Cities of Empire by Tristram Hunt

Author:Tristram Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805096002
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

7

Bombay

‘City of the present and the future’

Struggling against the ‘abominable filthiness’ of Mango Senoy Street in the Fort district of Bombay, the deputy inspector general of hospitals was led by one enraged tenant to ‘a range of latrines, where he indignantly showed to him what he and others were subjected by the landlord’. ‘Both men and women, to avoid wading through the pool of ordure, had to use as stepping-stones some pieces of masonry that still projected a little above its surface,’ reported the inspector, Andrew Leith. Alongside decomposing animal and vegetable refuse rotting in the streets, ‘there is scarcely a part of the Fort or Native Town in which the ground along every dead wall is not wet or in pools from its being resorted to as an urinary’. Indeed, ‘many instances occur where the walls of the adjoining houses are constantly wet with fœtid fluid which frequently affects the atmosphere of the rooms so as to render it impossible to keep food for one single night without its being tainted’.

Sewage was another problem for the city, as painstakingly recorded in the Report on the Sanitary State and Sanitary Requirements of Bombay (1852). ‘The open drains, or rather uncovered receptacles of filth … do not deserve the name of drains: there is seldom any perceptible motion in the liquid contents of the majority of them.’ One Bombay resident, the Parsi lawyer and politician Sir Dinshaw Wacha, well remembered how this refuse was dealt with. ‘The black foul semi liquid stuff was first thrown out on both sides of a street or road in a heap and after a day or two carted away.’ In the meantime, the ‘decomposed gases emitted from the perforated covers saturated the atmosphere with foul exhalations’. It was all deeply unpleasant. ‘Picture to yourself the life of a Hindu gentleman in the heart of the city,’ pleaded one public official. ‘Disturbed in the early morning, long before sunrise, by the sweepers at work, he gets up and goes to the verandah in front of his house to breathe the cool and refreshing air of the morning; but even that comfort – and how dear it is to all India! – is denied him, for he is driven from the verandah by the sweepers passing to and fro in front of his dwelling, and the horrid odours that taint the morning breeze.’

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