Mumbai Fables Page 8

  Dr. Acacio Gabriel Viegas was first to ring the alarm bell. A Goan graduate of Grant Medical College, Dr. Viegas’s dispensary was located in Mandvi in the Port Trust Estate. It was a poor neighborhood of narrow and overcrowded streets, with buildings piled atop each other and filth accumulating in its sewers.76 The drains were silted and blocked up with buckets of night soil that were routinely emptied into the nearby gullies. The night soil found its way into the blocked drains, along with urine and sewage from the privies and sullage water. The worried doctor raised his concerns about these conditions at the Municipal Corporation meetings. Then, at noon on September 18, 1896, he was asked to see a patient, Lukmibai. He learned that she had not slept for three days. She was comatose and yet could be roused easily. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she had a glandular swelling the size of an orange in her femoral region. Her temperature was 104.2, with a pulse rate of 140. There was nothing to explain the femoral bubo. He prescribed diaphoretics, salicylate of soda, and quinine, but her condition worsened in the evening. When he went to see her the next day, she was dead. Surprised by the rapidity of her death, he suspected that this might be a case of bubonic plague.

  On September 19, Dr. Viegas saw another patient who also presented with a high temperature, developed a bubo, and died within a day. He was now convinced that bubonic plague was raging in the neighborhood. Reports of fifty to sixty deaths following similar symptoms confirmed his diagnosis, which he promptly brought to the municipal commissioner’s attention. The government summoned Waldemar Haffkine, the famous Russian Jewish epidemiologist from Calcutta, whose bacteriological examination established that the city had a plague epidemic on its hands. Official investigations reported armies of rats infected with the disease moving from area to area, spreading the epidemic. Mortality figures mounted; the average number of deaths for the last three months of the year was well over fifteen hundred per week.

  In Bleak House, Dickens predicts that the wicked force of disease and moral depravity bred in the foul Tom-all-Alone slum “shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high.”77 Colonial officials shuddered with something of that fear as they struggled to contain the epidemic and keep the sanitary workers from fleeing. Meanwhile, their measures to segregate and hospitalize the plague victims provoked widespread opposition. Shut out from decisions that affected them, the poor residents of the city were suspicious of the government’s motives. A rumor spread that hospitalized people were being killed. On October 10 mill workers gathered outside the Arthur Road Hospital and threatened to demolish it. Two weeks later, a thousand of them returned and attacked the hospital with sticks and stones.78 As the epidemic continued unabated toward the end of the year, the panic spread. People mobbed the railway stations, desperately trying to escape. Nearly four hundred thousand people—almost half of the city’s population—fled. Bombay became the “City of the Dead.”79

  The plague epidemic of 1896–97 demonstrated that the commitment of the British to the city’s welfare was limited to questions of order—order for colonial governance and for the operation of laissez-faire capitalism. The epidemic threatened the security of the colonial order and the industrial economy. The British could no longer pretend that all was well with the urban edifice. While the well-heeled European residents from the central parts took flight to the healthy air of neighborhoods such as Malabar Hill, the government established the Bombay City Improvement Trust in 1898 to tackle problems of housing and urban infrastructure.

  2.9. Plague inspections. Courtesy: British Library Board, photo 311/1 (110).

  The trust’s establishment and its activities signaled a redirection of colonial urbanism. This occurred against the background of a general shift in the colonial state’s functions by the early twentieth century. By this time, the energies of the state throughout the colonial world were increasingly directed toward managing and developing a healthy and productive subject population. To achieve this end, the state acted upon its colonial subjects, known and enumerated through census operations, by enacting and implementing public health laws; by building roads and railways that transported the population to work in factories, plantations, and mines; and by laying the framework of institutions and regulations to govern the urban dwellers in towns and cities that had developed as nodes in the imperial network of the capitalist economy. Such a mode of managing the insertion of colonies in the capitalist world economy meant that the exercise of imperial power could not be limited to the assertion of sovereignty; indeed, imperial sovereignty had to be expressed and realized in configuring and governing colonial life. Ruling Bombay now meant governing the life of the subject population—improving sanitation and general hygiene, decongesting crowded neighborhoods, upgrading housing, and developing the infrastructure to shape Bombay into a productive, healthy, and efficient urban society.

  By exploding through the complacent and self-satisfied images of growth and development, the bubonic plague forced the government to rethink its urban policies. But official inquiries looked only for the epidemiological causes of the plague. The government recognized, as Dr. Viegas insisted, that the dreadful sanitary conditions in the Bombay Port Trust chawls had bred the disease. However, it could not acknowledge that the underlying cause was colonial rule. The unsanitary and disease-prone living conditions, after all, were the result of the industrialization-on-the-cheap forced upon by colonialism. Its response, therefore, was to deal with the symptoms—the segregation and removal of victims to the hospital. Victimized by the epidemic nurtured by colonial industrialization, the workers whose toil had built the city were now subjected to the full force of the government’s despotic power. In Albert Camus’ The Plague, the solidarity of the people against the depredations of the epidemic in the mythical city of Oran in colonial Algeria stands as an allegory for the struggle against fascism and war in Europe. In Bombay, the residents did not gather in solidarity; instead, they took to their heels. They were not just fleeing dying rats.

  THE GOTHIC CITY

  We know only two roads

  One which leads to the factory

  And the other,

  Which leads to the Crematorium

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  My father withered away toiling

  So will I, and will my little ones?

  Perhaps, they too face such sad nights

  Wrapped in coils of darkness.

  My heart wells up,

  Seeks an outlet;

  For it was my father

  Who sculpted your epic in stone.

  —Narayan Surve, “Mumbai”

  The Portuguese are long gone now, the British have packed their bags and left, and yet the experience of the city as a colonizing force persists.80 Dalit writings brilliantly and powerfully portray the image of the metropolis as an urban monster that devours the toiling classes, whose labor and sweat produced it. The city appears as an oppressor, a whore. It ensnares the oppressed into its fold with its promise of livelihood and freedom, only to squeeze and smother them. In his autobiographical novel, the Dalit writer Daya Pawar writes that “a mad attraction for Bombay was deeply entrenched in my blood,” but he wonders, after all these years, “what has this city really given me.”

  As a I seek a place to merely rest my heart at the end of a hard day, all I have to come back to is a wretched hell that this city can offer . . . the life I see from a distance, the life of indulgence that I can see from afar is different. She appears as a temptress (Mahanagari), an illusion . . . like a ruby in a ring. It dazzles me, beckons me. But I can never escape the realization that this dazzling ruby has always eluded me.81

  This is not the traditional romantic critique of the city. There is no nostalgia for the imagined warmth and solidarity of the village. The perspective is entirely urban, and it springs from a history of the city whose promise has been built upon conquest.

  Capital comes into the world, Ma
rx wrote, dripping from head to toe in blood and dirt. This is how capital came to life in Bombay, not by sprouting from its soil but by colonizing it with the force of the conqueror’s sword. Conquest carried with it alluring representations. As the Portuguese looked for Christian souls in Bombay, they termed it “the island of good life.” Under the British, profits from the opium and cotton trade and wealth amassed from the labor of immigrants turned Bombay into the fabled city of gold. Bombay spilled out beyond the Fort by appropriating lands from the sea under the legal fiction of reclamation. Colonial domination over the land and its people combined with the conquest of nature by culture to forcefully produce a double colonization. Imperial power dressed this doubly colonized city in Gothic Revival architecture, enlisting an imagined European Middle Ages to establish its claims. All this elaborate subterfuge served the interests of capitalist industrialization and colonial power. Urban writers experienced the new urban landscape as “second nature” and tried to make sense of it by reading its visual fragments.

  Deprived of the context that lent it a glow, the history of colonial Bombay now appears in dark hues. This is not just hindsight, but an understanding that emerges because the passage of time has set aside the spell of “second nature.” The sight today of buildings named after merchant princes, who accumulated their wealth from the opium trade, no longer inspires awe. The post office and sewage works do not captivate us as they once did Dinshaw Wacha; now familiar and creaking under the pressure of popular growth, they appear ordinary and unremarkable. This is not to say that the historical imagination of the city as a dazzling metropolis of opportunity and cultural multiplicity is false, but that it concealed Bombay’s Gothic life of power and oppression in its own time. By displacing King Edward, Shivaji’s statue presents Mumbai’s history as an embodiment of unbroken Maratha and national glory and achievement. But can Mumbai usurp Bombay’s enchanting history without also inheriting its record of oppression? Can the postcolonial present appropriate the colonial past’s bewitching charm without also owning up to the enduring effects of double colonization, to its history as one that enchants only to devour? The bodies of the plague victims say no, and the Dalit writers say no—not until the city oppresses those who nurture it.

  3

  THE CITY ON THE SEA

  Marine Drive is no ordinary place. Mumbai’s residents, who do not need much prodding to rattle off the problems facing their city, change their disposition the moment the panoramic boulevard on the Arabian Sea enters the discussion. Their eyes turn dreamy and their speech slows down in midsentence as they voice the name in hushed and unhurried tones—M-a-r-i-n-e D-r-i-v-e. Utter the name slowly, clear up spaces before and after it, and you also might feel its aura.

  Running along Mumbai’s arcing southwestern shoreline, Marine Drive calls to mind the visual drama of the city by the sea. This is where one can observe the imagination to create the city as a society of immense openness—open to the sea, exposed to influences from far and wide, a dream city of cosmopolitan desire. The grandeur of the curving boulevard as it extends northward from Nariman Point and disappears into Malabar Hill evokes Mumbai’s ambition as a city of human artifice. Even the ocean does not appear in its natural form but comes into view framed by the curving shoreline dredged into shape by industrial technology. As this shoreline extends southward, a towering mass of buildings seems to rise up from the sea. This projecting arc of steel and concrete, extending from the office structures of Nariman Point to the luxury high-rise apartments on Cuffe Parade, stands on lands reclaimed—amid tales of greed and corruption—from the sea in the 1970s. Only the ramshackle huts of the Koli fishing community break up the solid continuity of the industrial mastery of the sea.

  3.1. Marine Drive in the early 1950s. Photo by A. L. Syed. Courtesy: Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra, Bombay: The Cities Within (Bombay: India Book House, 1995).

  Standing in stark contrast to the brash high-rises of the 1970s is the faded glory of the Art Deco buildings from the 1930s—also built on reclaimed lands—that line one side of the boulevard and look out confidently onto the Arabian Sea. The sea has avenged its loss by blasting the surface of Art Deco architecture with unsightly blotches of mildew. On the other side of the roadway, a promenade, flanked by a retaining wall reinforced by strange-looking concrete tetrapods, forms the border between the built space of the city and the blue waters of the Arabian Sea. When night falls and envelops Mumbai’s pulsating life in the mystery of darkness, the dance of lights on Marine Drive stages the nocturnal drama of the city by the sea. One can trace the city come to life by the clusters of glowing lights all the way from Marine Drive to distant Malabar Hill. On the boulevard itself, the streetlights form a luminous curve, often referred to as the Queen’s Necklace in a bid to evoke something poetic from the glitter of industrial technology.

  Marine Drive invites you to Mumbai’s imagined life as a spectacle of modernity, as an ideal of modern urban life. Here, heavy police patrols and the physical layout, which is designed to facilitate the flow of traffic, have kept urban sprawl at bay. The sweeping boulevard and the sites visible from it clearly demarcate the city into orderly spaces, public and private, work and leisure. The layout locates family life in apartments, business life in office towers, tourists and visitors in hotels, entertainment and leisure on the promenade and Chowpatty Beach, and the flow of modern traffic on the roadways. Set against the background of the limitless ocean, this methodical arrangement of urban life enhances the power of human artifice and ambition in Mumbai’s constitution. Here, the city is dressed in its finest to present itself as an incarnation of the good life. The squalor of slums, the violence of poverty and homelessness, the wretched effects of staggering inequality, and the oppression of power are tucked away from sight. All one is invited to see is the utopia promised by the city on the sea.

  It is a compelling image, endlessly reproduced and circulated in postcards, books, and magazines. Above all, it is the Hindi cinema of the 1950s—Raj Kapoor’s tramp films and the crime melodramas starring Dev Anand—that disseminated this picture far and wide. Raj Khosla’s CID (1956), for example, represents it as a classic Bombay mise-en-scène. As the film shows the comedian Johnny Walker prancing on the sidewalk, singing what was to become Mumbai’s rhapsody, “Ai Dil Hai Mushkil Jeena Yahan” (O Gentle Heart, Life Is an Uphill Struggle Here), we see a tableau of urban forms, characters, and life—the apartment buildings, the medley of traffic, the crowd, the hustle and bustle of the street, and people taking a break from the turbulence of metropolitan living by relaxing on the promenade. In Vijay Anand’s Kala Bazaar (1960), the boulevard surges with romantic passion as waves crash against the seaside wall and rains cascade down on the lovers against the background track of “Rimjhim Ke Taraane Leke Aai Barsaat” (Here Comes the Soft Rain with Its Melody of Joy). The sweeping seaside boulevard has it all—the turmoil, the glitter, the darkness, and the romance.

  3.2. Rain-drenched romance on Marine Drive in Kala Bazaar. Source: Navketan Films.

  As an emblem of Mumbai, Marine Drive evokes an epic narrative. Since it stands, like much of the Island City, on land that once lay under water, the whole dance of metropolitan life on its stage appears as a product of heroic modernity. We are invited to see the city as an expression of human artifice, of nature bent to the will of culture. How did this captivating picture emerge? What does it express, and what does it conceal? As a historian, I must dig to discover what lies beneath it, to unearth the topography of the alluring image of the city on the sea. What better place to begin this archaeology of Mumbai’s image as a modern city than Marine Drive?

  PLOTTING THE DREAMSCAPE

  When the plague epidemic hit Bombay in 1896–97, the British could no longer pretend that all was well with the urban edifice. While the well-heeled European residents from the central parts took flight to the healthy air of neighborhoods such as Malabar Hill, the Bombay City Improvement Trust undertook a number of projects and introduced building
-design regulations and standards to shape the city’s urban form over the next three decades.1 It began restructuring congested neighborhoods and building working-class tenements, and it built roads to improve traffic flow and circulation. The trust’s most visible effort to shape Bombay’s urban form was the Cuffe Parade reclamation on the southern end of the western seashore. Completed in 1905 and named after T. W. Cuffe, a member of the Improvement Trust, the parade was developed as an upscale residential area. Its showpiece was a row of Edwardian bungalows and villas that looked out to the sea across the promenade. Today the promenade does not exist; it was swallowed up by the reclamation of the 1970s. The tall residential towers that rose on the reclaimed New Cuffe Parade stole the sea view from the older bungalows and villas, which have given way almost entirely to apartment blocks. But the old residents still fondly recall the way it was—the graceful homes, strolls on the promenade, views of the ocean.

  Cuffe Parade’s successful realization of the ideal of upper-class urban life spurred the government to become more ambitious. It resuscitated the plan to reclaim the Backbay—so called because it was on the other side of the bay—which had first surfaced in the speculative bubble of the 1860s. The plan had lost its fizz when the bubble burst. Periodically, the government returned to the idea, but only in 1909, when flush with the success of the Improvement Trust’s projects, was fresh life breathed into the reclamation plan. After officials consulted with the city’s mill-owning and merchant elite, the government passed a resolution on urban policy. The decision was to earmark the western shores for the wealthy, and Salsette in the north for the middle classes, while punching through the congested central parts of the city to build arterial roads connecting the upper- and middle-class areas to the business district in the Fort, and to the magnificent commercial precinct of Ballard Estate then being built by the Bombay Port Trust on reclaimed lands on the east.