Mumbai’s Colaba before it became posh and most wanted: Nobody went there and very little happened

There was a time, not so long ago, when nobody ventured into Colaba. Then, all of a sudden, everybody seemed to be heading this way.

For visitors who stepped out of a train at Colaba Station or off a ship at Apollo Bunder, Colaba was an easy destination. Like other areas that develop around ports worldwide, it was a beguiling mix of languages and currencies, Italian restaurants, Japanese hotels, Arab traders and Armenian emigres. It was an area that was rough and charming, gritty and wide-eyed, all at the same time. A neighbourhood that absorbed fortune-hunters and holidaymakers, millionaires and gamblers, the flotsam and jetsam.

It was the obvious home for women with dubious reputations and Mata Hari accents. For solitary Englishmen who decided to stay on in Bombay even when sense and convention dictated that they go back home. For poets, artists and displaced Jewish families. Gradually this would become my grandmother’s Bombay, Aurora Zogoiby’s Bombay, Baumgartner’s Bombay. And, of course, my Bombay.

That, though, was in the future.

In the middle of the 19th century, the causeway was still being widened. Pieces of land were being fitted jigsaw-like along the shoreline. Buildings and landmarks were being translated from imagination into stone. There was still air and water where today there is cement and certainty.

The arrival of trains and trams in the 1870s dispelled the sea-lapped silence and hick-town reputation. “The horsedrawn tram and the railway line brought a certain romance of travel to the area,” wrote railway expert Rajendra Aklekar in his book Halt Station India. “And as crowds increased, the railways took up a project to convert the small Colaba station into a major terminus. A station building came up in 1893.”

Not all of Colaba was in a hurry to grow up, however. Upper Colaba and parts of Middle Colaba clung to their sleepy ways. The area was then – as it is now – reserved for the military and remained suspended in the amber of antiquated rules and conventions.

In Just Because, an otherwise dreary novel published in 1915, Margaret Peterson described the hermetically sealed world of the military station, with its scheming memsahibs, capable bearers and indiscreet dalliance. The rest of the city is devastated by plague, suspicion and funerals, but here are tea parties and summer frocks as usual:

“A row of servants were drawn up in a line to welcome the dog-cart as it turned in the garden gates. In command of the party was a fat stately gentleman arrayed in spotless linen who announced himself as the cook and took it upon himself to introduce the rest of the staff. There was the table boy, the hamal – the knife and lamp cleaner, two punkah coolies, two malis, three syces, the sweeper and last but not the least, ‘a most honest woman’, as the cook described her, who had been introduced by the ayah next door and who craved the honour of attending to the revered new mistress of Drummond Sahib’s bungalow.

Even in this realm of knife-cleaners, towering trees and low-slung military bungalows, however, change was afoot. The Colaba Agiary was built in 1836. It was announced with a letter dated March 9, entreating ‘the European and Native Gentlemen of Our Presidency’ to permit their ‘Parsee clerks and servants to attend an important Ceremony at the church newly erected by Jeejeebhoy Dadabhoy at Colaba on Tuesday the 15th March Instant. A compliance with the above request will Confer a great favour.”

Whether the European and Native Gentlemen complied is not known. What is known, however, is that the location of the fire temple was most inconvenient. In the early years, it could only be accessed by boat and even when roads were laid, Parsi women avoided wearing jewellery when they ventured into those badlands. So it’s ironic that today the Colaba Agiary is booked years in advance for fairytale weddings and navjotes – and sees the most eye-popping display of diamonds, rubies and emeralds imaginable.

Just around the corner, the lovely Afghan Church started to rise in 1847, in memory of the dreadful massacre that was the first Anglo-Afghan War. By 1858, its honey-hued spire had risen into the salty, clammy air. The names of the slain officers had been written on its walls.

The Great Game was at its heights when the British – paranoid that Russia would try to annexe India – marched into Afghanistan in 1838. After four years of guerrilla warfare and skirmishes, interference and politics, they agreed to depart if their 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 camp followers were given safe passage.

The unwieldly procession was making its way through the treacherous, snowbound Hindu Kush and was traversing a pass, five miles long and “so narrow and so shut in on either side that the wintry sun rarely penetrates its gloomy recesses”, when the Ghilzai tribals attacked. The outcome was a bloodbath that left thousands dead. Those who survived – largely women and children – were taken prisoners. Of those 16,500 individuals, only one officer and a handful of sepoys managed to escape to India.

This haunting story reverberates in my head when I visit Afghan Church one mundane Thursday morning. Standing in the middle of an overgrown garden, the church seems far away from the BEST buses and schoolchildren rattling away outside. And, stepping into its eerie hush, it’s easy to rewind to a time when the tragedy was still raw. When snakes and jackals were a part of the congregation. When the English officers worshipped with their rifles at hand, positioned in slots in the pews – in case of another 1857-type situation. And when the British imagined that they would be worshipping in this church for centuries to come.

Prong’s Lighthouse – at the tip of deadly Prong’s Reef – is equally evocative. The red and white lighthouse was built in 1875 and is the best-known of the three sentinels that flash their warning lights by the Mumbai harbour. Looking at it from the shore, it’s difficult to guess that this lighthouse has eight rooms, including living quarters for six people. And that once it was equipped with a cannon to repel pirates.

Prong’s Lighthouse was one of the numerous projects undertaken to transform Bombay into a safe and convenient port. After the Suez Canal opened and more ships chose to sail to Bombay, it became obvious that the city’s docking facilities were woefully inadequate. Albert-Abdullah Sassoon – the son of David Sassoon, the Baghdadi Jewish merchant, who had made Bombay his home in 1833 – stepped in.

He bought a rocky, malodorous piece of land at an extortionary price and constructed the first wet dock on the western coast of India. “It was a stupendous work,” wrote Cecil Roth in The Sassoon Dynasty. “It took three years to complete, from 1872 to 1875, and it covered an area of little less than 200,000 square feet.”

Later, the Bombay Port Trust bought Sassoon Dock and used it as a “trooping dock”. Which is how it came about that Winston Churchill had the famous accident that changed the course of his life – and possibly that of world history. Churchill was a junior officer when he was shipped to Bombay in 1896.

“We came alongside of a great stone wall with dripping steps and iron rings for hand-holds,” Churchill wrote later about his misadventure at Sassoon Dock. “The boat rose and fell four or five feet with the surges. I put out my hand and grasped at a ring; but before I could get my feet on the steps the boat swung away, giving my right shoulder a sharp and peculiar wrench.”

Churchill had torn the capsular attachments of his shoulder joint. The injury ensured that he used a pistol instead of a sword in the unexpectedly deadly Battle of Omdurman in Sudan. That saved his life, which in turn almost certainly had an impact on the outcome of World War II, as well.

This little port with a big history is now the city’s seafood market. During the day it is thick with fishy smells and fishier drips. But, one day, venture into the dock in the quiet hours of the evening, when the sun is setting and the fishing boats are gliding homewards over unruffled, topaz waters and it’s possible to catch a glimpse of the island that once was. Before ships and docks and blocky buildings made it their home.

Excerpted with permission from Colaba: The Diamond at the Tip of Mumbai, Shabnam Minwalla, Speaking Tiger Books.