Mumbai abhors a vacuum. Empty space is wasted space, an opportunity lost to use it to its maximum potential. It needs to be immediately occupied and, if possible, monetized. Thus, a plot of land soon becomes a slum, a balcony, built originally to provide a sense of openness, is enclosed to make a room bigger, even the tiny space under a staircase becomes a small tailoring shop. The terrace of a building, thus, holds immense possibilities.
Behind this conundrum lies centuries of history of how Mumbai grew and developed, and the perpetual hunt for space in a city with a limited landmass but unlimited dreams. The circumstances of how the community on top of Queen’s Mansion came to perch there and how the residents of the Patan Mandal buildings still live in their buildings all these decades later are seemingly different, but they both illustrate the same desire to somehow find a place and a roof over their heads in a city where even a toehold—whether to live or to hang on for dear life in a train—is enough, because that way you can continue to move.
‘Bombay, like all other large cities, has a very acute housing problem. Not only is it customary for a whole family to live in one room, but this room frequently houses a number of other relations of the family. To meet the needs the Government are now undertaking the erection of a large number of tenement buildings to provide accommodation for 50,000 families. In view of the high price of land it has not been found practicable to provide for the poorer classes in other than blocks of tenement buildings,’ wrote D.W. Davidge in his paper ‘Development of Bombay’, in 1924.
Just a few years before this, in his lecture on The Housing Question in Bombay to the Royal Society of Arts, London, which was published in 1910, G. Owen W. Dunn had said, ‘The slender means of the working-classes necessitate their residing in as close proximity as possible to their work; their habits and customs lead them to congregate in communities of race, religion, and caste, and these people have not the most elementary ideas of sanitation.’ Dunn had impressive credentials—he had been chief engineer of the Public Works Department and had held the position of not just the Commissioner of the Bombay Municipal Corporation but also the Bombay Improvement Trust, giving him an insight into the city’s housing, infrastructure and sanitation. The Trust itself had been founded to decongest the city after vast swathes of neighbourhoods were hit by a plague in 1896, which was blamed on the cramped housing of the natives. The disease-ridden areas were seen as an example of the unhygienic native ways of living. More than the cultural aspects, what was apparent was that Bombay’s biggest problem was congestion and overcrowding. The city’s inherent geographical limitations, combined with a rapidly growing population and high property prices, meant that Bombay’s residents had no option but to live in cramped conditions, a situation that is familiar even in the shiny, high-rise Mumbai of the early twenty-first century.
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The islands that formed the Bombay archipelago could not have been this cramped in the seventeenth century. All visitors had reported that the swampy, disease-ridden space had scattered communities who were engaged in fishing, rice farming or toddy tapping. There were clusters of people living on the main island and in Mahim, which had once been important, but it was on Salsette that most of the trade took place.
The Portuguese, after acquiring Bombay from the sultan of Gujarat, rented it out to various influential families and to Jesuits, but the rulers based themselves mainly in Bassein, where their fort was a commercial and military headquarters, and in Mahim, a trading and customs outpost to collect duties from ships. Their mission was also to harvest souls on behalf of the Catholic Church, which they did, converting thousands of Indians to Christianity. The British recruited their early clerks and assistants. Not much is known about how the population lived, but it is unlikely that it was in very crowded conditions.
Things began to change when the East India Company acquired Bombay. When the second Company governor, Gerald Aungier, in the 1860s and ’70s, welcomed settlers, mainly from Gujarat, to come and set up a base there, many responded—for a long time after that, the migrants were solely Gujaratis. (This is probably the genesis of the perpetual feeling among Gujaratis that they built the city.) Aungier and his successors had been based in Surat and knew the business prowess of the locals there, not just of the Banias, but also of the Khojas, the Memons, the Parsis and the Kutchis, all of whom displayed an adventurous spirit, especially when it came to business—dhandho—and making money.
These communities began moving to Bombay, and as usually happens, moved in clusters, creating enclaves—or ghettos—where others of their own kind lived. British officials had residences in the Fort, and by the eighteenth century, Parsis had congregated there too. The Bhatias set themselves up in different locations, but a good number of them were in the north end of the Fort, as did the Bohras, near Bazaar Gate. One street there is still called Bora Bazaar, and a Bhatia mansion stands there even today. Just outside the Fort limits is Bhatia Baug, a charitable initiative by the community.
Houses around the mid-seventeenth century were of the most basic kind. The Portuguese had already been there for a century, and while the administration was in Bassein, many had settled in Bombay, Mazagaon, Parel and Mahim, which had now become part of the Company’s domain.
In his book, A New Account of East India and Persia, in Eight Letters, published in 1698, John Fryer, who arrived in Bombay in 1673 to take up his duties as a doctor for the Company, wrote about the houses he saw:
At distance enough lies the Town, in which confusedly live the English, Portuguese, Topazes, Gentues, Moors, Coolie Christians, most Fishermen.
It is a full Mile in length, the houses are low, and Thatched with Oleas of the Cocoe-tree, all but a few the Portugalls left and some few that the Company have built, the Custom House and Warehouses are tiled and plastered and instead of glass, use panes of Oister shells for their windows, (which, as they are cut in squares and polished, look gracefully enough). There is also a reasonably handsome Buzzar.
Beyond the Town, which was the Fort, lay villages and fields, and ‘Massagoung (Mazagaon) a great fishing town, peculiarly noted for a fish called Bumbello,’ he wrote. The island was not yet fully developed but more and more people were coming into this new settlement, with its promises of fortunes to be made.
By the eighteenth century, the population had increased and demarcations had become clear. The European quarter extended from Fort to the present-day Crawford Market on the east and Dhobi Talao—or Framjee Cawasjee tank, to give its official name—where Metro cinema stands, on the west. It is still called Dhobi Talao, even though the water body that existed there, which was used by washermen, was filled up long ago. Though not as grandly laid out as in the past, it still has open spaces, not the least because the ruling British wanted to keep attackers at bay and wanted to see them coming in advance.
That the infrastructure in the European quarter was much superior to that elsewhere is visible even today. The roads are broad, the footpaths wide, the maidans expansive and the architecture, whether Victorian or Art Deco, graceful. There has been very little new construction since the 1950s, whether in the old quarter, i.e., Fort and Frere Town, or in the post-1930s reclaimed land, where Marine Drive and modern apartment buildings were constructed in the 1930s–’50s period. Ballard Estate, which was reclaimed in the early part of the twentieth century by the Port Trust, has elegant Edwardian buildings, almost all of them commercial, and once again shows a high level of planning by the British.
This excerpt from ‘Mumbai: A Million Islands’ by Sidharth Bhatia has been published with permission from HarperCollins Publishers.