Heptanesian Archives

Yesterday my friend, the historian and collector Deepak Rao, took me for what he excitedly described as a “peep show” in the corridors of the Bombay Municipal Corporation, which are lined with glass-faced cupboards containing a veritable treasure trove of municipal archives. Deepak is the only person I know who will compare the delight of visiting a rare archive to the pleasures of a brothel. And his “peep show” was indeed titillating. Everything from the proceedings of the Corporation House, to the departmental files of the Education, Sanitation, Improvements and Standing Committee are carefully stored in bound volumes which are seemingly catalogued according to an internal file keeping system, going back to the 1880s (!). Today I again returned to the corridors of the Municipal Corporation, this time to the Estates and Land Management Department at Manish Market. I gazed longingly at the files stacked next to the desk where I was sitting, each of which contain the files for individual plots in the old Scheme no.5 of the Bombay Improvement Trust, the neighbourhoods of Dadar and Matunga. While I am scheming to get access to the records in the main office I saw in the glass cupboards today, the hope of accessing these mountains of detailed files for research is a distant dream. The builders would sooner burn the place down.

Every building has a collective memory. Imagine if every building had a blog. The funds of neighbourhood histories, social commentaries, and civic complaint would open out new geographies. One idea for the Mumbai Free Map project has been to use it to locate and localise the practice of urban blogging. So it’s a pleasant surprise to see my ancestral neighbourhood of Matunga in the forefront of this new civic geekery.

Thiru recently drew my attention to the Matunga Musings and Wadala Whispers, hosted at KeralaIyers, a site devoted to the culture and history of the Palghat Brahmins, who comprised a large part of the middle-class community that migrated to the northerly parts of the Island City of Bombay in the interwar years. As Thiru has related (in one of his most remarkable asides from his doctoral research, The Men from Matunga), Matunga emerged between the twenties and forties as a new kind of neighbourhood for the salaried masses of the city. This army of clerks, typists, and service sector employees poured into Bombay at this time, initially living as migrant men in chawls, but eventually “movin’ on up” the Island into new apartment buildings in “schemes” developed by the Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT), where they brought their families. Thus the “man from Matunga” was the archetype of the white-collar employee, the harbinger of a novel culture which has since become generalised into the common sense of India’s urban middle classes. It is also now the name of a blog by columnist Bhavin Jankharia.

Pictured here are two such early settlers in these parts, my grandfather Subbiah and his younger brother, Dr S.S. Krishnan. The middle-class neighbourhoods of Hindu and Parsee Colonies in Dadar, and the South Indian and Gujarathi parts of Matunga, comprised what was then known as Scheme 5. This section from the Mumbai Free Map illustrates the novel ordering of building plots, traffic circles, public gardens, and civic facilities which characterised one of the first modern suburbs of Bombay.

A friend from Pune, Dnyanada, while visiting today reminded me that there are two types of scholars — those who are studious, and those who are creative. And historians, in most cases, must value the former as much, if not more, than the latter. For while there is no denying the labour of creativity involved in the act of interpretation, for under-investigated areas such as the urban history of modern India, give me a studious archive rat any day. The recently deceased Raj Chandavarkar always insisted, often polemically, that the most basic questions about urban history, such as about party politics in the Bombay Municipal Corporation, have still not been written about in any serious way, and the new research interest in cities will prove ephemeral without a solid empirical focus. Indeed a basic political history of the municipal corporation is waiting to be written, and the primary materials for this task can, I am confident, be found in the Maharashtra State Archives.

While sitting there yesterday, I happened upon a reference to a compilation of files from 1920-24 on “the reconstitution of the BMC on a more democratic basis” containing a fascinating debate around the extension of the municipal franchise following the constitutional reforms of 1919. Government sought an expansion in the franchise for municipal elections, which until 1920 was based on an electorate restricted to rate payers, who numbered no more than 12,000 in the entire City of Bombay. While the directive was to seek an expansion to between 50,000 to 60,000 voters for the reconstituted corporation, a debate ensued between British civil servants, and corporators and civic representatives, and nationalist reformers on the principle of the franchise. This was to be changed from a basis in “rate-payers” to “rent-payers”, the question arising as to the minimum rent paid which would qualify someone for the vote in Bombay City. Various statistical distributions of the rent-paying populations of each ward in the city were presented in the debate as to whether to fix the minimum from between Rs 10 to Rs 25.

As I remarked to Nikhil, who initially got me thinking about municipal elections, this was the first time I had seen a real breakdown of ward-wise rates of rent in this period. This is where the debate also turned communal, as the question of reserved electorates for minorities such as Parsis, Mohammedans, Christians and others were mooted along with the new principles of expanding the franchise on the basis of rents, and increasing the number of seats in the Corporation. It seems from the correspondence between the Indian members of the Municipal Corporation and the British officials deliberating the new principles of enfranchisement that the former were concerned with the dilution in the influence of Parsi community, whom Ibrahim Rahimtoola hailed as having shouldered the great burden of local self-government (and who must have also represented a significant number of the rate payers in the old franchise). Nonetheless they rejected the idea of communal electorates as divisive and unnecessary to secure minority interests, which they still claimed would be best managed by a propertied elite. Some British officials strongly remarked that Government should not stick too closely to the “class of landlords” who on the one hand directed civic affairs and on the other hand abetted in the creation of slum areas, the single biggest problem of colonial administration in Bombay at this time. The expansion of the franchise based on rent payers was eventually accepted with some amendments, and instituted in 1923.