Charles’ formative years were spent in the Ballard Estate, a planned precinct in a city that grew through a series of additions. The estate had come to be less than fifteen years before Charles was born. Designed by the Bombay architect George Wittet in the Edwardian neo-Classical style, the Estate was set up grid-wise with large office blocks, which had elaborate stone facades. There was consistency and rhythm in the buildings whose facades lined leafy avenues and well-lighted open spaces. This new business district, reclaimed through the creation of the adjacent Alexandria Dock, placed the Ballard Estate between the port and the Fort precinct, the latter being the heart of Bombay at the time. Charles’ grandfather had his offices and home here.
As a child, Charles would love to walk down to watch ships, big and small, come and go at the Ballard Pier. He was especially fond of the dry docks, where ships would be lifted out of the water in their entirety. He would be in awe of the massive hull, rising above him like an upside-down roof.
Back home, Charles would obsess over his train set. Here, he would learn that a drawing is a metaphor for a way of seeing the world beyond the confines of paper. Through its lanes and avenues, Charles would see how concepts and order, first visualised in two dimensions, can be realised in built form.
Charles studied at St Xaviers’ School, a neo-Gothic edifice in Dhobi Talao. This connected him to the other part of the city, leading out from the Victoria Terminus Railway Station and the Bombay Municipal Headquarters, to the native city, which was dense and chaotic, but vibrant. Bombay has had a legacy of architectural styles, developed since the time the Fort was a dominant presence, but which had really come to define the city once the Fort walls came down, in the 1860s.
Bombay’s buildings have always reflected their historical vintage through their stylistic expressions, particularly the “Revivalist” styles. These styles, from the late 19th century, were used to create new structures in an industrial age. They defined the predilection of the British for monumentality, an idealization of the past, and nostalgia for the mother country. NeoClassical expressions, the neo-Gothic, and the IndoSaracenic style which exhibited architectural features from Sultanate and Mughal architecture, (as seen in the General Post Office, the Gateway of India and the Prince of Wales Museum,) dominated peninsular Bombay.
But the city was still taking shape in the 1930s and 1940s, right in front of the boy growing up in the years between the World Wars. Bombay’s peripheries were being reclaimed along the sea-ward end, particularly along its long Western perimeter. The Backbay Reclamations added more than a kilometre of new land abutting the esplanade, making earlier water edges landlocked while creating new seafronts. One set of reclamations was completed by the end of the 1920s, and another by the end of the 1930s.
On this new land would emerge a new architecture, one of its own times, unfettered by the shackles of the past. The reclamations were smaller planned precincts, intended to create a modern waterfront filled with avenues, plazas and gardens, roadways for the new automobiles that were steadily catching the public imagination, and a new pedestrian promenade – the Queen’s Necklace on Marine Drive.
New homes in the form of Bombay’s first apartment buildings would be laid out on well-defined rectangular plots; their footprints, building and floor heights, coordinated to create urban harmonies, punctuated strategically by buildings that dominated street corners – cinema theatres, office buildings, and hotels.
They were constructed with modern materials and technologies, and finished with factory-made products, bright with colours that had never graced the facades of buildings in Bombay before. Flats in these new apartments opened out over well laid out streets and allowed the eastern and western light and breeze to flow thorough them.
The architecture that rose out of these reclamations would later be referred to as Art Deco. The apartments, cinemas, and offices have been constant use since the time they came up in the 1930s and 1940s. Today, they have once again caught the public imagination, after receiving a UNESCO World Heritage citation in 2018.
Young Charles would be connected from his home on the Eastern port lands to the bright new edifices of the Western promenade through a new road that was being built to connect the Ballard Estate with the Fort. This was the Phirozeshah Mehta road and was the site of new office buildings which were erected throughout the 1930s. They were built in the new manner mentioned above, and contrasted with the older, heavily ornamented neoclassical facades of the Ballard Estate.
Old and new architecture has always stayed cheek by jowl in Bombay, rarely have there been areas that were exclusive to a single style. A line drawn east to west across this part of the city would mark its narrowest section, with the Arabian sea on one side, and the Eastern Harbour on the other. The native town outside the former Fort walls would start northwards from Victoria Terminus and Crawford market, and this triangle would contain the heart of the city, easily accessible to a boy in his early teens.
Charles joined St Xavier’s college after matriculation to pursue a BSc Degree. He studied there up to Interscience but, a year before completing his graduation, a new future called. His brother, William, who was studying for a PhD in Michigan, wrote to suggest that there was a good school of architecture on the campus and that he should try to get admission.
Excerpted with permission from Charles Correa: Citizen Charles, Mustansir Dalvi, Niyogi Books.
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