Byculla to Bangkok

by Hussain Zaidi

  This incident marked the beginning of a violent battle between the BRA gang and the Bhaiyya gang. Until then, they had restricted themselves to street skirmishes and fist fights.

  Kundan was now on the BRA gang’s hit list. Soon after his release from jail, he barged into a gambling den at Parsi Wadi in Tardeo and killed two people; his reign of terror was beginning in the Grant Road area, earlier managed by his friend Shashi Rasam, the leader of the Cobra gang, whom he had met in jail.

  The selective crackdown by the police on their matka (gambling) dens only exacerbated hostilities; it frustrated the BRA gang as the dens of their rivals were never raided. It was obvious that the others paid more hafta to the police. Arun and Rama never intended to join a gang – they would have happily run their matkas and liquor joints – but the raids made them furious. It was their sense of frustration over the injustice that forced Rama Naik, Babu Reshim and Arun Gawli to join hands.

  Babu Reshim was the seniormost among the three and the other two looked up to him, discussing all plans with him and asking for advice. It was at his suggestion that they named their gang BRA. They soon started terrorizing the traders of the Byculla region by extorting money from gambling dens, liquor shops and those selling smuggled goods. Later, with the induction of foot soldiers into the gang, muscle power was provided to landlords and contractors to evict tenants for the construction of new buildings. This became their entry into the real estate business – Arun Gawli was the first don to dabble in land deals.

  Many other dons in Mumbai tried their hand at the real estate and construction businesses. Haji Mastan tried very hard to get his fingers into the construction pie, with the help of the Dawood and Pathan gangs, but was unable to sustain it as the business required constant engagement. Dawood came into the field much later, initially content with rigging horse races at the Mahalaxmi Derby and financing films. However, Arun Gawli had foreseen that real estate would be the next big thing and concentrated his energies in the Worli, Byculla, Chinchpokli, Parel, Lalbaug and Dadar areas of south-central Mumbai or Girangaon.

  Gawli understood the requirement for – and power of – muscle in this business. He started settling financial disputes and providing protection to his contractor friends. He demanded a flat 50 per cent fee for settling financial disputes or a certain number of flats in the newly constructed buildings. He was also the first don to demand 50 per cent of the money recovered in financial disputes. As the police could not intervene in such civil matters and did not get involved in settling financial disputes because of legal constraints, Gawli and other gangsters made a killing. These practices created a link between building contractors and gangsters, and the BRA gang became a force to reckon with.

  Meanwhile, when Kundan Dubey was in jail, his sister fell in love with Shashi Rasam, leader of the Cobra gang. Shashi Rasam at this point thought he should patch up the relationship between the BRA gang and the S-bridge gang.

  As it happened, Rama ended up in jail after a fight with another gang and met Shashi Rasam. Both were released in 1977. While in jail, Shashi tried to convince Rama to let bygones be bygones and bring closure to the Kundan episode by not testifying against Kundan in the Umakant Naik murder case.

  But Rama was in no mood for any such reconciliation. He told Shashi in no uncertain terms that blood was thicker than water and that Kundan would have to undergo punishment as dictated by the courts. As expected, after the court trials, Kundan was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Shashi was enraged, and this became the cause of their enmity. In Rama’s eyes, Shashi was no more his friend; rather, an acolyte of the bhaiyyas, as he was in love with Pushpa Dubey, and for that he deserved to be punished. After Rama’s release from jail, he – along with Chhota Babu and Arun Gawli – brutally stabbed Shashi at Bombay Central Bridge while he was returning from a visit to Pushpa’s house. The police arrested Rama Naik, Choughule and Chhota Babu, but Rama did not divulge Arun Gawli’s name. This not only took Gawli by surprise, it left him indebted to Rama Naik for life.

  The conflict between the bhaiyyas and ghatis (the bhaiyyas referred to the Maharashtrians pejoratively as ghatis) continued to rage. The BRA gang wanted to take over all the matka joints, but it was Parasnath Pandey whose writ operated in these dens. Pandey was seen as an obstacle to BRA’s growth, so one day Gawli and his men barged into his den and killed him, in full public view, brutally stabbing him with choppers and assaulting him with swords. The gruesome killing not only shocked everyone but scared the other matka operators, who immediately shifted their loyalties to the BRA gang.

  The Sarmalkar gang was gradually getting decimated by their rivals. The wild propaganda and the police were doing what Gawli had always wanted. Not that the system sided with Gawli; he, Babu Reshim and Rama Naik were tadipar (externed) from Mumbai for two years in 1979. While in jail, Rama Naik shook hands with don Varadarajan Mudaliar and Rajan Nair (Bada Rajan), who was the reigning don in the Tilak Nagar area. After Naik’s release, they decided to capitalize on their newly forged alliances.

  With Parasnath dead and Kundan in jail serving his life sentence, Sarmalkar decided to retreat from the arena. The remaining members – Hari Shankar Mishra, Mohan Gupta and others – also preferred to fade out. This gave Gawli complete control of the area and he began to call the shots.

  Gawli, meanwhile, was carrying on an affair with Zubeida Mujawar, whose family belonged to Vadgaon Maval, near Pune. The family did not approve of their relationship, so the two had to finally elope and tie the knot; Zubeida came to Dagdi Chawl as Asha Gawli. Rama Naik and Babu Reshim did not approve of Gawli’s marriage either, but Asha became Gawli’s strength and de facto don in later years.

  The bhaiyya bogey was later appropriated by the Shiv Sena and then the Maharashtra Nav Nirman Sena, who converted it into the Marathi-manoos-versus-bhaiyyas struggle. A paucity of issues had forced the Sena to reinvent itself around this time. Finding no new avenues, the party went back to its ‘anti-outsider’ credo, targeting people from the north, especially Uttar Pradesh.

  In 2003, the Sena claimed that only 10 per cent of the 500 Maharashtrian candidates who appeared for the railway exams were successful because Biharis walked away with most of the jobs. Before the exams that year, Shiv Sainiks ransacked a railway recruitment office in Bandra, protesting against the huge number of non-Maharashtrians (read north Indians); a total of 6.5 lakh candidates from all over the country were set to compete for the 2,200 railway jobs in Maharashtra. The central government was forced to delay the exams. The Shiv Sainiks thrashed every Bihari who had come to Mumbai for the exams – at Kalyan railway station, they caught hold of all north Indians getting offtrains arriving from the north.

  In gangland, the issue was never raised again, but the Shiv Sena made it an important tool in their political agenda.

  THREE

  Girangaon: The Village of Mills

  The changing skyline of south-central Mumbai seems at odds with the lower-middle-class pockets that sit cheek by jowl with it. You can spot a Maharashtrian woman in an oversized cotton maxi buying vegetables next to a young woman headed to college or work, dressed in a spaghetti top and jeans. The social diversity is evident from Worli to Parel, from Lalbaug to Chinchpokli, at Currey Road, Bombay Central and Byculla, at Mahalaxmi and Lower Parel, where the old crumbling textile mills are giving way to swanky new buildings. For the post-liberalization generation, which did not witness the tumultuous events that led to the closure of the textile mills, south-central Mumbai is characterized by High Street Phoenix, Kamala City, One India Bulls Centre and India Bulls Sky or Peninsula Towers, to name a few landmarks. These are the signposts that now define what was once Girangaon; girni in Marathi means mills, gaon is village.

  The entire stretch from Byculla to Dadar and Mahalaxmi to Worli was once referred to as Girangaon. The British found it difficult to pronounce these names, so they just referred to the entire area as Byculla. Today’s android-fixated generation may not even be aware that the m
alls and high-rises were once thriving cotton mills that fuelled the growth of Mumbai and defined its character, even shaping its political and cultural history. But there was a time when Byculla was Mumbai’s Manchester.

  For the uninitiated, India Bulls Sky was Jupiter Mills, One India Bulls Centre was Elphinstone Mills and Phoenix rose from the ashes of Phoenix Mills; Kamala City was Kamala Mills, Raghuvanshi Mills is today’s K-Lifestyle, Matulya Mills became Sun Palazzo, New Islam Mills is One Avighna Park, Piramal Spinning & Weaving Mills has become Marathon Nextgen, Modern Mills is now Mahindra Belvedere Court, Dawn Mills is today’s Peninsula Towers, and so on. A majority of the eighty mills of south-central Mumbai are being transformed, some into corporate parks, some into malls, super-luxury stores and luxurious apartments, some into the offices of the media and advertising fraternity, and some into five-star hotels.

  The denizens of these areas, who lived in chawls and one-room tenement buildings in the neighbourhood of the mills, are moving out or opting for boxed-in slum redevelopment homes. And the 250,000 men and women who worked in the mills are history. Some died, some became disillusioned, others simply lost their minds. Many committed suicide, some just melted into the background, some retreated to their native villages – while others ended up hawking vegetables beneath the very structures that gave them their bread and butter. Ironically, their children, denied a proper education and livelihood, work twelve-hour shifts in the mills-turned-malls. They are barely able to survive and there is no job security at all.

  In the next ten years, even the lone relics of the mill era, the long chimneys that seem to reach out to the skies, will be dismantled, taking with them a slice of our history, of a time when the mills ushered in the industrialization and development of Mumbai and brought hordes of people from all over India to this city of dreams. For more than 150 years, the cotton composite mills were integral to the city’s landscape. The textile mill boom changed the face of Mumbai to such an extent that the British put up a plaque at the Gateway of India, calling the city ‘Urbs Prima in Indis’ (most important city in India).

  The first mill, The Bombay Spinning and Weaving Company, was set up in 1854 in Tardeo by a Parsi gentleman, Cowasji Nanabhoy Davar. By this time, the first train had already been flagged off from Bori Bunder (which was then named Victoria Terminus and is now known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) to Thane, and a year later, to Kalyan. Transport speeded up the process of industrialization. By the year 1870, Mumbai’s south-central region had twenty-five composite mills. Both the British imperialists and the mill owners, all Indians, had realized that there was a big potential market for cloth made in India.

  Prior to the advent of the composite mills, Mumbai got its cloth from the charkha and handlooms. More than twenty per cent of the population was involved in the hand-spun and hand-woven cloth-making process. The bleaching and dyeing of cloth was another long process, and this made the finished product very expensive. The other option was to buy cloth from the British. They took cotton to Lancashire and Manchester and then sent cloth back to India to sell, a finished product that was unaffordable for the masses. So, when Davar set up his first mill, the mill owners of Lancashire, Manchester and south England were furious. They demanded to know from their countrymen ruling India why Indians were being allowed to set up their own mills. They were sure that allowing Indians to have their own cotton mills amounted to hara-kiri, as Indians would naturally prefer to buy clothes made locally, which would also be cheaper. This, they said, would take away the profits of the Manchester mills.

  The ruling class, however, expressed helplessness and retorted that the Indians would anyway got their hands on the technology because the Europeans and even the British making the textile machinery were eager to sell shuttle looms to Indians.

  Textile mills multiplied because the reformers of the time, such as Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a Marathi manoos, emphasized the importance of indigenous industries. He wrote an editorial on the first textile mill in Pune in his newspaper Kesari, as early as 1885, advocating swadeshi and talking about the need for industrial development.

  The workers at the mills initially worked twelve-hour shifts in the area that was called Girangaon, which stretched across a 12-km radius. When the mills came up in south-central Mumbai, it was access to the port that was a draw. Besides, there was ample land available and some mill owners got leases for ninety-nine years. Most were Indians: Parsis and Marwaris who had made their millions from trade in cotton and other products during the boom. In the year 1925, of the fifty-three mills in the city, only fourteen were British-owned. The Indians who owned these mills were the Tatas, Petits, Wadias, Currimbhoys, Thakerseys, Sassoons, Khataus and Goculdas, to name a few.

  The mill area stretched from Byculla to Dadar on the Central Railway side, from Tardeo to Bombay Central, Mahalaxmi and Elphinstone on the Western Railway side. It was not less than 1,000 acres, and later became worth its weight in gold. But in the late nineteenth century, it was cotton, brought in bales to the burgeoning textile mills, that was worth its weight in gold.

  The textile industry is cyclical by nature; each cycle seems to last an average of five to seven years, and a boom time is always followed by a downturn. Two historical developments led to a major boost for the Indian cotton trade and mills: the American Civil War and the war in Afghanistan.

  The first of these happened in 1860. Before the civil war, Britain used to buy cotton from India as well as America. At one point, in the early part of the nineteenth century, they were buying a lot of Indian cotton. But the Indian cotton was not able to keep up with the gargantuan quantity of production that the newly invented textile machinery installed in Britain demanded. So the British began looking at American cotton, which they realized was of a superior grade. Southern American states like Louisiana and Arkansas, which practised slavery, exported the best cotton to England. After the civil war broke out in 1861 on the issue of slavery, there was a Union blockage on southern ports. The pro-slavery, cotton-growing states united under a confederacy and hoped to secede from the Union of America. The confederacy itself stopped cotton exports, hoping that Britain would be affected by the ban and would therefore help them fight the Union, which was against slavery.

  But Britain did not take the bait. They instead looked east to India and Egypt, as did the French. This was the first boom time for cotton traders. Cotton became extremely valuable during the four years of the civil war. A cotton-starved Britain was guzzling Indian cotton and the Bhatia community and other cloth merchants like Premchand Raichand became the biggest cotton exporters. Raichand was called the cotton king. He minted millions and eventually built the Rajabai Tower, named after his mother, and invested in the reclamation of the Churchgate area. Raichand’s affluence can be gauged from the fact that he donated Rs 2 lakh to the British for the construction of the tower (now within the Mumbai University premises) in the 1860s.

  Other construction companies cropped up overnight to reclaim land from the sea. By January 1865, Bombay had thirty-one banks, eight reclamation companies, sixteen cotton pressing companies, ten shipping companies, twenty insurance companies and sixty-two joint stock companies. It came to be called the great Bombay bonanza. In just four years, the city’s profits from cotton exceeded eighty million pound sterling.

  The cotton came mainly from the Vidarbha region, which is now in Maharashtra. At that time, it was ruled by the Nizam of Hyderabad, who had control over a large territory consisting of the present Telangana, Vidarbha, Marathwada and four districts of Karnataka. In his overzealousness to help the British, the Nizam had once sent an army with the East India Company which wanted to conquer Afghanistan in the late 1830s. When they came back, the Company presented the Nizam with the bill. The Nizam was horrified, as he had presumed he was helping the Company. He could not pay, so he gave them Berar (Vidarbha) as a protectorate. Later, when the British Crown took over from the East India Company, they quietly annexed Berar with its rich, fertile soil th
at was excellent for cotton cultivation.

  The cotton bubble burst in 1865 when the American Civil War ended and the British resumed buying American cotton. Egypt and India suffered huge losses; businesses went into liquidation and the reclamation companies declared bankruptcy. Premchand Raichand went bankrupt too. Eventually, though, the mills recovered and the demand for cotton continued to rise.

  The next boom happened between 1914 and 1918. During the First World War, the British focused their energies on war efforts and their ships were used to carry arms and ammunition. Foreign-made cloth had stopped coming to India, so there was no competition. When the war ended in 1918, the mills were once again struggling. The great depression of 1919 did not help matters. But by 1925, they were back on their feet, and this time more mills had sprung up – taking the total number to eighty-three. (Between 1925 and 1938, fifteen of these mills shut down, unable to cope with the ups and down of the business.)

  World War II broke out in September 1939 and Britain, with its colonies, geared up for war efforts. A Defence of India Act was promulgated and cotton was placed under the Essential Commodities Act. Around 65 per cent of the cloth produced in the organized textile industry – i.e., the composite mills – was reserved for military orders and the rest for ordinary people. Imports were halted and the textile mills made huge fortunes during the next ten years. The war ended in 1945 and Europe got busy with reconstruction. The Indian textile business now had great opportunities to boost exports. By 1955, however, the market levelled and depression once again set in; textile mills started incurring losses. The composite mills were subjected to higher taxation, strict labour laws, export obligations, shortage of raw cotton and many other hurdles after 1947. Also, industrial policy was relaxed post Independence and new industries such as pharma, engineering and fertilisers were making higher profits and attracting capital. By 1948, a new fibre – viscose – became available and started competing with cotton textiles. By 1955, synthetic fabrics such as nylon and polyester had made their entry into India. As the textile industry was not making profits, it could not modernize to suit the new standards and started closing down.