Remembering Bombay

This chapter focuses on understanding Bombay’s social and political complexities as it grew exponentially over the 19th and 20th centuries. A typical colonial city it had a function as an entrepot in the trade routes that tracked around the globe as well as about the subcontinent. Its particularity as a city however was in part a product of the mix of its produce and its industries but also of what was brought to the city – social, political and economic diversity with elements of cultural, intellectual and creative benefit. It was a city that from its beginnings gloried in accommodating a mix of populations, ethnicities, social groups and religious adherents and of the urban spaces they severally occupied. In considering the locality as a city feature and as an active phenomenon implicitly and explicitly understood by its inhabitants, the chapter uses the idea of mental maps or templates that gave city spaces their characteristics as was also evident in those times of massive social conflict evident during riots and Bombay’s other forms of crowd aggregations. In drawing on notions of physical space as represented in the city’s localities or in mental maps of what might be understood as accustomed space, the research methods adopted in this chapter involved using city space and its patterns of customary behavior through the prism of the author’s subjective memories of the city from the 1960s as also textual research and analysis.

Civil Disobedience and the City

This essay examines the interaction between different sections of Bombay’s working population and the Indian National Congress during the first two years of the Civil Disobedience movement. It looks at this engagement primarily through the vernacular archives, and explores the divergent, sometimes conflicting, trends in the articulations of nationalism in the Civil Disobedience movement and the Congress. This essay draws upon Masselos’ work and focuses on the spatial templates of the Civil Disobedience movement. It maps the relationship between the functioning of the local units of the Congress and the political infrastructure of the city’s mill districts. It argues that there was a co-relation between their mobilization practices in the city’s working-class neighborhoods and their attempt to appropriate social spaces.

The Transnational Career of the ‘Indian Edison’

Shankar Abaji Bhisey (1867-1935) was a genius inventor whose career unfolded in three different continents. In his lifetime, he was known as the ‘Indian Edison’ and the ‘Pioneer Indian Inventor’. Bhisey’s most promising invention was the Bhisotype, a mechanical typecaster that promised to bring revolutionary change to the global printing industry. However, Bhisey required significant financial support for his inventive work. In Bombay and abroad, he found such support amongst leaders of the early Indian nationalist movement, many of whom enjoyed close business connections or possessed substantial business experience. Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and the British socialist Henry Hyndman were his three greatest supporters. By actively taking an interest and a financial stake in Bhisey’s career, these leaders demonstrated two dynamics at play. Firstly, the worlds of Indian finance and early nationalism were inextricably connected, especially in and through Bombay. Secondly, early nationalists and their British political allies could cooperate on a range of India-related activities beyond the domain of high politics.

Selling Home

This essay explores the emergence of new forms of retail in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bombay, an era which saw the development of new shopping districts, department stores, showrooms, and retail culture in the city. In a city known for its market density and commercial vibrancy, elite retailers tried to reach out to consumers in new ways, enticing them in from the street with window displays, standardized product lines, and novel assemblages of goods, while also contacting consumers directly through catalogues, flyers, designs sent on request, and home deliveries. Focusing on major department stores like the Army and Navy Stores and Whiteaway Laidlaw, major nationalist concerns like the Bombay Swadeshi Store and Godrej and Boyce, as well as smaller showrooms featuring fewer ranges of goods, the essay argues that novel retail strategies efforts helped to shape not just how things were sold but what was desired in Bombay—noting in particular how efforts to sell domestic furnishings promoted new ideas about what the home should be.

Mohammad Ali Rogay

Mohammad Ali Rogay, long-time participant in the Bombay Country Trade with China in the first half of the nineteenth century, and partner in the prominent trading firm of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy & Co, was also the most prominent Muslim citizen of Bombay during his lifetime. He was also the leader of the Konkani Musalman community which had been settled in Bombay for many centuries. In spite of his prominence in business and political spheres, very little information is available on him, nor has he, or the community he hails from, attracted serious scholarly attention. This essay outlines Rogay’s trading career in China and India, his public career in Bombay, his role as a patron of publishing and printing, his secular and religious charities, and his leadership of the Konkani Musalman community. A wide variety of sources including contemporary newspapers, government archives, private business archives, contemporary Urdu imprints and community histories, have helped in reconstructing Rogay’s life, which has largely remained obscure. This investigation explores the reasons why Rogay (and, by extension, his community) continues to remain on the fringes of the mainstream historical narrative on nineteenth-century Bombay.

The Politics of Business

This essay examines the tenure of the Congress ministry (1937-39) in Bombay and argues that it allowed the Muslim League to define its contours of opposition in terms of economic policies, and position itself as a pro-business, urban grouping. The two factors that shaped this were the Congress’s decision to introduce Prohibition and levy urban property tax, sales tax on cloth and petrol; and the emergence of a loose Muslim League-led, anti-Congress coalition in Bombay politics that transcended religious and social barriers. The Bombay Assembly and Municipal Corporation witnessed the coming together of Parsi, Hindu and Muslim merchants and landlords. These factors played within the spectrum of the perceived rural turn taken by the Congress to the detriment of urban, business interests.

‘A Powerful Weapon for the Employers’?

In the aftermath of the First World War, Bombay witnessed workers’ upsurges on an unprecedented scale. In order to cope with this new situation, the colonial authorities and the millowners alternated between repression and acclimation of methods, which had proven to be successful in England to abate social unrest. Building quarters to house the workers was one of them. This chapter begins by setting colonial intervention in its wider context, questioning the very limited role private employers played in the field of workers’ housing. It then studies how intervention of the authorities had unexpected effects that totally contradicted the initial aim of their building programed, which was to regulate workers’ unrest. It rather encouraged the development of solidarities that opened up new spaces of politicization and arenas of struggle.

Social Geographies of Bombay’s Sex Trade, 1880–1920

This chapter explores the relationship between spatial and social stratification in Bombay, focusing on the history of Kamathipura. With its heterogeneous racial makeup, this officially sanctioned red light zone was an exception to the orderly delineation of European and Indian spaces in the colonial city of Bombay. What did it mean that differently hailed social groups lived side by side in the same set of streets? Drawing on Jim Masselos’s call to examine, at a granular level, how social distinctions were drawn and maintained in proximity, this chapter focuses on struggles between Europeans and Indians to claim specific streets in Kamathipura. It recounts the history of migration of European and Indian sex workers and the conflicts that intensified in the early 1900s as the population of the city grew. It also reflects on how racial hierarchies were experienced by onlookers: even though Indian and European brothel workers lived side by side, social stratification was observed in ways that were felt deeply; class and caste enacted a clear grammar of difference. The story of how this part of Bombay emerged as the iconic center of its sex trade is a reminder of how intense social stratification can be experienced amidst the dense sharing of public space.

Reading Social Spaces

Built by public subscription in 1770, and in operation until 1830, the Bombay Theatre represents a curious colonial social space. Ticket sales show a range of Bombay ‘Society’ – from wealthy Parsi merchants to European ensigns – actively sought out the entertainment it promised, and an even broader swathe of society was involved in its day-to-day operation. This chapter argues that the theatre was, for a time, an important location for the articulation of urban life by those who claimed to represent Bombay ‘Society’. It uses an exploration of the life of the theatre to understand the place of shared leisure in the construction of colonial respectability. This chapter suggests the ways in which we might read the theatre not simply as a metaphor for the broader colonial social frame, but that we can examine the ways in which imperial power was encoded and embedded in the operation of this social space.

Bombay’s European Community During the Interwar Period

This essay explores the ways Europeans in interwar Bombay sustained their cultural identity as a distinct ethnic group despite the impermanent character of their residence in the city, their dispersed settlement patterns over much of southern Bombay, and the decline of their political dominance in the context of Indian nationalism. The essay particularly points to the creation of an intense sociality centered around social clubs, parties, and jazz performances. It also stresses the role of European associational life and the role of sports (for instance, cricket, hunting, yachting and golf) to the production of a continued sense of community and identity. By suggesting that the context of declining European power was critical to the ways Europeans reproduced their community, this essay contributes to the emergence of a new perspective on South Asian urban history that suggests that historians must abandon the concept of the colonial city during the post- World War I period. Europeans were now just one community in a city of communities that were undergoing parallel processes of making and remaking.