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

6. Of Gods and Mortal Heroes: Conundrums of the Secular Landscape of Colonial Bombay

191 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the city was modernized and a new secular public landscape was created—the joint public realm that was made up of public buildings and open spaces. The Gothic Revival architectural style signified the consensus between native philanthropists and colonial officials on the need for and the aims underlying the new public landscape for all of Bombay’s citizens. In contrast, various groups in the city were distinguished by their modes: their distinct clothing, religious buildings,and neighborhoods.Just as the dividing practices in the city’s medical institutions separated groups based on various criteria but disallowed religious practices at these sites, modernizing the city meant a clear separation between the religious and secular domains of the city, where local religious structures were not allowed to stand in the way of improvements and were moved, demolished , or rebuilt if the site was required. The religious also had to be contained so that the influence of gods and goddesses was restricted; they had to be restrained within certain boundaries so that the sacred would not get in the way of economic and urban development. Particularly after the mid-nineteenth century, the colonial regime erected public buildings and urban spaces that were supposedly free of religious symbols . However, statues and images of mortal heroes and royalty substituted for gods in these new arenas that supported the colonial regime’s emerging civil religion. In Bombay, many of these new deities were not British. From about the second half of the nineteenth century, busts and statues of Indian philanthropists , and later other prominent Indians, were erected as memorials to their 6 Of Gods and Mortal Heroes: Conundrums of the Secular Landscape of Colonial Bombay 192 Of Gods and Mortal Heroes generosity or leadership, clearly signaling that the British had partners in the building of Bombay (Figure 6.1). These new deities hailed from both Britain and India in a landscape that not only undermined British control and dominance but also complicated the signs of rule with these figures of joint sponsorship . What then is the role of religion in the secular public landscape of the colonial city? While the British were engaged in the process of converting some Indian religious buildings to secular use, Indians were engaged in an opposite process of inserting the religious into the secular colonial public landscape, and elite Indians were interposing their images amid those of the British. By examining the secularization of Indian religious structures by the British, and the accommodation of the religious by Indians into the secular public landscape, I argue that the meanings of monuments in Bombay became the vehicles of complex associations created by both the colonial regime and the local citizenry. By using the phrase “complex associations,” I mean to account for the ways that the secular, the religious, the aesthetic—events, rituals, emotions, to name a few—dynamically shape the meanings of monuments. The British redirected some associations of monuments by converting certain places of worship to secular use, such as for a governor’s residence or as a protected public monument. Public buildings and spaces were meant to accomFIGURE 6.1. Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Alexander Cowper, Town Hall, Bombay, 1821–33, interior view showing a statue from 1858 by Carlo Marochetti of the first baronet Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy (1783–1859). The statue is flanked by British worthies in the lobby of the library of the Asiatic Society housed in the Town Hall. Photograph by author, 1998. Of Gods and Mortal Heroes 193 modate British worthies and underscore the benefits of colonial rule, thereby upholding the myths of the colonizer’s civil religion.However,the local population redirected the meanings associated with secular colonial public buildings and public gardens by the introduction of religious buildings and rituals into these sites. Moreover, through acts of philanthropy, the Indian elite ensured that there was space for both British and Indian worthies at these sites. British Control of Spaces of Worship A decade after the Portuguese had ceded Bombay to the British in 1661, Gerald Aungier, the British governor of Bombay, inaugurated a policy that granted freedom of worship to caste groups who settled in Bombay.1 The ability of the British to provide stable conditions for trade and their promise of religious freedom attracted Indian trading communities to migrate to Bombay, a factor that was important in making Bombay the...