by Jerry Pinto
Similarly, I was aware that Banias and Brahmins and Thakurs existed as did Bengalis and Gujaratis and Malayalis, but it never occurred to me that these differences could be cause for rift and division, even bloodshed.
In the Lucknow of the 1950s, we asked some basic questions from an individual. Was he a bore or was he engaging? Could he spina decent yarn? Could we get a good meal at his house? Did he know any jokes besides the ones he had mugged up from the Reader’s Digest? A person’s worth was measured by his ability to make others laugh.
Founder-editor of the Sunday Observer, India’s first Sunday paper, Vinod Mehta is now the editor of the weekly news-magazine Outlook.
Mumbai/Bombay
A city on constant fast forward
For centuries, the seven islands that make up what is now the city of Mumbai, were mosquito-infested spits of land separated by creeks and swamps. Despite their ordinariness, the Greek scholar Ptolemy marked the islands in his maps and the ancient Greeks knew them as Heptanesia (literally, ‘Seven Islands’). It is odd but history and those who make history ignored what we know now as the island city. To them, the hinterland was much more important. It took alien eyes to recognize the potential lurking beneath the tidal swamps and strips of beach.
Bombay’s history begins with the legendary Buddhist emperor Ashoka, the only conqueror to have laid down arms after a victory, the first and only king to see that the cost of winning was too high if it had to be paid for in human lives. But even this ruler of the Mauryan Empire did not leave much of a mark on Bombay when he turned his attention to the region in the third century BC. He too ignored the islands, and instead colonised areas located beyond the northern limits of modern Mumbai. In those days, Nalla Sopara—now a fifteen-second commuter stop for trains on their way north to Virar—was a bustling town, located at the crossroads of ancient trade routes. Magnificent Buddhist monasteries were built here. Some of them can still be seen at Kanheri Caves in north Bombay. There is also a stupa, which is in a rather run-down condition.
Six hundred years later, a prince of the Chalukya dynasty, that ruled large parts of the western and southern regions of the country, came upon a spit of land in the bay of Bombay and thought it might be a fitting place for a cave temple to Shiva. There were probably Buddhist caves already there and now a huge panchmukhi or five-faced Shiva looms out of the darkness. The moment you see the three visible faces—you must use your imagination to construct the other two still hidden in the stone—will always remain with you.
The next dynasty to leave some architectural traces in Bombay—and often when we are looking far back in time—was the Silharas. In the twelfth century AD, Lakshman Prabhu, a minister in the Silhara court constructed the Walkeshwar temple near the sacred Banganga tank. (Today, the area is called Malabar Hill.) The Silharas controlled the islands until the fourteenth century, when the sultan of neighbouring Gujarat took over and ruled it for the next two centuries.
Soon the Portuguese explorers arrived. One of the first recorded visits of the Portuguese to Bombay was in 1508, when a ship halted briefly at Mahim island while travelling to an outpost at Diu in Gujarat. For the next two decades, the Portuguese kept making short visits to the islands and in 1532, they seized Bassein (now Vasai in northern Mumbai) from Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat. The Portuguese used that as a base and took control of the entire region, including the seven islands. At that time, the Arabian coast was a bustling region of trading ships and seaside outposts. The Portuguese already possessed Goa, Daman and Diu and Vasai became an important part of their maritime trade network.
In those days, if you were a European country with a trading route in your control, you would go to war to keep it safe. And one way to show that you were serious and that you were willing to fight to keep what you had was to build an imposing fort. So to protect their shipping routes, the Portuguese built forts at Mahim, Sion, Bandra and of course in Bassein or Vasai. On the walls, they mounted a large cannon that must have been a warning to any vessel carrying another country’s flag. It was around this time that the region got a new name—‘Bom Baia’, meaning ‘Good Bay’ in Portuguese.
Over the next hundred years, the region’s social history was shaped by the Portuguese and resembled other Portuguese outposts including Goa, Daman and Malacca in southeast Asia. Many village communities from Mahim to Vasai converted to Christianity and the spires of churches and chapels suddenly sprouted among the palm trees.
The Portuguese did not see much trade potential in the area and did little to develop it. Thus, Bombay remained unchanged for many years. Instead, their rivals, the British East India Company, cast a covetous eye from their headquarters in Gujarat over the area’s deep bay. They considered it a perfect natural harbour for the Company’s first Indian port.
They finally got their hands on them in 1661, when the islands were given to King Charles II as dowry for his marriage to Portuguese princess Catherine de Braganza. Apparently Charles II was not exactly sure what his wedding present was; he initially thought that the islands were somewhere in Brazil! In 1668, he leased the islands to the British East India Company for a sum of 10 pounds a year and the Company quickly established a colony in and around an existing Portuguese fort, which grew rapidly from 10,000 people in 1661 to 60,000 by 1675. In 1687, the East India Company transferred its headquarters from Surat to what the British now called Bombay.
Bombay’s early population mostly comprised Koli fisherfolk, East India Company officials and migrants from Gujarat who set up shop to service the outpost. Among these migrants was a community of Zoroastrians who had come from Iran. They came to be known as Parsis and they played a vital role in making Bombay the city it is today.
The Parsis established a ship-building industry, which later became the largest supplier of ships to the Royal Navy. They remained at the forefront of the city’s development and in 1777, Rustomji Kashaspathi published its first newspaper, the Bombay Courier. It would not have been a newspaper as you know it today. It would have focused on the news of the trading activities of the city. And that would have kept its pages nicely filled, for the city was beginning to resemble one of those markets you read about in the Arabian Nights.
Everything seemed to pass through Bombay: diamonds, tea, paper, porcelain, raw silk, calicoes, pepper, herbs and drugs sailed out to Britain and lead, quicksilver, woollen garments, hardware and bullion sailed in. The city was also part of the notorious opium trade network that the Company officials had developed all over Asia. For quite a long time, one-third of the money the British earned in India came out of opium. The British Raj was funded by drugs! But there was more to Bombay than the drug trade. The city’s status was boosted by an increase in cotton trade with China from 1770 onwards, an exchange that continued over the next century.
Money is a magnet and a huge amount of money was changing hands in Bombay. That brought in a steady stream of traders from Surat. This meant more trade which meant more money, which meant more traders eager to get their hands on some of the profits. When they arrived, they wanted to be as close to the action as possible and so they settled around the heart of the colony. This was a fort that the Portuguese had built and the British had extended. It was then known as Bombay Castle and was essentially a walled township in the area of the city today known as Fort.
The fort was not built to take so many people. It did not have a very efficient sanitary system. As more people arrived, it became congested and diseases spread rapidly. Many of the richer inhabitants including the Parsis, began to move out to new townships beyond the walled city, building bungalows and mansions in Byculla, Mazagaon and Malabar Hill.
But you cannot have a city of traders and bankers and merchants without a support system. The traders need clerks to maintain records, they need secretaries to help them with their daily work, and they need teachers for their children and nurses when they fall ill, so from the nineteenth century onwards, a sizeable middle-class population emerged.
T
hese people were not rich but they were educated and they created a huge demand for newspapers, schools and colleges. In 1822, India’s first Indian language newspaper, the Gujarati daily Mumbai Samachar, was published in Bombay. The first copy of the Bombay Times (the forerunner of the Times of India) and the Journal of Commerce rolled off the presses in 1838. The Grant Medical College was founded in 1845 and within another fifteen years, Wilson College and Bombay University were established. Other colleges like Elphinstone and St. Xavier’s came up within a decade. Both the new media and colleges were largely patronized by children of Gujarati merchants and traders, the indigenous Christian populations created by the Portuguese and the local Maharashtrian communities. Middle-class suburbs sprung up in the new neighbourhoods of Kalbadevi, Girgaum, Gowalia Tank, Mohammad Ali Road, Thakurdwar and Walkeshwar.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the basis of a modern city had been created with land measuring 170 sq miles—a landscape of fields, coconut groves and outsize colonial structures, of cosmopolitan enclaves and sleepy villages. But a city must also be connected to other parts of the world and in 1853, the first passenger railway line in India was inaugurated. It connected Bombay and Thane and may be said to have been the first of a sprawling network of railway lines that keeps Mumbai ticking even today and brings it fresh infusions of labour and talent.
Bombay did not have much to do with the first Indian war of independence in 1857 but in a way, it was affected by the aftermath. The British government took over the governing of India from the East India Company. The queen issued a proclamation to her Indian subjects but the men who came to India to rule knew that they needed a way in which to announce to India that they were here to stay. They felt that the best way to do this would be to dot the cities of their Indian empire with imposing buildings so that anyone who walked past something like the Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus), the Prince of Wales Museum (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Vastu Sangrahalaya), the Rajabai Tower, the Bombay University, the General Post Office, the Old Customs House, Elphinstone College or the Public Works Department Building would feel the power of England and know the difference between the rule of the East India Company and the rule of Her Imperial Majesty, Queen Victoria. All these buildings were begun in the 1860s. And despite all the problems dogging the city which had not been planned, it began to be described in typical colonial hyperbole as the first city in India, urbs prima in Indis.
Cotton now dominated trade in Bombay. Raw cotton from Gujarat was shipped to Lancashire in Britain, processed into cloth and then shipped back via Bombay to be resold in the Indian market at a considerable profit. Although cotton trading was the city’s main activity, city businesspersons began to recognize that bigger profits could be made by spinning the cotton themselves. In 1854, a Parsi, Cowasji Nanabhai Davar, opened the first cotton mill. He called it the Bombay Spinning Mill.
That was only the beginning. By 1870, around thirteen mills were in operation in the city. The shipping of raw cotton was still the main engine of the city’s economy, however, and was given a massive boost when the American Civil War broke out in 1861. (This was the war that Abraham Lincoln fought that ended slavery in the United States of America and kept the nation united.) When a country is at war, it is not going to bother about the cotton fields. And so all the booming textile industries of Britain and other countries in Europe that bought American cotton had to look for another source of raw material. They looked east and saw a city that had a seaport and good road and rail connections to the interior where cotton was grown.
Bombay became the world’s foremost exporter of cotton. Money began pouring into the city. By 1865, Bombay had thirty-one banks, eight reclamation companies, sixteen cotton pressing companies, ten shipping companies, sixty-two joint stock companies and twenty insurance companies. This was boom time for the city.
Then the war ended. America went back to work. Cotton started pouring out of America. The boom did what booms do—it went bust.
Within a year after the war, most of the companies were liquidated and many businesspersons went bankrupt. In spite of this, the city continued to grow and even used the wealth generated during the boom to make itself over, shifting more and more into cotton spinning.
With the growth of the mills, Bombay’s population rapidly increased as thousands of workers migrated to the city to work the looms. They had to live somewhere and so the first of Bombay’s ‘chawls’ were built to accommodate these single men. A chawl is a tenement in which each family has a room, all share a common veranda and a common set of toilets. The workers settled close to the mills, with new neighbourhoods springing up in Byculla, Lalbaugh, Parel and Worli. The people who lived in the area called these neighbourhoods by one name: Girangaon or the ‘Village of Mills’. Put hundreds of Indian villagers together, all far from home from different cultures and communities and they will sing and tell stories and remember the villages they have left behind and imagine the city they would like to live in. Out of these memories and mirages came generations of writers, poets and dramatists in Marathi and Gujarati.
The city’s imagination was expanding. It was learning to look at itself. And its land mass was expanding too. Additional land was reclaimed and more roads, causeways and wharves were built. Finally, in 1870, the Bombay Port Trust was officially formed, bringing together the administration of the various docks.
A trading city will always be vibrant and diverse. The pursuit of money brings everyone together. Or so they say. From its early beginnings, Bombay had always been a vibrantly diverse city of Europeans and Indians from across the subcontinent. By the nineteenth century, lines between communities had been firmly drawn, though an uneasy tolerance persisted. Europeans socialized amongst themselves in sports clubs, with cricket as the main recreation. The Bombay Gymkhana was set up in 1875, exclusively for Europeans, spurring other communities, including Muslims, Hindus and Parsis, to set up their own gymkhanas, all in a line by the sea along Marine Drive.
A friendly rivalry developed between them, which turned into a regular ‘pentangular’ cricket tournament. The results never failed to make headlines in city newspapers.
But the same newspapers ignored the Indian National Congress when it started in Bombay. After all, no one could imagine that the talking club that had been founded so that Indians could have a few discussions would take such a leading role in India’s freedom movement.
Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, one of the founding fathers of the movement, displayed all the inventiveness of the city when he turned the Ganesh Chaturthi festival into a public affair. The British were reluctant to interfere with religious sentiments—they had burnt their fingers in 1857 over the rifle cartridges that were said to have been smeared with the fat of cows and pigs. This meant that Lokmanya Tilak could gather the people on the sands of Chowpatty beach, perform a pooja and then spread the message of freedom. The neighbourhood of Girgaum became one of the first such places to celebrate the festival in which the elephant-headed god is immersed in the sea after days of prayer and celebration.
By the early twentieth century, Bombay had become quite a hot-bed of politics, especially after Mahatma Gandhi’s return from South Africa in 1915. It was at Mani Bhavan in Girgaum that Gandhi started mobilizing local citizens. A number of businesspersons, traders, workers and professionals from the city became his followers.
As Gandhi refashioned the world of protest, another man was reinventing storytelling. In 1913, Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, or Dadasaheb Phalke as he later came to be known, made the first full-length feature film Raja Harishchandra. Within seven years there was a regular film industry functioning in the country with Bombay as its main player. By the year 1931, about 207 films were being made every year in the country, with a substantial number coming out of Bombay.
In 1926, the first motorized bus ran between Afghan Church and Crawford Market. Those who preferred the leisurely tram system—which now sadly no longer exists—scoffed at the speed of
the buses. But even those who still took their trams from the Dadar Tram Terminus were proud of the industrialist and aviator Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata who flew from Karachi to Bombay via Ahmedabad to land on a grass strip at Juhu in 1932.
After Independence, the city expanded beyond Mahim and Bandra, once Portuguese areas. It now incorporated the region known as the Salsette into the city’s structure. The city of Bombay came to include all the land up to Mankhurd, Mulund and Dahisar. It was a big city that was the capital of the Bombay state. And you must remember that Bombay state included what is now Gujarat and Maharashtra.
In the ensuing years, the city became a battlefield for linguistic movements, mainly between its Gujarati and Marathi-speaking populations. The Samyukta Maharashtra Andolan was a major political force, comprising socialists, trade unions and artists that fought fiercely for the formation of an independent state for Marathi-speaking people, with the simultaneous demand that Bombay be included in it. Bombay was eventually crowned the capital of the new linguistic state of Maharashtra in the year 1960. However, the movement also claimed the lives of 105 protestors who were then commemorated with a memorial—the Hutatma Chowk, next to Flora Fountain.
The 1960s saw a dynamic political scene with the communist ideology dominating the working-class mill areas and influencing the city’s political fabric. Newspapers and publications proliferated in many languages.