The Religious and Racial Geography of Late Nineteenth-Century Bombay

Abstract

The spatial separation of European colonialists and the local population was long seen as the defining feature of colonial cities. In recent years, the literature has moved toward a more ambivalent and contingent view of this spatial separation. This paper attempts to look beyond imagining the colonial city in terms of stark dualities or revisionist ambivalences, addressing both religious and racial separation. The paper analyses the street-level religious and racial geography of late nineteenth-century Bombay, using data from the 1881 Census. Results suggest moderate to high levels of racial and religious segregation in nineteenth-century Bombay at the street level, varying across groups, coupled with the existence of enclaves, and expressions of preference for segregation in diverse domains. The paper concludes that religion and race were meaningful social categories inscribed in urban space.

Keywords:

• Bombay
• colonial cities
• historical GIS
• race
• religion
• segregation
• spatial

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Quentin Ramond and Yannick Savina for help with mapping and methods and for their advice, and the two anonymous South Asia reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy (Abingdon: Routledge, 1990), p. 57.

2. William Cunningham Bissell, ‘Between Fixity and Fantasy: Assessing the Spatial Impact of Colonial Urban Dualism’, in Journal of Urban History, Vol. 37, no. 2 (2011), pp. 208–29; Rebecca M. Brown, ‘The Cemeteries and the Suburbs: Patna’s Challenges to the Colonial City in South Asia’, in Journal of Urban History, Vol. 29, no. 2 (2003), pp. 151–72; Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta’, in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 59, no. 2 (2000), pp. 307–31; Preeti Chopra, A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Mariam Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City, 1845–1875 (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1991); William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Robert Lewis and Richard Harris, ‘Segregation and the Social Relations of Place, Bombay, 1890–1910’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 36, no. 4 (2013), pp. 589–607; and Carl H. Nightingale, ‘Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York’, in The American Historical Review, Vol. 113, no. 1 (2008), pp. 48–71.

3. Bissell, ‘Between Fixity and Fantasy’, p. 223.

4. Nightingale, ‘Before Race Mattered’, p. 56.

5. Lewis and Harris, ‘Segregation and Social Relations’, p. 592.

6. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, ‘The Perils of Proximity: Rivalries and Conflicts in the Making of a Neighbourhood in Bombay City in the Twentieth Century’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 52, no. 2 (2018), pp. 351–93 [360].

7. Meera Kosambi, Bombay in Transition: The Growth and Social Ecology of a Colonial City, 1880–1980 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1986), p. 65.

8. Jim Masselos, ‘Social Segregation and Crowd Cohesion: Reflections Around Some Preliminary Data from 19th Century Bombay City’, in Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 13, no. 2 (1979), pp. 145–67 [156].

9. Susan J. Lewandowski, ‘Changing Form and Function in the Ceremonial and the Colonial Port City in India: An Historical Analysis of Madurai and Madras’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol.11, no. 2 (1977), pp. 183–212.

10. Glover, Making Lahore Modern.

11. Edward B. Eastwick, Handbook for India, Part II (Bombay/London: John Murray, 1859), p. 272; Stephen M. Edwardes, The Rise of Bombay: A Retrospect, reprinted from Volume X of the Census of India Series, 1901 (Bombay: Times of India Press, 1902); Dinsha E. Wacha, Shells for the Sands of Bombay, Being My Recollections and Reminiscences (Bombay: Anklesaria, 1920), pp. 411–6.

12. Warden’s Report on Landed Tenures in Bombay, Selection 55, 1814, p. 27, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai, India (henceforth MSA). Warden is quoting from Fryer’s famous account of the 1670s. ‘Parsee’ is the earlier spelling of Parsi.

13. James Gray, Life in Bombay and Neighbouring Out Stations (London: British Library, 1855), pp. 5–6.

14. Chopra, A Joint Enterprise; King, Urbanism, Colonialism; Nightingale, ‘Before Race Mattered’; Eric L. Beverley, ‘Colonial Urbanism and South Asian Cities’, in Social History, Vol. 36, no. 4 (2011), pp. 482–97; and Kosambi, Bombay in Transition.

15. M. Raisur Rahman, ‘Religion, Law and State Policing: Accusations, Inquests and Arbitration of Religious Conflicts in Colonial India’, in South Asian History and Culture, Vol. 10, no. 2 (2019), pp. 187–98.

16. The Parsis, a commercially powerful religious group in Bombay’s history, migrated to India from Persia (Iran).

17. ‘The Bombay Riots of February 1874’, article reprinted from The Times of India (Bombay: Times of India Printing Works, n.d.).

18. Ibid., p. 2.

19. Ibid., p. 14.

20. Angelina Grigoryeva and Martin Ruef, ‘The Historical Demography of Racial Segregation’, in American Sociological Review, Vol. 80, no. 4 (2015), pp. 814–42.

21. Kosambi, Bombay in Transition.

22. Ibid., p. 40.

23. Wacha, Shells for the Sands.

24. Edwardes, The Rise of Bombay, p. 206, emphasis added.

25. Town Committee Diary 1/183, 1803, MSA. Kosambi, Bombay in Transition, pp. 48–9, situates New Town in Girgaum and Kamathipura.

26. Base map digitised from Henry Conybeare’s 1855 Map of Fort, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; and T.S. Weir, surgeon-major, Census of the City and Island of Bombay, 1881 (Bombay: Times of India Steam Press, 1883).

27. Specifically, the street-level data used in this paper is from tables titled ‘Males and Females by Class and by Streets Residing in < Name of Section > on the 17^th of February 1881’. This count did not include the harbour population (those who lived on ships or boats) and the ‘houseless’.

28. ‘Suggestion for the Improvement of the Island of Bombay’, by Mr. Conybeare, The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce (17 July 1852), p. 465. For a broader perspective on the colonial state’s drive for statistics, see Richard Harris and Robert Lewis, ‘A Happy Confluence of Planning and Statistics: Bombay and Calcutta in the 1901 Census’, in Planning Perspectives, Vol. 28, no. 1 (2013), pp. 125–38; and Prashant Kidambi, ‘Planning, the Information Order, and the Bombay Census of 1901’, in Planning Perspectives, Vol. 28, no. 1 (2013), pp. 117–23.

29. For example the 1901 Census of Bombay included 5 circles in southern and 8 circles in northern Fort.

30. Rick Grannis, ‘The Importance of Trivial Streets: Residential Streets and Residential Segregation’, in American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 103, no. 6 (1998), pp. 1530–64; and Grigoryeva and Ruef, ‘The Historical Demography of Racial Segregation’.

31. Jim Masselos, ‘Power in the Bombay “Moholla”, 1904–15: An Initial Exploration into the World of the Indian Urban Muslim’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 6, no. 1 (1976), pp. 75–95; and Stephen Legg, ‘A Pre-Partitioned City? Anti-Colonial and Communal Mohallas in Inter-War Delhi’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 42, no. 1 (2019), pp. 170–87.

32. For example, Muslims were internally differentiated by doctrine, occupation, class and language; see Masselos ‘Power in the Bombay “Moholla”’; and Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 4–6. The Census of 1881 enumerates for ‘Muslim’ only at the street level. While the sectarian division between Shi’a and Sunni is itemised at the ward level, ethnic–religious divisions (Konkani, Memon, Khoja, Afghan and so on) were only counted at the city level with at least half of the Muslim population not returning any information on ethnicity.

33. C.A. Bayly, ‘The Pre-History of “Communalism”? Religious Conflict in India, 1700–1860’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 19, no. 2 (1985), pp. 177–203; Sumit Guha, ‘The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India c. 1600–1990’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 45, no. 1 (2003), pp. 148–67; and David N. Lorenzen, ‘Who Invented Hinduism?’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 41, no. 4 (1999), pp. 630–59.

34. Conybeare’s 1855 street map is the most detailed: other street maps, while useful to fill in gaps, mark out principal streets only.

35. Some streets do not exist today, but their names can show up in the names of establishments in today's Fort area. I used this information to triangulate. 

36. Samuel T. Sheppard, Bombay Place-Names and Street Names: An Excursion into the By-Ways of the History of Bombay City (Bombay: Times Press, 1917).

37. Language information is from Table no. 115 of the 1881 Census: Weir, Census of the City and Island of Bombay, 1881, pp. 154–5.

38. Information on the number of buildings and the uses to which these were put is from Table no. 34 of the 1881 Census: ibid., p. 265.

39. Kosambi, Bombay in Transition, p. 42.

40. A chawl is an Indian built form similar to a tenement.

41. Table no. 9 of the 1881 Census: Weir, Census of the City and Island of Bombay, 1881, p. 9.

42. Leilah Vevaina, ‘Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good (Trust) Deeds’, in Peter van der Veer (ed.), Handbook of Religion and the Asian City (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), pp. 152–67.

43. Wacha, Shells for the Sands, p. 412.

44. To compute the indices for Bombay City, I used information for all the streets in the 1881 Census, which comprises 33 areas in Bombay (from the southern tip to Mahim), and 681 streets.

45. Otis D. Duncan and Beverly Duncan, ‘A Methodological Analysis of Segregation Indexes’, in American Sociological Review, Vol. 20, no. 2 (1955), pp. 210–7; and Michael J. White, ‘Segregation and Diversity Measures in Population Distribution’, in Population Index, Vol. 52, no. 2 (1986), pp. 198–221.

46. Anne K. Knowles, ‘Introduction’, in Social Science History, Special Issue, Vol. 24, no. 3 (2000), pp. 451–70 [453].

47. Kosambi, Bombay in Transition.

48. Sheppard, Bombay Place-Names and Street Names, p. 3.

49. Edwardes, The Rise of Bombay, p. 116, notes that the ‘shops of the Moody’s or victuallers’ gave the name to Moodykhana or Modykhana or Moodi street (spellings vary).

50. Masselos, ‘Power in the Bombay “Moholla”’; Legg, ‘A Pre-Partitioned City’; and Chandavarkar, ‘The Perils of Proximity’.

51. The Times of India Directory includes a street directory for Fort focusing on establishments. The Ash Lane entry listed a range of different businesses of which some have Muslim names. From the directory for 1884 (the closest to 1881 for which I have data), Ash Lane listed the following: C. Marcks and Co., Watchmakers; Bombay and Persia Steam Navigation Co.; Arabian Steam Launch Co. Ltd.; Amirudin Kikabhoy, Watchmaker; Aga Goolam Hoossein, Japanese-ware; B. Shapoorjee, Ice Confectionery; Dr. J.M. Barbour. However, it is not clear whether any of these businesses would account for the high percentage of Muslims in this particular street: The Times of India Calendar and Bombay Directory (Bombay: Times of India Office, 1884).

52. Kosambi, Bombay in Transition.

53. Ibid.

54. Lewis and Harris, ‘Segregation and Social Relations’.

55. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 40.

56. Edwardes, The Rise of Bombay, p. 206; Philip J. Stern, ‘“A Politie of Civill & Military Power”: Political Thought and the Late Seventeenth-Century Foundations of the East India Company-State’, in Journal of British Studies, Vol. 47, no. 2 (2008), pp. 253–83.

57. Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities; Edwardes, The Rise of Bombay; Kosambi, Bombay in Transition; and Susan Neild-Basu, ‘The Dubashes of Madras’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 18, no. 1 (1984), pp. 1–31.

58. Junfu Zhang, ‘Tipping and Residential Segregation: A Unified Schelling Model’, in Journal of Regional Science, Vol. 51, no. 1 (2011), pp. 167–93.

59. Ryan D. Enos and Christopher Celaya, ‘The Effect of Segregation on Intergroup Relations’, in Journal of Experimental Political Science, Vol. 5, no. 1 (2018), pp. 26–38; and John Dixon et al., ‘“The Inner Citadels of the Color Line”: Mapping the Micro-Ecology of Racial Segregation in Everyday Life Spaces’, in Social and Personality Psychology Compass, Vol. 2 no. 4 (2008), pp. 1547–69.

60. See Guha, ‘The Politics of Identity and Enumeration’.

61. Dixon et al., ‘“The Inner Citadels of the Color Line”’.

62. Ibid.

63. Star of India (31 Jan. 1871), SM 79, British Library.

64. Star of India (14 Jan. 1871), SM 79, British Library.

65. Edward B. Eastwick, ‘Preface’ to Gujarat and the Gujaratis: Pictures of Men and Manners taken from Life, Behramji Merwanji Malabari (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1882), pp. vii–viii.

66. Letter from superintendent, Lunatic Asylum, Colaba, 5 May 1900, 62 (663), General Department, 1900, MSA.

67. Report from S.M. Edwardes, commissioner of police, GD. No. 6180/6 of 1911, 1 July 1911, 45 (531, part I), General Department, 1912, MSA.

68. Gurákhi (8 Jan. 1898), 3, part I, General Department, 1898, MSA.

69. Letter from Dinsha Bamanji Pestanji Master, honorary physician, Nasarvanji Manekji Petit Charity Fund for Destitute Insane Parsis, 28 June 1895, 2522 (378), General Department, 1900, MSA.

70. ‘…the objections which members of the upper classes and the learned professions may entertain to having their schedules filled up for them by persons of lower social status…’, 33 (1063), General Department, 1990, MSA; see also Dossal, Imperial Designs.