Urban Development and Death: Bombay City, 1870–1914

Abstract

Historians, statesmen, administrators, nationalists and others have disagreed sharply about the impact of modernization in the era of Western domination. Did Western rule provide the tools for Indian progress but did economically medieval, ‘other-worldly’ Indians fail to maximize the benefits of modernization and even thwart advances? Conversely, did Western imperialism systematically impoverish India by making it a ‘satellite,’ freezing the subcontinent into a neo-feudal social pattern while sucking up its wealth? Finally, is a ‘new revisionist’ interpretation correct that India experienced real if undramatic economic growth during the Western era and that notions of exploitation or Indian suffering induced by development were myths? Interpretations expressing either the great success and benign innovations of Western rule, or its exploitiveness both appear flawed, according to Bombay's modernizing experience. Bombay underwent a great expansion of wealth and became the source of India's new factory textile production, the hub of a great newwork of trasport and trade, and the cosmopolitan abode of wealth Indian merchants, industrialist and professionals, whose affluence, modernity, industrializing activies and eventual nationalist orientation distinguished them from a supine or neo-feudal comprador class, cooperating with Western masters in exploiting ‘natives’ for a myrmidon's share of the profits. Alternatively, Bombay's prosperity did not flow down to the masses; its modernization was complex, dynamically helping to produce progress and wealth, but for some decades impoverishing and destroying many lives. In the half-century of rapid development preceding the first world war, the great majority of Bombay's populace, its ordinary working classes, experienced significant declines in living standards, worsening environmental conditions and escalating death-rates. Diminished real income and increased mortality among Bombay's ordinary inhabitants warn against extrapolating from rising indices of material production an optimistic conclusion about the general human condition in the city or in British India.