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

The idea, once rampant, that colonial cities were, in essence, the one-sided creation of a colonial regime or could be neatly divided, socially and spatially, between what might be called a European white town and the black or native quarters has steadily fallen out of academic favor. As the colonial situation in general has come to be seen as more complex and multi-stranded, and to involve varieties of indigenous as well as colonial agency, so the understanding of the ways in which such cities were constructed and functioned has become more nuanced and dynamic. Preeti Chopra’s well-illustrated and richly documented account of the making of modern Bombay is a significant contribution to this burgeoning new literature. In her view the physical form of the city, as it evolved between the 1850s and 1920s, was the product of a “joint enterprise” or partnership between the British rulers and the Indian elites, with the prosperous and philanthropic Parsis foremost among the latter. As she observes, “It often seems as if the Parsis, rather than the British, built British Bombay” (xii). Chopra argues for the joint creation of an urban “public realm,” which she differentiates from the Habermasian “public sphere” by stressing the more socially and historically grounded nature of her work and the importance of dialogue and negotiation between the colonial government and the Indian elites (xx).

She illustrates and elaborates this challenging thesis by looking in turn at the mutual adoption of the gothic style of architecture (in preference to earlier classicism and the Indo-Saracenic style adopted in some other parts of British India); the professional career and architectural works of “an unknown Native Engineer,” the Parsi Khan Bahadur Muncherji Cowasji Murzban; and (in one of the book’s most interesting sections) the shared use of “dividing practices,” devised along lines of race, caste, community, and class, in the design and layout of such public buildings as hospitals and mental asylums. She investigates the complex interplay between secularism and religion in a colonial metropolis, in which the British veneration of queen, vice-consuls, military heroes, and civic celebrities, principally manifested through the erection and conspicuous display of public statues, was matched by an Indian commemoration of local philanthropists and public figures. Chopra shows the ways in which the supposedly secular spaces of the colonial city were subverted by the creation or resurrection of Muslim devotional sites and Hindu religious structures.

The main period covered by Chopra’s discussion begins with the sudden explosion of commercial wealth and civic pride during the cotton boom of the American Civil War. It ends, almost equally abruptly, with the rise of militant nationalism and the questioning of the desirability of a public partnership between native Indians and the colonial British, some of whose most revered monuments, including that of a besmirched Queen Victoria, became vulnerable to attack.

Chopra’s thesis is elegantly presented and effectively developed in relation to specific buildings, their plans and styles, and through individual architects and engineers. Of the latter, Murzban, who served for eleven years as executive engineer for the Bombay municipal corporation, is the most interesting and informative example, one that goes a long way to counter the assumption that Indians’ contributions to colonial architecture and urban layout were confined to their role as craftsmen and laborers. Here was an Indian engineer and architect who designed and built a series of significant buildings (albeit in the imported gothic style) and whose personal engagement with the Parsi community (including the poor) demonstrates the range of intersecting interests between professionalism and performance, and between buildings, their intended meanings, and their public and communal usages.

Chopra’s argument about partnership is not, however, unproblematic. Although she refers in her title to Bombay’s Indian elites, in practice this joint enterprise relates almost exclusively to the Parsi community, whose idiosyncratic and ambiguous position she must...