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Free to move, forced to flee: the formation and dissolution of suburbs in colonial Bombay, 1750–1918

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2012

PREETI CHOPRA
PREETI CHOPRA*
Affiliation:
Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1250 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA
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Abstract:

This article shows the centrality of movement – the freedom to move, the inability to move and being forced to flee – to the suburban development of Bombay. The reason as well as the spatio-temporal rhythm of movement differed among population groups inhabiting the city. The early suburbs of colonial Bombay were predicated on the ability of a tiny European elite to move to different parts of the city according to the seasons. By the mid-nineteenth century, their movement would no longer be restricted to the several islands that constituted Bombay. Instead, tracing the governor's footsteps they would move many miles away, from Bombay to Poona during the monsoons, to Mahabaleshwar after the rains and back to Bombay for the cool winter season as the seat of governance shifted according to the season. In late nineteenth-century Bombay, the growth of the mill industry would force Europeans to retreat to other areas of the city from their former suburban homes, which were now transformed into mill districts. In contrast to the freedom of movement that underlay the early foundation of European suburban development in Bombay, Indian suburban development was based on the necessity to flee the crowded and insalubrious native city districts. The bubonic plague that first struck the city in 1896 was most virulent in the native districts of the city, long subject to municipal neglect. After 1896, large numbers of Bombay's native citizenry were forced to flee their homes each year during the plague season. Moving to different locations, often along the railway lines, they formed small communities that became the foundation of Bombay's future suburban development.

Type
Indian suburbs
Information
Urban History , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 83 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 In 1854, C.N. Davar, a Parsi entrepreneur, constructed the first of many textile mills to be built in Bombay on a site east of the ridge of Cumballa Hills. In contrast to Calcutta, Bombay's industrialization was founded and managed mostly by Indians of various communities. See Gordon, A.D.D., Businessmen and Politics: Rising Nationalism and a Modernising Economy in Bombay, 1918–1933 (New Delhi, 1978), 1, 58–68Google Scholar.

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4 According to historian Mariam Dossal, ‘the move towards the suburbs’ in Bombay began as early as the late eighteenth century. However, the first time I have seen the use of the term ‘suburbs’ is in Marianne Postans' book of western India in 1838. See Dossal, M., Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City 1845–1875 (Delhi, 1991), 19Google Scholar; Mrs Postans [Marianne Young, second name], Western India in 1838, 2 vols. (London, 1839), vol. I, 12.

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36 RDPGB, xxvii. It appears that the date is not correct as at least one body, the Bombay Native Piece Goods Merchants’ Association, responded before this date.

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41 Govind Narayan's Mumbai: An Urban Biography from 1863, ed. and trans. M. Ranganathan, foreword by G. Prakash (London, 2008), 130–1. Written in Marathi, under the title of Mumbaiche Varnan, this was the first comprehensive account of Bombay that preceded other urban biographies of the city written in other languages.

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53 From about 1865, building fines had been applied to undeveloped land. In the case of Tata's proposed development in Bandra, the collector of Thana observed that a building fine of Rs 1,500 per acre would be applied not only on the houses but also on the surrounding fenced or walled gardens and compounds. The building fine would have resulted in an annual assessment that equalled approximately 4% of the property's value. As a comparison it was pointed to the collector that the rates and taxes were not even one fourth of this in Bombay where water, electricity and police protection were also given. The government argued ‘that the revenue would be deprived of any benefit from the ground rent, should the periodical survey of the district warrant a further revision of the tax’ (78). See ibid., 77–8, quote from 77.

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