BOMBAY LANDMARKS

No more enduring memorial to the British Raj’s response to the Indian environment may be found than in the architecture that the Raj raised and left behind. This is as true of the Indian subcontinent as a whole as it is of its component areas – geographical units large enough to encompass separate countries elsewhere in the world – and Maharashtra provides through its buildings and monuments a distinctive regional example and setting.

Already rich in archeological and architectural monuments affording an imposing vista of man’s history, Maharashtra happens to have caught in its architectural mirror the finest reflection of the British Raj’s cultural and commercial self confidence in 19th century India. Economic power, reinforced with the guiding hand of Governor Sir Bartle Frere saw to it that most of the best examples of the new architecture were located in Bombay. The result is an astonishing concentration of high Victorian gothic expressed in public and private buildings of great splendor and considerable sophistication.

The sophistication was not confined to external features, though after the 1860s these began to incorporate the superlative craftsmanship of western India’s traditional stone-masons and sculptors. It was part of a conscientious by British building engineers and architects to adapt and evolve architecture suitable to their historical situation in an alien climate.

We may distinguish four basic formulations of this tradition of architectural adaptation to a climate which is frequently described as hostile and to an environment which, both in its teeming population and tropical flora and fauna, was felt by many British pioneers to contribute to a febrile hothouse state of unmanageable disorder. The frequent description of congested Indian domestic urban settlements as “The Black Town” – from which planners of cantonments and civil lines antiseptically distanced their town scapes – preeminently focused this point of view.

Out of disorder therefore the requirements of power required order. Who else could give the lead when it came to a public expression of the spirit of each successive age of the British Raj but the military engineers and the public works department (PWD) architects in government employ? The earliest formulation, apart from specialized military fortifications crystallized an indigenous domestic structure into a standardized, permanent and upgraded dwelling known universally as a bungalow. A high plinth raised the ground level on which were erected the walls containing living or office quarters, the whole surrounded often on all four sides by a verandah over hung by a pitched roof which was thatched or later more often tiled. It was usually single storey dwelling but was often elaborated to rise to two. Regional styles developed and the bungalow became a more complex and often grand structure as occasion demanded. In western India, one has now to scour the small town mofussil to identify these remnants of a pioneer style. Few grand bungalows survive in developing Bombay – the graceful early 19th century banquet hall and Raj Bhavan on Malabar Hill is one – but mofussil settlements like Pune are still graced with 19th century cantonment and private bungalows of much charm.

As the empire progressed building activity in India not surprisingly followed the inspiration of architectural currents in Britain and the classical idiom of the late 18th century and the early regency period. In India the prime examples of this development are the many palatial public buildings of Calcutta. Remnants of this classical tradition, interlocked with the regional versions of the bungalow became a common feature of domestic British architecture all over British administered India. In Bombay few examples survive – the government mint designed in 1820 by Major John Hawkins of the royal engineers and the aesthetically successful former town hall and present central library completed in 1833 by Colonel Thomas Cowper. The former has purely Ionic detail whilst the latter presents an exterior with an extensive Doric façade. In 1863 the orientation of this imposing building was felicitously incorporated in the circular garden development that was to become Elphinstone (later re-named Horniman) Circle, affording a view from the Town Hall steps axially through the Circle to the Arabian Sea. The late eighteenth century private bungalow-mansion which became the old Government House on Apollo Street is another fine extant example. It is in dire need of restoration, as are Charles Forbes’ house and several later eighteenth century town buildings which lend much charm to the urban back-setting bounded by Military Square Lane, Forbes Street and Ropewalk Lane off K. Dubash Marg.

Early nineteenth century churches in India also reflect this classical inspiration and in Bombay the Georgian Style is evident in St. Andrew’s Church, built in 1818 opposite the present Dockyard as well as in Christ Church, Byculla competed in 1835. In 1825 Bishop Heber consecrated the Georgian St. James’ Church at Thane as well as the oldest church in the Deccan, the Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Ghorpuri in Pune. This Georgian structure has a charming interior, its light inside partially modified by double-glazing and its nostalgic ambience heightened by tattered regimental standards preserved on the walls. A Royal Engineer, Colonel Trotter, designed the stained-glass east window. The steeple was renewed in 1982.

The oldest British church in Bombay, St. Thomas’ Cathedral readied for use in 1718, is a mixture of successive styles culminating in a Gothic tower in 1838 and a Gothic chancel inside which was part of an 1860 renovation by the Government architect, James Trubshawe. Few people know of the striving for quality which some of these renovations envisaged – one of Britain’s most celebrated architectural designers, William Butterfield, was commissioned to design its chancel paving but financial stringencies allowed only a part of Butterfield’s 1872 tiled paving design to be implemented. Another distinguished Victorian architect, Sir Gilbert Scott, designed the Gothic fountain in front of the Cathedral’s entrance. Mumbai, universally known as Bombay, established itself as the urbs prima in Indis of the nineteenth century Raj heyday. By the mid – 1850s Bombay achieved this architecturally by making a technological, stylistic and revolutionary leap into the then contemporary present. This occurred after the first church in India built according to the neo-gothic principles adumbrated by the Ecclesiologists was constructed in Bombay, between 1847 and 1857; and when, by 1868, Bombay’s first iron-frame, semi-prefabricated construction – the old Watson’s Hotel, the Esplanade Mansions of today – was erected from a design by R. M. Ordish on a prime site overlooking the Esplanade. The church is St. John’s Afghan Memorial Church in Colaba cantonment, still the landmark that it has been for over a century for those at sea. Views of it from within the city now reveal the insensitivity with which subsequent building development has dwarfed its scale.

This brings us to the high-water mark of British public architectural policy during the Raj- the grand era of Victorian Revival Gothic. It is to be encountered in numerous manifestations in the larger towns of western India but the finest collection of these buildings in the world is rightly identified in Bombay.

The Gothic Revival Style with its open balconies, staircases, galleries and verandahs acclimatized itself naturally in sub-tropical India and so survived functionally long after it had given way in England to less exotic domestic traditions.
Most of these buildings in western India were constructed by the P.W.D., a service instituted in 1854 to meet development demands. Construction was from local materials such as Deccan trap stone, blue Kurla basalt, red Bassein sandstone and Porbandar sandstone. The architects were Englishmen either in a service of the P. W. D. or Government or occasionally contracted from private practice. Although mostly resident in Bombay they were in touch with the latest currents of architectural thinking of the time in Britain and they imbued Bombay’s later nineteenth century public buildings with the spirit of A. W. N. Pugin. Yet there was a conscious formal effort in their work to evolve a distinctive architectural synthesis combining avant-grade principles of Gothic Revivalism with their perception of the indigenous idiom of Hindu and Muslim architecture. The Mechanics’ Institute, whose striking yet relatively small-scale neo-Gothic premises now house the David Sassoon Library, contributed to the intellectual climate by offering rewards for architectural design which were advertised in The Bombay builder, itself a reflection of the favorable local conditions for architectural practice at that time.
The impetus given by Governor Bartle Frere achieved significance in 1862 with the final dismantling of Bombay’s Fort walls and bastions. The land thus cleared provided opportunities for development and the deployment of architects. It was no coincidence that by 1862 there was an amalgamation of the P.W.D. with the older military cadre of Royal Engineers, thus strengthening an all India service. In the same year Frere also announced a plan for the construction of some fourteen public buildings, most of which constitute a priceless architectural legacy in fine, robustly constructed buildings which are the pride of Bombay today.

The architectural masterpiece of Bombay is universally acclaimed. It is Victoria Terminus, designed by F. W. Stevens and completed in 1888. It was conceived in the traditions of the great British architects of the period-Pugin, Burges, Butterfield, Scott and Street—and its symmetrical structure successfully culminates in a magnificent masonry dome, the whole embellished with locally adapted Gothic decoration and detailing which was admirably ‘carried out by Indian stone-masons.

Stevens was also entrusted with designing the Bombay Municipal Corporation building, completed in 1893 opposite Victoria Terminus (V.T.). His towering, domed confrontation successfully exploits its triangular corner site and fully justified the nomination of F.W.
Stevens for this challenging and sensitive commission.

No wonder, then, that the choice again rested on Stevens to design another headquarters building, on a prime site overlooking both the Oval maidan and the Esplanade, facing the Arabian Sea in sympathy with the orientation of several buildings in Bartle Frere’s original development list. It was completed in 1899 to house the offices of the B.B. & C.I. Railway and after nationalisation became the head- quarters of the Western Railway opposite Churchgate Station. Unlike V.T. it is not a railway terminus. Its multi-domed super- structure manages to suggest a delightful indigenous playfulness lacking in Stevens severely disciplined formulations for the Municipal Corporation building, for Victoria Terminus or for the more rugged former Alfred Sailors’ Home constructed by 1872 on another crossroads site overlooking the Wellington Fountain.

Contending for prestigious recognition in Bartle Frere’s Gothic facade are Sir George Gilbert Scott’s University Senate building and his University Library crowned with the spectacular Rajabai Clock Tower. They were completed in 1874 and in 1878 from drawings prepared by the architect in England. The resonance of these two buildings from a distance is one of cultivated dignity and quiet authority but closer inspection reveals a tirade of spiral staircases, open Venetian verandahs and detailed, carved ornamentation of great virtuosity. Mukund Ramchandra supervised the carving, monitored by J. L. Kipling and students of Sir J. J. School of Art.
These outstanding examples of Victorian Revival Gothic architecture must be seen against a local background richly endowed in similar style, if not as distinguished. The conglomeration is nevertheless imposing and collectively asserts a character for the centre of south Bombay that is unique in India. The first Government building in Bombay of the period was the Old Secretariat designed by Colonel H. St. Clair Wilkins, a Royal Engineer, and completed in 1874. Its polychromatic local stone echoes thirteenth century Gothic from the European continent. Another Royal Engineer, General J. A. Fuller, designed the majestic High Court which was built in 1878, which, with the P.W.D. building also by Colonel Wilkins, constitutes a town-plan facade of astonishing ideological depth and aesthetic vision. At the time, west of the open space now known as the Oval maidan there was a vista open to the horizon across the Arabian Sea. This partly explains the orientation of these buildings and obviously enhanced their original impact. The revolutionary late- nineteenth century Gothic skyline of Bombay however persists as a reminder of the extra-ordinary dedication to an architectural ideal which pervaded the city’s planning bonanza in the 1860s. Meanwhile, outside the Fort area, the 18605 saw the early flowering of the work of William Emerson, a pupil of the celebrated Victorian architect William Burges. The young Emerson came to Bombay on the errand of delivering Burges’ design for the proposed Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy School of Art building. Although the design was not accepted nor built, it had a seminal influence amongst the contemporary architectural intelligentsia. Emerson stayed on in the congenial professional climate that Bombay offered him at the time.

His most public monument is the cool and airy Crawford Market (re-named after Mahatma Jyotirao Phule) which was built in 1869 incorporating cast-iron roof-supports and a heat-reducing structural roof-design. He also designed three churches—Ambroli Church (opposite the site of the recently demolished mansion which was once the home of Dr. John Wilson) and Emmanuel Church, Girgaum, both completed in 1869, St. Paul’s Church, Kamatipura, completed in 1872.

For architectural historians, Emmanuel Church provides the best of two local examples of church architecture which incorporate a built-in total immersion bath, in addition to a baptismal font.

So pervasive was the architectural idiom developed at this time that we find two local Jewish places of worship heavily endowed with a British neo~Gothic spirit. One is the Ohel David Synagogue built in Pune (1868) in red brick with a handsome campanile tower and the other, the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue by D.E. Gostling in Forbes Street, Bombay, completed in 1884.

John Adams, the Bombay Government’s Architectural Executive Engineer, can be credited with more memorable achievements. His design for the Presidency (Esplanade) Magistrates Court in 1889 incorporates carved detail of great delicacy, eloquently sculpted by local carvers. The construction of an exterior lift shaft in 1984 has marred the exterior of this fine building. Adams was also the architect of that distinguished essay in domestic bungalow-form, the old Royal Yacht Club completed in 1881 as well as the Yacht Club Chambers, 1898, facing their once magnificent waterfront site at Apollo Bunder.

Sharing the harbour waterfront, but taking pride of place is the monument Bombay is perhaps most famous for, Government architect George Wittet’s Gateway of India, completed in 1922 in the later Indo-Anglian Saracenic idiom of medieval Gujarat, but minus its planned subsidiary flanking structures.

The Indo-Anglian synthesis achieved its apotheosis of course in the fourth British formulation with the ordered classicism and conscious re-interpretation of indigenous traditions immortalised in New Delhi by Sir Edward Lutyens and his colleagues, Sir Herbert Baker, H. A. H. Medd and A. G. Shoosmith.

Western India was not favoured with examples of their work but their influence became widely prevalent in architectural practice.
Thus the last of the four Raj architectural legacies lingered on in the early, and indeed up to the mid-twentieth century. It received elegant expression in Bombay in the ordered facades of the Ballard Estate development by Claude Batley (1879-1956), another locally celebrated but otherwise underestimated British architect who worked and died in Bombay. The refined quality of his design stands out and may be encountered in surprising corners of the city, such as the Agiary in New Marine Lines built in the 1940s and the Khushroo Baug with its smaller Agiary, off Colaba Causeway. Batley was responsible for several private architectural landmarks as well-Jinnah’s house in Mount Pleasant Road is a unique example in its magnificent hillside setting, as is the smaller, perhaps more interesting bungalow built on Dahanukar Marg for Kasturbhai Lalbhai.

More intimately accessible are some of the monuments and statues which reflected the architectural ‘humours’ of the Raj. The historical sixteenth century figures above the gateway to the original Fort (now INS Angre behind the Central Library) are perhaps the earliest examples and may not be British but once Bombay was consolidated as a settlement, the eighteenth century fashion for statues and church memorials found full expression in Bombay and western India.

Many of the fine public statues of the earlier period in Bombay have suffered irreparable damage and displacement, a contingency the more disastrous in view of their intrinsic value, some representing the work of well-known monumental sculptors of the time. Such were the statue of Marquis Cornwalis produced in 1810 by John Bacon the younger, and Matthew Noble’s celebrated version of Queen Victoria seated on a canopied throne, sculpted in 1872. It will be a salutary day for the conservation-minded when this statue and its canopy are reunited. Matthew Noble had made his mark in Bombay earlier in 1865 with the splendidly patriarchal seated figure of Jagganath Shankarshet, dramatically lit through an over-head skylight in the ground-floor entrance to the Asiatic Society of Bombay’s premises.
One may still admire several of the portrait statues commissioned from Sir Francis Chantrey housed in the premises of the Asiatic Society of Bombay-those of Stephen Babington (1827), Mounstuart Elphinstone and Sir John Malcolm (both completed in 1833) and that of Sir Charles Forbes (1841). Amongst these are to be found a statue of John, Lord Elphinstone (1864) by John H. Foley who had been commissioned in 1865 to produce the statue of Manchojee Nusserwanjee.

The most striking early nineteenth century sculpted memorials are those by John Bacon the younger, a sculptor whose work was not overly admired by his contemporaries. One may still see several of his thoughtful compositions inside St. Thomas’ Cathedral in the memorials to Katherine Kirkpatrick (1800), the virtuoso set-piece commemorating Captain G. Hardinge (1808) and the nostalgic memorial to Governor Jonathan Duncan (1817). A representative of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood can also be counted amongst those who contributed to monumental art in Bombay. This was Thomas Woolner who perhaps appropriately produced a fine statue in 1872 of Sir Bartle Frere which is in the care of the Asiatic Society of Bombay.

In 1877 J. E. Boehm completed the bronze-cast equestrian statue of Edward, Prince of Wales, once a celebrated landmark which still lends its name to a busy Bombay crossroads, one of the finest public statues gifted to the city of Bombay. The work of another late-Victorian sculptor, also cast in bronze, is still on view to the public. It is Sir Alfred Gilbert’s monumental yet sensitive seated figure of Donald James Mackay, Xlth Lord Reay, depicted in his ceremonial robe as Chancellor of Bombay University.

Materially, Bombay’s post-1860 development ferment was a reflection of the city’s sudden prosperity arising from fortunes amassed partly as a result of the 1860-1865 blockade of the American cotton trade. While it was fashionable to endow institutions of learning and medicine, it became equally acceptable to donate public services in the form of drinking-water supplies and ornamental water-displays all over the city. These gestures took the form of several fine fountains of which the most celebrated is Flora Fountain, designed in Britain by R. Norman Shaw and sculpted in fine Portland stone by James Forsythe. It has served as the hub of Bombay’s ‘Fort’ area since 1869.

Few of Bombay’s commuting citizens who pass by the Mulji Jetha fountain on P. D’Mello Road every day may be aware that it represents yet another attempt at cultural integration in an architectural idiom assayed by F. W. Stevens. Nor do the frenetic sellers and buyers in the wholesale fruit-yard of Mahatma Phule Market realise that they ignore another monumental fountain, designed by William Emerson and sculpted by John Lockwood Kipling.

The fountain bears Kipling’s name but is more fascinating because of the presence, in Kamatipura, of an unfinished sculpted fountain which offers the student of this period of Bombay’s architectural history an intriguing sequential palimpsest of the designer’s imagination. The Kamatipura fountain must be an abandoned essay, an earlier draft of the Phule market fountain, not on the drawing board but wrought in stone, emblazoned with emblematic symbols of the designer’s and sculptor’s craft bearing the initials ‘WE’, ‘JK’ and the name ‘Arthur Travers Crawford’. The inference is obvious and exciting, the more so because Emerson was Burges’ pupil. In a personal communication (1985), C. W. London has drawn attention to the way that the apex and finial detail of this fountain echoes W. Burges’ 1857-1858 design for the Sabrina Fountain, Gloucester, which was never built. Over a hundred years after the visionary development of Bombay’s High Victorian era, its visible traces can still impose respect for architectural quality and professional, problem-solving invention. Moreover, underlying the material heritage of these resplendent buildings is their intellectual legacy and the fascination of tracing how the stylistic fusion the buildings display came about.

By Foy Nissen
(Article reproduced from Marg magazine, April 1986)