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

1. A Joint Enterprise

1 On 5 March 1839, five prominent native businessmen of Bombay proposed a scheme to the government that would cost over two hundred thousand rupees, a huge sum in those days.The scheme consisted of the building of a wharf and basin at the Cooly Bunder (dock) for the landing of grain, and the extension of this wharf as far as the Bori Bunder for the landing of cotton or any other merchandise. In their letter the merchants added, We doubt not that considering the importance of the undertaking to the interest of a large portion of the community; and the expense that will be involved in the completion of it, upwards of two lacs of Rupees—as also the improvement it will confer upon the island of Bombay—an improvement the furtherence of which we have always understood it to be a particular object of attention to the Government of this Presidency to have effected through private enterprise, our humble request will be favorably taken into consideration by the Honorable the Governor in Council.1 In other words, business leaders understood that the colonial government believed that private enterprise would play an integral role in the development of the city. This chapter explores the city that was built and controlled jointly by the colonial rulers and the Indian and European mercantile and industrial elite to serve the interests of these classes and especially their interests in the commerce of the city. In this city, the government and capitalists worked together to develop the city through projects that were mutually beneficial. Especially since 1 A Joint Enterprise 2 A Joint Enterprise the 1860s the government, with the help of the philanthropic individuals of the capitalist class, created institutions to form the new public realm and built infrastructure to aid the capitalistic development that was emerging.These institutions included hospitals, educational institutions, asylums, and dispensaries for the use of the public at large. The joint partnership between the government and financial elite dominated the direction of urban planning and local government, but by the 1920s the control of the upper classes was under attack. My argument that the building of colonial Bombay was a joint enterprise of the colonial regime and Indians stands in contrast to that of Anthony D. King, who credits European imperialism and colonialism alone with the creation of colonial cities.2 King sees global influences at work in colonial cities, but in Bombay as well as elsewhere these influences were met head on by local influences and politics, which were equally determinant forces in the making of colonial cities. As the opening anecdote of this chapter indicates, in Bombay, taxpayers, landlords, and intellectuals, as well as industrialists and merchants who were involved in the global commodity exchange, were influential actors in molding urban-planning policies conducive to their agendas, demonstrating the ways, as geographer Jane Jacobs has argued, that global and local already inhabit one another.3 Gyan Prakash and Douglas Haynes recognize that in unequal power relations there is both dominance and resistance and “struggle is constantly being conditioned by the structures of social and political power.”While acknowledging the importance of what James Scott calls “everyday forms of resistance,” Prakash and Haynes argue for the need to look at both extraordinary and everyday resistance. Of particular significance is their argument that resistance is not always overt and conscious.They define resistance “as those behaviours and cultural practices by subordinate groups that contest hegemonic formations, that threaten to unravel the strategies of domination; ‘consciousness’ need not be essential to its constitution.”4 In Bombay, both ordinary and privileged sections of Indian society undercut colonial and elite projects by challenging the government in court or by bargaining with the government through contestatory acts that were not always overt or conscious. Although the cooperation of the native elite and colonial government was central to the operation of the joint enterprise, the native elite did not simply follow the government’s directions . Instead, cooperation, the negotiation of unequal power relations, domination , and resistance were all features of the complex relationship that made the city of Bombay and shaped a range of more specific social processes: from migration—both from the hinterland to the city and within the city itself—to commerce and industry, urban design schemes, and the partnership between government and private enterprise. A Joint Enterprise 3...