Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  Yet, for all these iniquities, there is little internal confusion about Mumbai’s place in the world. In contrast to Calcutta, this ‘City of Gold’, as it became known in the nineteenth century, is relatively uninterested in its relationship with its British pre-history. It is the business of making money that drives Mumbai. The imperial past is demolished, the new rises up, hotels and skyscrapers, smart bridges and thrusting flyovers jostle for space as edifices of Old Bombay offer little in the way of nostalgia to Mumbai’s youthful, globalized, middle class. The history which has re-emerged after the end of the Raj is the lost world of Shivaji, the seventeenth-century Maratha warrior who battled against the Mughal Empire and whom the Shiv Sena Hindu militant movement adopted as an all-purpose icon for Bombay’s home state of Maharashtra in the mid-1990s. Statues, airports, roads and municipal offices all began to bear his name as part of a broader shedding of the English language and decolonization of public space. So, to the consternation of Urdu-speaking Muslims and middle-class protectors of the city’s cosmopolitan spirit, in June 1995 Bombay became Mumbai – a ‘proper’ Indian city, with a name and an identity that honoured its cultural and linguistic heritage.9 In turn, VT was swapped for CST, and the Victoria and Albert Museum became the Bhau Daji Lad Museum – in whose gardens were dumped the fallen heroes of Empire, angrily decapitated statues of Wellesley, Cornwallis and Sir Richard Temple among them. ‘By Indianizing street and building names, by officially renaming Bombay Mumbai, the postcolonial present suggests control over the colonial past,’ argues historian Gyan Prakash. ‘It assumes that the colonial past can be bleached out of Mumbai’s historical existence as a metropolis and neatly appropriated by the postcolonial era.’10 For some, this aggressive anti-colonialism is self-defeating and only serves to undermine Mumbai’s complex identity. ‘By banishing the statues and symbols of the Raj to the Queen’s gardens in Byculla, we have also turned our backs on the city’s history which in turn formed its character,’ says Pratapaditya Pal.11

  The irony is that it was precisely this kind of confident, commercial and nostalgia-free ethos that was first adumbrated for the city by the rulers of British India themselves. In the 1890s, James Furneaux was already praising Bombay for the refreshing absence ‘of historical associations clinging about it, as about many another Indian city … it is essentially a modern city, a city of the present and the future, but not of the past’.12 For Bombay’s role was to display the technological and managerial capacity of British imperialism: unlike East India Company Calcutta or laissez-faire Hong Kong, Bombay would embody the Victorian spirit of Progress. Under beneficent colonial guidance, all the virtues of urban improvement – rail and trams, sewage and drinking water, municipal governance and higher education, industry and finance, architecture and planning – could be brought to the benighted East. And more so than with any previous imperial city, modern communications and the advancing science of urban planning meant that British debates about civic improvement informed the development of Bombay. The planning and civilization which had transformed the British cities of London, Birmingham and Glasgow were now to be unleashed on insanitary, ill-equipped India. Bombay would not represent British naval or military might, its mercantilist power or buccaneering free enterprise, but instead the Empire’s awakening capacity for effective, technocratic governance. In Bombay the British Empire would build a monument to its own modernity.

  TOWERING CHIMNEYS SOLEMN AND SOMBRE

  Like Cape Town before it, the British Empire came to Bombay on the back of a competing imperial power – this time the Portuguese, who had started taking land from Gujarat Muslim chieftains in the early 1500s, steadily building up a small trading and fishing settlement on the islet they called a ilha da boa vida, or the island of good life. In stages, the name would change from the native Mumbai (after the local goddess Mumba) to Mumbaim, Mombaim, Boa Vida, Bombaim, Bom Bahia and thence Bombay. The islands’ rulers gently prospered under Portuguese protection, and by the early 1600s both the British and Dutch East India Companies were eyeing the harbour with envy. Even amid the man-made docks and tugs of the Victorian age, the natural advantages of this Arabian Sea inlet were relentlessly praised. ‘The soundings are of convenient depths, the holding ground good; and the strong ebb and flood tides … facilitate the entrance and exit of ships in all winds and all weathers,’ thought the Calcutta-based writer James Silk Buckingham. ‘No harbour in the world, perhaps, is better entitled than this to the original name given it by its first European possessors, the Portuguese, of “Bon Baia”, or Good Bay, from whence the present name of Bombay is formed.’13 These attractions would also be noted by the Bombay Marine (Indian navy), which controlled from here the Persian Gulf and so helped to maintain British influence over the growing number of East African colonies.

  In the event, the British Crown beat off the Dutch when in 1661 Portugal gave the islands as a dowry for the marriage of Princess Catherine of Braganza to King Charles II. Seven years later, the colony was handed over to the East India Company with a mandate to grow it as a commercial centre. Under an active Company campaign to bring in migrant workers with the promise of religious liberty, Bombay soon attracted a multinational merchant community. The secure bastions and gates of Bombay Fort, built by the Company in the early 1700s, also proved an attractive draw for merchants, bankers and investors. Under the shadow of the fort’s Apollo Gate, Church Gate and Bazaar Gate, a settlement of residential and commercial houses, shops, churches and temples grew up. A moat was added in 1743 and then an esplanade of wide, open land in the same manner as Calcutta’s Maidan. The Parsi community from Surat were among the first to enter under the fort’s ramparts in the latter half of the seventeenth century, to be joined later by Hindu and Jain merchants of the Bania caste, Brahmans from Salsette, Armenians and Jews (most notably, once again, the Sassoons). The traders initially settled in the Bazaar Gate area in the northern part of the fort. Outside the city walls were the Gujarati Muslim communities of Bohras and Khojas as well as merchants from as far afield as Afghanistan, Persia and Arabia. Abolition of the East India Company’s monopoly over commerce in India in 1833 opened up further commercial opportunities, while Hong Kong’s incessant demand for Malwa opium helped to endow the fortunes of such Parsi merchants as the Jardine and Matheson partner Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy.14

  It was the industrial revolution and then the political ramifications of the American Civil War that transformed Bombay’s prospects. In Britain, the entrepreneur and inventor Richard Arkwright – who had pioneered cotton production at his Cromford mills along Derbyshire’s Derwent Valley – was the first to use steam-power for the purposes of cotton-spinning in Manchester in the late 1780s. By 1830, there were more than 550 cotton mills in Lancashire with well over 100,000 workers. ‘Hast thou heard, with sound ears,’ asked the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle, ‘the awakening of a Manchester, on Monday morning, at half-past five by the clock; the rushing off of its thousand mills, like the boom of an Atlantic tide, ten-thousand times ten-thousand spools and spindles all set humming there, – it is perhaps, if thou knew it well, sublime as a Niagra, or more so.’15

  Steam-power inaugurated a new urban era as iron and steel, glass and ceramics, woollen and worsted, silk, lace and above all cotton production transferred to cities. Beginning in the 1800s, hundreds of thousands of migrants flooded into Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool and London – bringing in their wake an industrial proletariat, collapsing life expectancy, sanitary horror and, for some, unprecedented prosperity.

  As in Manchester in the 1780s, so in Bombay in the 1850s, the cotton industry sparked economic take-off. Luckily, the city was about to have a governor with a particular passion for weaving and spinning. ‘Cotton has always been a special hobby of mine,’ wrote Sir Bartle Frere in 1861 to a British business contact. ‘The capacity of India to supply cotton is absolutely unlimited … if the demand for cotton continues, there can be no doubt we can supply you all you want.’16 Traditionally, the cotton lords of Ma
nchester had preferred the plants of the American South for their raw material, which was cheaper to import and generally of higher quality than the Indian. ‘The supply in the English market from India is merely supplementary to that received from America, and the largest exports from India take place in those years in which there is a deficiency in the American crops,’ noted a commercial report on western India for the Lancashire Chambers of Commerce in 1853.17 In turn, the finished goods – made with either American or Indian cotton – were exported back to India, flooding the indigenous market with mass-produced mill-made cloth from the Lancashire factories. ‘It was the British intruder who broke up the Indian hand-loom and destroyed the spinning wheel. England began with driving the Indian cottons from the European market; it then introduced twist into Hindostan, and in the end inundated the very mother country of cotton with cottons,’ as Karl Marx put it. In 1824, Britain exported 1 million yards of cotton to India; by 1837 it was 64 million yards.18

  Bartle Frere aimed to improve the supply of raw cotton, and its production, by appointing a cotton commissioner with a mandate to cut transport costs from the cotton fields to the docks and erect new mills in the northern Byculla quarter. ‘I am convinced the growth of cotton factories in India is the very best thing which could happen for Manchester,’ he announced in 1862, with a frank expression of his priorities in India. It would improve the growing of raw cotton and act as a surplus source for Lancashire’s trading houses.

  The first effect of an extension of mills in India will be an improvement in the quality of the cotton used for local purposes and by India manufacturers … once improve the general quality of Indian cotton, so as to make it workable by such machinery, and you create a vast supply which is always in reserve for, and at the command of, the long purse of the English manufacturer.19

  Yet it was events in America, rather than England, which were to spur the boom of the mills and blacken Bombay’s skyline with smog. In April 1861, at the inception of the American Civil War, Northern Federal forces started to blockade the Southern Confederate cotton-exporting ports, ratcheting up the cost of freight and insurance and, above all, the price of cotton itself. Imports from the American South into Liverpool fell from 2.6 million bales in 1860 to fewer than 72,000 by 1862; in response, Surat cotton from India rose from 5 pence per lb to 24 pence per lb. Bombay seized the moment. ‘The produce of all the great cotton-fields of India, Nagpur, Berar, Guzerat, the South Mahratta country, found its way to Bombay in order to be exported to England, with all possible despatch while the high prices ruled and the blockade of the South American ports lasted,’ remembered Temple of the 1860s boom.20 Cotton exports to Europe rose from 490,000 bales in 1859 to near 890,000 by 1865, the vast majority heading to Britain. Wisely, Bombay also started its own production lines. Parsi merchants, Jewish traders and Bhatia industrialists seized the opportunity by commissioning new steam-powered mills which employed tens of thousands of migrant labourers: in 1854 there was only the Bombay Spinning and Weaving Company mill at Tardeo in central Bombay; by the mid-1860s there were some 10 mills employing 7,000 workers; by the late 1870s near 30 mills employing over 13,000 hands; and by 1900 around 80 mills providing jobs for 73,000 workers (the industry having diversified, by then, into the China market for yarn). As early as July 1860 one Bombay newspaper could boast:

  Capital was never more plentiful amongst us than at present, nor the spirit of enterprise more powerful. Money, to the amount of nearly a quarter of a million pounds sterling, has been invested during the last fortnight in the establishment of manufactories calculated to promote industry and assist in the development of the resources of the country. Bombay has long been the Liverpool of the East, and she is now become the Manchester also … In 1850 we question much if even the model of a cotton mill had found its way to Bombay: but now the tall chimneys of half-a-dozen factories tower solemn and sombre above the surrounding buildings.21

  Underpinning the export surge was the development of rail infrastructure. Just as Newcastle, Glasgow and Birmingham had metamorphosed into industrial cities on the back of rail, so Bombay’s exponential growth was made possible by steam transport. Its greatest promoter was Lord Dalhousie, governor-general of India (1848–56), who wrote in 1852 of rail’s capacity to produce in India ‘some similar progress in social improvement that has marked the introduction of improved communications in various Kingdoms of the Western World’. Education would spread, the caste system would crumble amid the enforced intimacy of third-class carriages, and new lines would ensure ‘the prevention of local famine and the uniform dispersion of food’.22 The first 34 kilometres of railway in India were laid by the Great Indian Peninsula Railway in 1853 between Bombay and Thana, but the real ambition was always to link up the Deccan plateau of west-central India with Bombay port. This involved boring through the Western Ghat mountain range to the east of Bombay and so providing James J. Berkley, chief resident engineer of the GIPR, with a perfect opportunity to show India the might of British engineering. ‘The passage of the Ghauts has always been a costly and serious obstruction to the trade of India,’ he explained in a paper to the Bombay Mechanics Institution in 1850. But with some 30,000 men working on his celebrated Bhore Ghaut Incline (with its terrifying mountaintop reversing station), Berkley judged that ‘it has always appeared to me to be impossible that the liberality and devices of English enterprise could so fail in their operation upon the industrial classes of India, as not to procure an ample supply of labour for the completion of undertakings materially affecting the prosperity of commerce, the public revenue, and the convenience of the people’.23 English technological efficacy combined with a vast resource of Indian labour would build the railways. The young Dinshaw Wacha attended Berkley’s talk. ‘It was a thrilling narrative of what the great railway engineer had accomplished in the way of tunnelling the two Ghats and the innumerable difficulties he had to surmount,’ he recalled. ‘Those tunnels are a permanent monument of his engineering skill and ingenuity.’24 They also accelerated the movement of industry into Bombay and boosted exports by connecting hinterland to port. At the same time, the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway was surging northwards to link the cotton fields of Gujarat with the mills of Bombay – one of Bartle Frere’s essential requirements to boost competitiveness. In 1862 there were only 917 kilometres of rail open for traffic within the Bombay region; by 1867 it had reached 1,865. But more infrastructure was needed.

  ‘At present your railways are like the Great Eastern, with nothing but canoes and catamarans to load and unload her,’ complained Frere to the Indian Supreme Council at Calcutta, referring to Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s epic ship. ‘We are doing well in this Presidency as regards traffic on all open lines, but I see everywhere that it can be increased, perhaps doubled, by a good network of roads affording the necessary complement to the great carrying engine already provided.’25 The Council obliged, and in the wake of the railway main lines came deeper docks, more roads, better bridges, a growing suburban network and, above all, an extensive programme of land reclamation. During the second half of the nineteenth century, in a quintessentially Victorian display of urban engineering, Bombay’s natural archipelago of seven islands was bolted together (like Boston) into the single littoral recognizable today. Bombay became a city of iron and steel, earning its identity as one of the great railway cities of the world – still obvious today in the daily mass commute of some 6 million Mumbaikers in and out of the city.

  Together with the cotton came new communities migrating into Bombay – from Gujarat and the Deccan – along the railway routes. Having stood at some half a million residents in the mid-1840s, by 1872 Bombay’s population had reached more than 644,000 (overtaking that of Calcutta) and climbed to 773,196 by the census of 1881. Of that cohort, 50 per cent had come from Bombay’s hinterland and spoke Mararthi as their native tongue (itself subject to some thirty or forty regional dialects), 28 per cent spoke Gujarati, 12 per cent Urdu, and just 1 per cent used English.
Only 28 per cent of the city’s dwellers had been born in Bombay. This overwhelming multiculturalism – the religions, languages, ethnicities and dress – was an abiding feature of commentary on nineteenth-century Bombay. Already in the 1820s, Mrs Anne Elwood, visiting her brother-in-law, the governor Mountstuart Elphinstone, thought the street scenes reminiscent of the last days of the Florence Carnival. Yet, ‘even in a fancy ball in London, or during the Carnival in Italy, where every one strives to be in a particular and original costume, it would be impossible to meet with a greater variety than … what may be seen every day in the Island of Bombay’. ‘On all sides, jostling and passing each other, are seen – Persian dyers; Bannian shop-keepers; Chinese with long tails; Arab horse dealers; Abyssinian youths … Armenian priests, with flowing robes and beards; Jews in long tunics and mantles,’ reported Viscountess Falkland in her Chow-Chow: Being Selections from a Journal Kept in India, Egypt and Syria (1857). G. W. Stevens commented on how ‘every race has its own costume; so that the streets of Bombay are a tulip-garden of vermilion turbans and crimson, orange and flame colour, of men in blue and brown and emerald waistcoats, women in cherry-coloured satin-drawers … of blazing purple or green that shines like a grass-hopper’. G. W. Forrest, author of Cities of India (1903), described Bombay as simply ‘a world of wonder’. ‘Here all races have met: Persians in huge shaggy hats, and British sailors in white; the strong, lithe, coal-black Afreedee seaman, tall martial Rajpoots, peaceful Parsees in cherry-coloured silk trousers, Chinamen with the traditional pigtail, swaggering Mussulmans in turbans of green, sleek Marwarees with high-fitting parti-coloured turbans of red and yellow.’26