Mumbai Fables Page 9
Thus began the first act in the drama that was to be staged on the city’s western foreshores. The plan to rob the sea for the rich began modestly, starting with the shuffling of bureaucratic memos on reclaiming lands on the Backbay for the wealthy classes who desired sea-facing residences in close proximity to the business district.2 The scheme gathered momentum in 1912 when the government hired the engineering firm of Messrs. Lowther, Kidd and Company to prepare estimates for reclaiming 1,145 acres in the Backbay and 124 acres on the east side of Colaba for military purposes.3 Two years later, the Bombay Development Committee, appointed by the government to recommend plans for the city’s growth, reconsidered the scheme. Over two years of meetings, it invited and received written statements and oral testimonies from government officials, leading merchants, and industrialists. When it was all over in 1914, the committee submitted a report with a set of recommendations. Among these was a suggestion to reclaim lands on the Backbay.4 Less grandiose than previous proposals, the committee’s recommendation nevertheless was reclamation as part of a plan to accommodate public buildings and to improve the urban environment. The government hesitated because of the cost involved, but this evaporated when two private consortiums joined hands in January 1918 to bid for the reclamation project. The offer convinced the government of the reclamation’s financial feasibility.5 The government concluded that if the project was profitable, why allow private individuals to reap the benefit? Why not use the profits for the general good? The land-grab scheme now wore the veil of “public” purpose.
When Sir George Lloyd arrived in December 1918 as the governor of Bombay, the Backbay reclamation once more rose high on the agenda as a desirable and profitable scheme for the government to undertake to relieve the pressure on housing in the city. Somehow, the government convinced itself that providing land for upper-class residences would relieve overcrowding in the working-class neighborhoods. This fantastic make-believe had already been established by the colonial government’s written proceedings, which in lieu of popular representation, served as the legitimate basis for policy making. Lloyd had to look no further than the official records to arrive at the conclusion that reclamation was a bold measure to tackle Bombay’s urban blight.
In fixing his sights on reclamation, Lloyd invoked the justification already well entrenched in the official discourse: the housing shortage. Lord Montagu, the secretary of state for India, had spoken forcefully of the urgent problem of housing for the poor when the governor met him in London prior to his departure for Bombay. Charged to deal speedily with the housing problem, Lloyd wrote to Montagu soon after he arrived in India. He complained that wartime migration had worsened the problem of congestion. The Improvement Trust had tried to open up existing neighborhoods and to develop new areas for construction, but these efforts were frustrated by Indians, who refused, unless forced, to move out of their congested neighborhoods near bazaars and temples. According to Lloyd, the problem was that the native landed interests dominated the municipality and did not want any increase in the housing stock lest it lower the rents. The nationalists, in his view, only added fuel to the fire by backing up these vested interests.6
The solution, then, was to circumvent the Municipal Corporation altogether. Speaking in the Bombay Legislative Council in 1920, Lloyd listed the bold steps needed—improving the water supply, drainage, sewage, roads, schools, and housing—to bring the city up to the standard that would do it credit. For this purpose, he proposed the establishment of the Development Directorate.7 This was a canny move. It took Lloyd’s showpiece Backbay project out of the public scrutiny by the Municipal Council’s Indian members, whose motives he distrusted. The ambitious imperialist that he was, Lloyd believed that for a public welfare project to succeed, the public must be shut out.
The plot thickened as the government hired Sir George Buchanan, who had done reclamation work on the Rangoon River and at Basra, as a consulting engineer. In 1919 Buchanan submitted a report on the scheme prepared by Lowther, Kidd and Company in 1912, estimating that the project would take about six years to complete at a cost of about Rs 37 million. This was an increase of a mere 10 percent over Kidd’s 1912 estimate—a gross underestimate that later was to haunt him and the project. He also approved a dredger that was designed for soft clay, not the stiff clay that Kidd had identified as present in the harbor—another grievous mistake that would later bedevil the reclamation.
Greedily eyeing the huge profit of £20 million promised by the high land values that had prevailed since the war, the government did not look too closely at Buchanan’s report. Enough time had passed. Now was the moment to act. So thought Lord Montagu, who wrote that any delay in starting the Backbay reclamation would be scandalous.8 Following the scheme’s approval by the secretary of state in May 1920, a bill was introduced in the Bombay Legislative Council in August 1920 entrusting the Development Department with carrying out the reclamation and other urban projects. In 1921 Buchanan’s firm was appointed as consulting engineers, and work finally began on a project that the colonial ideology had miraculously posited as the panacea for Bombay’s housing shortage.
THE PLOT UNRAVELS
A quarry was opened some twenty miles away at Kandivli for the construction of a retaining seawall from Colaba to Marine Lines. The dredger, the “Sir George Lloyd,” commenced dredging the projected filling of twenty-five million cubic yards. The sight and sound of construction sent the colonial urban imagination soaring. In 1924 the British town planner W. R. Davidge published an article detailing the plan he had prepared for the reclaimed land.9
Reaffirming the colonial make-believe that the reclamation aimed to solve the city’s housing problem, Davidge also drew on all its latent fantasies. The fiction that seaside reclamation would address the problems of housing and public hygiene, long articulated in colonial documents, was now given full expression in his Backbay dreamscape. He visualized an imposing seaside complex of public buildings and office premises, grouped around shady quadrangles modeled after Gray’s Inn and Oxford colleges. A broad open space, lined with palm trees, was to run along the whole length of the reclamation, ending in a public building at the southern end of the vista, while the northern end was to be directed toward the Rajabai Clock Tower, built by Sir George Gilbert Scott in 1865. Residential quarters laid out in neatly lined rectangular plots were to occupy the remainder of the area.
It was a grand vision of the city on the sea, an elegant picture of wealth and power. But the poor were nowhere to be seen in Davidge’s dreamland. Their lives, the way they used space, appeared only through images of congestion, disease, filth, and fetid smells, which served as alibis for the proposed plans. The neatly and harmoniously organized buildings, parks, trees, and roads, offered as solutions to the social problem of poverty and exploitation, did not reserve any space for the poor. It was a vision from above that divided physical spaces and drew geometrical shapes to produce a visually compelling plan of society, formulated and executed by disinterested experts and administrators.
3.3. Davidge’s plan. Source: W. R. Davidge, “The Development of Bombay,” Town Planning Review 10, no. 4 (1924): 273–79.
Consider, for example, the book Development in Bombay, published in 1924 by the government. Written by S. Nihal Singh, it began by stating that Bombay was at a crucial point in its life as an urban community. The Island City had grown tremendously since its beginnings as seven islets. Trade, commerce, and industry had turned it into a bustling metropolis. But its laissez-faire growth had also created spots of incredible ugliness—the living hell of chawls, the congested neighborhoods and bazaars, and the foul and fetid lanes. George Lloyd’s administration and the Development Department had embarked on such an audacious plan precisely to meet the challenge posed by this haphazard growth. Predictably, Singh described the Backbay reclamation as a spectacular attempt to remake the urban community, writing enthusiastically of its grand design. Enthralled by the picture of a four-mile-long seawall running from Cola
ba to the Marine Lines, he envisioned it as defying and mocking the crashing waves. He wrote of hearing the rumble following a series of deafening explosions, of falling rocks at Kandivli, where the mountain’s nose was being cut off to spite the sea. The projected dredging of twenty-five million cubic yards of mud and the advanced science of engineering manifest in the pile-driving machine and the dredger “Sir George Lloyd” left him awestruck.10 Written in breathless tones, the book celebrated the Backbay reclamation as a daring assault on nature by forces of urban planning and technology to remake Bombay’s urban community. Photographs of the stone quarry, the work in progress at the reclamation site, the dredger, and the seawall going up offered an image of the heroic efforts by labor and technology to tame the sea.
The praise was premature, for the Backbay plan was soon plunged into a crisis. If even the best-laid plans often go awry, then poorly drawn ones are destined to come undone. Contrary to the official propaganda, the reclamation was planned with stunning casualness. The details of the staggering mistakes and oversights became apparent and caused great official embarrassment the moment the plans were scrutinized. An official inquiry in 1926 determined that George Buchanan’s plans were plagued with problems from the very beginning. He had so wildly underestimated the project’s cost that within a year of the plan’s approval, the budget was revised upward to Rs 70 million from Buchanan’s original estimate of Rs 37 million—an 89 percent increase!11
Even more disastrous was his approval of the purchase of the dredger “Sir George Lloyd” from Messrs. Simon and Company. Kidd’s 1912 report had ruled out dredging the Backbay because of its rocky bed and high tides and had recommended fillings from the harbor, where the soil was of stiff clay. Buchanan accepted Kidd’s report but went on to approve Simon and Company’s specification of the dredger, which was designed to dredge 2,000 cubic yards per hour of soft, not stiff, clay. He overlooked this specification and estimated that the “Sir George Lloyd,” along with the booster “Colaba,” would deliver 2,000 cubic yards per hour from the harbor to the Backbay, over 15 hours of pumping time per day, for 170 days a year for five years, to complete the project.12 Astonishingly, he conducted no check borings to test the harbor bed. Nor did he make the dredger’s approval conditional on its successful testing on the harbor. As the manufacturer’s representative acknowledged in his testimony before the inquiry committee, he did not test the dredger on the harbor because he knew that the harbor’s stiff clay would not permit it to produce 2,000 cubic yards of fill per hour.13 Indeed, the manufacturer did not even guarantee that its dredger would achieve the planned target of 2,000 cubic yards, but only that it “may be expected to meet your requirements.”14
Naturally, disaster struck. To begin with, the dredger and the booster sat idle for twenty-one months after their purchase because there were no lagoons ready for them to fill. When they finally started dredging at the end of 1922, no one checked their output for a year. Measurements were finally taken in July 1924, but it was discovered that the sea had refused to cooperate. Its stiff clay permitted the dredger to scour only 1,020, not 2,000, cubic yards per hour. The next year, the results were even more disappointing. This was not all. Inquiries also revealed that a significant portion of the filling had escaped through the porous seawall.15 Suddenly, the project’s completion appeared decades away, and the costs seemed prohibitive, particularly because land prices had fallen off sharply since their wartime highs.
THE MUCKRAKER’S MOMENT
The grand plan was now a grand mess; a magnificent urban vision had become a visible illustration of official incompetence, mismanagement, and allegedly a lot more. The Backbay Enquiry Committee confirmed that the project was in disarray. But even before the official pronouncement, the whole scheme had been publicly declared a failure. Indeed, it was in response to a sustained public campaign against the scheme that the government was forced to institute an inquiry committee.
Leading the campaign was the fiery nationalist Khurshed Framji Nariman. A Parsi lawyer and a prominent congressman, he began his public criticism of the Development Department by writing columns in the nationalist newspaper the Bombay Chronicle. He wrote regularly on development scandals under the byline Development Scandal Monger, and he carried his scandalmongering into the Legislative Council, to which he was elected in 1922–23. The Development Department was the chosen object of his ire because he believed, rightly, that the government created it to execute the reclamation and other schemes without any public scrutiny. If the government had hoped to bury the scandal of the reclamation’s despotic birth in its supposedly intrinsic appeal as a public good, then it had overlooked Nariman’s nationalist fervor. For no sooner was he elected to the Legislative Council than Nariman was railing against the Development Department and the reclamation scheme. He demanded an unofficial and public inquiry in 1924. The government responded by appointing an advisory committee, which he refused to join because it was not permitted to examine the workings of the department. While the majority report blamed Sir George Buchanan for the failures of the reclamation scheme, the minority report, authored by Indian members, held the government responsible for embarking on the scheme without legislative scrutiny. The graceful bay had been ruined and turned into a “Lord Lloyd lake for breeding mosquitoes,” the minority concluded.16 Nariman was not satisfied with this indictment. When the council assembled for a session in March 1925, he usurped the stage, denouncing the department and the scheme at length. Charging the possibly criminal misuse of funds, he spoke darkly of “ugly rumours” of payoffs to high officials.17
The charges stung. The department’s spokesman, Sir Lawless Hepper, replied that much had been made of “trifling mistakes.” Taking exception to the charges against public servants, he acidly remarked that if Nariman saw corruption too readily, it was probably because he encountered it all too often in his environment. Nariman cried foul, taking great offense at Hepper’s insinuation that he was acting like a despicable anonymous letter writer. When Hepper withdrew his remarks, a triumphant Nariman proceeded to reiterate his charges and offered to prove every one of them.
3.4. “Back Bay Bungle.” Source: Bombay Chronicle, 1927–28
All this high drama would not have mattered much had it remained confined to the cloistered council. But Nariman, determined to dig out the reclamation’s buried history and expose it as truth, carried out a vigorous campaign in the press. His main vehicle was the Bombay Chronicle, a nationalist newspaper edited by B. G. Horniman, the anticolonial Irishman. Day after day, the Chronicle published articles attacking the reclamation and the Development Department. Sir George Lloyd’s prize venture became “Lloyd’s Follies,” “Back Bay Bungle,” and “Back Bay Muddle.”
The opposition to the scheme received powerful support from the landed interests, who feared that the supply of reclaimed lands would depress the rental market. Wealthy magnates, whose contract bids the government had spurned, also joined the nationalist bandwagon to assail the reclamation. In bold letters, the Chronicle announced public meetings, usually held at the Gaiety Theatre, opposite the Victoria Terminus station, for their strongly worded denunciations. Leading magnates of the city attended and spoke at these meetings, but the star was Nariman, who thundered against the government for its “vandalism” on the Backbay.18
Nariman’s rhetoric was combative and designed to provoke. To be sure, nationalist politics had been around for a few decades, and it had become increasingly assertive. But western-educated Parsi politicians of Nariman’s class had traditionally spoken in reverential tones about British rule, suggesting only greater representation of Indians in the administration. But here was Nariman, dressed immaculately in three-piece suits—no coarse homespun nationalist uniform for him—ratcheting up the nationalist rhetoric several notches in flawless English. The scandal of colonial government was out in the open, revealed in public meetings and emblazoned in the pages of the Bombay Chronicle. “Bring Offenders to Book” screamed the nationalist ne
wspaper headline, reporting on the speech Nariman had delivered at a public meeting organized by the Bombay Provincial Congress.19 So effective was Nariman’s Chronicle campaign that a hapless Buchanan felt compelled to plead his defense to the newspaper.
If the government had thought that the establishment of an official inquiry would quiet the relentless din of criticisms, it had thought wrong. Nariman immediately denounced the inquiry committee as a mask to cover up the failures.20 And when the Backbay Enquiry Committee started its work, its proceedings served only to provide additional grist to the nationalist mill. The first day that Sir Lawless Hepper, the director of the Development Department, appeared before the committee to give evidence, the Chronicle had a field day. The story ran under the headlines “A Mad Venture,” “A Huge Hoax,” and “Public Hoodwinked from Day to Day.” The paper reported some “startling disclosures” and gleefully noted Hepper’s “damaging” admission that his reports on the project’s progress had been misleading. Referring to the blame that he placed on Buchanan, the paper asked: “Lloyd’s ‘Folly’ or Buchanan’s ‘Blunders’”?21 The next day Hepper heaped blame for the project’s problems on Lloyd’s desire to stage the reclamation as an impressive spectacle.22 The Chronicle was only too happy to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the former governor rather than allow the government to make the engineer the scapegoat.
The inquiry committee’s proceedings had helped to make the reclamation such a riveting scandal that even the staid and reliably pro-British Times of India jumped into the fray with the storyline “Sensational Revelations in Back Bay Inquiry.”23 But nothing was more sensational than Nariman’s appearance before the committee. The Chronicle reported in big, bold letters: “Mr. Nariman Speaks Out.” Delivering his testimony with great style to a packed room, Nariman blamed Sir George Lloyd and his government’s violation of constitutional principles, rather than Sir George Buchanan’s incompetence, for the reclamation’s failure. Once again, he repeated the charges of corruption and favoritism, prompting Sir Frederick Hopkinson, a member of the committee, to accuse him of wasting its time. An angry Nariman gathered his papers and threatened to leave, but he was dissuaded by the chairman and others. The Chronicle reported Nariman’s triumph in this stormy drama with satisfaction and then proceeded to recount the hard-hitting charges that he went on to hurl at the administration. One exposure of hidden malfeasance followed another—the tampering with indents, the payment of secret commissions to high officials, the hushing up of the bungle, the hoodwinking of the public, and the abuse of the scheme as a free pasture for foreigners.24 It took five newspaper pages to chronicle Nariman’s dramatic performance.