface. To survive in this environment, one had to read the signs correctly; read them wrong, and you were likely to be duped. This is what happened to a Marwari merchant who was sitting one afternoon in his shop in the bazaar.58 A landau, “drawn by a pair of well-caparisoned horses, stopped at his door.” Out from the carriage stepped a “Hindu lady, who, from her rich dress and the servants who accompanied her, appeared to be connected in some way with the house of a Native Chief.” The lady bought small amounts of jewelry and then left. She reappeared by herself some days later and asked for a loan of Rs 10,000, which, according to her, she urgently needed to buy a house in Bombay. When the merchant balked at lending such a large sum to a stranger, she offered to place as security jewelry worth Rs 50,000. The Marwari agreed and visited her house, where, after showing the jewelry to the satisfaction of the merchant, she ordered the jewelry sealed in a bundle. The merchant was to keep this sealed bundle for three months, during which the loan would accrue an interest of 5 percent per month. If the lady failed to repay the principal along with interest at the end of three months, the Marwari was free to break the seal and keep the jewelry. A document was drawn up, both parties signed the agreement, and the Marwari handed over Rs 10,000.