High-rises, signifying nothing?

Visiting Bombay in 1926, Aldous Huxley struck a note on its famed Victorian-Gothic buildings such as the Victoria Terminus (now the Chhatrapati Shivaji terminus) that many today, not least Indians, would find shocking. This is what he opined: “Architecturally, Bombay is one of the most appalling cities of either hemisphere. It had the misfortune to develop during what was, perhaps, the darkest period of all architectural history. Most of its public buildings were designed and executed between 1860 and 1890.”

Huxley quotes the official guidebook sort to support his case to great effect. That book reads like a history of cross-eyed mindlessness in urban design: the VT station is described as “‘Italian Gothic with certain oriental modifications…’” and so on. The only public building Huxley liked was the old Town Hall, now the Asiatic Library, with its flight of steps, its Doric colonnade and “an air of calm and quiet decency”. To Huxley, it seemed “as good as the Parthenon.”

Imperial arrogance

The great author was taking pot shots at Empire, but he had missed the point about these structures. They were the symbols of an Imperium meant to last a lifetime; the appropriation of ‘exotic’ styles answered to their need for monuments that exuded power and superiority. They were detached, aloof and overweening, even if grotesque to the refined mind.

Over the next eighty years the Victorian Gothic exuded power with diminishing significance, as the Old Secretariat and the High Court buildings were taken over by the new post-colonial dispensation. Their stylised syncretism has been transmuted into idiosyncratic and treasured expressions of a diverse urban legacy — to be flaunted at the tourist.

The Victoria Terminus train station still throbs, even though that sense of historical dislocation evident to Huxley in its architectural oddities has been ironically heightened by its rechristening as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Its aura of imperial grandeur has slipped into oblivion; but unlike other remnants of colonial arrogance the CST resonates for millions of Indians --- seeking their way to the greatest city on the subcontinent, or out of it, with the enigma of both arrival and departure.

‘Native’ communitarianism

No city in the country expresses the relationship between its buildings and culture quite as vividly as does Mumbai.

In the city’s evolution you can trace the lineages of the cultures that made it so vibrant, transforming the colonial power itself to a more adaptive mode of conduct. Entire communities from across the Indian subcontinent could bring not just their trades but social organisations and their building traditions, too.

As the “native” town expanded between present Charni Road and Marine Lines Stations on the west and Mohammed Ali Road on the east, the bustling quarters of Kalbadevi, Bhuleswhar and Pydhonie, among others, became habitats for the trader-castes from Gujarat and further south. Architecture reflected ways of life back “home” with courtyards and strict adherence to customs and food habits. Names such as Bhang Wadi, Madhav Bagh, Bhatia Wadi, Bhendi Bazaar and Kamathipura recreated an effusive and vibrant urban space, almost self-perpetuating amidst a colonial setting. Kaiwan Mehta’s delightful little book Alice in Bhuleshwar, pays tribute to the native quarters, their ethnic segregations and confluences that provided an eloquent foil to the rootlessness of colonial structures.

“Art Deco” confronts empire

By the 1930s Art Deco added another variant to the city’s landscape of colonial detachment and ‘native’ solidarities. The city’s experiment with Art Deco introduced exuberant eclecticism, a break both from colonial grandiosity and traditional conservatism. The Marine Drive, a 4-km sweep of buildings facing the Arabian Sea, remains a striking example of departure from the colonial bungalow and the traditional haveli .

But the style also confronted the pomposity of the Victorian-Gothic as the haveli had never done.

This is how Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra describe the geography created by the first lot of art deco buildings that stand opposite the phalanx of Victorian-Gothic reliquaries: “the open maidan (Oval) created a fantastic setting and urban composition with two centuries of building types valiantly and defiantly fronting each other across the green.” ( Bombay. The cities within .)

Thirty years later another building boom gave the city its current nondescript dreariness.

Once again Dwivedi and Mehrotra sum it up well: “Cloaked with an array of high rises, the developments at Nariman Point and Cuffe Parade have in no way reinforced the architectural or urban qualities of Bombay. Their basis is not in rational use of available land but in commercial arrogance and greed.”

And, they could have added, in the rootlessness of the new, post-reforms middle class.

The city’s metaphorical searches for cultural belonging, whether in the imperial, communitarian or as in the case of the Art Deco, a modern-urban opposition to both, had defined its land and soundscapes.

Now, the middle classes settled for a vacuous idea, urban efficiency. A myth was created that for an island city such as Mumbai high-rises represented the most optimal use of land.

One result was the 1980-built Bombay Stock Exchange Towers, a 29-storied complex that presaged the mushrooming of high-rises to follow.

With the opening up of the economy after 1991, the city’s buildings had only one direction to follow — skywards.

Three buildings sum it up

Wall Street has become the inspiration for the current urban design credos for offices; unlike Art Deco that gave the city exuberance and joy of design, Wall Street offers post-modern Indian cities the value of anonymity, of the arrogance of power not flaunted but hidden behind glass-fronted high-rises approaching heaven, far removed from the roiling upheavals of the real economy.

For Indians, however, the real parable lies in south Mumbai. Seen from the leeward side of Marine Drive and from a terrace preferably, three buildings sum up Mumbai’s journeys.

In the background is the BSE Towers, in the foreground the General Insurance office block an art deco now encased in plate glass that reflects the buildings across J. Tata Road.

Sandwiched between them can be seen the forlorn elegance of Rajabai Clock Tower, once an icon of learning.

( blfeedback@thehindu.co.in )

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