Mumbai Fables Page 7
Some days later, the Marwari became alarmed when a friend laughed upon being told about the excellent deal he had struck with the lady. The friend said that she was no lady from the house of a native chief but a notorious city woman called Amba. The Marwari broke the seal and opened the bundle. It contained stones all right, but none was precious. The lady had somehow substituted common bits of road metal covered in mud for the jewelry before sealing the bundle. The crestfallen Marwari filed a criminal complaint. Although the police later apprehended Amba, she was acquitted for lack of evidence.
The sight of a carriage drawn by “well-caparisoned horses,” the dazzle of jewelry, the staged appearance of servants, and the seeming assurance of the signed document and the sealed bundle had misled the Marwari. If this was an example of misreading signs at one’s own peril, the detective’s work in solving a double murder showed how reading them correctly could uncover hidden details.59 This was the case in the investigations following the brutal murders of a “Mogul merchant” and his wife in 1884 in Umerkhadi, a densely populated neighborhood in the eastern part of the city. At about two o’clock in the morning of June 25, an assailant entered the bedroom of the couple’s house, extinguished the lights, and cut through the mosquito net with a knife. The merchant’s wife woke up when she felt a hand on her body. Her screams woke her husband. A scuffle followed. When the wife cried “Thief, thief,” the assailant turned to her and said in Persian, “Father is burnt, you also raise cries.” Then he stabbed her. Her cries roused the neighbors, but the assailant escaped capture. The merchant, who was also stabbed, and his wife were rushed to the hospital, where, after giving depositions, they died.
The case was assigned to Sardar Mir Abdul Ali. Based on the words the assailant directed at the merchant’s wife, Sardar Ali surmised that she knew her attacker and that the assailant spoke Persian. The detective began by inquiring about the skullcap and the cloak the intruder left behind. He discovered that on the morning of the murder, people in Null Bazaar had seen a Mogul with torn clothes. The man was not wearing a skullcap and cloak, but they remembered him wearing both on the previous evening. After further inquiries, the detective discovered that a “certain Mogul,” Haji Mirza Aga, had once been deeply smitten with the merchant’s wife and had wanted to marry her. When the woman’s brother turned down his marriage proposal, Aga went on a pilgrimage to Karbala, hoping that this pious act would win him the family’s approval. But in his absence, his beloved was married off to the merchant. The murder of the merchant was his brutal revenge, and he killed his beloved in outrage for raising the alarm. Sardar Ali apprehended Aga and built the case against him by gathering visual evidence to support the prosecution’s story of the murderous vengeance of a disappointed lover.
Dumasia’s accounts of crimes and their detection shared with other urban writings an attention to the minute visual details of everyday life. Of course, their purposes were different. Wacha’s wondrous depiction of “air eating” on the maidan, and Madgavkar’s portrait of the dazzling diversity and stimuli on the streets, sought to capture what was exciting and intoxicating. Dumasia’s stories of crime, by contrast, aimed to uncover what lay underneath the shiny glitter. But common to all was a concern with visuality. This was because urban change was experienced as a transformation in the way the modern city looked.
COLONIAL EYES
There is a hint of the exotic in Parsi and Marathi descriptions of the city. The exotic in their writings, however, refers to the novelty of the everyday sights and sounds of Bombay’s urban life. The Europeans, on the other hand, viewed the Indian as the exotic because they saw the city through a colonial prism. Bombay, after all, was a colonial city. Its spatial divisions and order encoded racial dominance. While the nucleus of the European population lived in the south, Indians were clustered north of the old fortified town, with the east-west line of Churchgate Street demarcating the boundary between the natives and the foreigners. This basic division persisted even after the fort walls came down in 1862. Over time, however, class came to mute racial divisions as wealthy Indian merchants and industrialists built houses in European areas. Broad avenues and spacious houses set in gardens characterized the European areas, where elite Indians also built grand bungalows. No Europeans lived in the native quarters, which were crowded, mixed-use neighborhoods where the Indian merchants both lived and worked.
Europeans felt proud of the “comely city” in the south with its gardens, bungalows, and public buildings dressed in neo-Gothic architecture, but they did not think of it as exotic. Its feel was comfortingly familiar. The expression of their wonder at Bombay’s modern urban life was reserved for the city’s Indian quarters. Their snapshots of these areas represented Bombay’s modern everyday life in images of otherness. The product of colonial modernity appeared as the timeless East. Thus, nearly four decades after the fort walls came down, a Briton wrote about the dramatic change in the landscape as one crossed over from the British to the Indian areas. It was as if a magician had suddenly turned his ring, he remarked. The old was new, the plain was colored, and the East had swallowed up the West. “Cross one street and you are suddenly plunged in the native town. In your nostrils is the smell of the East. . . . The decoration henceforth is its people. The windows are frames for women, the streets become wedges of men.”60
S. M. Edwardes, who had served as Bombay’s police commissioner, wrote a series of ethnographic sketches, highlighting the charming colors of the “native” quaters. Originally printed in the Times of India under the pen name of Etonensis, they were later published as a book. Here, too, the focus is visual. Thus, he writes of the dazzling tides of humans rolling through the city streets every morning, of Memon and Khoja women in green and gold or pink and yellow kurta and izzar, strolling with their children dressed in all hues of the rainbow. The accent in these descriptions is on capturing ethnic groups in their characteristic dress, colors, and sounds. He depicts “sleek Hindus from northern India in soft Muslin and neat colored turbans; Gujarathis [sic] in red headgear, Cutchi seafarers, descendants of the pirates of dead centuries. . . . Bombay Mahomedans of the lower class with their long white shirts, white trousers and skull-caps of silk and brocade; there too every type of European from the almost albino to the swarthy Italian.”61 There are Arabs, Africans, Afghans, Persians, and Malays, all in their ethnic dresses. The portrait of an array of communities is followed by a description of the medley of sounds—the rattle of trams, the hymn of fakirs, the cry of “Allaho Akbar,” the shouts of the vendors. While the faithful wend their way home, “bands of cheerful millhands hasten past you to the mills, and are followed by files of Koli fisherfolk,—the men unclad and red-hatted, with heavy creels, the women tight-girt[ed] and flower-decked, bearing their headloads of shining fish at a trot towards the market.”62
The evening brings forth images of “rich black-coated Persian merchants, picturesque full-bearded Moulvis, smart sepoys from Hindustan, gold-turbaned and shrewd-eyed Memon traders, ruddy Jats from Multan, high-cheeked Sidis, heavily-dressed Bukharas, Arabs, Afghans and pallid embroiderers from Surat.”63 Then there are mill hands returning from their daily labor, merchants going home, beggars, hawkers, fruit sellers, and sweetmeat sellers milling about, crowds entering shops, and groups on the thresholds of coffee vendors.
Edwardes then invites the reader to enter the shadows of the night in the city. Make your way through a squalid lane to a house covered in darkness, walk to the end of the passageway, lift the greasy curtain, and you are in an opium den, where the flotsam and jetsam of the city gather to purchase nightly oblivion for a modest sum.64 Or wander down one of the arteries of the city, enter a double-storied tumbledown house, walk up the stairs, and enter a room carpeted with cheap date-leaf mats and a faded polychromed dhurry. You are in a “Kasumba” saloon, where a woman nurses “an elderly and peevish Lothario with a cup of sago-milk gruel, which the opium-eaters consider such a delicacy.” After everyone has had their fill, an elderly Muslim in sh
abby clothes recites stories interspersed with quotations from Persian poets and culled from A Thousand and One Nights.65 The police commissioner then introduces you to Nur Jan, who sits in her diwankhana “like some delicate flower cradled on a crystal lake.” She is a courtesan, a dancer and singer who sings Hindustani melodies and even some old English roundelays. Her delicate hands, great dark eyes, little ivory feet, and courteous bearing captivate him. He learns that Nur Jan came from a respectable family in Calcutta, went to school, and learned English but fell on hard times and ended up in Bombay, where she earns a living with her singing.66
Like the other urban writers we encountered above, Edwardes reads the city visually. But there is a vital difference. Whereas Wacha and Madgavkar saw the exotic in Bombay’s modernity, in its intoxicating hustle and bustle, Edwardes writes about the “sleek Hindus” and “rich black-coated Persian merchants” and invites you to the opium den. His snapshots of daily life transport the reader to an exotic place of another kind. The imperial flaneur’s eyes see strangeness not in Bombay’s modern industrial life, which finds scarcely a mention, but in its rich mix of communities, in the colorful tapestry of different ethnic types. Each person’s ethnicity is identified by his or her dress, language, or behavior. Edwardes skillfully enlists ethnographic description and situates different ethnic types in particular spaces to evoke a sense of the place. Streets and alleys emerge invested with deeply resonant cultural meanings, as a locus for the dance of timeless traditions. This was the colonial way of rendering familiar the strangeness of modern urban life.
URBAN HORROR
Bombay’s modern urban life may have been a spectacle, but the sights were not always shining and enchanting. When colonial officials turned their eye to the mill districts, they saw squalor and degradation. Pride in the comely city gave way to horror and revulsion at the sight of the dark, ill-ventilated tenements packed with impoverished workers and set amid cesspools of filth and disease.
2.8. A chawl. Courtesy: Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra, Bombay: The Cities Within (Bombay: India Book House, 1995)
Land was abundant in the city, but neither the capitalists nor colonial authorities were willing to spend enough money to build inexpensive and adequate transportation. This forced workers to live close to work, where land was at a premium. Seeing opportunities for profits with little investment, landlords recklessly erected slums and tenements. The chawl, a Marathi word meaning “room or house fronted by a corridor,” was the defining emblem of the overcrowded working-class space.
Initially, mill owners and private builders built these tenements. A typical chawl was a two- or three-storied building, each floor consisting of a row of single rooms sharing a common balcony. Each room had a small mori, a space for a faucet or for storing water in vessels. The common toilet and bathing facilities were on the ground floor. Each room, measuring six square meters or less, housed five to ten people. Lucky was the family who had sole occupancy of the room, for the scarcity of working-class housing frequently forced multiple households to cram into the tiny cubicle. Equally common was the sight of a single chawl room packed tight with several men. The immigrants were predominantly male. So, when they arrived in the city without their families, these men from the countryside used their village and kin ties to find work and a place to live. This often meant somehow squeezing into a room already filled to capacity by their kinsmen. Every inch of space, including verandas, was rented to immigrants from the countryside.
The jam-packed chawl became a symbol of Bombay’s working-class space. Patrick Geddes remarked that the chawls were not for “housing, but warehousing people.”67 Those not lucky enough to be warehoused in chawls found roofs over their heads in makeshift dwellings fabricated with corrugated iron, flattened tins, and wooden planks or found refuge on the sidewalk. This was the lot of casual laborers, hawkers, peddlers, cobblers, tailors, and domestic servants. With no access to the mill chawls, and with their employment conditions even more unsteady than those of industrial workers, these laborers were forced to improvise living quarters for which the term housing was largely a euphemism.
The government recognized the wretchedness of working-class housing.68 In fact, colonial officials themselves drew dark pictures of the poor, packed in dense clusters of overcrowded and poorly ventilated chawls and slums that were set between narrow lanes and open drains, stables and warehouses. But what the British observers saw is as striking as what they did not, or could not, see. There is a Dickensian impulse in their focus on squalor and misery but none of the English novelist’s insight that industrialization was directly responsible for the wretched, inhuman conditions.69 Their imperial blinders prevented the recognition that the hellish landscape was produced by the colonial economy; they could not see that the economic relations that British power imposed rendered the precarious mill industry critically dependent on the exploitation of cheap labor. To them, the workers’ appalling living conditions had nothing to do with British rule; it was a matter of civic facilities’ lagging behind industrial growth or simply a result of Indian unsanitary habits.
In developing as a colonial outpost and as a hub in the colonial exploitation of Indian resources, Bombay had acquired the facade of a European city. But outside the elite precincts, the island had developed other urban forms. Gillian Tindall, in her evocative biography of colonial Bombay, calls these forms “non-European.” She writes that “every mill that has been built has created mud-shanties somewhere near at hand; every block of flats that has been built, from the ponderous ‘Hindustan Chambers’ or ‘Dharbanga Mansions’ of the high Edwardian era to the glass towers of the present, has attracted into the city yet more up-country people with country standards and country ways.”70 This is true, but classifying them as “non-European” conceals their lives as the other side of modernity, which she implicitly identifies in the twin birth of mills and mud shanties. Slums and tenements were not alien to modern Bombay but its intimate other; they held up a mirror to elite spaces, reflecting the grotesque other side of colonial and capitalist spatialization.
Undoubtedly, a difference in spatial patterns was a common feature in colonial cities from Bombay to Algiers.71 As one moved from the space of the rulers to that occupied by the ruled, the population density and urban forms changed. However, the “white” and “black” towns were neither homogeneous nor radically set apart; nor could they be. The very logic of colonial power required interactions, blurred boundaries, and scrambled spatial patterns. The separation was in the colonial mind. It was precisely because social and spatial borders were regularly crossed that colonial ideology seized on the wretchedness of chawls and slums to deny that the mill districts could ever form part of the “comely” city that made the Briton proud.
The colonial eye not only failed to see the intimate connection between the two cites but also could not penetrate the gloomy lens of misery and horror to see the lives the workers lived in their dismal chawls and slums. With social and cultural ingenuity, the working-class immigrants forged strategies to survive and fashion an urban life in Bombay. They coped with their uncertain and difficult circumstances by maintaining their rural links. Many returned annually to their villages to help with harvesting and used connections based on the village, caste, and kin in finding their feet in the city. Male workers from the same village grouped together to rent a room. Caste and kin members could be persuaded to make a few feet of space available in their crowded single-room tenements. The social patterns of the working-class neighborhood imparted the appearance of a village. Not surprisingly, the mill district became known as Girangaon, the village of the mills.
The village was a powerful ideal for migrants who dreamed of returning one day permanently to the village.72 It was their way of negotiating the difficult conditions in the city. The social and cultural resonance of the rural forms in the urban setting did not signify the persistence of tradition in the face of modernity.73 Workers summoned “traditions” to manage the conditions o
f urban modernity; they erected villagelike structures in response to housing and labor conditions in the modern city. If mud shanties were born as the mill’s inseparable twin, then the village also emerged as an aspect of the city’s formation. Instead of following the ordered sequence of tradition and modernity, Bombay developed by intertwining and interweaving different histories. Migrants from near and far traversed and marked the urban landscape with the footprints of the village, language, ethnicity, region, and religion. An integral aspect of colonial urbanism, the packed chawls and their “village life” equally nurtured and sustained the spell of Bombay’s industrial modernity.
THE CITY OF THE DEAD
It was the late summer of 1896. The year had been one of the hottest recorded over fifty-one years. The monsoon lasted only half its normal duration, but the downpour was heavy. A concentrated rainfall of fifteen inches above the average lashed the city during this truncated monsoon season. The ground was moist, and the drains overflowed with sewage. Masses of wet grain rotted in dark granaries.74 The atmosphere was ripe for disaster in poor neighborhoods where Bombay’s working classes huddled in dark, crowded, poorly ventilated, and ramshackle buildings, jammed together without consideration for drainage or ventilation. The streets were heaped with garbage. Several lodging houses had no plinths at all; the ground floors were frequently below the level of the streets, over which flowed the deadly soup of rushing rainwaters mixed with sewage. Cesspools of human waste and animal refuse accumulated right outside living quarters and soaked into the ground.75