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India Booked | Colaba: The Diamond at the Tip of Mumbai
141 Plays3 years ago
Colaba, the southernmost tip of Mumbai, is Mumbai's most iconic neighbourhood. This bustling locality—with the Gateway of India, the world-famous Taj Mahal Hotel, and the Colaba Causeway, a shopper’s paradise—is an unparalleled tourist attraction. But barely 200 years ago, it was a rocky, jackal-infested island, separated from the rest of Bombay by a temperamental creek. In this episode, host Ayushi Mona discusses the compelling biography of the neighbourhood with author Shabnam Minwalla. The podcast much like the book unravels accounts of colonial rivalries and dowry negotiations; and of shrewd industrialists who transformed this doomed island into the centre of trade during the cotton boom of the 1860s. She navigates through the sometimes charming, sometimes seedy streets to track its evolution from a spiritual and recuperative retreat for British soldiers to a coveted residential area for the Brits and Indians alike. Tune in!
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Transcript
Introduction to 'India Booked' Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
I'm your host Ayushi Mona and you're listening to India Booked, a podcast where we lean into the idea of India through its literature and we speak to authors who bring this to life.
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello everyone. I am Aayushi Mona, your host on India Booked, a podcast where we lean into the idea of India through its literature.
Guest Introduction: Shabnam Minwala
00:00:39
Speaker
Today I have with me Shabnam Minwala. She writes for newspapers, plays mother to three teenagers, devours, murder mysteries, writes books for children.
00:00:49
Speaker
Today we are going to discuss her book which is Colaba the diamond at the tip of Mumbai.
Impact of 'Colaba' on Cultural Heritage
00:00:55
Speaker
This book I think is so reflective of what I wanted to do with India book that not only did I immensely enjoy reading it, it actually strengthened my belief that you know
00:01:08
Speaker
There are so many of these stories present in our milieu that we forget and which we allow you know the time passing or situations changing to take away from how we imagine our country to be and how we imagine our communities to be that this ruling this book actually was a personal experience and very satisfying. Charmam welcome to the show and thank you so much for doing this. Total pleasure and delighted to be here.
00:01:38
Speaker
So, Shabnam, first of all, I have to ask you, right?
Conception of 'Colaba' at Kalagoda Café
00:01:42
Speaker
You talk in the book that, you know, the book was conceived in Kalagoda, right, when you were meeting your editor? Yes, yes, in a cafe there. Yes. Did the book come to you or did you go to the book and how did, what was that moment really when both you and your editor said that, oh, let's, you know, do something like this?
00:02:03
Speaker
Well, I primarily write books for children, but I write books for children with a very clear agenda, of course, to tell a story, to make it fun, to make it exciting, but also to tell stories for Indian children which are set in their world and their environment. Mumbai, Bombay, the city is a very important character and all the books I've written and all my books have a very strong sense of place.
00:02:28
Speaker
Now my editor, Raghika, had come and we were meeting with Alapura just to chat about another series of books that I had done for Speaking Tiger, about a schoolgirl named Nimi and her adulteurs and with adulteurs in school.
00:02:44
Speaker
Towards the end we were finishing up our sandwiches and our milkshakes and we were not chatting and Radhika mentioned that they were doing a series of books about neighborhoods around India and in other countries as well. And she asked me, would you do a book on a Mumbai neighborhood? And I was a little thrown.
Decision to Write about Colaba
00:03:03
Speaker
because I see myself on one hand as a journalist and on the other hand as a writer of books for children so I didn't see where this book would fit in but Radhika was pretty persuasive and she said think think there must be some neighborhood in the city in the city that you are comfortable with and then I just said well Colaba that's where I've grown up and I mean that's the only place I could ever imagine writing a book about so she just said done that's the book
00:03:33
Speaker
and promptly dished out the deadline and I was getting paler by the minute because I had a bunch of children's books I wanted to write and I wasn't sure where this would fit in with my larger life plan but Radhika being my editor for some time and being very sweet and eager soul I said okay but I still wasn't sure I would really deliver
Inspiration through Research
00:03:56
Speaker
it. What actually happened was when I started doing a little research in my off time and
00:04:01
Speaker
I really found it a lot of fun because when you write fiction, even if it's only fiction for children, you tend to delve very deep into your own, you know, your imagination. And there is a time when your imagination needs some kind of pop-up. And I'm not a very outgoing and social person, so I sit a lot of the time at home writing. And doing research into Colaba and its past, I think really
00:04:27
Speaker
gave me insights into other worlds, other times, other emotions, other moods. And it really, really, I don't know, it has inspired me greatly and I think will inspire my fiction in the future as well. And once I started that research, I knew this was a book that had to be written. And if nobody else was doing it, I would. So yes, that's how Colaba happened.
00:04:50
Speaker
I am glad for it you know and I think thank you Ravika because reading this book you know Shabnam at this point of time right when all of us have been cloistered inside our houses for so long
00:05:03
Speaker
was such a personal and enriching experience, right? Because, of course, I've been to Colaba, like almost everyone who's lived in Mumbai, for some or the other, either to meet a friend or to go buy something, you know, for different purposes. And there is obviously a memory which is very viscerally attached to those moments.
Personal Connections to 'Colaba'
00:05:26
Speaker
And when I read the first chapter, you know, when I started reading the book, I felt,
00:05:33
Speaker
literally breathed in and breathed out and I felt that I was walking the roads again. So for me, I think the book was made special by the fact that I haven't been to Kalabha for a long time as well. But of course, the book is really a traveler's delight. It's a Bombay Wana's delight. It's a delight for somebody who's lived in the city or somebody who's recently come to the city.
00:06:00
Speaker
And it's also a very nice tongue-in-the-cheek thing when I think right at the beginning you made the remark about one having to constantly dismiss that one is not a snob, but you know that I really live in Kalabha.
00:06:15
Speaker
So borrowing from this, right, one of the ways, right, I found this book very interesting. Shabnam is how you structured it, right? So that is, for those of you listening to the podcast, every chapter begins with an excerpt from somebody who's intrinsically linked to Colaba and that person could be an Alec Padmasi, it could be a fisherman, and then Shabnam goes on to explain and write and give us
00:06:42
Speaker
such rich detailing and then it ends with a you know a lesson what will you choose this particular structure because it was delightful and it's also something we don't really see often you know it just came i i guess as i started writing all these lessons for life started popping up in my way
Book Structure: Anecdotes and Lessons
00:07:01
Speaker
And okay, so when I first wrote the book, what happened was the first two chapters were very personal and the rest of the book was largely history and story. And I felt, and later when Radhika read it, we both felt that, you know, it was too much of a jump in style. So my challenge then was to bring the personal into the impersonal and the impersonal into the personal. And I think the focus helped a lot because it gave a variety of voices, largely otherwise the voice is mine.
00:07:29
Speaker
and the work of a lot of historical sources. I did a lot of interviews, but I didn't want to lose a very journalistic style of, he said, she said, he recalled, she recalled, you know, the classic kind of Indian style, if I may. I wanted to keep it more flowing and more easy and more, you know, more
00:07:50
Speaker
I'm a fiction writer now, so you know that fiction style stays with me and I wanted that to remain. At the same time I wanted other voices and so I decided to start with a quote from company and in a way a quote was connected a little, not entirely, but a little with what I was then saying in the chapter.
00:08:09
Speaker
And I was jotting down these lessons for life and I wasn't sure what I would do with them. I wasn't sure if I would even use them. But I felt there was so much, you know, there are little things, there are tongue and cheek remarks, there are clips I've seen on Colaba causeway, there's the story of the dragonflies, there's the story of how electricity didn't come to Colaba till the geomagnetic observatory was moved away because the British were so into that observatory. And I just felt that
00:08:39
Speaker
those were details I loved but I but somehow we're not fitting in with a main narrative and so and then I realized that they fit beautifully at the end of every chapter so I wouldn't say I planned the structure I think the structure sort of came and tapped me on the shoulder and said this is how it should be so this is how it was but yeah I really enjoyed the book because I could be creative in a new way you know it's journalism with a
00:09:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that's what made the book special, you know. Oh, and on that note, I think one of my favorite quotes, I think it's almost midway. I don't remember the chapter number, but there is one that says, lesson for life on a Colaba t-shirt. Until late, doggy, for great doggy.
00:09:25
Speaker
And I felt it was so fitting because this is exactly Colaba's story, right? Entry was late, but entry is great. As an ardent Colaba mala, I have to say that. So yes, honestly, a lot of my writing, even in fiction, I often don't know how the
New Murder Mystery in Colaba
00:09:43
Speaker
book ends. I've just written a murder mystery, also set in Colaba, surprise, surprise, which is coming out in April. And I really, you know, I had no clue who the killer was going to be till two chapters before the end.
00:09:55
Speaker
So I think the pillar comes as a surprise to everyone because it came as a surprise to me. So, yeah. And you know, Shambhant, if I didn't receive the book and I did start reading the book, I didn't realize that the first book that I read this year in 2020 was actually Shivaji Park by Shandla Moklev, which is also in the Speaking Tiger series.
00:10:22
Speaker
And it has literally taken me all of my self control to not go and start tweeting about how excited I am about.
00:10:31
Speaker
The serendipity that the book that I began the year with, the book that I'm ending the year with are actually part of the same series, both Bombay neighborhoods. Right? Yeah, absolutely. You have funny.
Series on Indian Neighborhoods
00:10:45
Speaker
That's amazing. Yeah. And then I realized, you know, towards the end of the book, right, that there is this, and I recognized it. I mean, before I saw the name, I saw the cover and I said, oh, the covers look so similar. It didn't extract me.
00:11:01
Speaker
Yeah, so I think it's quite a, I mean, the series is growing beautifully, I think. And I expect that a lot of other corners of the country will soon come alive in this way. And you know, I think for me, the great, the most amazing part about writing this book really was the fact that there are stories everywhere. And sometimes you don't see them, you don't know about them. Like I've written in the book, three generations of my family have lived here.
00:11:29
Speaker
But I knew so little, really little. And then all you have to do is dig a little and you find the most incredible signs just lurking around the corner waiting to say, I'm here or you never bothered to see me before. And so I'm sure this is true about many, most every neighborhood around the world. It's a matter of just looking. Yeah.
00:11:54
Speaker
the kind of insights that it can throw into both the personal space, right? Like the part, I think, where you mentioned that your brother who has come back to work out of a building which your great grandfather inhabited. At all a coincidence, no planning at all. It's just life coming a full circle. That's all.
00:12:17
Speaker
Wonderful. So let us now I think Shabnam segway a little bit into the origin of Bombay and you have devoted while the origin story comes towards chapter three and I'm actually glad that you don't open the book with an origin story because then it's too chronological and too Wikipedia-ish like
00:12:40
Speaker
I think it comes in after all this personal context has been set. So one is invested also by that point of time in the book. Let us discuss your journey of finding out the origin of Bombay, this origin of Colaba, the islands, the historical accuracies and inaccuracies you grappled with, and the role of the Portuguese and the English in all of this.
Bombay's Transformation and History
00:13:05
Speaker
Yeah, so I think like any other Mumbai car, I grew up with two important facts about my city. One that it was seven islands originally, and two that it was given as a dowry by Catherine Braganza's family to Charles II.
00:13:21
Speaker
Charles II upon their marriage as dowry. When I got to writing about Colaba, I felt, you know, I was on a safe ground, I knew Seven Islands, I knew dowry and I just had to fit a few details into place. And then I got my massive shock and I think the shock came when I started to look for what exactly is Colaba? Where do I, what are the boundaries? It's a little unclear because when you go to the police, they look at you blankly and say,
00:13:48
Speaker
Well, this is our, this is our ilaka, this is where our boundaries are, but it has nothing to do with history. It has to do with convenience. Then you go to BMC and you find out that they too parcel up the city in a very different way. So somewhere you have to be able to figure out where the boundaries are. Now, pinholes didn't help in this case because Colaba actually has three pinholes coming and going in the area of Colaba.
00:14:16
Speaker
So I was really quite summer. And so I decided to start with the gazettia, which is the, I think the standard book that all amateur historian, wanna be historians would look at, right? So I looked at the gazettia and there was this neat description of your seven islands of Bombay, Paral, Mahim, Worli, the main island of Bombay, which is shaped like an eight.
00:14:38
Speaker
Musgow and then to the south the old women's island which is just like this little stepping stone and then the rocky strip of Colaba. So all good. Then I started looking at maps because I thought okay maybe I will find the old island of Colaba and base that for my boundaries of Colaba and I think that is where when I got my really big surprise
00:15:01
Speaker
because when I started looking at the maps, the first map I looked at was the map which set Bombay as it was in 1670. So I looked at it and there were these neat southern islands, perfect, exactly as imagined and it's the map that comes up whenever you hit Wikipedia or whenever you hit any story about the past of Bombay. So it's very familiar.
00:15:26
Speaker
Then I started to look at later maps, stripped out of curiosity, and I found a map, I think it was 1672, something like that, by a doctor called Friar, Dr. John Friar, who had come to this part of the world with the East India Company. And it had a very rough air to it, and I think I've written in the book, it was almost like the map a pizza delivery boy would draw at the back of a napkin.
00:15:51
Speaker
And the map had no correlation at all with a map of 16, 17, and something here looked really wrong because he had drawn all of Bombay as one really fat blob. So when I say Bombay, I mean Bombay, Paril, Mahim, Mascow, and the main island of Bombay. And then he had drawn a little tale which he had labeled as old woman's island. And he had written about the seven islands, but the strange thing was he had talked about the island in Bombay, he had talked about.
00:16:17
Speaker
which is what the British then called Butcher's Island.
00:16:24
Speaker
and is now, you know, part of the whole Bombay High network. So I was very befuddled because this Seven Islands had no, these Seven Islands had no correlation earlier Seven Islands. This map had no correlation, earlier maps. So I went to Bauda Ajilad Museum and I started to look at a lot of old maps. And I think that is when I started to understand what had happened.
00:16:48
Speaker
What we are never told is when Bombay was handed over by the Portuguese to the British, it was not a very amicable and friendly transfer. The British, when they arrived here in their boats with their soldiers to take over the island, there was a poor fellow called Abraham Shipman, something like that. And when he arrived here, the Portuguese were already living the good life, the life of the top dog in
00:17:17
Speaker
Bombay and the surrounding islands. They did not want to give up their land. So they made life very difficult and they were refusing to budge. So this poor man was just sitting and waiting to take over Bombay. Now the question was, what was Bombay? The Portuguese said, Bombay is just the central island of Bombay, the eight shaped island. The British said, no, Bombay is Mahim, Parel, Worli, Mascara and
00:17:45
Speaker
the island of Bombay and the British were as it is very disenchanted by what they had got because originally when they were bargaining for the dowry they wanted Goa the Portuguese had said no we'll give you Bombay the British were a little fuzzy about it and in fact there is a very famous quote by the Lord Clarendon who was a big shot then who said oh we are getting this town very close to Brazil with all its castles and forts therein so they were expecting something glamorous and built up and you know very wealthy and huge
00:18:15
Speaker
When they arrived, they came to these little rocky islands with a little bit of cultivation, a few palm trees, a few fishermen's huts. And they were, as it is, upset. And then they were even more upset when they were told that they would only be getting this one island. But to complicate matters, Charles II, who was, I think, not a very committed ruler and more interested than the ladies than in his kingdom, lost his map.
00:18:38
Speaker
In the process, Abraham Shipman was sent off to one island near Karnataka to wait while matters were sorted out. He died. A whole bunch of his troops died. And it was only later that his then secretary managed to come and rest the island of Bombay. So he managed to only initially get the island of Bombay. After that, he started quibbling. He said that if you can walk anywhere that you can walk,
00:19:06
Speaker
By foot, he's not an island. So if I can walk from Bombay to Mahin by foot, then that is my land. And he actually walked to Proven. And that is how he managed to get all these other islands. Now the thing is the Portuguese went out of their way to draw Bombay and the surrounding islands as islands because they were trying to prove that only Bombay go to the British. Whereas the British went out of their way to draw it as a single clump of land.
00:19:34
Speaker
to prove that, you know, to sort of say that all of this belongs to us. And neither were lying, neither were telling the truth, because what Bombay was, a bunch of clumps of land, and at low tide, the sea receded, and you could actually walk through swampy lands, of course, doing great damage to your shoes and your boots. But, and when the tide came in, you needed a boat to go from one place to another, so the Portuguese were right as well.
00:20:04
Speaker
So a lot of perception and the British wanted to rest all five islands to themselves. The only two islands that nobody cared about and that nobody quibbled about was Old Woman's Island and Colaba because they were so inhospitable. They were so small who would want a bunch of rocks in the middle of nowhere. And it was only when
00:20:30
Speaker
a far-seeing governor came finally and realized that for the defenses of the city, you needed those two islands that he signed a treaty with the Portuguese who readily gave him the islands because what would they do with these two little bits of land so far away from Basin and the other places that they were?
00:20:50
Speaker
sitting in. So that really to me the great surprise was that the dowry was a very unfriendly exchange and the fact that the seven islands really may not have been seven islands in the conventional sense at all and yeah so that in fact was the story that I found and that thrilled me to bits because I think it
00:21:11
Speaker
It tells you that when we simplify matters, when we put history down in two or three sentences, you know that's convenient for the Bonbita quiz contest or for a fill in the blank in school, we are really not doing justice to the complexities of the past and simplifications can be dangerous always.
00:21:29
Speaker
Absolutely. And this is such an incredible story, right, that what is fed to us as facts, right, in dodgily written books, right, is just something that's been created out of poetry and memories, right, rather than observation, measurement, you know. And this was one of the moments when I was reading the book, right. I had also presumed, right, oh, that, you know, one of the things the author
00:21:58
Speaker
And this specially happens when you're reading non-fiction, right? In fiction, you don't know what it's like. In non-fiction, you broadly have an entry point into the subject you're reading about. So I always had, you know, something at the back of my mind that, oh, the author is going to tell us.
00:22:14
Speaker
that you know this happened and there was this dowry and then when i read this chapter i was like oh no i know can you imagine my oh no i froze for a month this is not what i've learned this is not what i know what is going on absolutely and on all of these right histories of people of
00:22:37
Speaker
personal agendas or political agendas, they shape so much of what becomes our future, right? And yet when in the future we know so little of the past or we perceive it to be so linear, so without complications, right? Because it is the one narrative that we have to fit. Exactly.
00:22:58
Speaker
Exactly. And yeah, it's just everything boiled down to these three or four lines that everybody knows and just hiding the truth completely. It's I think like pouring concrete over the rocks of Colabana. You never see what's beneath. So you have a real island lies anymore because it's all fordered and reclaimed land and paving. But yeah, somewhere the truth is there underneath.
00:23:24
Speaker
This now, I think, and the whole old woman's island versus Colaba Conundrum. And I think the part where you say that now that I know that this would not make me like a Colabaite, but an old woman, Karan, I refuse. Yeah, I'm a Colabaite. So I decided, okay, history plays its part. It gives you a little bit of an insight into the past, but I refuse to define myself purely on the basis of what I have learned.
00:23:50
Speaker
Because, I mean, real kunaba then would start the south, would start south of Sasundag, which means that half of the kunaba that we know and love would be old woman kars and the other half would be reclaimed land kars, which is very ugly. No, don't want that.
00:24:07
Speaker
So Shabnam, I think I will just like the book and the question that you tease us with towards the end of this chapter. When I read this chapter, I was like, this is my favorite chapter. And now I have a new anecdote that I want to tell at parties. And then when people try to tell me, no, no, there were these islands and there was this dowry, I'm going to say, wait, read this book. I have a job authority from the author who's done intensive research.
00:24:34
Speaker
And actually, all you have to do is read enough to see this. You know, that is the interesting thing. It's all there. The material is all there. Nothing is, nothing that I've written is stuff I have actually dug up myself physically. I've just dug it out of old books and out of academic papers and it's all there.
Forgotten Stories of Colaba
00:24:52
Speaker
I guess very few of us, there's no reason to read so deeply about everything, right? Unless you're launching into a project.
00:24:59
Speaker
And hence, books like these which give us such a strong sense of our neighborhood and the places we live in are so important because we never discover for ourselves. But truly, we are all such honest travelers and learning more about our city or our world or experiences is such a buzzword.
00:25:19
Speaker
that it seemed to live your life without knowing the history of where you are at the moment, actually. You are telling me, you know, when I realized, and honestly, I'd been thinking, so my great revelation was, okay, I always knew that there was this Colaba station, railway station, that came all the way into Colaba.
00:25:38
Speaker
And my grandfather had talked about it and we have a very popular family story that talks about how one day he and his friends got together and they were hanging around and they said let's just get into a train and they hopped into a train and landed up in Surat while their families were going completely frantic thinking where are the boys.
00:25:55
Speaker
So we knew about Kalabha station where exactly it was for something I didn't know. And I asked my mom and I asked various people and everybody vaguely pointed in one direction and said, it was there, it was there, you can find out. Then I spoke to Rajendra Akhlekar, who was a great railway historian, and he gave me the answer that was, I guess, so obvious and so startling that I almost fell off my chair. He said, well, the old Kalabha station was in Padwarka.
00:26:23
Speaker
Now, this makes perfect sense because Bhadwara Park is the railway officer's colony. So it just makes sense that it would have been built in the land that they once used as a station. What startled me so much was that when I write, I look out of a window, as I am writing, and that window looks out exactly onto Bhadwara Park. And to me, a huge shock was how easily we forget and how easily we cover up the past and move on.
00:26:51
Speaker
because there was no memory at all that my window overlooked what was once Bhagwar Park and that the banyan tree outside my window which I love so much was probably the old Colaba station and that the banyan tree that stands in Bhagwar Park and that I love quite so much must have looked over Colaba station at the hustle and bustle of the cotton coming in from the rest of the country and the bullock carts being loaded and the great deals being struck because the other great revelation
00:27:20
Speaker
you know came as a huge shock to me and to everyone around me was that the entire area a large chunk of the area that we now know as Kalabakoswe part of it is reclaimed and the other part was actually the old cotton green of Bombay and it was the place
00:27:37
Speaker
in a sense of huge importance to the city because when the American Civil War was being fought, cotton completely dried up from the Americas, from North and South America. It just stopped coming because the war was being fought and the South, at the beginning of the war, the first thing they did was burn the bales of cotton, a huge number of bales of cotton to signal to the world that if you don't support us, you guys won't get cotton.
00:28:01
Speaker
The North also established a blockade on the cotton trade. So the world was looking frantically for alternate sources of cotton and they looked towards two countries, Egypt and India.
00:28:12
Speaker
And what happened was the cotton green in those days was in Colaba. And the cotton hunger was so enormous that you can read a lot about how people used to actually rip up their mattresses and sell the cotton from their mattresses just to make a quick mark. And all of those transactions were happening in Colaba, literally where my building now stands or where basically the place I walked from school to home every day, if it had been done,
00:28:41
Speaker
not even that long ago in the 1860s.
00:28:45
Speaker
1817-1890, I would have been walking through a cotton green filled with wheeling and dealing and Englishmen and parties and traders and carriages muttering under their breaths and praying at the mandir at the corner of my road. And you know this mandir at the corner of my road was just a mandir to me. It was just a place I passed every day. And now every time I pass it, I ask it, what were the secrets and what were the prayers of all those cotton merchants that, you know,
00:29:11
Speaker
that you heard, it really saddens me to think that all of that has been lost, but all of that must once have been there. So yes, those were my two big revelations. Really, I mean, we're talking about a very short span of time. We're talking about a little over 150 years.
00:29:30
Speaker
This part has changed so dramatically and the past has been forgotten so much that not even the old timers I meet remember it or know about it. And the fact that my grandmother must once have walked through areas that were still active cotton grains and past bales of cotton, but never once mentioned it to me, I think sparkles me immensely. That make almost one yearn to me.
00:29:58
Speaker
I wish you were all compulsive journal writers. Yes, I really, really think because, you know, Penaba, what we know about early Penaba is largely thanks to this one guy called John Bernal, I think, and he wrote these two letters to his father. And thank God they remained. He was a mercenary with the East India Company who seemed to be doing a lot of stuff. He fought. He also did some kind of land measurement and stuff like that. So for that, he had come to Penaba.
00:30:24
Speaker
And so his early description of Colaba really tells us what Colaba was. So he talks about this two, about two miles of rocky land, just three quarters of a mile in width, surrounded by mangroves and swamps and rocks. And he talks about Colaba as having just a couple of these tuna kilns of creating limestone, you know, limestone kilns.
00:30:49
Speaker
and a few coconut groves and 50 to 60 girls, wherever he went, he would try to shoot and never manage. And I think just those two letters are such a repository of knowledge. It really makes one sad to think that there weren't more people who put down their thoughts or if there were more people that those thoughts didn't survive. And I do wish I had talked about my grandparents. I mean, that is something that
00:31:12
Speaker
fills me with regret yes and that is and that is in the footnote of chapter second and i did i uh while i read it and while you've written about it in a in a in a passing way i did sense some yearning when you wrote that shabnam shabnam the next thing that i want to ask you right it's what happens to kalabha which leaves it to go from being this whole mosquito riddled mangrove
00:31:41
Speaker
criminal infested way in the early 1800s to the colaba that we know today, right? And then that is the causeway. And I'm just going to hand it over to you to talk to us about
00:31:55
Speaker
This transformation of Colaba aided by the causeway.
Colaba's Evolution into a Hub
00:31:59
Speaker
Absolutely. So they opened the Colaba before the causeway came. So even the Colaba of the late 1700s and the early 1800s was a place that nobody wanted to be. It's filled with all the stories that you will ever find about Colaba are to do with snakes or wildlife sighting, you know, some kind of wild animal or thugs. And there is a lovely little, I mean, very sad but lovely little story
00:32:24
Speaker
Armenian highwayman and what was an Armenian highwayman doing in Colaba? But anyway, he shoots the year of the carriage driver of some Mrs. Faroe. So that is this one story and it kind of gives you a sense of what kind of place Colaba must have been where random Armenians could shoot off people's ears. And it's a place, it was a highly inconvenient place primarily because there was a large creek that separated Old Woman's Island from Bombay.
00:32:54
Speaker
from the island of Bombay. And there were, at low tide, you could gallop across. But when the tide came in, it came in with great ferocity and led to many tragic deaths and many tragic love stories where dashing Englishmen leapt into the creek and saved gorgeous young women who were either Hindu or Muslim in the narrative. That changes very strangely, but whatever Indian women. Yeah. But except, I think, in the book also, would you say that
00:33:23
Speaker
See, this is what he wrote in the most purple prose. And that's what he wrote in. But this was sort of the place where tragedies of these kinds took place. And nobody, you know, nobody wanted to be in Colaba because this is so bloody inconvenient if you go for dinner to somebody's house in Bombay and then the Thai place, spoilsport, you can't come home. So you're stuck.
00:33:46
Speaker
Now in 1836, finally, finally, after lots and lots of planning, a causeway was built.
00:33:54
Speaker
what is a causeway, it's just a raised strip of land that connects two places. And in this case, it connected the island of Bombay to the island, old woman's island. The gap between old woman's island and Colaba had been narrower to begin with, and it had sometime been reclaimed, I think, just in a very matter of fact manner by some industrialist, somebody who needed the land over there. So that had been taken care of.
00:34:21
Speaker
Once the causeway was built, everything changed. I mean, everything till suddenly land in Colaba became desirable. Colaba became accessible. You could just drive across. Now the rich factory owners and industrialists, they had their palatial mansions in Parel and in Malabar Hill. So they did not view Colaba as a place to build houses. They viewed Colaba as a place to build their factories, build their warehouses.
00:34:48
Speaker
And it became a very, very convenient place because think about it, the port was near Gateway of India is today, right? The port was very close. Slowly, Colaba station came in. So even the train started coming in. The trams, the horse drawn carriages started in Colaba. They began their journey from Colaba. Eventually, the trams started from Colaba. Suddenly, from being this outpost, Colaba became a place where which is very connected.
00:35:15
Speaker
And it just made a lot of sense when your average traveller came in tired from his journey by sea or by train. Colaba seemed like a nice convenient place to be. And when the cotton green was there, the hotel started coming up because all the traders and all needed places to stay. So you had your Watson's Hotel, which is actually on the island of Bombay, but just at the tip of Colaba. And I have cheated and written a little about it anyway. Sorry.
00:35:43
Speaker
then Majestic Hotel and Apollo Hotel and they all came up and something Colaba became the place of you know restaurants and bars and seedy and not so seedy and of course it made the sort of the dashing and daring corner of the city because you had your travelers you had your adventurers you had your traders out for a quick buck you had all the
00:36:06
Speaker
you know people from different parts who came here and I think in those times traveling was a big part of the life of a particular kind of businessman and both my grandfathers in a sense were those kind of businessmen also when so land started being reclaimed in the 1860s in the area from Colaba Causeway to Gateway of India is almost fully reclaimed
00:36:30
Speaker
They had reclaimed it because they wanted warehouses. Then they thought, Aree, we are reclaiming anyway. Let us reclaim a little more. And they created this sort of residential area. And suddenly, you had houses coming up, built by Kani investors, Jamchaji Tata being one of them, a whole lot of Gujarati, Nawabs, and Princes being another, who decided to just invest in buildings and give out apartments on rent.
00:36:57
Speaker
And so suddenly you had this very, you know, perfect middle class housing. Tata himself wanted the houses. He created these houses for middle class English men who were neither part of the government nor part of the military services, but who were coming to do business. And in general, when they came, they were looked down upon by the other Britishers, but they needed accommodation. And so he created these vast buildings, including the building that my great grandfather moved into.
00:37:26
Speaker
So suddenly you had this middle class housing and that attracted, I think, a lot of people who were looking for comfortable houses and who were willing to move out of their immediate community, the area, you know, parts of the other parts of the city, which were community oriented. And they were looking for space, they were looking for high ceilings, air, sunlight, and they came here. And what happened is I think there was a huge mix of people
00:37:51
Speaker
that arrived also driven by the fact that then places like Woodhouse Cathedral were built which attracted the Catholic community.
00:38:00
Speaker
A lot of Parsis came along with Khushro Bagh, but that came a little later. The Boraas came, I think, because they were traders and looking for a base close to the port, perhaps, and created, I think, a very multicultural area and an area which truly believed that everybody was welcome, which is in a sense why I think the Sindhis also found it so welcoming when they arrived after partition. And I think this very mosaic and very forgiving and accepting and
00:38:30
Speaker
welcoming aura is what has made Colaba, Colaba. That is the beauty of it, you know, the openness and the diversity. And while the book really begins with, you know, you mentioning this in passing, right, the centricity, the multiculturalism, etc.
Multicultural Community of Colaba
00:38:49
Speaker
as you read through you see that you know that these are not token words right and they specially apply to Colaba much more than other parts of the city or or or the state or you know clearly this how special the place is
00:39:05
Speaker
It comes through, right, and it's so interesting that this chapter on Reclamation, right, where you can even allude to the whole aspect of Culawa being this whole, you know, a hellhole from like a Charles Dickens book, right?
00:39:21
Speaker
and then there is the British charge and there is so much going on and this whole aspect of launching the Apollo Bay Reclamation and then there are railway tracks and there is so much happening and you can feel the shape of time and you can literally see this once desolate
00:39:45
Speaker
a distant hellhole of a place, transforming into something that's a force to reckon within in so many ways and shapes, right? The visual imprint of what Bombay or Mumbai is to people outside of Bombay is what is represented by Colaba. And to think of the fact that nobody wanted anything to do with it, they were jackets.
00:40:09
Speaker
And it was fantastic. Also, one of the joys of reading the book Shabnam is to look at all the pictures and the images, right? How did you decide what goes in, what goes out, how many to put?
00:40:26
Speaker
did the images while your prose is exceedingly you know visual in the sense that one does feel like that they're seeing the buildings and they're sensing the changes and and the transformations that Colaba goes through but because we have visual aids right for instance to sensation right how do you decide
00:40:49
Speaker
What goes in where and why and when? So that really was mainly Pradika and the publishers. I'm a very non-visual person in terms of layout and photographs. I went with the photographer to do the contemporary photographs.
00:41:06
Speaker
And some of them have been used. The old photographs, you know, as I was doing research, if I found anything, I would send Radhika the images and the links. And my mom was a great help because she's on all these WhatsApp chats and, you know, her group is constantly sending old pictures of Bombay, old pictures of Mumbai, old pictures of this, of that. So she would keep forwarding a lot to me, masses and masses of stuff.
00:41:29
Speaker
We found ourselves sitting on quite a treasure trove by the end of it. It all just came. And I think Radhika was very clear about how many pictures she could use and how she could use them. And she organized all of that. So the look is really hers. I am just awful at all that. Of course, I had clear ideas about which buildings I wanted in and the areas I wanted in.
00:41:55
Speaker
you know some moments I felt you could not have a book on Colaba without like the what about the building of the causeway being such a momentous thing it needed a picture and that we had that archival image was just amazing but in general yes not me at all but I get you and I also really like that that while you you say you're not visual there is a very nice way where you talk about Colaba as a time lapse video
00:42:25
Speaker
Right? And the Wellington Fountain is replaced by a collaboration station, it's replaced by the Yacht Club, it's replaced by the Majestic Hotel, the Gateway of India, Regal, right? So, as somebody who's actually involved in being around the area, as a reader, it's a delight because you're also assimilating and thinking of it that way.
Historical Imagery from Old Fiction
00:42:47
Speaker
No, and it's very interesting actually because you know how the idea came to me when I was reading an old article in an old railway magazine and the people were, they were talking about the building of the Alfred Siemens Rest or the Alfred Siemens guest house.
00:43:04
Speaker
which is now the director general of police's office. And they were talking about how travelers came from anywhere. They were used to just open space and open sky and being able to see the sea from one end to the other, and how all eyes were turned to this new huge structure coming up. And I started imagining what it must have been like to live then, where one day you see one building, then you see another coming up, and suddenly, you know, your sky gets knocked.
00:43:31
Speaker
and filled by all these structures, one around the other, and how the prabha that we know must have been taken shape then, how we take it so for granted, but with what wonderment the people living then must have viewed it. With what wonderment and maybe with some disgust, you know, because I'm sure there were those who didn't like the change as well.
00:43:51
Speaker
For me it was fascinating to think of the emotions of the people living there. And I think a lot of this old fiction books that I found, you know, really flashy old British English books, romances and all, but happened to be set in the colaba of those days. I can't tell you how excited I was to get those vivid pictures because, you know, when you read fiction,
00:44:13
Speaker
sometimes it's much more visual than reading non-fiction which often has a very matter-of-fact style. So when I read those you know the little fictional accounts and descriptions I think they brought the past alive to me. I think one of the reasons that I enjoyed reading the book so much perhaps is also because as somebody who reads both fiction and non-fiction right
Blend of Fiction and Non-fiction
00:44:37
Speaker
enjoyed the fact that a fiction writer was writing non-fiction. You know, it's just one of those things that you enjoy poetry when it's written more like prose. You enjoy prose when it's written slightly more poetically, right? You do that meshing of the two schools of the narrative, right?
00:44:54
Speaker
that make it so much fun to read. Also, how about the people themselves, right? You obviously paint a vivid picture of historical figures and people who've lived, your own family. But they're also these very gossipy bits, right? Like the word panics and how, you know,
00:45:14
Speaker
People have had secret liaisons. All of these little gossipy stories. And that is so much a part of a neighborhood, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we all grew up with these strange urban legends. You know, I've mentioned, I think, in one part, there was this couple, two ladies who lived and they used to have foster children. And there was this one, there's a hot rumor just because this little girl had brown hair that she was a kidnapped Arabian princess.
00:45:42
Speaker
And it was such a part of my childhood and of the Colaba landscape. He all believed these little things. And of course, all the gossip of earlier times. Even little things like the fact that before Colaba station was Colaba station, the land belonged to this lady named Mrs. Huff. And Mrs. Huff was famous for two reasons. She had danced with Arthur Wellesley when he came before he defeated Napoleon.
00:46:10
Speaker
and the second reason was that she had a mango tree which bore fruit twice a year and that is such a big fact every British book you read from that age will talk about that mango tree and you can't I can't tell you how excited I got when this mango tree turned out to be again in the
00:46:28
Speaker
land that became the Colaba station, again land that I can see from my window. And I literally, I went to Badwarpak and I asked all the Malis there, do you know about this mango tree? And they all gaped at me and kept pointing at random trees and say, both the banyan tree, both the peepal tree here. And I kept explaining that the mango tree went through twice a year, but no, I couldn't find it. Sad.
00:46:50
Speaker
got one of these these urban legends and and i don't know back then it's even right to call it urban legend but but i immensely enjoyed this these tidbits as well um for instance the i mean i have seen only one movie ever at regal the fact that i did not started it's you call it a celluloid career with the laurel and hardy comedy everybody is
00:47:16
Speaker
And then there's Gregory Preck, and there is, you know, Rabindranath Tawar decided that Gregory, so much happening. Absolutely. And you know, I love Regal. It was where my school took me to see every movie that school took us to, because we only had to cross the road to go to it. And I remember we saw one movie called Ape and Super Ape, and it was a deadly duh movie, but there was so much movement.
00:47:43
Speaker
because there were scenes of various animals moving, including the human and every class told the other, you can't imagine what you're going to see. And it was major excitement. So for me, Regal is sitting with all my classmates and giggling, giggling, giggling, and stuffing one of samothas into our mouth. So yeah, Regal was, I think, was and still is a huge part of our imaginary imaginative life here. Yeah.
00:48:08
Speaker
lovely this is so delightful and I think for everyone right who will read this book they will re-experience you know so much of what they they only pass through right today when when they visit Colaba I loved reading so many
Joy of Reading 'Colaba'
00:48:27
Speaker
in which I love the trivia, I love the fact that it was an approach you will read. So I didn't have to constantly feel the, you know, and one of the best parts from the book really was that you can pick up any page and start reading from anywhere. Really? Oh, I'm so happy that you enjoyed it so much. I can't tell you how thrilled I'm feeling, really.
00:48:48
Speaker
and you know you like something and you know like you'll always be like oh I love this part of the city and but there's only so much you know about it and and I am not somebody who was born in Bombay and hence for me a lot of these discoveries were very very delightful in fact it's so funny when I and I am telling you again of the presumptions I had right one of the presumptions was that we discussed the dowry thing before I began reading the book
00:49:14
Speaker
I thought the presumption was that I'd heavily talk about the Gateway of India and you know that's right but as I discovered the book I realized that okay it's there and it's important and it's interesting to read about those tidbits also
00:49:29
Speaker
But within the people and the lives and the stories and so much happening, the fact that today, how I understand Kula Bar, how it's visually mostly represented with this aerial shot of the Gateway, actually doesn't hold much. Yes, it was just another fragment that makes this neighborhood very special.
00:49:49
Speaker
But by itself was just a symbol and a symbol that has changed over the years. It stood for different things over different times and we are happy to have it but we don't define ourselves by it, I think.
00:50:04
Speaker
I think before we wrap up this conversation, you have a delightfully detailed bibliography at the end of the book, right?
Recommended Books on Bombay
00:50:12
Speaker
But what are some books, Shabnam, that you would recommend, perhaps, about Bombay Fu Bishnu from the list of books you've written about?
00:50:20
Speaker
but even the general books that you have enjoyed reading or books that help you get a better idea of the country. So over to you really about what it is Ed you would like to recommend to anybody listening to this podcast to learn more. So bombing books I would say of the British historians the one I really really loved and I mean it read and reread was Samuel Shepherd and he's written
00:50:44
Speaker
two books that I used, for instance, one is simply called Bombay. He's a very tongue-in-cheek-ry kind of man and I absolutely adore him for that. And the other book he's written is Bombay, Names and Places, a history where he talks about how each street name and place
00:51:03
Speaker
has a reason. So me, you know, I think what saddened me a lot after I read this particular book was the way we keep changing the names of Rhodes, right? We say, oh, we don't want a British name. But there is often a really good reason for why that name is that name. For example, Ormiston Road has now become, I think, B.S.T.
00:51:23
Speaker
And he was one of the architects who actually built one or maybe two lighthouses around Colaba. He was a man who was a part of creating the Colaba we know and love. He has a right to have his name here. He's not some random British ruler who had nothing to do with the city.
00:51:40
Speaker
And that saddens me that we crampled upon the past without even asking why the name was a name. And I think so Samuel Shepard's book really educated me in those respects. The other books I truly enjoyed were, as I said, the trashy penny romances set in the Bombay of those days.
00:51:59
Speaker
For many reasons, partly because you get so angry when you hear them talk about Indians and you want to just slap all those women. The tone is so dismissive and you realize, I realize how lucky I am to live in the time I do and in the place I do. Night in Bombay is like this racy book about the Bombay's of the 1930s.
00:52:21
Speaker
It really, really gives you a glimpse into the city in its heyday. It was a time when women from strange Eastern European nations were dancing in various bars and pubs, a time when jazz helps way over the city. In a way, it was a time when my grandmother was in the city and could hear jazz coming out of every apartment around her house.
00:52:45
Speaker
And I think a lot of that I'm now writing a young adult romance set in Mumbai today and the Bombay of then and it's two parallel stories based on
00:52:56
Speaker
a diary item that my second cousin found from her grandmother with a lot of masala that we had no idea about for the part of family law. So in a way this has given all these romance books and all these books gave me a sense of the city then and really helped me to place my character of that time. Other books about India you say
00:53:20
Speaker
Gosh, I'm trying to think. As a children's writer, I would highly, highly recommend it. So I really, really love Moen and the Monster by Anushka Ravi Shankar. It's my favorite Indian children's book.
00:53:31
Speaker
It is the funniest book I've ever read. So funny that when my kids were growing up, we had a rule that this book could not be read at dinner time or when the kids were eating because they would laugh so much, they would throw up. And it's set in Bangalore. A little boy named Moin, and one day he wakes up and there's a monster under his bed. And the monster says, I need a shape and form, so you have to draw me. Please draw me in this dark purple. But Moin doesn't have purple, so he draws him with a pink crayon.
00:53:59
Speaker
The monster says, please give me horns. Mohin imagines that they are auto rickshaw horns. So he draws the monster with auto rickshaw horns. So this poor monster emerges looking like nothing on earth and is very cross. And it's just the funniest story ever. Oh gosh, that's adorable. That is so adorable.
00:54:18
Speaker
Thank you for this conversation. Thank you for writing this delightful book that was almost like, you know, a warm hug from that part of the city, which we all could live a little, you know, not side only stereotype as snobbish. Nothing like it. It's really changed my perspective and it made me feel warm and it made me feel
00:54:44
Speaker
so interested and invested in the community and the personal history of a neighborhood. I'm so glad that this series exists. I'm so glad you wrote this book. And to everyone listening to this podcast, please go and pick up a copy from Amazon Flipkart, independent bookstores near you. If you are remotely interested in Mumbai, remotely interested in history, remotely interested in trivia and anecdotes,
00:55:13
Speaker
You will be as delighted as I was and every time you open a page it is literally reading an interesting piece of trivia that you can pick and start from anywhere, read it in one stretch and you will be as delighted over and over again. Thank you Aayushi. I had a lot of fun on your podcast and I really
00:55:36
Speaker
absolutely ecstatic that you liked the book so much because as I said it wasn't really the space I was comfortable in, I was scared of mine. Let's put it honestly, I was shivering when I started. No, no, it's come out very well and thank you so much Abnam once again for taking out the time and sharing and doing this with us really. Thank you so much. Pleasure.
00:56:07
Speaker
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