A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay (review)

Colonial cities in India have been a subject of study for quite some time and many cities such as Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras have received a good deal of attention from historians and social scientists. Over the last few decades, scholars have studied the structures, architectural designs, and building plans of colonial cities and have examined their social and cultural meanings and attributes. Such studies have focused mainly on the colonial state as the prime builder of cities that served as its administrative headquarters and also represented the political and cultural ethos of the British Empire in the colony. The colonial state's urban planning, its policies regarding allocation of funds and distribution of physical spaces for public buildings, and the social and cultural dimensions of the cities' public spaces have so far dominated the discourse. The book under review revisits the colonial city of Bombay. It tracks the city's expansion and development in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and explores the building of public institutions and the creation of a public arena in the city. Preeti Chopra's main argument in the book is that the building of the colonial city of Bombay was a joint enterprise of the British colonial government and native Indians. It was the result of the partnership between the state and the Indian mercantile and industrial elites. The latter actively participated in various urban developmental projects spearheaded by the government and were also often able to appropriate a place in the public sphere that would serve as a mark of their identity. The author argues that not only business elites and philanthropists but also Indian engineers, architects, artists, craftsmen, and even laborers played a vital role in the making of nineteenth-century Bombay. Whereas the native philanthropists, especially the Parsis, joined hands with the government in raising funds, others offered crucial technical and artistic services and cooperated in designing and actually carrying out the intended building projects. The author culls empirical data from a variety of sources and brings in visual evidence to prove that the shaping of colonial Bombay was an outcome of an intentional partnership and cooperation of the native elites with the colonial government.

What is most interesting in the book is the illustration of how this joint enterprise was actually carried out. This is done by examining various phases of urbanization and analyzing the political and sociocultural meanings of architectural designs, allocation of spaces in public buildings, and representations of human images and local cultural motifs. The book contributes significantly towards an understanding of the urban history as it looks at Bombay as a locus of a wide range of social spaces and sociocultural practices. The author explicates how the social space, that is, the public arena, that this joint enterprise created in British Bombay, was imagined and appropriated by the colonial state and the natives. She makes an interesting observation that the city's public sphere was a fractured and divided one (p. 176). It helped the natives to reimagine themselves as Bombay's citizens and make use of public spaces for collective activities. It also, however, reinforced racial, religious, community, caste, and gender differences, as the chapter on hospitals and lunatic asylums clearly shows. Complex and contested processes of representation, imagination, and articulation of identities went into the creation of the public arena. Whereas the native philanthropists, contributors, and the general public appropriated this sphere for themselves, their communities, and their fellow citizens, the colonial government sought to use this arena to represent the British Empire and its secular ideals.

There are some other important issues discussed in the book, such as the relationship between religion and colonialism, religion and modernization, and how the colonial state navigated the challenges of building a colonial city with a modern secular landscape. The government did not tolerate religious spaces or practices at public premises and...