BOMBAY CITY OF GOLD
“The City of Gold” is two place. People have been coming to Bombay for 300 years, hoping to make their fortune. But in their search for gold many have died. Their bodies were laid in a place known as Sonapur, which also means “the city of gold” since, according to an Indian saying, to die is to be turned to gold.
When the British first interested themselves in Bombay, a natural port on the west coast of India, 'the Island', as it was commonly called, consisted properly speaking of not one island but seven: these were grouped around an expanse of salt flats which, in the monsoon, became a dividing flood, but which, in drier seasons and at low tide, united the islands and was eventually to be reclaimed and made part of one whole.
The East India Company, which had been granted its charter by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600, had its eye on the place from the start, but it was then a Portuguese trading post on which the Dutch, too, had designs. Sixty years of man oeuvres and warlike forays were to elapse before the British Crown acquired the Island, almost absent-mindedly, as part of the dowry of Charles II's bride Catherine of Braganza. The only person at the time who seems to have appreciated the potential significance of this transfer was Antonio de Mello de Castro, the Viceroy of Goa, the main Portuguese colony down the coast. He wrote to his king: '... I for see the great trouble that from this neighborhood will result to the Portuguese, and that India will be lost on the same day on which the English nation is settled in Bombay.' Given the apparent insignificance of Bombay at this date, it was an amazingly prophetic statement.
Any account of the early decades of Bombay's British history leaves the reader wondering how it was that the whole enterprise did not flounder. How, amongst frequent deaths, internal disputes, shortage of funds, mutinies, a revolt, and attacks or threats of attacks from without from four separate but intermittently collusive enemies, did the town get founded at all? Yet it did Perhaps it is important to remember, in view of the dominating image of the high-minded Indian Civil Servant that we have inherited from the more recent past, that the early settlers in Bombay, as in the other two presidencies of Calcutta and Madras, were men of a very different cast. Whatever they lacked in integrity and moral fervor, and most of them lacked a great deal, they were at least courageous and determined in their self-seeking. The early name for the East India Company was The Company of Merchant Adventurers to the East Indies' and that indeed was what they were traders, bent on making personal fortunes. Some of their activities were frankly piratical, and all were carried out in a time when India was many months away from England so that neither immediate censure nor ready help could be expected from the Company servants at home. When Bombay be a Crown colony in 1665 it was obvious that its governance must be carried out with some semblance of order and decency But this was not easy to arrange.
Sir Humphrey Cooke arrived to find ' neither Government Justice' in the place. The Portuguese had already made themselves difficult toward the British and he paid them back in the same coin He annexed Mahim, one of the northern islands which had not been included in the final agreement, and attempted to confiscate Roman Catholic (i.e. Portuguese) plantations when the incumbents refused to renounce the Pope. (The amount of Bombay Island that actually belonged to the Crown, as distinct from just being in its sovereignty, consisted mainly of rock, drowned land and shoreline - a shoreline which, two hundred years later in the days of the great dock-building, was to become immensely valuable.) Cooke also got on the wrong side of the Moghul overlords of western India, and this in turn annoyed the East India Company servants who were then settled up the coast n Surat, the Company's headquarters in India. They had a "factory" (agency) in Surat, but the town was under the control of the Moghul Emperor Aurangzeb, and if relations with the Moghuls were bad this harmed trade. The Company also resented the way Cooke traded on his own account on the side although the Company was at that time supposed to have the monopoly of all trading in Bombay. (In fact almost all the early Governors transgressed this rule.)
Cooke was demoted, and a new Governor, Sir Gervase Lucas, was sent out from England. His story is typical in that he narrowly escaped capture by local Mahratta pirates before arriving in the place in November 1666, by the following year he was dead of 'a lethargy that held him twenty-four hours'. Neither he nor his successor were much more popular locally than Cooke had been, and one way and another Bombay seemed to be of so little use to the British that the Portuguese had hopes of being able to buy it back, and made un official overtures to Charles II on this subject. When this became known, the Company decided they had better acquire it for themselves: the King, uninterested in his distant island and chronically short of money, agreed to hand it over to them in exchange for a loan of £50,000, repay able at 6 percent interest, and a yearly rent of £10. The agreement declared the Company to be 'the true and absolute Lords and Proprietors of the Fort and the Island... their successors and assigns for evermore to be holden to us, our heirs and successors, as of the Manor of East Greenwich in the country of Kent, in free and common soccage.'
Thus did the Merchant Adventurers gain their first substantial possession and responsibility, and thus inconspicuously began the process which was one day to transform the British presence in India into what Gandhi referred to as 'the most powerful secret corporation the world has ever known'. In practice, over the next 190 years, the Government of Great Britain was, in piecemeal fashion to take back the powers it had so prodigally vested in the East India Company till at last the wraith of the Company faded away in 1858, the year after the Mutiny. But in 1668 the concept that the whole sub-continent of India might one day be administered by Britain can hardly have been a remote dream in any one's mind, the Company were no doubt sufficiently pleased with the clauses in the agreement that stated that under the terms of their charter their powers in Bombay were to apply to any other territory in India that they might acquire. The local Company men in Bombay were surprised as well as gratified when the news of the acquisition came through. The agreement had been signed in May 1668, but word of it did not reach Bombay till a passing ship brought mail in September.
By their charter, the Company were to collect all the revenues of Bombay, estimated at £2,833 per annum, make laws and see that they were enforced. Bombay was to be governed from Surat, with a resident Deputy Governor. People born on the island were to be reckoned natural subjects of Great Britain (another proviso that was to have unforeseeably far-reaching results) and were to be allowed free exercise of their religion. On their own account, the Company wanted to establish an English colony and expand trade, and for the first time it was envisaged that the port might become a center of ship building.
At this point there comes on the scene the man who is always considered the founding father of Bombay, Gerald Aungier. Sir George Oxinden, the Governor who was in charge when Bombay became Company property, was a Surat man with little interest in the new acquisition, but he died the following year, and Aungier, who already knew Bombay, took over. Three years later, in 1672, having tried in vain to get the Company to shift their center of government from Surat, he moved his own headquarters to Bombay, and devoted the next several years to laying out the city, which by God's assistance is intended to be built'.
The phrase has, in Bombay annals, become famous, but the inner significance is less readily recognized. Simply, Bombay was, like Leningrad and Washington but not like the archetypal European city upon which most general concepts of urban history are founded, a conscious creation, and furthermore an urban creation almost from the beginning. The classic concept of 'city' is of an agglomeration which has grown, by slow degrees, from a rural agricultural settlement to a prosperous village to a market town to a city, gradually acquiring the appurtenances of the final in carnation (large governmental or religious (edifices, etc.) along the way. But however valid this concept is for certain cities, particularly in Europe and even there its validity as a stereotype may be questioned in many instances it is invalid for Bombay or, for that matter, Calcutta. Bombay was never primarily an agricultural settlement, even using the term in the loosest sense: much of her eventual land surface went straight from semi wilderness to suburban occupation. And it was a city, the final apotheosis which most settlements never reach, which was envisaged from the first. It was wit goal in mind, rather than the ad hoc needs of his own day, that Aungier started construction.
It was he who established the Courts of Justice under English law, as promised by the agreement with the Crown; part of the original building, Mapla Por, was still standing in the Fort in the 1930s. He also builds new docks, a printing press and a mint to manufacture gold and silver coins for local use. He inaugurate a Company militia, the precursor to the East India Company Army which was eventually to become the Indian Army, plus a reserve force of local inhabitants who, on a feudal. System, were liable for sages. Under Aungier to the Armenians began to arrive.
One should not exaggerate. Aungier’s cise, which they do with as much grace as a cow might make a courtesy’. Instead of appropriating land like his predecessors, he called a meeting of local l