Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  However, the Haussmannesque arrogance of Crawford’s reign proved too much for many Bombay residents: the paving, draining, street-widening and improving were carried out at a speed which showed little sensitivity to the city’s complicated caste and ethnic politics. As with the Vihar water project, there were allegations of favouring improvements to the European quarter at the expense of the rest of the city as well as a careless approach to costs in a post-crash era when the city could ill-afford unnecessary expenditure. Many wealthier residents were also uncomfortable with Crawford’s detailed property survey and ensuing demand for retrospective taxes. Just as London’s Metropolitan Board of Works would finally be replaced by the democratically elected London County Council in 1888, so Commissioner Crawford was removed, and in 1872 the Bombay Municipal Act established a Municipal Corporation, half of whose sixty-four members were to be elected by ratepayers. It was on the Corporation that the future British Member of Parliament for Central Finsbury, Naoroji Dadabhai, garnered his taste for politics. A brilliant Bombay polymath – combining roles as a cotton trader with a professorship in mathematics and natural philosophy at Elphinstone College – Dadabhai progressed from the Corporation to the Bombay legislative council, thence to the Indian National Congress, before fighting seats in the British General Elections of 1886 and 1892. Spectacularly disproving the future Liberal prime minister Lord Rosebery’s prediction that the people of London would never elect a ‘black man’, Dadabhai became an active figure in British radical circles and a conspicuous embodiment of Bombay’s colonial, cosmopolitan ethos.

  In London, the County Council sought to transform the British capital into a city worthy of its imperial calling by laying out the sweeping boulevards of Holborn Kingsway and the Aldwych, as well as expanding Trafalgar Square. In Bombay, the Corporation was the instrument for an equivalent programme of modernization and extolling of Empire: the transformation of the ‘Queen of Isles’ into a colonial city, ‘her population expanded to an extent, unparalleled in past eras; and those great works of public convenience and adornment, which fitted her to take high rank among the most beautiful possessions of a world-wide empire, were by the exertions and genius of her leading men brought to completion’.67 In a ‘business city’ such as Bombay, the Corporation was just the vehicle to exploit the age of steam and progress, technology and improvement, the Suez Canal and the quickening use of telegram from the 1860s. Under its aegis would come all the other evidence of civilization – the train stations and the docks, the post offices and courts, the gas and sewerage, the land reclamation and tram tracks – working steadily to reveal the worthy, pragmatic benefits of Empire. And its architecture would say so. In contrast to the fine, classical delicacy of the old town hall, the bombastic Municipal Corporation Building erected in 1884 was a red-blooded statement of the place of Bombay within the British Empire and the function of local government. With a 72-metre tower fronting this riot of Bombay Gothic styling (or ‘free treatment of early Gothic with an Oriental feeling’, as the architect put it), the building was a championing of municipal modernity. Its hydraulic lifts, fireproofing and electricity were a testament to the improving spirit of the times and corporate purpose of Bombay. Unsurprisingly, the designs drew heavily upon Joseph Chamberlain’s Venetian-inspired Council House in Birmingham and had emblazoned upon them an equally adamant belief in the virtues of municipal action: on the front façade hovered an enormous winged figure representing Urbs Prima in Indis – the First City of India.

  MERCHANT PRINCES: ICONS OF PROGRESS

  ‘Though many distinguished Britons played a great part in the making of Bombay … the city is essentially the handiwork of the Indian communities also,’ Sir Lovat Fraser, editor of the Times of India, generously conceded. ‘Hindus and Mussulmans and Parsees and Jews, have in equal measure spent themselves and their wealth in the advancement and embellishment of the Gate of India. To their enterprise and generosity, not less than to the prescient control of capable Englishmen, we owe the magnificent capital of Western India as it exists today.’68

  Despite the Empire’s obvious gifts to Bombay, the British were always more willing to concede that indigenous residents might have played a greater role in its development than they had in the case of Calcutta. Coming from Bengal, the Bombay governor Mountstuart Elphinstone was immediately impressed with the greater ‘zeal and liberality’ he saw on display in ‘the construction of roads and public buildings’. Indeed, from the early 1850s, commentators keen to debate the reasons as to why Bombay was rising and Calcutta was falling focused on the differing approaches of their native elite. While the Calcutta merchant classes, it was said, tended to retreat to country estates to live as landed rentiers, the Parsis and Muslim Gujaratis of Bombay had little opportunity for rural investment and no other home than the city. ‘Bombay’s affairs were taken over by a band of dedicated industrialists, businessmen and entrepreneurs who were large in vision, big in money and unsparing of effort,’ as the Calcutta historian Asok Mitra puts it. ‘Bombay was their passion, their destiny and apart from straining all their surplus energy for the good and prosperity of the city, they gave away their own money in trusts and charities to make Bombay strong, cultured, beautiful.’69

  The very same ethos which inspired Victorian merchant princes to endow the art galleries, museums, schools, universities, medical colleges and parks of urban Britain was at play in Bombay – but on an even grander scale. ‘There are many valuable charitable institutions in Bombay, all of which are liberally supported by the rich Natives, as well as by the English,’ wrote James Gray in his 1852 Life in Bombay. ‘Amongst these is one especially worthy of notice, the Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy Hospital, built and endowed at the joint expense of the munificent Parsee Knight, and the East India Company.’70 After Jejeebhoy had made his money shipping opium with Jardine, Matheson & Co., before then branching into cotton, banking and shipping, he poured the profits back into the civic fabric of Bombay – endowing a further obstetric hospital, school of industry and school of art. (It was to the last of these that the sculptor John Lockwood Kipling would come from Stoke-on-Trent to teach. His son Rudyard was born in a bungalow on the art school grounds.) What was so remarkable about Bombay was that the liberal Jejeebhoy was just one philanthropist of many.

  David Sassoon was born in Baghdad in 1792 to a Sephardic family of financiers and religious scholars. He arrived in Bombay in 1832, fleeing persecution of the Jews, and soon set up a small counting house, then a carpet warehouse, before providing finance to other industrialists and emerging as one of the city’s leading commodity traders. The Sassoon portfolio ranged wide as he bought up companies, turned around commercial failures and invested in new enterprises to take advantage of Bombay’s transit point between the markets of Europe and China. ‘Silver and gold, silks, gums and spices, opium and cotton, wool and wheat – whatever moves over sea or land feels the hand or bears the mark of Sassoon & Co.,’ was how one contemporary explained the breadth of his business.71 His eldest son, Abdullah (later Sir Albert), grew the family firm – branching into cotton-weaving and then building the vast Sassoon Docks in 1875 – and continued the philanthropic ethos. The Sassoons endowed synagogues, schools, boys’ reformatories, hospitals, convalescent homes and, perhaps most famously, the David Sassoon Mechanics Institute and Library, which stands to this day, in all its Venetian Gothic finery, on Mahatma Gandhi Road in the ‘Kala Ghoda’ district. The origins of the library go back to 1847, when a group of young mechanics and foremen of the Royal Mint and Government Dockyard decided to establish a museum and library of mechanical models and architectural designs. Sassoon then funded its development as a sanctuary of learning and improvement for Bombay’s industrious classes (which the cloistered calm of its reading rooms still admirably sustains); he was rewarded for his patronage with a fine marble statue in the entrance hall. Opposite the library there also used to stand the 13-foot, bronze statue of the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) on his ‘black horse’
donated by Sir Albert Sassoon to the city in commemoration of the Prince’s visit in 1875. In 1965, the ‘Kala Ghoda’ (as it was known) was removed to the graveyard of Empire in the Byculla Gardens – to be replaced, in a superb display of Mumbai’s unrepentant modernism, by a carpark.

  ‘Kala Ghoda’. Albert Sassoon presents Bombay with Statue of the Prince of Wales (1879), with the Mechanics Institute and Library in the background.

  Besting even Jejeebhoy and Sassoon was the Hindu banker Premchund Roychund. ‘During his prosperity he strove to make the best use of his money, and gave several of the noblest benefactions for the service of education and of charity that have ever been given by a Native of India,’ thought Sir Richard Temple.72 The University Library and Rajabai Clock Tower, which was named after his mother and whose bells used to peel out of a Sunday ‘God Save the Queen!’, instilling the merits of both patriotism and punctuality, stands testimony to Roychund’s extensive urban philanthropy, which continued even after his losses in the cotton crash of ’65. There were other equally generous donors: businessman Gokuldas Tejpal funded a hospital; Mulji Jetha built the largest textile market in the city, still carrying his name; Mangaldas Nathubhai encouraged education by establishing scholarships; and the ‘Peabody of the East’, Sir Cowasji Jehangir Readymoney, used his trading fortune, built up from working first as a lowly godown keeper, to give Bombay a convocation hall, an ophthalmic hospital, an art gallery and forty water fountains.73

  One of Mumbai’s most telling testimonies to this civic culture of philanthropy is the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, in the northern Byculla district. In the aftermath of the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in London’s Hyde Park – when the diffuse riches of Empire had been brought together for the admiration of the British people under Joseph Paxton’s ‘Crystal Palace’ – the governor of Bombay, Lord Elphinstone, appointed a committee to establish a ‘Museum of Economic Products’ that would similarly showcase ‘the raw products of Western India and the methods of converting them into manufactured articles and to gather together a collection of natural history specimens’. And just as South Kensington was to establish a Museum of Science and Art, soon known as the Victoria and Albert Museum, so Bombay would have its own museum to prove its contribution to the age of Progress and Improvement. What was more, a Bombay museum would offer the city’s merchant princes an opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the Crown in the aftermath of the 1857 Mutiny. In the words of businessman Sir Jagannath Shankarseth, president of the Museum Committee, the new institution would be a tribute ‘worthy of the august and good sovereign who wielded the scepter of the mightiest and most beneficent empire the globe has ever bowed beneath’. So Shankarseth joined together with the merchants Mangaldas Nathubhai, Rustomjee Jejeebhoy and David Sassoon – as well as Sir George Birdwood of the Grant Medical College, Dr George Buist of the Bombay Times and physician and surgeon Dr Bhau Daji Lad and others – to build a Victoria and Albert Museum at the Botanical Gardens. The foundation stone was laid by Sir Bartle Frere in 1862, with a clear injunction that he did not want a ‘mere collection of rarities and curiosities’, but an improving display of Indian and Eastern economic products to promote manufacturing, engineering and craft. The displays would be housed in a resplendent Palladian building, more Calcutta than Bombay, with plinths, friezes and Corinthian columns full of neo-classical bravura about the purpose of Empire. Inside, however, stone gave way to iron as the pillars and railings of the upper balcony spoke to the museum’s consciously urban, mid-Victorian sensibility. In many ways, the BDL is a generic site of the British Empire – with its statue of Prince Albert (donated by David Sassoon, complete with Hebrew inscription), its busts of Victoria, its display cabinets of brassware and copper, ceramics and silverware, it clearly has the same instincts behind it as the Manchester Royal Institution or the Melbourne Royal Exhibition Building. After a brilliant restoration project in 2007, its gaudy, overflowing and inchoate style manages to capture the spirit of 1860s Bombay and its essential conviction in the power of technology, progress and wealth creation.74

  The V&A and the Municipal Buildings would not be Bombay’s only monuments to modernity. Across the city, the ideology of the later nineteenth-century British Empire was coming to be revealed through an architecture unrivalled for its heterogeneity.* Fronted by an esplanade of resplendent colonial edifices, Bombay stood ready to take from Calcutta the title of ‘City of Palaces’. ‘Her public buildings are remarkably handsome and imposing, beautifying her broad streets and adorning her common resorts,’ thought Sir Richard Temple. ‘Few cities in the world can show a finer series of structures.’75 This was not, however, the initial sentiment. ‘When the English nation suddenly found itself the possessor of a great empire and of its great works of architecture, architecture in England was at such a low ebb that we could not realise what was essential to the progress of art in India,’ reflected Sir Bartle Frere in 1870. ‘Our ancestors in consequence left no good architecture behind them in India.’76 What Frere had in mind was the unsympathetic neo-classicism of Wellesley’s Calcutta, as well as Bombay’s Regency town hall (described by the Bombay Builder in the 1860s as ‘a decayed old beau of the last century, whose wig sits awry and whose false teeth are falling out’).77

  For there had erupted in India, some two decades after England, a colonial version of the ‘Battle of the Styles’, which pitted the supporters of classicist and Italianate design against the Gothicists. In Britain, such battles had usually centred around the construction of provincial town halls in cities such as Manchester, Northampton and Liverpool, as well as major national buildings including the India Office and the Grand Midland Hotel at St Pancras Station. In Bombay, the debate had begun in the late 1840s with the construction of the Afghan Memorial Church of St John the Evangelist at Colaba in the south of the city. Dedicated to the British victims of the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–42), it was designed by the ubiquitous Henry Conybeare, working from outline proposals by George Gilbert Scott, its ‘Early English’ styling beginning the move away from classicism towards more Gothic fashioning. In Britain, the nuances of the Gothic Revival were highly complex terrain – with the precise details of Early English, domestic, thirteenth-century French and later Venetian Gothic all aggressively contested by architects and commentators alike. The chief protagonist in these architectural struggles was often the Ecclesiologist, the journal of the Camden Society dedicated to reviving ‘the principles which guided medieval builders’ and always keen to excommunicate transgressors. In 1846 the journal decreed two colonial styles for India: ‘Hyperborean’ for the north of the country, based on the native, vernacular style; and ‘Speluncular’ for the south, involving heavy planes and a lot of polychrome masonry. The latter pointed to the Venetian Gothic styling of pointed arches and sculptural ornament, of coloured stonework and free design which John Ruskin would popularize so successfully in The Stones of Venice; more importantly for Bombay, it was the favoured architectural idiom of Sir Bartle Frere. So, when the rampart walls came down, the domes, turrets and towers of ‘Bombay Gothic’ rose in their place.78

  The contribution of Indian merchant princes to this aesthetic is particularly interesting. For all Bombay’s later role in the development of Indian national consciousness – as the foundation city of the Indian National Congress and starting point for Gandhi’s 1942 ‘Quit India’ campaign – in matters of art and design the Parsi elite appeared more than happy to allow European idioms (such as the classical temple housing the Victoria and Albert Museum) to dominate their cityscape. There existed a form of deep cultural hesitation to beautifying the city in indigenous styles. Only Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy’s School of Art seemed interested in preserving and developing traditional Indian pottery, carving and architecture. And through the teachings of Lockwood Kipling and others at the school, there began to emerge that fusion of English Gothic and so-called Indo-Saracenic designs which would come to reshape the face of Bombay and change British ar
chitecture in India for good.

  Across the road from the School of Art, heading north towards the Muslim district lining Mohammed Ali Road, stands a glorious product of this cultural fusion. Commissioner Crawford’s Market (since renamed Mahatma Phule Market), built to eradicate the unhygienic bazaars but now something of a public health challenge itself, is a gaudy mix of Flemish-Moorish, even Norman, styling. Its three large gateways, whose arches are distinctly coloured with bright red stone from Bassein, are interlaid with sculpted marble panels in bas-relief celebrating commerce and industry, and all overseen by a 39-metre-high clocktower. The market is now disfigured with a corrugated iron roof, collapsing guttering and fume-blackened sculpture, but among the pineapple, onion and lime sellers in the interior, it manages to hold on to its greatest secret. There, between sleeping vendors and water-melons, is a gleefully ornamental water fountain designed by William Emerson and then encased with decorative panels by Lockwood Kipling. These playful, naturalistic designs – mixing gargoyles, goddesses (now with red bindi marks), monkeys and alligators – might have come straight from the pages of Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of Gothic’. It symbolizes the evolution of the Gothic Revival away from church design and its transformation of the secular architecture of Bombay.