Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  Such high levels of migration and ethnic diversity made for a much more complicated colonial geography than the traditional European ‘White Town’ versus Indian ‘Dark Town’. Of course, a racial divide overlaid the city, and West remained distinct from East. ‘Cross but one street and you are plunged in the native town,’ explained G. W. Stevens. ‘In your nostrils is the smell of the East, dear and never to be forgotten; rapturously you snuff that blending of incense and spices and garlic, and sugar and goats and dung.’27 A visiting Scottish missionary, Norman Macleod, recorded the inequalities in less romantic terms. ‘As to the native town, no Irish village of the worst kind has a look of greater poverty, confusion and utter discomfort,’ he wrote in Peeps at the Far East: A Familiar Account of a Visit to India (1871). ‘The low huts covered with palm leaves – the open drains – the naked children, with their naked fathers and miserable-looking mothers … present a most remarkable contrast to the wealth and luxury of the neighbouring city.’28

  But in Bombay, wealth as well as race played its part in the social topography as a prosperous elite clustered along the south and west side of the city while the poor were shunted together amid ill-planned and insanitary alleys north of the fort. Industrialization – the arrival of tens of thousands to work in the docks, the mills and the railways – intensified the demarcations with workers huddled in overcrowded tenement chawls around their factories on the north of the island, while the middle classes sought refuge up-wind. In 1881, the British-dominated section of the South Fort had a density of 27 persons per acre; in the Indian-occupied North Fort there were 258 per acre and outside the city walls it could reach 700 per acre.29 At the height of mill production, Girangaon – ‘the village of the mills’ – stretched over 1,000 acres across the centre of Bombay. Along the eastern foreshore, in Dongri and Majid Bunder, the dockworkers stayed in kholis consisting of a single room or two. Within these slums, elements of a multicultural proletariat could also be found as poor Europeans were housed cheek by jowl with poor Indians. An 1863 ‘Report on European Pauperism’ commented how ‘European operatives on the railway are more constantly and closely connected with the natives than any other class of Europeans, and for this reason their moral condition has an important national significance which cannot be safely over-looked.’30 Indeed, European vagrancy after 1857–8 became a growing concern as ever greater numbers of labourers arrived to take up construction and manual work. At the other extreme, Bombay’s wealthy merchant princes could just as easily be found living within European neighbourhoods. Yet, in Bombay, it was congestion that shaped the fabric of the city more than cosmopolitanism. Sir Bartle Frere was determined to liberate the fetid urban core.

  FRERE TOWN

  Standing above a crown of yucca plants in the gardens of London’s Victoria Embankment is a brass statue of Sir Bartle; with his back to Whitehall’s great offices of state, he looks thoughtfully out towards the River Thames. It is a perfect site for this engineer of Empire: beneath his feet flow some of the 134 kilometres of sewer mains installed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette as well as the tube trains of London Underground’s District Line. Indeed, the Victoria Embankment as a whole stands as a concrete testament to the mid-Victorian determination to use all their advances in engineering, technology and planning to tame Britain’s filthy, insanitary cities. This was not simply a phenomenon of London. In Paris in the 1850s Georges-Eugène Haussmann, préfet of the Seine département, began to cut great boulevards through the arrondissements of medieval Paris to create a capital fit for Emperor Napoleon III. ‘Second Empire’ Paris, with its grandeur, apartment blocks, train termini, parks and cafés, was the epitome of modernity – ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’. In Vienna, the thirteenth-century walls of the city were demolished to make way for Emperor Franz Joseph I’s Ringstrasse, along which were built museums, university departments, government ministries and other embodiments of state power. This was the European vision of improvement and progress which Bartle Frere was ready to transfer to India.

  Born in 1815 to an East Anglian family with a lineage of parliamentary and diplomatic service, Frere was trained up for the East India Company at Haileybury before beginning his Company career as a writer in Bombay in 1834. His apprenticeship took him across the Bombay Presidency (the administrative region for the British Empire in the west of India) and then Karachi and Calcutta. At each posting, Frere showed a passion for public works – water supplies and education in the Maratha state of Satara; irrigation and harbour works in Karachi; and railways everywhere. When he returned to Bombay in 1862 as governor, Sir Bartle and Lady Frere journeyed by the first train to cross India from the Indian Ocean to the Arabian Sea. It was a suitable preamble to his plans for the city.

  With a booming population and accelerating economy, Bombay Fort’s gates and bastions, ramparts and moat were anachronistic obstacles to economic progress. It was a seventeenth-century relic of when the East India Company ruled Bombay as a garrison town, and not a credible urban setting for the industrial age of railway, steamboats and telegrams. ‘The maintenance of the Fort of Bombay,’ wrote the Times correspondent as early as 1841, ‘is not only useless, but has become a downright and most serious nuisance to the inhabitants at large. It is the source of a ridiculous waste of money to Government itself.’31 Bombay resident James Gray criticized the government residence within the fort as ‘much more like a prison than a vice-regal abode’.32 Others thought the entire fort ‘cramped in space, badly situated and imperfectly ventilated … erected at a time when civilization was but little advanced in the settlements of the East India Company’.33 There had been previous attempts to open up the fort, notably in 1787, when a Special Committee (along the lines of Dublin’s Wide Street Commissioners) urged the widening of principal streets in the town, but planning reform was made more urgent by the 1857 Indian Mutiny, or First War of Indian Independence, and its aftermath. The rebellion was a seismic assault on British power in India. It began with a revolt of sepoy soldiers in the Bengal army (angry over mistreatment and threats to their military privileges) before cascading into a much broader civil uprising and culminating in an assault on Delhi to restore Mughal power across India. Fed on lurid tales of massacres at Kanpur and the defiling of English women by rapacious Moors (Indians), the British army steadily and bloodily restored colonial rule. In Bombay, investment in technology and urban planning was accelerated as part of this reassertion of imperial hegemony. This signalled the transition of the city from a Western defence fort into a presidency capital of India – in the words of Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra, ‘the metamorphosis of Bombay from a trading centre into a multifunctional industrial port-town’. And, in the aftermath of the Mutiny, there was now the money to reshape the city, since over £80 million had poured into Bombay during the five-year export boom brought about by the American Civil War.34

  In January 1863 the three great gates of the fort’s ramparts – Apollo, Church and Bazaar – were levelled, then the water tanks sealed, the encircling swamps drained and further consolidation between the Bombay islands approved. The Ramparts Removal Committee succeeded in widening roads, erecting bridges, building houses and joining the fort area to the city. In London, the 1860s were known as the ‘time to pull down’, as the Underground, the Embankment and new boulevards and railway lines honeycombed the capital; in Bombay, these were known as the ‘years of improvement’, as Frere’s embrace of modernity displayed a similar absence of nostalgia. Yet the resulting urban plan was not without elegance. On top of the spot where Church Gate had stood, Flora Fountain was erected as a conscious act of beautification for the new Bombay. Designed by R. Norman Shaw and sculpted in fine Portland stone, the Roman goddess Flora stands above some bullish-looking carp, from whose mouths jets of water shoot out into the open clams below. The statue could have been removed from the Boboli Gardens or a Roman mansion, but today resides in the midst of Mumbai as a glistening, whitewashed traffic island, opposite the modernist martyrs’ memoria
l of Hutatma Chowk. Due east from Flora’s Fountain, in front of the city’s neo-classical town hall, erected in the 1830s as both a symbol of the British Empire’s Roman aspirations and as a meeting-place for the Royal Asiatic Society, Frere then laid out Elphinstone Circle, an urban park in the heart of the old fort, in honour of his predecessor. The circular garden’s lawn and Banyan trees are themselves encircled by a terrace of uniform, classical buildings, with an ornamental arcade beneath them that would not have looked out of place in Regency Brighton. This was to be Frere’s commercial district, built on the back of the cotton boom, and its first tenant was the Bank of Bombay. Today, Horniman Circle (as it was later renamed in honour of Benjamin Horniman, pro-independence editor of the Bombay Chronicle) retains that self-same corporate sensibility: beneath the Circle’s sand-blasted stonework, dotted with neo-classical keystone heads, a Hermès flagship store and other global boutiques now occupy the arcade.

  Frere would have approved, because his Bombay was a business city. ‘It has never in past times been the proud capital of a mighty empire like Delhi; it has not even been the seat of a wealthy provincial kingdom like Ahmeddabad or Bijapur. It has never been the centre of a great historical religion likes Benares,’ explained James Furneaux.35 As a result, Bombay contained, in the words of an 1880s pamphlet, ‘no elaborate antique structures, no features of ancient greatness, which people run to see with heightened curiosity … There is no “Taj Mahal” of spotless marble masonry and unblemished purity.’36 Instead, this was a workaday city, ‘with an air of businesslike activity pervading every street’.37 Visitors to Manchester at the height of its industrial might in the 1830s always marvelled at the unnatural speed of the people and the crush of the streets: Alexis de Tocqueville described how ‘crowds are ever hurrying this way and that … their footsteps are brisk, their looks preoccupied and their appearance sombre and harsh’.38 So commentators on Victorian Bombay complained of ‘the rush of agents and merchants immersed in large-scale financial speculation; the more or less rushed pace of official and private employees going to work, checking their watches; every person concentrating hard on his work and walking fast and straight without looking around’. In one Maratha account of this increasingly foreign-feeling city, money-making had subsumed the entire urban ethos. ‘In Bombay, even soil has a price,’ noted the Mumbaicha Vrittanta (1889). ‘It is not possible to spend even a single day in this city without money. Everything has to be bought.’39 The sensitive Sir Dinshaw Wacha lamented the ignoring of antique structures or features of ancient greatness, deeply regretting how ‘Bombay has been intensely shopkeeping, and that is the reason why the temples, the mosques and other places of worship inspire neither reverence nor awe, let alone beauty and joy’.40

  Frere’s ambition was to intensify the shopkeeping. ‘When the Bombay walls fell, great was the fall thereof … Bombay now threw out her arms like a giant refreshed in a new atmosphere and Samson-like burst away the bonds of a hundred years,’ was how one resident remembered the impact of Frere’s assault on the fort.41 Just as Haussmann had opened up medieval Paris to allow for the free circulation of capital, goods and services (as well as soldiers) across the city, so Frere Town’s easy access betwixt the docks, the mills, the banks and the trading floors would ensure the future prosperity of Bombay. As such, it makes sense to think of Sir Bartle Frere less as a Baron Haussmann and more of a Joseph Chamberlain. As mayor of Birmingham, Chamberlain cut Hill Street and New Street through the cramped quarters of the inner-city St Mary’s ward, lined the new Corporation Street with offices and shops and beautified the urban core complete with Council House and Victoria Square as symbols of civic pride. What is more, he ensured that the council retained the freehold and operated an aggressive leasing strategy in order to retain any surplus for the ratepayers. Chamberlain’s genius was to combine profit with civic dignity; to use commercial acumen for the glory of the conurbation. ‘Birmingham is above all else a business city, run by business men on business principles,’ as an American magazine admiringly put it in 1890. Frere might have hoped for similar approbation as he auctioned off land-sites made available by the fort demolition process to private developers and diverted the funds back into urban renewal projects. It was a virtuous circle which redeveloped the fort quarter (whose seventeenth-century origins are now totally obliterated) and helped Bombay’s economy scale dangerously inflated heights.

  ‘How many alive still remember those silver times?’ asked Arthur Crawford, the former municipal commissioner, of booming 1860s Bombay,

  … when there was a new bank or new ‘Financial’ almost every day – when it was a common thing, in strolling from your office to the dear old Indian Navy Club, to stop a moment in the seething Share Market and ask your broker, ‘Well, Mr B. or Bomanji! What’s doing?’ before then going for tiffin and ordering a pint of champagne – no one ever drank anything but champagne in those days.42

  With tens of millions of pounds flooding into Bombay from Lancashire’s cotton orders (which, despite the city’s expanding domestic production, still constituted a sizeable part of the urban economy), all sorts of investment schemes miraculously appeared to soak up the surplus capital. ‘Financial associations formed for various purposes sprung up like mushrooms; companies expanded with an inflation as that of bubbles; projects blossomed only to decay,’ recalled Sir Richard Temple. By January 1865 the ‘City of Gold’ could boast 31 banks, 16 financial associations, 8 land companies, 16 cotton press companies, 10 shipping companies, 20 insurance companies and 62 joint stock companies, most of them the product of the previous five years. The land companies, or khados, offered by far the most inflated business enterprises with their dock construction projects and reclamation projects. The Back Bay, Mody Bay, Apollo Bay and Mazagon reclamation companies collectively accounted for 94.5 per cent of the 206 million rupees of paid-up capital for companies registered in 1863–5.43 ‘Not only were baseless schemes put forth,’ continued Sir Richard, ‘but also schemes, which originally had a sound foundation were pushed forward so imprudently that they ended in becoming unsound and involving in loss or ruin those who were concerned in them.’44

  No matter. While the Bombay bubble kept floating upwards, vast riches were accumulated by the city’s merchant princes, headed by the ‘Supreme Pontiff of Speculation’ Premchund Roychund. This Hindu merchant’s early fortune had been made by his speed to market with privileged information on cotton pricing. Before British ships lowered anchor, Roychund’s network of sailors and dockers managed to ascertain for him the London and Liverpool prices and he then speculated accordingly on the Bombay exchange. ‘His bark rode on the crest of the wave, and he was the acknowledged leader among the knot of speculators from whom many financial associations had their origin,’ in Temple’s judgement.45 Roychund nursed his fortune carefully enough to become a major shareholder in the Bank of Bombay as well as a leading public dignitary. But while the modest Roychund was personally frugal with his wealth, other profiteers took to the lush, breezy heights of Malabar Hill, then as now Bombay’s most exclusive suburb, for a display of conspicuous consumption. ‘The immense bungalows of the rich merchants and the high government officials are ranged, with their gardens and terraces, along the side of the hill,’ was how the French writer Louis Rousselet described the plutocratic neighbourhood, revealing again Bombay’s racial intermingling. ‘Some of the houses display a richness and sumptuousness truly Asiatic. Columns support the verandahs and porticoes, and large flights of steps, bordered by China vases, lead to terraces on which are collected works of art both of Europe and Asia.’46 ‘Rich foliage plants in profusion adorn the entrances, where well-attired servants, assuming a conscious air of importance, stand about in readiness to obey orders,’ said another account of the Malabar lifestyle. ‘Carriages well appointed with liveried servants drive up in a style that accords with the air of luxury and ease apparent everywhere.’47

  But then, half a world away, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army
of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on 9 April 1865. The American Civil War had been lost by the South, and it was only a matter of time before the Northern blockade would be lifted and cotton shipments resume to Lancashire. ‘The price of Bombay cotton fell fast, property in produce estimated at many millions sterling declined in a few weeks to less than half the value.’ Banks crashed, financial associations folded, pyramid investment schemes collapsed, and the merchants of Malabar Hill went into liquidation. The bubble had burst, and the cotton mania was over. Some 40 per cent of Bank of Bombay debts had to be written off, and Premchund Roychund was among the most high-profile casualties. ‘Never had I witnessed in any place a ruin so widely distributed, nor such distress following so quickly on the heels of such prosperity,’ said Temple.48

  HANDMAIDENS OF CIVILIZATION

  The crash cascaded through all elements of ‘society’, and those already on the bottom rung of Bombay life had an even harder time to deal with than the fallen merchant princes. Conditions in the northern half of the city, around the mills and tenements, in the alleys and lanes, were existentially miserable both before and after 1865. An essential precondition of improving them was official acknowledgement of the reasons behind such Dickensian squalor. ‘The present sanitary movement in England is even there of very recent origin,’ wrote Henry Conybeare, architect, engineer and superintendent of Bombay repairs, in 1852, ‘and the great importance of the subject had been as yet scarcely recognized in India.’ Unlike in Britain, where a library of sanitary reports, parliamentary investigations and official publications from the registrar general to local medical officers of health had been exposing the wretched state of industrial cities since the 1820s, there was a crippling absence of comparable information about Victorian Bombay. What was more, public opinion still seemed to care far more about law enforcement than public health. ‘In fact, the general impression seems to be, that a defective police is a greater municipal evil than a defective sanitary condition.’ It was a ridiculous position, thought Conybeare, ‘for the only object of a police is the protection of life and property; and … what is this to the thousands of lives which it can be proved annually lost in Bombay “for want of the most evident sanitary precautions”’. Indeed, the superintendent of repairs was willing to estimate that ‘a very large proportion, probably nearly one-half of the deaths, from 12,000 to 16,000 in number, that annually occur in this island, are preventable’.49 This was the conclusion which eventually secured the establishment of a proper ethnographic census for the city, a Sanitary Commission, a Public Health Commission, a Commission on the Drainage and Water Supply of Bombay and a concerted programme of municipal improvement to sanitary infrastructure. It was almost a textbook replica of the process of sanitary improvement which had been adopted in British cities.