Modern-day critics of Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy may say that he was no more than a drug lord who collaborated with a colonial power to enrich himself by engaging in a business that devastated the lives of many fellow humans, both Indian and Chinese. His supporters would argue that he was just a businessman who responded to the circumstances of his times. Moreover, they will point out the fact that Jamsetjee gave away a significant part of his fortune in charity. Mumbai is still served by the Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and the Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy Hospital. Whatever one thinks of him on balance, he was certainly a remarkable man living at a remarkable time in Mumbai’s history.
One of Jamsetjee’s lesser-known contributions to Mumbai is the introduction of ice cream. This was made possible by the regular supply of ice from Boston from the 1830s. An ‘ice-house’ was built to store the ice but the stock often ran out due to melting or delays in the supply chain. Not surprisingly, the rich saw ice as a way to display their wealth and Jamsetjee began to serve ice cream at his dinner parties. The very first time he served it, it was alleged that everyone caught a cold!14 Social rivalries within the city’s elite were just as intense in the mid-nineteenth century as they are today.
Another of Bombay’s merchant princes was David Sassoon, a Baghdadi Jew who had fled the despotic rule of Daud Pasha.15 When Sassoon arrived in Bombay in 1833, the city already had a significant Jewish population. He soon built a business empire trading in cotton and opium but the Sassoon family fortunes skyrocketed when the American Civil War cut off supplies of raw cotton between 1861 and 1865. The mills of Lancashire turned to India for raw material and Bombay witnessed a boom. David Sassoon died in 1864 but he is remembered through several institutions built by him and his sons in Mumbai and Pune.
Sassoon’s palatial house survives as Masina Hospital in the neighbourhood of Byculla. Readers familiar with Mumbai may wonder why one of the city’s richest residents built a house in such a crowded area but Byculla was in fact a fashionable suburb in the nineteenth century. The exterior of the main building is in good condition but the interiors have been haphazardly divided into cubicles for various medical activities. I did, however, find a grand wooden staircase that has survived largely unscathed and retains the feel of a merchant prince’s house. The David Sassoon Library, built in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda area, is another elegant example of the period’s architecture. The Sassoon Docks in Colaba were built by David’s son Albert-Abdullah. It is now used to land Mumbai’s daily supply of fish. This is the reason that on a hot day, when the wind is blowing from the east, Mumbai’s expensive Cuffe Parade neighbourhood finds itself cloaked in a strong fishy odour.
Not all of Bombay’s tycoons made their money from opium. Premchand Roychand would make, lose and regain his fortune in real estate and financial markets. His father had brought his family from Gujarat and had settled in a tenement in the densely packed Kalbadevi area. As a boy, Premchand would have heard about the exploits of David Sassoon and Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy. By the 1850s, he had amassed a sizeable capital base as a cotton broker. Around the same time, a small group of Indian brokers began to trade financial securities and bullion under a banyan tree in front of Town Hall (this later evolved into the Bombay Stock Exchange).
It was in this milieu of speculation and risk-taking that Premchand Roychand began to promote land reclamation projects. By this time, the original seven islands of Bombay had already been connected through land reclamation into a single land mass but growing population and commercial activity argued for further reclamation. What added fuel to the fire was the cotton boom caused by the American Civil War. So when Premchand launched the Backbay Reclamation Company, its shares spiralled up in a frenzy of speculation. Soon, the city saw many new banks, companies and construction projects being launched and Premchand was involved in several of them. It was mania like never before and, inevitably, it ended suddenly when North American cotton supplies resumed in 1865. The shares of the Backbay Reclamation Company dropped from Rs 50,000 to Rs 2000 and that of Bank of Bombay from Rs 2850 to Rs 87. Many investors were ruined and the economic collapse was so large that the city’s population dropped from 816,000 in 1864 to 644,000 in 1872!16
Premchand Roychand not only lost everything but was also blamed for the wider financial mess. Nonetheless, he seems to have been stoic about the whole affair and, over the following decades, would repay his creditors and gradually build back his fortune. When he died in 1906, he would be remembered for his extraordinary resilience and the large sums he gave away to charity and public works. For instance, the Rajabhai Clock Tower, one of Mumbai’s most iconic buildings, was built with funding from Premchand Roychand and is named after his mother.
The stories of these three tycoons give a good flavour of how Bombay evolved and expanded over the nineteenth century. These were larger-than-life figures who took big, even reckless risks but were also prepared to share their good fortune. Many of the city’s most loved buildings and institutions were built by them or others like them. More importantly, they bequeathed the city a risk-taking spirit that remains alive to this day. David Sassoon, Jamsetjee and Premchand were all migrants who had made it big in the city. Mumbai’s slums are still full of migrants who think they too can do it. This is why Mumbai slums are not places of hopelessness as one may expect but full of industry and enterprise despite all the squalor.
Oman to Zanzibar
Even as the Europeans were tightening their stranglehold on the Indian subcontinent and South East Asia, the Persian Gulf was witnessing its own geopolitical realignment. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Omanis had managed to evict the Portuguese in the mid-seventeenth century but a few decades later they found themselves under occupation by the Persians led by Nadir Shah (this is the same Nadir Shah who raided Delhi in 1739 and took away the famous Peacock throne from the Mughals). In 1747, Ahmad ibn Said united the various feuding Omani factions and then invited the Persian officers for a ceremonial banquet. At a pre-planned signal midway through the meal, the hosts suddenly attacked and massacred the guests.17 The occupying Persian forces were leaderless and were pushed out with ease. Nonetheless, the Omanis knew that they remained under threat and therefore opted for a long-term strategic alliance with the British. The British, in turn, were keen on building up a local ally as a bulwark against the Wahhabis of the Arabian peninsula. This special relationship with Britain would remain alive till the late twentieth century.
In 1804, Sultan Said came to the throne. His fifty-two-year rule is often seen as the golden age by the Omanis. His success was based on naval power that he systematically built up over time. Sultan Said supported shipbuilding yards at Muscat, Sur, Mutrah and Shinas (the one at Sur still builds wooden dhows) but also imported a number of European-designed ships built in Bombay.18 Using this growing fleet, and with implicit British support, the Omanis steadily expanded control over a maritime empire that extended from Gwadar on the Makran coast (now in Pakistan) to Zanzibar off the east African coast (now in Tanzania).
The economic engine of the empire was powered by cloves grown in Zanzibar and African slaves procured from the interiors. This meant that Sultan Said needed to maintain control over the Swahili coast. Recall that much of this coastline had been explored and settled by the Omanis in medieval times and some links had been intermittently maintained. Even before Sultan Said, the Omanis had nominal control over some parts of the coast but in the 1830s the Omani court moved to Zanzibar and tightened its grip. Many reminders of these times have survived on the island’s Stone Town including the palaces of rich merchants and the Omani nobility. The hanging balconies look exactly like those one sees in the older parts of Muscat and Ahmedabad, a reminder of linkages across the Indian Ocean. One can also see remains of the dark hovels where newly procured slaves were kept. Climbing down into one of the underground slave prisons, one can still feel some of the terror that newly arrived slaves, chained together, must have felt as they waited for an uncertain fate.
The tra
de in slaves, however, was eventually abandoned under pressure from the British. The role of the Royal Navy in ending this despicable practice is indeed praiseworthy but let it be clear that British motivations were not entirely driven by altruism. The British economy had already gone through the Industrial Revolution and was less dependent than its rivals on mass deployment of unskilled labour. Coal and steam now provided much of the muscle of their economy. Moreover, the British also had access to an inexhaustible supply of cheap indentured labour from India where British policies had systematically impoverished the population. So, the anti-slavery position of the British at least partly aimed at undermining rivals and was self-serving.
The Omani nobility would continue to rule over Zanzibar till as late as 1964 when a revolution would overthrow them. Many would be killed in riots and most of the remaining Arabs would leave. Zanzibar would then merge with Tanganyika on the mainland to form Tanzania. The island’s once thriving Indian community was also hurt by the revolution and most left for other shores. But I was pleasantly surprised to find a small group that still survives in the narrow lanes of Stone Town and maintains a handful of Hindu temples; a reminder of another age.
Steam Ships and Fishing Fleets
From the middle of the nineteenth century, the commercial and human dynamics of the Indian Ocean world suddenly went through a radical shift as Victorian-era transportation technologies began to reorder the landscape. Coal-powered railways and steam ships dramatically reduced the time taken to move goods and people over land and sea. It also changed the dynamics of naval war with the construction of steam-powered, armour-plated, iron-hulled warships. Amazingly, the very first such warship—HMS Warrior of the Royal Navy—has survived and has been beautifully restored. Maritime history enthusiasts can visit it in Portsmouth harbour. The design was still a hybrid as the Warrior also had masts for sails and its guns were lined along the sides for a broadside. Nonetheless, the contrast with the previous generation of ships is plainly visible if one compares it with HMS Victory that is also moored at Portsmouth harbour. The latter had been the most advanced war machine of its time and had participated in the Battle of Trafalgar as Nelson’s flagship (indeed, Nelson would be killed on its deck). Interestingly, the Warrior never participated in a war. Its design was so successful that all ships were subsequently designed with steam power and metal hulls, and the Warrior itself rapidly became outdated.
The other major factor that changed the dynamics of the Indian Ocean was the Suez Canal. As we have seen, the idea of a canal was not new and various versions had been built since ancient times. However, all the earlier versions had focused on connecting the Red Sea to the Nile and, in each case, was choked by sand and silt after a few years. In contrast, the nineteenth-century canal built jointly by the French and the Egyptians connected the Red Sea directly with the Mediterranean. It was opened in 1869 under French control but faced severe financial difficulties. Their Egyptian partners eventually sold their stake to the British. Combined with steam power, the Suez Canal soon changed the logistics of Atlantic–Indian Ocean trade as ships no longer had to make the long and arduous journey around Africa. Aden re-emerged as a major hub after centuries of decline.
One of the less anticipated effects of the Suez Canal was the flood of young, unmarried European women who headed for India and other colonies in search of husbands.19 Known as the ‘fishing fleet’, these women were drawn from all segments of society. Depending on their class background, they would marry British civilian and military officers, merchants, clerks and so on. Some even found their way into the harems of native princes. While Victorian society was very conscious of class, it was possible for an enterprising woman to climb the ladder in the East. An average-looking girl from a modest background could become a sought-after beauty if she made her way to a sufficiently remote outpost. The arrival of so many women transformed the Europeans in Asia into an endogamous ruling caste that lived in enclaves with conventions and etiquette completely separate from those of the indigenous people. The stage was set for the numerous Raj-era books about tiger hunting, amateur theatricals, and tea parties in hill stations.
Meanwhile, the ships also carried increasing numbers of Indians across the Indian Ocean and beyond, but their experience was very different. A key factor driving this churn of people was the shortage of labour in sugar-growing colonies after the British abolished slavery in 1833. Within a year, there were fourteen ships engaged in transporting Indian indentured workers from Calcutta to Mauritius.20 The original contracts were for five years at Rs 10 per month plus some food and clothing. An option of a free return passage was provided at the end of the contract. Soon Indian indentured workers were being transported to faraway places like the Caribbean and Fiji. Other European countries, such as France, also began to recruit workers. By the 1840s, the authorities began to encourage women to sign up so that self-perpetuating Indian communities could be created which in turn would reduce the need for constant replenishment from the mother country.
The recruitment of indentured workers was done by a network of Indian subagents who further contracted out their work. For example, Ghura Khan was British Guyana’s subagent at Buxar and paid his recruiters Rs 5 to Rs 8 per month plus Rs 5 for a man and Rs 8 for a woman (evidently women were more difficult to recruit). The whole supply chain was riddled with false promises and rampant abuse but repeated famines in India pushed increasing numbers to risk the journey. During 1870–79 alone, Calcutta shipped out 142,793 workers, Madras 19,104 and Pondicherry 20,269.21
Indentured workers and soldiers were not the only Indians on the move. The late nineteenth century saw Indian merchant and financial networks come alive again after a hiatus of centuries. Tamil Chettiar merchants and moneylenders spread across South East Asia. In Malaya they lent to Chinese tin miners and European planters, and in Burma they supplied credit to farmers. They operated through a system of guild-like firms and agencies, usually run by members of the extended family. One of the largest of these firms, established by Muthiah Chetty in the early 1900s, was headquartered in Kanadukanta in Chettinad, Tamil Nadu, but with offices in Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaya and French Indo-China. Similarly, Gujarati traders and moneylenders established themselves along the coast from South Africa to Oman.
A significant concentration of Indians settled around Durban in South Africa. Some had come as indentured workers and stayed back while others came freely in search of economic opportunities. By the end of the nineteenth century, their numbers not only equalled that of the white population but they were successfully competing with the Europeans as accountants, lawyers, clerks, traders and so on. This led to a series of discriminatory laws aimed at protecting the interests of the whites. This was the milieu to which a young lawyer called Mohandas K. Gandhi arrived in 1893. He was brought to South Africa by a well-established Gujarati businessman Dada Abdoolah to assist in a personal matter. However, he was soon part of a movement to oppose anti-Indian laws. In 1894, the Natal Indian Congress was established with Gandhi as its secretary. Thus began a journey.
The Scramble for Africa
The nineteenth century was a tumultuous time for the African shores of the Indian Ocean. The Cape at the southern tip of Africa had long been a Dutch colony but it was taken over by the British during the Napoleonic wars. The treaty of 1814 confirmed British control but a sizeable community of Dutch settlers continued to live there. Known as Afrikaners or Boers, they were constantly suspicious of the motives of their new rulers. When the British outlawed slavery, the Afrikaners saw it as a ruse to undermine them. Eventually large numbers of them decided from the 1830s to take their families, livestock, guns and African slaves (now dubbed as servants), and trek into the interiors. As one trekker subsequently wrote:
We abandoned our lands and homesteads, our country and kindred [because of] the shameful and unjust proceedings with reference to the freedom of our slaves: and yet it is not so much their freedom that drove us to such lengths as their being placed o
n an equal footing with Christians, contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race and religion. . . . we rather withdrew in order thus to preserve our doctrines in purity.22
Just as the Afrikaners were moving into the interiors of what is now South Africa, the area was also witnessing a large influx of Bantu tribes from the north-east. A prolonged drought in the early nineteenth century had caused these groups to migrate but there was a more immediate cause—the rise of the Zulus. The Zulu tribe had been converted into a military machine by the famous leader Shaka. Using a combination of spears and fast-moving, disciplined units, the Zulus were even capable of taking on guns on occasion. As they expanded their territories, the other African tribes were forced to flee. This is known as the ‘Mfecane’ or The Scattering. The current location of various tribes in southern Africa is a direct outcome of this episode. Swaziland and Lesotho were both founded as a result of refugee groups banding together under powerful chiefs to defend themselves. The Xhosa (Nelson Mandela’s tribe of origin) were among the worst affected as they were being crushed between the Zulus and white settlers.
Thus, the political dynamics of South Africa was never simply a white and black matter (if you will pardon the bad pun). There was just as much rivalry and bloodshed within each racial group as between them. The Khoi-San, the original inhabitants of the country, were the sorriest victims—already marginalized, enslaved and dispersed, they would play almost no role in subsequent events.
The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History Page 23