Bombay to Mumbai

Bombay Before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos | Author: Prashant Kidambi, Manjiri Kamat, and Rachel Dwyer (editors) | Publisher: Viking (Penguin)

When Australian historian Jim Masselos arrived in Bombay (now Mumbai) for the first time in 1961 on a Commonwealth scholarship to study for his PhD in St Xavier’s College, he was hardly any different from thousands of people who land at the airports, railways stations and beaches of the metropolis every day. “India and Southeast Asia became important locations on the world crossroads,” he writes in “Remembering Bombay”, the final essay in the book under review, “we… (did not) see ourselves in Australia as positioned at the world’s crossroads.” Dr Masselos writes he was unsure if he would like Bombay — a fear that has been belied by his illustrious carrier since then. 

This book, dedicated to him and a product of a seminar organised by him in 2017, provides more evidence of the mutual affection between India’s “Maximum City” and one of its foremost chroniclers. The 13 essays in the book — excluding Dr  Masselo’s Afterword and an Introduction by Prof Kidambi — are neatly arranged into four parts: (I) “Community”, (II) “Spatial Templates”, (III) “Power”, and (IV) “Nationalism”. The first part has four essays while the other three have three each, their subjects as varied as how the 1871 famine in Iran affected the Parsi population in Mumbai to how home furnishings were marketed in the city in the 1930s and 1940s.

One of my favourite essays in the book is, in fact, “Selling Home: Marketing Home Furnishings in Late Colonial Bombay” by Abigail McGowan, associate professor of history at the University of Vermont, USA. Prof McGowan has previously researched the politics of craft and craft development. In her essay in this book, she writes: “Traders and contemporary writers regularly described Bombay as a city where anything could be bought or sold.” There are, however, relatively few investigations into the material history of the lives of people living in the city — what did their homes look like, what cutlery and crockery did they use, what beds did they sleep in.

A helpful footnote informs the reader that Prof McGowan accessed the archives of the Godrej group, foremost manufacturers of furniture in India, as well as the Scottish Business Archives at the University of Glasgow. She also provides 18 advertisements at the end of her essay — catalogues and promotion of furniture shops in the city. As her essay demonstrates, the gradual disappearance of European furniture makers and their replacement by Indian alternatives is a narrative not only of the birth of a new nation but also its turn towards a socialist economy. In conclusion, Prof McGowan writes, “they sold goods for home, and sold the idea of home as well”.  The home of the the family is, in fact, the smallest unit of the economy and the nation, and it is undeniable that the microcosm of the home is the stage on which the drama of the nation plays out.

Several historical characters  stand out in the book. One among them is Mohammad Ali Rogay, a late 18th-early 19th century trader who spent several years in China as an agent of the legendary Readymoney family and later associated with Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy. In the inaugural essay of the book, “Mohammad Ali Rogay: Life and Times of a Bombay Country Trader”, Murali Ranganathan traces the history of community formation in early Bombay through the life and career of Rogay, who emerged as a leader of the Konkani Muslim community. Prof Ranganathan writes this is only a preliminary essay—one can only hope he will write a fuller account of this intriguing character.

In recent times, there has been a lively debate about the utility of popular and academic history, with both camps not infrequently locking horns. The writers and editors of this book — all of them reputed historians with impeccable credentials — seem to have tried to make the essay accessible to readers beyond academic circles. My only complaint is that the critical apparatus is in the endnotes — imagine turning 400 pages every time you want to look up something! As history becomes a contested space in “new” India, books such as these will perform the essential task of serving as reminders.