The city...of Mumbai..

The British left behind an architectural legacy which lives on in many of Bombay’s public buildings. Let us take a look at the Anglo-Indian heritage which once gave Bombay the reputation of the best Victorian Gothic city in the world.

When the British left India, what remained behind was a legacy ranging from intangibles like language, social customs, the modes of administrative functioning, and more enduringly their buildings scattered across twenty-four latitudes and windely varied terrain. A lot of the construction in British India was the work of amateurs and military engineers. Their work reflects a curious adaptation of local materials and weather to a longing for home being expressed in the implantation of European styles in a tropical land. In all of India, apart from Shimla perhaps, it is the city of Bombay which shows the greatest incorporation of a multitude of divergent styles popular in the Victoria era.

As part of the Portuguese Catharine of Braganza’s dowery when she married Charles II, Bombay passed into British possession in 1670. Not a mainland settlement like that of Madras or Calcutta, it was originally a string of islands sheltering the wide inlet of bom Bahia or beautiful bay from the Arabian sea.

Unlike the other two presidency towns, Bombay’s growth was peaceful, untroubled by attacks from native potentates or foreign competitors. Slowly its identity changed from that of an archipelago to a peninsula, as a network of roads linked the several islands. It was only after 1850 and the cutting of the Suez Canal that Bombay boomed from a trading port on a quiet backwater to a teeming, expanding metropolis.

Today as post-independence urban architecture in Bombay burgeons in a plethora of concrete and glass angularly pushing skywards, public buildings of a bygone era still remain like spacious islands of ornate extravagance. These are nearly all the buildings of Sir Bartle’s Bombay. Florence Nightingale, so impressed with the sanitary arrangements incorporated into his town planning, is said to have remarked on the fact that Victorian Bombay had achieved a lower mortality rate than London’s (itself the lowest in Europe). Together with Sir Bartle, James Trubshave, the architectural planner had endeavoured to lay out a model business town of imperial Britain.

According to writer Jan Morris, Bombay is one of the most characteristically Victorian cities in the world, displayed all the grand effrontery of Victorian eclectism. From the Fort the Fort area down to the cantonment at Colaba still stand buildings with examples of diverse architectural features such as German gables, Dutch roofs, Swiss timbering, Romance arches and Tudor casements mingled with more ethnic oriental embellishments.

British reaction to such grand and diverse display was also equally diverse. While Aldous Huxley is said to have sneered and dismissed Bombay s pretentious, architectural historian, Gavin Stamp has called it the best Victorian Gothic city in the world.

Perhaps the most fitting monuments both in name and splendour, the very symbol of the British in Victorian Bombay is a building that was opened in 1887 in time to celebrate Queen Victoria Terminus or VT as it is better known today.

A far far grander edifice in which to dine, the Taj Mahal Hotel was constructed at the ocean’s edge in 1903. It was built not by the British, but by one of the most enterprising Parsees of all time, Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata. The idea of building a grand hotel was conceived by him when he was refused entry into the nearby Watson’s Hotel, on account of his race. Today Watson’s doesn’t exist but the Taj has prospered enough to give birth to a growing hotel chain. For travelers on the P&O lines during the Raj, the Taj became as welcome a landmark as another famous hotel, Raffles of Singapore.

Most of the public building in Bombay are still used for the purpose for which they were originally designed. Today much is unchanged too at clubs like the Bombay Gymkhana where members still order chhota pegs at sun down. What is threatened is the dwindling private bungalow with its high ceilings, deep verandahs and tiled floors. Tomorrow’s newspaper will never carry an advertisement like that of the Bombay Courier in 1793 For Sale- a bungalow situated between the two tombstones on the island of Coulaba.