A history on foot: How Mumbai’s cosmopolitan past shaped Indian nationalism

Mumbai was once India’s political centre, the de facto headquarters of its fight for freedom from British rule. This is hard to imagine today. Its evolution into a commercial hub has obscured the city’s vital role in the history of the national movement.

This is not a trivial loss. In recent decades, Indian politics has often been the antithesis of the national movement’s broadly unifying ideals. Divisions along religious lines, primarily, Hindu-Muslim, and other schisms based on caste or region have taken over political mobilisation.

In contrast, the nationalism of India’s historical anti-colonial struggle appears preternaturally cosmopolitan. With Mumbai (then Bombay) as the crucible, its success served as a model for many others worldwide.

Earlier this year, my fellow historian Prashant Kidambi and I took a walk in Mumbai to some key sites and streets that had once been associated with India’s freedom movement. It was Monday, January 22. The Central government had unexpectedly declared a national holiday for the consecration of the new Ram temple in Ayodhya.

The event absorbed the attention of the entire country – from children in our neighbourhoods to the media, captains of industry, administrative machinery, and public figures. It was also widely reported in international papers. This was a situation so out of step with the Indian Republic’s trajectory until just a decade ago that it felt surreal.

We walked to several sites in what is referred to as south Mumbai’s “Fort” area and its surroundings. Over two hundred years ago, the British developed the Fort as its administrative and commercial centre. The streets and buildings there, though, are not simply colonial constructions. They are also places that the city’s various Indian communities shaped and where several events from the freedom struggle also played out.

We then made our way northwards to neighbourhoods that had extended the city beyond the Fort in the 19th and early 20th centuries when the freedom movement was unfolding. Not too far away from the colonial centre, these localities were primarily inhabited by Bombay’s Indian populations.

It is remarkable how much of the movement’s history unfolded within the confines of a small area like the Fort and its vicinity. By visiting a small selection of buildings, we hoped to “excavate” the many connections between the city’s cosmopolitanism and Indian nationalism.

Consider this a history on foot – an argument in walk-form.

The High Court, 1908: Tilak’s sedition trial and mass resistance

We began at the High Court. It was here that in July 1908, Bal Gangadhar “Lokamanya” Tilak (1856-1920) – the most prominent Indian National Congress leader of the time – was tried on a sedition charge. The trial was sensational. The British government had accused Tilak for justifying a bomb attack on a British official in his newspaper, Kesari. Instead of hiring a lawyer for his defence, Tilak chose to address the jury of seven Europeans and two Indians directly – an unprecedented act in colonial India. By deciding to speak for himself, Tilak, who was also a teacher of law, exposed the biases of the colonial judicial system.

The proceedings went on for 10 days from July 13-22, at the end of which Tilak was found guilty. He was given six years of deportation and rigorous imprisonment in faraway Mandalay, in present-day Myanmar.

As soon as the verdict was announced, there was chaos. Violent incidents broke out all over the city, and eventually the country. The public anger was already deep because of many recent events like the 1905 Partition of Bengal; their beloved leaders’ arrest, triggered it even more. Particularly, it was Bombay’s millworkers – Tilak’s fellow Marathi speakers – who hurled stones at the textile factories in the Lower Parel area and attacked Europeans.

The violence continued across Bombay for three days; it only stopped when military troops were brought in to fire at the crowds, killing and wounding many.

Prashant, who is working on a biography of Tilak, remarked, “You have to imagine that this would have been an amazing scene. All of Bombay came to a halt. There were crowds everywhere here and even in other places; and a massive police presence. And the mills and markets – the nerve centres of the city – all shut down as a mark of protest.”

On that January afternoon when we arrived at the High Court, a group of Mumbai Police personnel were milling around a small raised thatched checkpoint, a distinctively Indian structure set against the Victorian Gothic court building that stood behind it. It seemed like business as usual at the court despite the national holiday. A digital signboard flashed outside announcing the cases for the day in green letters.

As people came in and out of the courtrooms, we caught passing glimpses of the sombre proceeding. Right outside stood a wooden board with an impossible number of documents pinned to it. An official appeared periodically, adding to the already formidable stack.

Sardar Griha and Chowpatty: Tilak’s legacy in Mumbai

From the High Court, we walked about 2 km north to Sardar Griha – the place that Tilak made his home in Bombay. Located in Crawford Market, this was once a guesthouse. In the colonial era, it would have stood just off the European-dominated city centre. Then, as now, the neighbourhood was one in which several Indian communities lived and ran their businesses.

Today, the decrepit building is easy to miss amidst Crawford Market’s hustle bustle and the dense cluster of readymade garment and artificial flower shops that surround it. Tilak’s famous words, “Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it,” are painted on the building’s front façade in Marathi, visible only from the opposite side of the street. His room still houses the trust offices of Kesari and Maratha, the two newspapers he ran.

In the early 20th century, Sardar Griha was well-regarded among the freedom movement’s luminaries. Leaders like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1875-1950) and Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) had stayed there too during visits to Bombay. Tilak, however, was a regular: two rooms in the building were permanently assigned to him. This is where he conducted much of his political work when he was in the city. It was also the place where he died on August 1, 1920. Coincidentally, as if marking a new phase in history, that was the same day Gandhi and the Congress had scheduled the launch of the Non-Cooperation agitations.

Even in January, Mumbai’s sweltering heat was starting to slow us down. The fact that most of the roads were dug up for the upcoming metro project didn’t make walking easier either. We reluctantly took a taxi to our next stop: Tilak’s statue and memorial park at Chowpatty.

It was here that Tilak was cremated. Thousands from across the city and beyond, gathered to bid him farewell. The streets were teeming with people – the route on which Tilak’s funeral procession was expected to pass was especially packed. As the Bombay Chronicle reported the next day, “the crowd was unapparelled in the history of the city within living memory”.

In life and in death, Tilak’s undeterred commitment to self-rule and political freedom for India resonated with Bombay’s people.

Mani Bhavan, 1920s-1930s: Expanding the movement

From Chowpatty, another short cab ride took us to Mani Bhavan, the place where Gandhi stayed when he was in Bombay. Mani Bhavan is on Laburnum Road, named after the yellow-flowered golden rain trees that were supposedly planted there in the 19th century.

The peaceful tree-lined avenue, still housing some old-style bungalows, stands in stark contrast to the wider neighborhood where traditional homes have given way to multistory redevelopment projects. Located in the Gamdevi area, Mani Bhavan, like Sardar Griha, was in the heart of an Indian neighborhood where Parsis, as well as other Gujarati and Marathi communities lived.

Today, Mani Bhavan is a museum and library dedicated to Gandhi’s life. But when Gandhi would live there during his visits from 1917 to 1935, it was the house of his friend, admirer and host, Revashankar Jagjeevandas Jhaveri. As the freedom movement evolved under Gandhi’s leadership in the 1920s and 30s, Mani Bhavan also served as his political base in the city. Here, Gandhi built upon the public sentiments that Tilak had cultivated, but his political methods significantly expanded and deepened the movement’s participant and funder base.

Gandhi’s cultural affinities were with the city’s Gujarati traders and Marwari and Gujarati business elites like his mate, Revashankar Jhaveri. A substantial portion of the financial support his movement received was from this politically moderate and affluent class.

The majority of Tilak’s followers, on the other hand, were the city’s mill workers and Marathi-speaking middle-class. Even after Tilak’s death in August 1920, it was not easy for Gandhi and the Indian National Congress to build affinities between these groups with opposing interests.

Nevertheless, Gandhi and other Congress leaders made consistent efforts to draw in the workers by emphasising the ill effects of foreign rule over every other concern. They would often hold meetings in the mill areas or the chawls, the workers’ living quarters.

While Gandhi’s connections with the industrial working class would always remain tenuous, the Congress under his leadership did manage to get considerable buy-in from the city’s workers. According to historian David Hardiman, the workers’ support in the early days of the Non Cooperation agitations in August 1920 started off as patchy. But it was not long before more workers began to participate: in September, 10,000 to 12,000 joined in a peaceful bonfire of foreign cloth at a meeting held in Elphinstone Mill, owned by Khilafat leader Umar Sobhani.

Two months later, on November 17, 1920, some 25,000 people attended another bonfire at the same venue to protest the Prince of Wales’s arrival in Bombay that day, indicating that the call to oppose the British above everything else had worked.

If Tilak had shown, for the first time, that the British Empire could be brought to a halt, Gandhi perfected the art of confronting and negotiating with it through controlled non-violent mass mobilisation. The biggest difference between them was the level of planning. The protests that emerged around Tilak had been largely spontaneous. What Gandhi brought was meticulous organisation, be it the smallest of satyagrahas to large urban protests.

Local Congress workers played a key role in this regard, training volunteers and ensuring that crowds adhered to the non-violence agenda in the face of police brutalities and lathi charges. This kind of micro-level planning was crucial in a city like Bombay for keeping the protests peaceful, which they remained largely from 1920s right until the 1940s.

One example of this organised approach was The Bombay Congress Bulletin, a simple-typed publication that was circulated daily during the Civil Disobedience agitations in the 1930s. The bulletin helped to keep the general public in the loop about the movement and to maintain the high spirits even as the government was cracking down hard.

In growing the anticolonial struggle, a third part of Gandhian strategy also emerged. This was his response to the multi-religious and multi-ethnic reality not just of Bombay city but the rest of India. It turned out to be the greatest test of Gandhian mass mobilisation.

In the early decades of the 20th century, particularly in the 1930s, as the Gandhi-led Congress attempted to reshape the city as a nationalist space, Hindu and Muslim organisations appeared to contest his vision. As Civil Disobedience ideals spread, Bombay simultaneously witnessed 10 major Hindu-Muslim riots that lasted for days at a time from 1928 to 1939. The atmosphere was so volatile that even the tiniest provocation could spark a violent incident.

Many of Gandhi experiments, such as interfaith prayer meetings and support for the Khilafat movement, were designed to create a broad, inclusive umbrella movement that could transcend existing social and religious divisions.

Prashant has also written about this paradox. “The emphasis on unity was the most essential part of the nationalists’ message – they wanted people to come together as Indians irrespective of religion,” he said. “Yet these very streets became battlegrounds where the nationalist fervour clashed with communal sentiments. Our secular ideals came to us through a very hard lesson – this is something we should remember and aspire to.”

Nonetheless, the years that Gandhi spent in Bombay residing at Mani Bhavan during the 1920s and 30s were crucial for the development of his pan-Indian methods and goals. The cosmopolitanism that Bombay had to offer, became vital in shaping Gandhi’s vision of an India that could transcend religion and social divides to come together against colonial oppression.

August Kranti Maidan, 1942: Do or Die

Only a few minutes’ walking distance from Mani Bhavan are two of the most iconic sites that bookend the Indian freedom movement: the Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College, where the Indian National Congress’s first session was held in 1885, and the Gowalia Tank Maidan (now August Kranti Maidan) from where, 57 years later in 1942, the Congress and Gandhi gave the last call for the British to “Quit India”.

It was here on August 7 and August 8, 1942, that members of the All-India Congress Committee gathered to announce the start of yet another mass satyagraha. By now, Gandhian protests methods and their impact were widely recognised.

The maidan and the streets around it were packed full with eager supporters. An estimated audience of 10,000 people stood inside the maidan and another 10,000 outside it when Gandhi made his most fiery speech yet: “Here is a mantra, and a short one, that I give you…The mantra is ‘Do or Die’. We shall either free India or die in the attempt; we shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery.”

The British authorities were jumpy, and saw Gandhi’s call as a betrayal in the middle of the Second World War. London was in no mood for an upheaval in its largest colony. It struck back with force: Gandhi, and every other Congress leader of even the slightest import were arrested the very next day.

With the leaders in jail, Bombay’s people spontaneously took charge. Open spaces like Gowalia Tank and Shivaji Park emerged as major sites of resistance; hartals, processions, demonstrations, and incidents of violence erupted all over the city. Hundreds of women and students played a key role.

College students from Elphinstone, Sydenham, Ruia, and Khalsa, and the VJTI engineering institute, drove the protests distributing pamphlets and upholding picket lines, encouraging their colleagues to boycott classes. One of the Bombay youth’s remarkable contributions was the Congress Radio, an underground broadcast station. The brainchild of Usha Mehta, a feisty 22-year from Wilson College, and a handful of other collaborators, the station became the counter to All India Radio, the official mouthpiece.

The Quit India protests were the last of the major Gandhian mass satyagrahas before India attained its freedom in 1947. The movement had charged up the entire nation. And it was in Bombay where they had begun. It was fitting then that after decades of practice, Bombay’s people – workers, middle-class professionals, even the elite, as well as women and students – found ways to continue the resistance even in the absence of the usual planning and leadership.

The transition from protesting the colonial state to forming the Indian Republic also had its beginnings in Bombay. Another Mumbaikar, BR Ambedkar, played a crucial role in this process. He was a member of the Constituent Assembly and Chairman of its most important committee that drafted the Indian Constitution.

Ambedkar’s life and work are deeply intertwined with Mumbai’s landscape. An exploration of his struggle to ensure equal rights for Dalits and the spaces associated with that struggle deserve an entirely different walk. It is worth noting, though, that his journey was very much part of colonial Mumbai.

He studied at Elphinstone School and College, worked as the principal of the Government Law College in the Fort area, had his law offices in Parel, and fought cases at the High Court. In Dadar, he built Rajagriha, the home where he lived with his family and his beloved pet dog, Tobby. Today, Rajagriha’s ground floor houses a museum dedicated to Ambedkar’s memory.

Mumbai, January 2024: Chutney sandwiches and morning walks

Our walk ended at the nearby Tejpal Sanskrit College. Here, in December 1885, 72 male delegates from across India came together at the inaugural session of the Indian National Congress. Their aim was to provide a platform for civic and political dialogue between educated Indians and the British Raj.

Tejpal Sanskrit College’s building today is overshadowed by the glamorous Tejpal Auditorium next door. That evening, an affluent Gujarati organisation was hosting a concert of devotional music to celebrate the Ram temple. In contrast, the Sanskrit College was quiet. Since its doors were ajar and no guard was in sight, we sauntered in.

Almost instantly, two men materialised as if from thin air, frantically shooing us off. Our pleas reassuring them of our innocent intentions – we were simply there to see the historical venue – didn’t move them in the slightest. Our pursuit of the past thwarted, we consoled ourselves by sampling what, at least in this writer’s opinion, is the best chutney sandwich in the city at the auditorium’s outdoor canteen.

As we looked back on our day, we realised that while there were some signs indicating the historic sites we had visited, they didn’t quite convey the immense significance of these spots in the city and country’s history. Unlike Delhi, where the national movement’s commemoration is monumental, in Mumbai its markers are humdrum, like the road or traffic signs. In keeping with the city’s rushed daily rhythms, it is as if Mumbai has chosen not to prominently feature its past in its present.

I am writing this column several months after the walk. In the meantime, India held a national election. Defying the pollsters and pundits, the results suggested that religious appeals had failed to sway voters; their verdict, in fact, appeared to rebuff the January 22 extravaganza. For the two of us walking that day and for many others, this was a stark reminder of Indian society’s longstanding grassroots tradition of resistance to extremism even when strong institutions or a unified opposition were missing.

The Independence movement too did not simply flow from the top down. The citizens’ takeover of the Quit India agitations in that sense is not surprising. Leaders like Tilak, Gandhi, and Ambedkar developed their own strategies, but they also tapped into and scaled up community resistance.

Bombay, for instance witnessed the emergence a distinctive form of popular protest against colonial rule in the 1930s: prabhat pheris (morning processions). These pheris, historian Jim Masselos finds, involved small groups of citizens walking around the city’s streets at dawn, singing patriotic songs in different languages like Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati. Here’s one such song that encapsulates some of the common sentiments they expressed:

The morning light is spreading and the night has hidden itself through fear of the sun.
Awake, O sons, and awake O sisters of India.
Look, the auspicious moment has arrived, now do not shut your eyes…
Our heart is burning. Let us constantly think of Swaraj.

This local-level nationalist fervor miffed the British authorities. They also found the singing in public at daybreak jarring. Amusingly, they complained to Gandhi about the pheris’ lack of musicality and their concerns about the groups disturbing the morning peace in various neighbourhoods.

Gandhi, in contrast, was delighted by the sunrise singers as they aligned with his idea of moral and spiritual uplift. Yet, in keeping with his characteristic love for organising and improvement, he made some changes to the ways the groups could go about their wanderings.

Accepting that the quality of singing could do with some polish, Gandhi suggested formal musical training for the singer-walkers. He also asked them to start and finish at fixed hours in the morning and to use a consolidated song-book that anyone who belonged to any faith or party could use to sing.

While there was no need to cause disturbance, Gandhi said, “Good singing in the morning will be appreciated.”

Aparna Kapadia is Associate Professor in History at Williams College in the US. She is currently working on a biography of Kasturba Gandhi. Prashant Kidambi is Professor of Colonial Urban History at the University of Leicester. He is writing a biography of Bal Gangadhar Tilak.