The colonial port city

The notion of the capital city had acquired a European facade under the raj while the hill station and the cantonment represented new kinds of urban concentrations suited to the purposes of foreign rulers.

Getting to that point had been a slow process. The original low-lying seven islands were joined up and land reclaimed from the sea to create a single island that, along with the urban settlement, was known during the nineteenth century and later as Bombay Town and Island. After 1803, when a disastrous fire in the original walled city destroyed many trading, artisan and commercial buildings and markets as well as domestic houses, a new planned settlement (‘The New Town’) was located outside the town walls, the place where Bombay’s growing population was housed over the coming decades. Space was needed given the size to which the city grew. In the 1660s its population was probably around 10,000, in the 1760s 60,000 to 80,000, and in the 1870s 650,000 to 800,000.²⁰ Estimates vary because census-taking was not yet particularly accurate—and also because of the large temporary, ‘floating’, population of sailors and others that a maritime settlement necessarily acquired from time to time.

Another break with Bombay’s past and a sign of its commitment to the future was an extensive town-altering exercise—the pulling down of the town walls around the 1860s. The result was a swathe of empty land to be occupied by broad avenues, a public park (the maidan) and government buildings. Facing the maidan and looking over the Arabian Sea, the array of massive Gothic-influenced buildings—a high court, a university and

Figure 22.2 J.M.Gonsalves, Town hall, Bombay. Coloured lithograph c. 1833. The original fort/castle is in the background next to the ‘modern’ Town Hall. In front is a cosmopolitan mix of people enjoying the open space of what was earlier the city’s cotton green. Photo: Portvale collection, Sydney.

a government secretariat—asserted the importance of the law, learning and governance under the British raj. They were structures designed with all the grandeur appropriate to a capital city, one that controlled most of coastal western India. At the same time Bombay was still an entrepot, a trading centre, and continued to be so. But during the century its trading concerns were conducted on an immensely larger scale than had ever occurred when it was a Company factory. Nevertheless in the nineteenth century Bombay was a typical and prosperous colonial port city much like others scattered along sea links around the world.

Bombay was also becoming a new kind of city during the century. Apart from its Indian elites winning virtual self-government for its municipal corporation in the 1870s,²¹ and continuing to be a population magnet, it was changing into a city of new machines and technologies. And it benefited from the productivity and profits they brought. Bombay had been a leading maker of naval ships for the Company in the preceding century, and the Indians who had presided over the dockyards and built the ships had done well out of them, as indeed many had done from Company rule generally.

Bombay’s elites were proud of their city and of the wealth it generated, and proud too of their own achievements. It was a place of change and new ideas, one deserving of its motto: urbs prima in Indis, or first city in India, though rival cities elsewhere may have had different ideas as to which city was prime. Bombay was among other traits the industrial city par excellence. It epitomised the modern city, a new kind of urban phenomenon with a trajectory not determined exclusively by the interests and wishes of foreign rulers.