Colonial Bombay Research Articles

Civilising subject(s): drawing pedagogy in Bombay in the age of industrial capitalism and empire

ABSTRACT This article charts a critical history of drawing, as it was taught within “general” schooling in colonial Bombay (now Mumbai), beyond the artisanal workshop, art, and industrial schools. Rather than children’s creative or subjective expression as it is commonly seen today, drawing’s presence in the school curriculum was a sign of the efforts being taken to create a workforce suitable for industrial capitalism, in Britain and in India. Analysing archival sources, and situating them within the broader discourses around colonialism, work, and the industrial subject, the article points out that when drawing was taught in Bombay it was hamstrung by issues metropolitan in origin, viz. course design, inconsistent pedagogic vision, lack of financial outlay as well as local conditions of low industrialisation. Similar problems plagued drawing in Britain. However, colonial power relations held Indian teachers and school-goers responsible for drawing’s “failures” in addressing the crisis of technical skilling and employment generation in India, while in Britain the critique was directed towards the system. Drawing – despite these “failures” – came to be valued as a practice necessary in and of itself. Drawing, the article contends, offered an embodied and verifiable response to wage labour, as seen in its unfolding in the colony, i.e. a moral technology geared towards wage labour.

Mill, Market, Mandir, Masjid: The Geographies of Communal Conflict in Colonial Bombay, c. 1929–39

This article reframes a crucial period in the history of popular politics in colonial Bombay. Focusing on Hindu-Muslim antagonism between 1929 and 1939, it highlights the centrality of everyday urban spaces and places in shaping the context, dynamics and nature of communal conflict in a putatively cosmopolitan city. The first section shows how recurrent communal discord in Bombay was the outcome of two spatially contingent political developments that occurred concurrently in the years between 1929 and 1933. On the one hand, intra-class tensions engendered by industrial strife in tandem with the rapid ascendancy of the communist-led Girni Kamgar Union in the mill districts resulted in a communal backlash. On the other hand, the launch of the Congress’ Civil Disobedience movement deepened Hindu-Muslim differences in the market areas of the Indian town. The second section focuses on clashes over religious places and processions, which became a chronic feature of urban life in the 1930s. Through a range of examples, it underscores how local disputes over sacred sites and religious rites became integral to the political construction of communal identities in late colonial Bombay.

Historicizing Real Estate: The East India Company in Early Colonial Bombay

Property-as-real-estate emerged in Bombay at least by the turn of the nineteenth century. Real estate is historicized through previously unexplored archival sources (qualitative and quantitative) by analyzing how property was transacted in a colonial port, and how it became embedded in global circuits of commerce and the accumulation strategies of locals and the English East India Company. The paper demonstrates the existence by this time of legal institutions of publicity and property registration, specialized intermediaries, price-finding mechanisms such as auctions, and imaginaries of a property market as an abstract entity marked by general trends and values. Contrary to the literature that sees prices in this period as erratic and inconsistent, a systematic analysis of prices suggests a rationalized and standardized property market. These findings push back the timeline usually associated with the development of real estate in India.

Bombay Lights: Gas Light and the Transition to a Modern City

Gas lighting, part of a re-envisioning of cities as modern metropoles, was one of the first ‘modern’ technologies implemented in nineteenth century Bombay. The debates over the implementation of gas light to illuminate the streets of Bombay have largely been overlooked in the history and historiography of colonial Bombay. Yet, the illumination of Bombay’s public streets with gas light was an important turning point in the transition of Bombay from a provincial outpost to a modern city. The article examines the related debates, presents the illumination of colonial Bombay with gas light as a metaphor for the emergence of the modern city and depicts how new processes regarding civic planning and development emerged from this gas light debate, which ultimately made the implementation of electrical light and other aspects of modern city life possible.

Nuisance, Planning and the Common Law in Late Eighteenth-Century Bombay

ABSTRACT The literature on the legal transfer of English property law to colonial South Asia has long focused on the agrarian context. Urban property and the built environment remain understudied. This article explores how the common law of nuisance found its way into the workings of a Committee of Buildings in late eighteenth-century Bombay. An analysis of the internal files of the Committee of Buildings shows that the Committee focused on public and private nuisance mitigation. Residents filed private party nuisance complaints, taking up nuisance law in their own disputes with neighbours. The Committee’s attempts to deal with public nuisances highlights the resistance of local residents. The conclusion considers the broader question of how we can conceptualize the actors, vectors and mechanisms involved in legal transfer, and its reception. Alternative explanations such as influences from pre-English colonial regimes, the impact of local custom, and the balance between common law and statute are evaluated. Rather than a seamless legal transfer, nuisance in early colonial Bombay demonstrates dialogue, resistance and appropriation.

Special Issue: Parsis and Iranians in the Modern Period

A hundred years ago in colonial Bombay, on September 10, 1922, a group of Parsis established an organization called the Iran League. Meant to strengthen ties with their Iranian Zoroastrian coreligionists inside Iran, the Iran League also endeavored to recast wider economic and cultural relations between India and the country which Parsis regarded as their ancient homeland. That ancient homeland, after all, was undergoing seismic change. In the years following Reza Khan's 1921 coup and the establishment of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1925, Parsis watched with growing anticipation and excitement as Iran's new leader increasingly promoted a new national culture rooted in Iran's ancient past. Prominent Parsis, many of them leaders in the Iran League, fervently believed that Pahlavi Iran would herald all sorts of progressive change: improved conditions for the Iranian Zoroastrians, deeper appreciation of Zoroastrianism among Iran's Muslim majority, conditions for significant Parsi investment in Iran, and even the possibility of a mass Parsi “return” to the shah's domain, reversing the direction of centuries of Zoroastrian migration.1

Light Writing on the Lathi Raj: Bombay, 1930–31

This article explores the intersection between policing and photography in the course of the Civil Disobedience Movement in colonial Bombay in 1930–31 by focusing on historical photographs compiled in a recently discovered album. When the ‘disobedient’ men, women and children of Bombay repeatedly challenged the colonial state by breaking laws deemed unjust under the leadership of Mohandas K. Gandhi, they came into direct confrontation with the most visible expression of imperial authority: the cross-racial Bombay Police armed with the ubiquitous baton (lathi). While Indian historiography is particularly rich in its exploration of both exceptional and quotidian forms of colonial violence, the visual history of violent policing remains underexplored. Through our analysis of photographic images from two specific episodes of the disobedient drama that unfolded in Bombay in 1930 – the raids at the salt pans in Wadala in June, and the national flag salutation ceremony at the Esplanade in October – we explore the complex and conspicuous entanglement of race and gender in a moment of heightened anti-colonial action and police violence in British India. In underscoring the work of the camera in documenting the history of violent police action against non-violent civil demonstrators, we reveal its role as a historical actor and an active participant in history-making.

Review: Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay, by Sheetal Chhabria

Review: <i>Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay</i>, by Sheetal Chhabria

Bombay Fever/Spanish FLU: Public health and native press in Colonial Bombay, 1918–19

In view of the topicality of pandemics, this brief article discusses the responses of the vernacular press in Bombay during 1918 following the influenza pandemic of that year. With occasional inputs from English language dailies, such as The Times of India and The Hindu of the period, the aim is to understand how, as the epidemic receded, the government’s response to the epidemic was questioned and the influenza epidemic was constructed as a part of anticolonial rhetoric by the ‘native press’, closely monitored by the British.

SWADESHI CAPITALISM IN COLONIAL BOMBAY

AbstractThis article examines economic nationalism in India, specifically the role of capitalists in late colonial Bombay. It shows how swadeshi was the fulcrum that supported the expressions of nationalism and capitalism. The notion that Indian capital needed to be used for the benefit of Indian nationals became established as nationalist thought by the 1930s. Such swadeshi capitalism – Indian capital for Indian industries – recasts the notion of swadeshi as a broader, more sophisticated cultural response to colonialism and globalization. As capitalism transitioned from mercantile activities to capital-hungry industrialization, nationalism was itself reframed from being anti-colonial in 1905 to being anti-globalization by the 1950s. Swadeshi capitalism helped to overlay a radical, grittier form of economic nationalism over the intellectually driven version of the nineteenth century. Swadeshi, as a form of economic patriotism, can be distinguished from similar expressions of nationalism within the British empire and dominions. This article is an effort to decolonize the narratives of modern capitalism by shifting the focus away from the global West. It will appeal to readers interested in South Asian history, and those interested in cultural responses to globalization, the contested nature of economic nationalism, and histories of capitalism in the global South.

The Indian Panchayat, Access to Knowledge and Criminal Prosecutions in Colonial Bombay, 1827–61

Throughout the mofussil of the Bombay Presidency British judges and magistrates called upon panchayats, that is, caste or village councils, to help them administer justice. By the mid-nineteenth century, panchayats were being deployed by British justices not only to offer their advice to judges attempting to decide a case, but much more frequently to investigate crimes, including murder, assault, robbery, arson, forgery, rape, and property disputes. Moreover, the active participation of the panchayat in the administration of criminal law varied as much in form as in function. In different scenarios, the panchayat functioned as a coroner's court, a criminal investigation team, and a general witnessing agent for the courts. With very few exceptions, they almost always appear in a supporting role on the prosecution side of any case offering their opinions on the crime in question in written form. Judges, for their part, appear to have relied quite heavily upon these recommendations and there are very few instances in which the panchayat's opinions were either ignored or rejected. There thus developed a hybrid system of justice whereby judges and magistrates adapted, transformed, and incorporated the expertise and knowledge of the ‘customary’ panchayat to suit the needs of British governance and legal administration.

Water, Air, Light: The Materialities of Plague Photography in Colonial Bombay, 1896–97

This essay examines the ways in which the third plague pandemic was documented and visualized in relation to rapidly evolving ideas about disease, medicine, and the environment by engaging with a set of photo albums produced in late nineteenth-century Bombay. As one of the first examples of epidemiological photography, a new genre of photography that had developed at the turn of the century in the wake of the bubonic plague epidemic, the photo albums serve as a significant archive of late nineteenth-century colonial epidemiological, visual, and urban practices. Through my analysis of the Bombay photographs, I aim to foreground the environmental and biological contexts of cultural practices, focusing on the multiple ways in which nonhuman materials such as water, air, light, and microorganisms can drive and effect image-making. I thus propose an epistemological shift in our reading of colonial photography that foregrounds the dynamic materiality of the natural world.

Sanitizing Heritage—Hydraulic Water Supply and the Erosion of the Traditional Water Management System in Colonial Bombay City (1860–1947)

The traditional urban water management systems of Bombay (Mumbai) city consisted of tanks and wells constructed by charitable people of all creeds. But the entry of hydraulic engineering techniques, via the construction of Vihar Lake in 1860, ostensibly to supply pure and plentiful water heralded their doom. The modern but intrinsically flawed water supply system, unplanned urban development and the ensuing insanitation aggravated cholera and malaria epidemics, endemic to the city, threatening its imperial trade. This, and the desire to create sanitized colonies through town planning, encouraged Bombay municipality to attack the city’s tanks and wells, vilified as sources of pollution, despite protests of the local people. Based on an examination of archival sources, this article traces the history of colonial Bombay’s water management policy from 1860 and examines its impact on the city’s water inheritance, up to Indian independence in 1947. It aims to raise awareness levels about the potential importance of the surviving heritage, at a time when the spectre of insanitation and water scarcity haunts Mumbai.

The Politics of Time in Colonial Bombay: Labor Patterns and Protest in Cotton Mills

Abstract This article examines the modes of time and work discipline that emerged through factory industry in colonial Bombay. Based on a wide range of archival sources, it shows that mechanized production did not invariably suggest a transition from task-based, irregular to clock-measured, rationally organized work patterns. Operating simultaneously within temporal orders constructed by the global economy, agriculture, family, and community, cotton mills combined new disciplinary practices with a flexible approach to labor. Gender, marital status, religion, skill, and position in the manufacturing chain influenced the pace and duration of work as well as subjective experiences of time at the factory. By maintaining the diversity and flexibility of time organization, mill owners could adjust production to fluctuations in market demand. At the same time, the strategy facilitated and obscured exploitation. As the industry grew, workers developed a language of resistance that emphasized the value of regular and standard work patterns defined with reference to clock hours and calendar days. In the factories of colonial Bombay, clocks were not just symbols of discipline and subjugation but also instruments of resistance and negotiation.

The Petition as Event: Colonial Bombay,circa1889–1914

AbstractThe historiography on colonial petitioning has primarily construed it as an authorized ritual of supplication designed to affirm and reproduce established power relations. This article restores to the analysis of the petition its status as a potential ‘event’ that could exceed its documentary confines and generate new communities of action. Focusing specifically on colonial Bombay,circa1889–1914, it highlights three ways in which petitioning marked a rupture in the relations between rulers and ruled, and heralded significant shifts in the local constructions of state and society. First, the article shows how Bombay's Indian residents deployed the petitioning process to contest the unprecedented degree of state intervention in their quotidian lives following an extraordinary civic crisis that engulfed the city in the last decade of the Victorian era. Secondly, the article contends that the petitions that ordinary Indians in Bombay submitted to the different agencies of urban government point to a more complex set of orientations to the colonial state than has been acknowledged by scholars. Thirdly, the article argues that by the end of the nineteenth century, collective petitioning in colonial Bombay had become embedded in forms of political action with which it is conventionally regarded as being incompatible.

Lunatic Asylums in Colonial Bombay: Shackled bodies, unchained minds by Sarah Ann Pinto

Lunatic Asylums in Colonial Bombay: Shackled bodies, unchained minds by Sarah Ann Pinto

The Wellbeing of the Labor Force in Bombay: Discourses and practices by Priyanka Srivastava

Reviewed by: The Wellbeing of the Labor Force in Bombay: Discourses and practices by Priyanka Srivastava Mrunmayee Satam The Wellbeing of the Labor Force in Bombay: Discourses and practices By Priyanka Srivastava. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. The mid-nineteenth century saw the foundation of the cotton textile industry in Bombay and by the end of the century, the city had emerged as the hub of industrial and commercial trade activities in colonial India. It was the flourishing cotton textile industry which proved to be a major force in the rise of Bombay as the Urbs Prima in Indis.1 Despite the contribution of the industrial working class being crucial to Bombay's growth, the previous existing scholarship on colonial textile labour in Bombay does not really go beyond the political and economic domain—focussing on the trade unions and the relationship of the industry to the city's economic emergence. Therefore, Priyanka Srivastava's book brings in a number of welcome new perspectives, which engage with labour, gender, social, nationalist and urban histories. The book is an upgraded version of the author's doctoral thesis submitted at the University of Cincinnati. The book begins with a brief background to the growth of cotton textile industry and the emergence of an "unhealthy" industrial working class in Bombay. In the second chapter, Srivastava discusses the political economy of the textile industry and its employees. While highlighting the informed ignorance on the part of the colonial state and the industrialists towards the health issues faced by the mill workers, Srivastava argues that the political economy cannot be understood in totality without studying the structural neglect towards the health and wellbeing of the mill hands in the city. Chapter Three focusses on the impact of the bubonic plague of 1896 on the city, with a special focus on the change in the attitudes of the colonial state and the industrialists: the high mortality rates recorded during the epidemic forced the government agencies and the mill owners to reluctantly intervene in matters associated with housing, health, sanitation and working conditions of the industrial working class. The chapter traces the housing and development schemes, such as the City Improvement Trust (CIT) initiated for the mill workers in the first half of the twentieth century. In Chapter Four, the author discusses the emergence of alternate forms of urban governmentalities due to the failure on the part of the government agencies and the industrialists to address issues related to workers' health and sanitation. A number of voluntary organisations, such as Bombay Sanitary Association, Social Service League and the Young Men's Christian Association, were set up by the educated elites in Bombay to "uplift" the "unhygienic" industrial labour force in the city (109–10). After a careful examination of the nature of various social service programmes initiated in the city, Srivastava concludes that the voluntary organisations often reflected "contemporary biases" and "paternalistic tendencies" that existed in the society (110). In the same chapter, the author also includes the impact of mainstream nationalism into the discourses and practices of improvement and social welfare. The author argues that the ideas of social upliftment promoted by nationalist leaders such as M.K. Gandhi and G.K. Gokhale had a strong presence in the various programmes initiated by the non-state agencies. Chapters Five and Six describe the discourses and practices associated with maternal and infant welfare amongst the industrial working class in Bombay. Maternal and infant health became important concerns in the twentieth century because of the need to reproduce a healthy workforce in order to contribute to the growth of the economy. Srivastava argues that this resulted in women being recognised only for their reproductive capabilities and pushed aside other important concerns, such as the wage gap between the two sexes and the need to improve their working conditions. Chapter Six throws light on the process of the medicalization of childbirth in twentieth-century colonial Bombay; there was a considerable expansion of medical facilities such as infant welfare centres, creches, paediatric hospitals and charitable dispensaries. However, the author argues that the "financial conservatism" displayed by the "colonial state and Indian industrialists" resulted in the limited success of the policy (228). The...

The Aboriginal Alibi: Governing Dispossession in Colonial Bombay

AbstractThis article analyzes representations of the Koli as aboriginal in colonial Bombay, and explores the ends to which various actors have narrated Koli aboriginality. It examines the relationship between the historical deployment of the concept of aboriginality and its mediating role in the power of capital and state-making practices in one colonial urban context. The article shows how the Koli, as Bombay's “aboriginals,” gained concessions that served as an alibi for the market-based dispossession of the remainder of the city's population, and also as a pretext for claim-making by peoples with competing collective identities who used the tale of Koli identity and history as a narrative resource to argue for their own nativity. The Koli case helps us understand the co-emergence of the powers of caste and capital in Bombay, and compels us to revisit important, broader questions about relationships between aboriginal or indigenous peoples, capitalism, colonialism, liberalism, and governance.

Controlling Mobility and Regulation in Urban Space: Muslim Pilgrims to Mecca in Colonial Bombay, 1880–1914

AbstractThe meanings and practices of space shape how cities are understood and governed. This article argues that space is central to understandings of mobility and practices of regulation in the city. Undertaking an analysis of the regulation of Muslim pilgrims (Hajis) in colonial Bombay (Mumbai) from 1880 to 1914, this article explores urban governance discourses around race, religion and public health at a variety of scales. It investigates the way that Hajis were problematized through these discourses, and targeted as threats to elite power and prosperity in the specific context of Bombay as a global shipping and economic hub. I conclude that elite conceptions of the city shape the governance of problematized bodies in ways which reinforce the meanings and politics of mobility and space. Elite understandings of movement and the city itself shape the practices and targets of urban regulation and control.

Review: House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964, by Nikhil Rao

Nikhil Rao House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, 312 pp., 2 tables, 53 b/w illus. $90 (cloth), ISBN 9780816678129; $30 (paper), ISBN 9780816678136 Of all the cities founded by the British in the colonial era, Bombay (now known as Mumbai) has most captured the imagination of writers. Over the past decade or so it has served as one of the primary subjects of a rich body of scholarship that vastly expands our understanding of the complexities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial cities in South Asia. This scholarship shows the important role of local populations in the making, imagining, and inhabiting of the colonial city, thus not only providing compelling insights into the architecture and urbanism of this era but also adding nuance to our understanding of colonial processes that shaped the urban environment. Nikhil Rao’s House, but No Garden , which focuses on the construction and inhabitation of apartments as a new residential mode of dwelling as well as on global processes of suburbanization, is an important contribution to this emerging body of research. Rao’s book reveals that the events associated with Bombay’s suburbanization in the twentieth century are vital to our understanding of urban land management, apartment dwelling’s role in the creation of middle-class identities and meta-identities, and the contemporary city. This work is significant for several reasons. First, it spans the period from 1898 to 1964, straddling the colonial and postcolonial eras (India became independent in 1947) and thus encompassing a part of the twentieth century that is relatively understudied in Indian cities. Many urban histories end around 1918, and anthropologists and sociologists often focus on the contemporary city. Urban historians writing about colonial Bombay prior to 1918 are referring to a limited geographical area of about 22 square miles in the southern third of the island of Bombay; in that period the northern third of the island remained undeveloped. In contrast, scholars writing on the contemporary city refer to …