[Reader-list] Who owns Bombay

[mahmood farooqui]

A piece I wrote sometime ago...taaki sanad rahe ki liberal musalman ko
ghair-musalmani maslon pe bhi bolne ki ijazat hai....

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"This opium trade is a sin on England's head and a curse on India for
her share in being  the instrument."

Dada Bhai Naoroji-1880.

It sometimes appears, from the nature of current historical debates,
as if the British Empire in India was purely an Orientalising mission
whose discourses generated a politics of identity but that it was
little more than an ideological apparatus that hegemonised us. It is
difficult therefore to connect back to the earliest Nationalists who
decried the drain of wealth from India, who lamented India's
deindustrialization and the economic exploitation of our people by
foreign occupiers. It is easy, in the miasma of post-colonialisms
emanating from American Universities, to forget that the Empire came
into being and remained in force as an economic entity, that it was
instituted by traders, that there was also something called economic
Imperialism.

Amar Farooqui's "Opium City-The Making of Colonial Bombay," is welcome
first of all because it reorients us to the fundamentals of how and
why we were colonized by the East India Company. It is a new title by
the Three Essays Press, a Delhi based outfit, which has been
publishing tracts in the form, as its name implies, of three essays in
slim volumes by renowned and radical academics in a style and on
subjects that are of general interest. Opium City, like everything
else published by it-ranging from Hindi film music to the search for
an Indian Enlightenment-breaks new ground at the same time as
reorienting the debate into a radical yet suitably indigenous
direction.

In our school histories we have read about the opium triangle, the
unholy trade nexus established by the East India Company wherein it
forced Indian peasants to grow opium, under its own monopoly and
control, smuggled it to China and sold it in return for Chinese tea
and repatriated profits back home. They made entire generations of
Chinese addicted to opium because it was the only way to solve the
balance of payments problem. This opium trade, once the commonest
polemic against Empire, has today virtually passed into oblivion.

Amar Farooqui's book returns it centre stage at the same time as
showing us how important the opium trade was for the businessmen of
Western India, particularly Bombay and how significant a role it
played in generating the capital that later on built Bombay. The
peculiar nature of British, piecemeal, conquest of India meant that
they could control the monopoly of opium growth, sales and import far
better in Bengal and Bihar than in western India.

Since large chunks of territory in western India was not directly
under British rule until the 1850s-Portugese Daman to the North of
Bombay and Goa to the South, numerous indigenously ruled states in
western India, Sind- it was therefore possible for merchants to access
opium grown in Malwa and smuggle it via Pali in Rajasthan, to
Jaisalmer then to Karachi and from Karachi by sea to Daman.


By the 1820s a large number of Parsis, Marwaris, Gujarati Banias and
Konkani Muslims had moved into the opium trade at Bombay. Of the 42
foreign firms operating in China at the end of the 1830s, 20 were
fully owned by Parsis. Indigenous shipping and opium trade too were
closely interlinked. For two decades the figure who dominated the
opium trade at Bombay was Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy (1783-1859). He was the
first Indian to be knighted (1842), the first to win a baronetcy
(1857) who partnered Jardine and Matheson, the largest opium trading
network in China. Apart from owning ships, agents and commercial
clearing houses, he was also one of the six directors of the Bank of
Bombay.

It was the capital accumulation of these years that allowed these same
people to later on lay the foundation of the industrial Bombay as well
as the grand public buildings that survive in South Bombay. From being
an obscure port which could not even generate its own revenues
Bombay's transformation into one of the leading cities of the Empire
occurred fairly rapidly within the space of about half a century,
between the 1790s and 1840s. The share of Bombay in 1820-40 for
bullion inflow, especially for opium, was much larger than Calcutta.
During this period, the Malwa opium was worth Rs 15-20 million
annually to India and unlike Bengali opium which directly benefited
the colonial state, earnings from Malwa opium largely represented
private, mainly indigenous profits, giving it a great multiplier
effect.

This effect was evident in the geographical make up of the city. It
was the Parsis, many of them beneficiaries of opium's huge profits,
who developed South Bombay. The bungalows of Malabar and Cumbala
Hills, of Breach Candy and Walkeshwar were mostly Parsi-owned and
unexceptionally lent out to Europeans. But in the 1830s and 40s they
also owned and developed many of Bombay's quintessential suburbs.
Cursetji Manockji owned Anik, Dhakji Dadaji owned Varasavy (present
day Versova), Framji Cowasji (Poway estate), Jamestji Bomanji (Vila
Parla, Jhu); Cursetji Cowasji (Goregaum); Ratanji Edulji (Gatkopar);
Krushnarao Raghunath (Borvday); and Laxman Hurrichanderji (Chincholi).

Opium City, a distillation of the same writer's bigger treatise
"Smuggling as Subversion-Colonialism, Indian Merchants and the
Politics of Opium," (Lexington, 2005) also shows how this opium trade
caused no pangs of conscience among community leaders in Bombay who
engaged in numerous moral crusades on other issues while
simultaneously shipping the drug to china. We know that the Indian
nationalists too in the last quarter of the 19th c showed no
inclination to oppose the opium trade, actually extending tacit
support to it. These businessmen, remembered as great public figures
by us, would not countenance paying taxes to improve the city's water
supply (in 1850s) while ratifying stringent provisions, like some of
our present day politicos, for sending aliens off the
island-particularly those who live 'idle without work.' The biggest
merit of the book, however, is to show us how it was "the poppy fields
of Bihar that built Bombay." Biharis and Karachiites, therefore, have
more than a natural right to live in Bombay.