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

A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay is an important contribution to the growing body of revisionist South Asian architectural and urban history. Preeti Chopra illuminates the limitations of the colonial canon and joins other historians who have challenged colonial urban and architectural histories that are based on the paradigm of dominance and exclusivity of the colonial agency in mandating architectural and urban production. These revisionist histories, exemplified in the work of Zeynep Çelik, Swati Chattopadhyay, and William Glover, among others, unearth the role of the colonized in the shaping of their built environment; their resistance to colonial authority; the limits of colonial power in the use of architecture and urbanism as spatial tools for regulating societies; the inadequacies of the colonial production of knowledge; the heterogeneity of colonizers as a fragmented group and its impact on the built form; the limits of the tradition–modernity model; and the inadequacy of the black town–white town model of the colonial city.

Among existing histories of Bombay, Sharada Dwivedi’s and Rahul Mehrotra’s Bombay: The Cities Within presents the most comprehensive architectural survey, while Mariam Dossal’s Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City offers a detailed planning history of the city. These histories have been written from the vantage point of a clear divide between colonizers and colonized and present the British as the dominant agents of urban and architectural change. Revisionist histories such as Prashant Kidambi’s The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920, Sandip Hazareesingh’s The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity: Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay City, 1905–1925, and Mariam Dossal’s Theatre of Conflict, City of Hope: Mumbai, 1660 to Present Times present alternative narratives of how colonial power was contested in the making of Bombay.

Revisionist colonial urban historiography offers several approaches to the question of how to theorize the colonial city. A Joint Enterprise theorizes the colonial city as a product of ruler–ruled collaborative alliances in which the lines of division between the colonizer and the colonized are neither firm nor still. Chopra presents the instability of the categories of “colonizer” and “colonized” in the making of the architecture of the city. The most important contribution of this book is the detail devoted to the role of the elite Parsi philanthropists in the construction of Bombay’s buildings. Chopra painstakingly documents how the collaborative construction of the city was the product of uneasy and shifting alliances among several constituencies.

The introduction presents the theoretical layout and plan of the book. Chopra lists the themes of investigation: charity and philanthropy, the public and the joint public realm, and religion and secularism. Chapter 1, “A Joint Enterprise,” problematizes Anthony King’s argument— that colonial cities were exclusive products of colonial regimes— through the unearthing of Indian financial, artistic, and technical contributions in the making of Bombay. Chopra demonstrates how multiple agents built colonial Bombay’s infrastructure and public institutions, which forged new cosmopolitan identities among its populace.

Colonial architectural historians find it compelling to address the question of architectural styles in British India and their slippery relationship to colonial ideology. In chapter 2, “Anglo-Indian Architecture and the Meaning of Its Styles,” Chopra challenges Thomas Metcalf’s argument in An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj that the British used architectural styles to legitimize colonial rule and establish themselves as the natural successors to the Mughals after 1857. She departs from Metcalf’s construct to argue that debates over style were largely a result of the desire to create stable identities of the colonizers and colonized.

The Gothic Revival style in Bombay is theorized in several ways. On the one hand is Christopher London’s argument that the Gothic...