Mumbai

The pace of urbanisation in India was slow under colonial rule. In the early

twentieth century, no more than 11 per cent of Indians were living in cities. A large proportion of these urban dwellers were residents of the three Presidency cities. These were multi-functional cities: they had major ports, warehouses, homes and offices, army camps, as well as educational institutions, museums and libraries. Bombay was the premier city of India.

• Bombay became the capital of the Bombay Presidency in 1819, after the Maratha defeat in the Anglo-Maratha war.
• The city quickly expanded.
• With the growth of trade in cotton and opium, large communities of traders and bankers as well as artisans andshopkeepers came to settle in Bombay.
• The establishment of textile mills led to a fresh surge in migration.
• The first cotton textile mill in Bombay was established in 1854.
• By 1921, there were 85 cotton mills with about 146,000 workers.
• Women formed as much as 23 per cent of the mill workforce in
• the period between 1919 and 1926.

• The homes being small, streets and neighbourhoods were used for a variety of activities such as cooking, washing and sleeping.
• Liquor shops and akharas came up in any empty spot.
• People who belonged to the ‘depressed classes’ found it even more difficult to find housing.
• Lower castes were kept out of many chawls.

• Caste and family groups in the mill neighbourhoods were headed by someone who was similar to a village headman.
• Sometimes, the jobber in the mills could be the local neighbourhood leader.
• He settled disputes, organised food supplies, or arranged informal credit.
• He also brought important information on political developments.

Mumbai

Work in the city

Different people..... Different occupations.....

"The City of Dreams"

Neighbourhoods

A short video

What was it similar to? What was it different from?

• Chawls were multi-storeyed structures which had been built from at least the 1860s in the ‘native’ parts of the town.
• These houses were largely owned by private landlords looking for quick ways of earning money from anxious migrants.
• Each chawl was divided into smaller one-room tenements which had no private toilets, had many families living at a time in a tenement.
• The Census of 1901 reported that ‘the mass of the island’s population or 80 per cent of the total, resides in tenements of one room.

Caste and family groups

Condition of living

Conservative measures

Features of the city

• Trust was established in 1898; it focused on clearing poorer homes out of the city centre.
• By 1918, Trust schemes had deprived 64,000 people of their homes, but only 14,000 were rehoused.
• In 1918, a Rent Act was passed to keep rents reasonable, but it had the opposite effect of producing a severe housing crisis, since landlords withdrew houses from the market.

Work in the City

Housing and Neighbourhoods

The World of Cinema and Culture

Land Reclamation

Housing

Bombay as the City of Dreams

Urban life.... changes... for the better or the worse?

The World of Cinema........... and Culture

• Many Bombay films deal with the arrival in the city of new migrants, and their encounters with the real pressures of daily life.
• Some popular songs from the Bombay film industry speak of the contradictory aspects of the city.
• When did the Bombay film industry make its first appearance?
• Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatwadekar shot a scene of a wrestling match in Bombay’s Hanging Gardens and it became India’s first movie in 1896.
• Soon after, Dadasaheb Phalke made Raja Harishchandra (1913). After that, there was no turning back.

• Bombay was a crowded city. While every Londoner in the 1840s enjoyed an average space of 155 square yards, Bombay had a mere 9.5 square yards.
• The Bombay Fort area which formed the heart of the city in the early 1800s was divided between a ‘native’ town, where most of the Indians lived, and a European or ‘white’ section.
• With the rapid and unplanned expansion of the city, the crisis of housing and water supply became acute by the mid-1850s
• Since workers walked to their place of work, 90 per cent of millworkers were housed in Girangaon, a ‘mill village’ not more than 15 minutes’ walk from the mills.

By 1925, Bombay had become India’s film capital, producing films for a national audience. The amount of money invested in about 50 Indian films in 1947 was Rs 756 million. By 1987, the film industry employed 520,000 people.

Bombay films have contributed in a big way to produce an image of the city as a blend of dream and reality, of slums and star bungalows.

The East India Company quickly shifted its base from Surat, its principal western port, to Bombay.

Bombay was the major outlet for cotton textiles from Gujarat. Later, in the nineteenth century, the city functioned as a port through which large quantities of raw materials such as cotton and opium would pass.

• Most of the people in the film industry were themselves migrants who came from cities like Lahore, Calcutta, Madras and contributed to the national character of the industry.
• Those who came from Lahore, then in Punjab, were especially important for the development of the Hindi film industry. Many famous writers, like Ismat Chughtai and Saadat Hasan Manto, were associated with Hindi cinema.

Let us look at how Bombay developed

In the seventeenth century, Bombay was a group of seven islands under Portuguese control. In 1661, control of the islands passed into British hands after the marriage of Britain’s King Charles II to the Portuguese princess.

Land Reclamation in Bombay

How was it divided?...... how did the re-distribute?......

"From a slum to a city"

Currently, Mumbai has the highest number of billionaires and millionaires among all cities in India.

Gradually, it also became an important administrative centre in western India, and then, by the end of the nineteenth century, a major industrial centre.

It expanded rapidly from the late nineteenth century, its population going up from 644,405 in 1872 to nearly 1,500,000 in 1941.

• The need for additional commercial space in the mid-nineteenth century led to the formulation of several plans, both by government and private companies, for the reclamation of more land from the sea.
• In 1864, the Back Bay Reclamation Company won the right to reclaim the western foreshore from the tip of Malabar Hill to the end of Colaba.
• A successful reclamation project was undertaken by the Bombay Port Trust, which built a dry dock between 1914 and 1918 and used the excavated earth to create the 22-acre Ballard Estate. Subsequently, the famous Marine Drive of Bombay was developed.

Conclusion