It was yet another rainy Sunday, and it was time for a Sunday morning ride.
I cycled happily towards ‘South Bombay’ and went on to visit a most beautiful place - the ‘Hanging garden’ - or, to give it its official name - the ‘Phirozeshah Mehta garden’. Which is a good opportunity to talk about that magnificently moustachioed Parsi gentleman - Sir Pherozeshah Mehta - ‘The father of Bombay’ and a founding member of the Indian National Congress.
This venerable bawaji was a remarkable fellow - he was one of the first ‘Post Graduate’ degree holders in the country - getting his ‘Master of Arts’ from the newly minted ‘Univerity of Bombay’ in 1864, and then went to London to get his law degree, and became the first Parsi barrister in blighty. He then returned to Bombay to hang out his shingle and go toe-to-toe with the toffee-nosed British lawyers who had held a monopoly on the silly-wig-and-black-housecoat trade in India till that time. P.M. went on to become one of the most famous lawyers in Bombay and probably charged an arm and a leg just to look at a brief. ( A legal brief, I mean...not undies!)
One of his famous clients was the first Municipal Commissioner of Bombay - Arthur Crawford - who was accused of corruption! The very first commissioner clearly set the corruption ball rolling and his example seems to have been faithfully followed by all the BMC employees ever since!
But to be fair to Crawford, he was a remarkable visionary who changed the face of Bombay, The Bombay of the time - especially the ‘black’ areas - was a shithole of a place, with no sanitation and waste disposal and huge amounts of epidemics - plague, cholera, typhoid..the works.
He cleaned the city up the city with a vengeance - cleaned the streets, fixed the drains, enforced hygiene measures, stopped the epidemics and lowered the mortality rate by half from 35,000 to 18,000 over the next two years. Crawford was not only the first Municipal Commissioner, he was also the Collector of Bombay and handled police functions as well, and wrote books like ‘Reminiscence of an Indian Police Officer’, ‘The Unrest in India’ and ‘Legends of Konkan’. In fact, he was so fluent in Marathi, that author N C Kelkar commented that Crawford could have passed off as a Chitpawan Kokanastha Brahmin had he donned a dhoti! How fascinating! People born and brought up in Bombay for generations cant speak the local language even today - but this linguistic firangi empire-builder could do so! Crawford aggressively attacked all of Bombay’s problems - railways, sanitation, drainage, water supply, markets, slaughterhouses and burial grounds. (All of which are still the main problems of the municipality even today I suppose…) One can see the memory of the man in the new-fangled marketplace he created in town... the ‘Crawford market’. It was the first planned market area with cleanliness and separate areas for merchants and so on - a great change from the stinking and overcrowded bazaars of the time! It must have been as revolutionary then as the first airconditioned mall was in modern times! It was the first time that anyone had tried to do good for the city, especially for the ‘black town’ and so the whole city fell in love with him! He was celebrated and toasted everywhere. However, his plans greatly overshot his budget. ‘Large towns like Bombay cannot be managed without large funds’, he said - and ignored the fact that he did not actually have the large funds! Crawford did not care where the money for his dreams for Bombay came from as long as he could have it. The corporation’s deficit went to dangerous levels but Crawford, blinded by his own vision, refused to slow down. He ignored, overrode and provoked other members of the corporation and set the whole city against himself. He juggled so many funds around to meet the municipal costs that he made a sad mess of the finances and was accused of systematically swindling the city and ended up in the dock. He was defended in court by our man Pherozeshah Mehta - and while conducting the case, Mr Mehta learnt about the urgent need for a functioning Municipal corporation to maintain the city, and the massive challenges in running it. Mehta got interested in governance work himself - he pointed out the need for reforms in the Bombay municipal government. Later, he drafted the Bombay Municipal Act of 1872 and is thus considered the 'father of Bombay Municipality.’ Mehta did not just talk - he walked the talk. He himself got more and more involved in governance and management and actually did the work - so much so, that he eventually left his extremely lucrative law practice to enter politics full-time! He became the Municipal commissioner of Bombay Municipality in 1873 and its President four times – 1884, 1885, 1905 and 1911. Mehta was nominated to the Bombay Legislative Council in 1887 and in 1893 a member of the Imperial Legislative Council. In 1894, he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (CIE) and was appointed a Knight Commander (KCIE) in 1904. It was a really unusual thing - and a great achievement - for a guy without any royal connections or family moneybags to be so influential in his lifetime that the famously racist British Raj would honour him with a Knighthood! And he was not a lapdog for the British either! Very unusually for those days - the very highest point of the British empire - he was a fierce votary of getting self-government rights for Indians! As one of the few people who espoused involvement of the activity of Indians in politics, he was nicknamed ‘Ferocious Mehta’! He was one of the founders of the Indian National Congress. He was the chairman of the Reception Committee in its fifth session in Bombay in 1889, and he presided over the next session in Calcutta. He was known as 'The Lion of Bombay' and 'Uncrowned King of Bombay'. He even started his own newspaper in 1910 - The Bombay Chronicle - to present the Indian point of view in the media, and this paper went on to do one of the most important pieces of journalism in Indian history. From 1913 to 1919 it was edited by B. G. Horniman - No...not a horny man...B G Horniman was an intrepid and fearless British journalist who was particularly notable for his support of Indian independence! Horniman was born in Sussex and came to India in 1906 as a reporter, and worked with the ‘Statesman’ in Calcutta.
This would be about the high point of the British Raj in India - the absolute pinnacle of the strength and power of the British empire. One might remember that the final ‘Delhi Durbar’ was held in India in 1911, and the King Emperor George V actually attended it - wearing the Imperial Crown of India with eight arches, containing 6170 exquisitely cut diamonds, and covered with sapphires, emeralds and rubies, with a velvet and miniver cap all weighing 34 ounces (almost a kilogram of gold and jewels!). It must have been the grandest and most elaborate of all events ever - all the great men of India - all the Kings and Princes and Nawabs - came to Delhi to bend the knee to their boss, 50,000 troops marched in the great parade and more than half a million men came to see it and hear that King George was shifting the capital of India from Calcutta to Delhi.
This was the halcyon period before the great depression, before the 1st world war, before the Russian revolution - and the sun shone brightly on the British empire from pine to palm. It was the best time in history to be a white man and a Britisher - especially in India, where you could really lord it over the wogs and niggers.
But Horniman didn't like it. He didn't like the way that the country was run. He didn't like the oppression, the corruption, the racism, the brutality and he must have been amongst the very few British journalists to write fearlessly against the British-Indian government. He must have been given the push from the Statesman for his anti-government views - but in 1913, he became editor of The Bombay Chronicle and the paper adopted a trenchant anti-colonial voice and became a mouthpiece of the freedom movement under Horniman. He served as vice-president of the Home Rule League under Annie Besant and called for a satyagraha campaign against the Rowlatt Act in 1919 through The Bombay Chronicle and at public meetings. When Gandhi formed the Satyagraha Sabha to launch a national campaign against the Rowlatt Act, Horniman was made its vice-president. Following the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in 1919, Horniman was the only person to break the real story and tell the world of the horrors which were being committed in India by the Raj government on their own subjects! Mass murder! Aerial attacks! Heinous crimes committed by the British Army. The government tried their best to bury the affair and prevent the news from leaking out - but Horniman managed to smuggle photographs of the incident and broke the story about the massacre and its aftermath in the Labour Party's mouthpiece the Daily Herald.
The exposé broke through the censorship on the matter and unleashed a wave of revulsion in the British public over the incidents. All the actions that happened to investigate this outrage - the Hunter commission, the recall of Colonel Dyer, etc happened as a result of Horniman’s courageous and principled stand.
The government lashed out at him - One of his correspondents, Goverdhan Das, was imprisoned for three years. Horniman himself was arrested for his coverage of the massacre and criticism of the colonial government and deported to London, and the Chronicle closed down! (It is sadly ironic how much the Indian government of today is copying the British Raj playbook of that time. Instead of the Rowlatt act we have UAPA, and journalists are still being arrested and harassed.) In England he continued his journalistic crusade against the colonial government and authored ‘British Administration and the Amritsar Massacre’ in 1920. He returned to India a few years later and resumed the editorship of the Chronicle. The Horniman Circle Gardens in Mumbai, formerly the Elphinstone Circle, were named in his honour, after he died in 1948.
Sir Phirozeshah Mehta died in 1915, before all these horrors - but I am sure that ‘Ferocious Mehta’ would have backed his brave editor to the hilt!
I brought my attention back to the gardens which were named after him. Well, actually they were named after him later - the first name for the gardens, and what they are still commonly known as, is ‘Hanging gardens’. When I was a kid I used to wonder why is it called a ‘Hanging’ garden? Were people hanged out there? Was I going to see a gallows and a gibbet ...or perhaps a guillotine and a madame Defarge cackling away? Or was it a place to ‘hang out’ in? Or was it for ‘well hung’ people? Or was it a place where potted plants were hung? Well, it was first known as a ...lake! The area was a water reservoir to supply water to the city of Bombay! The reservoir was constructed in 1880 - maybe it was made by Arthur Crawford! Anyway - the reservoir was nice and all...but there was a small problem. You see...there was a Parsi ‘Tower of Silence’ right next to it.
Didn't get the problem?
You see - the ‘Tower of silence’ is not a silent place to meditate or something...it is a rather macabre bird feeder... You see... Parsees don't burn or bury their dead - they feed them to the birds instead. The tower of silence is a high tower, where the dead bodies of Parsi people are kept so that the carrion-eating birds like vultures and kites and hawks and crows can eat up the corpses. Thus the mortal body is not wasted in being burnt or buried, but can serve a final good purpose by feeding the ‘peckish’ birds. While this might be a good idea in deserted mountain communities of ancient Persia, it is a less good idea in the middle of a crowded city. The birds tear off the flesh of the dead bodies - and then fight over the scraps in mid-air...resulting in bits of Parsi body parts dropping from the sky at times! You wouldn’t like to see bits and pieces of Pestonjee and Nusservanjee splashing into the water which you are going to drink! So, they decided to cover up the lake with concrete slabs - and since a bunch of cement slabs doesn’t look very nice, they decided to cover it up with a nice garden. This garden wouldn’t be actually planted on the ground - it would be on cement slabs over a water reservoir - so it was called an overhanging or a ‘Hanging’ garden.
So, they decided to cover up the lake with concrete slabs - and since a bunch of cement slabs doesn’t look very nice, they decided to cover it up with a nice garden. This garden wouldn’t be actually planted on the ground - it would be on cement slabs over a water reservoir - so it was called an overhanging or a ‘Hanging’ garden.
The name was also inspired by the legendary and ancient ‘Hanging gardens of Babylon’ - one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world. These were also artificial ‘Over-hanging’ gardens created by the great king Nebuchadnezzar II (of modern-day Iraq) for his queen Amytis, because the queen missed the green gardens of her native mountain land of Medea. They were described as a remarkable feat of engineering with an ascending series of tiered gardens containing a wide variety of trees, shrubs, and vines, resembling a large green mountain constructed of mud bricks. So now you have a triple whammy! A huge water reservoir, freedom from bits of bawajis in the water, and a lovely garden with awesome views of the bay of Bombay! You can see the lovely expanse of the Arabian sea, the silver crescent beach of Girgaon chowpatty and the lovely road called the ‘Queen necklace’. The gardens are famous for some fancy hedges cut up in animal shapes, and a cement boot - which is supposed to show the ‘old woman who lived in a shoe’. This was a regular place for school picnics and remembered that shabby old shoe that used to smell strongly of pee. Now it was restored and smartly painted - but was fenced off and no one was allowed to go near it! That’s going the other extreme, I must say!
I was happy to see a statue of another great philanthropist there - Seth Anandilal Podar - a leading citizen, commercial magnate and philanthropist. This cotton magnate established a board to create schools in 1927 - and Mahatma Gandhi was the first president of the Anandilal Podar trust.
But the reason I was so happy to see this statue was that I am the alumnus of a college named after his son - Ramniranjan Anandilal Podar. In 1941, the prominent Marwari Industrialist Seth Rāmdeoji Ānandilāl Podār provided funds of one hundred and fifty thousand rupees—a substantial sum in those times—for establishing the College in the memory of his brother, Rāmniranjan Ānandilāl Podār - and the R A Podar college of commerce and economics was founded - apparently, he first private (non-government) commerce college to be started in Mumbai, and it even survived having me as a student!
There is another garden across the road, which is called the ‘Kamala Nehru park’. I don't know why that also can’t be a part of the same garden - but I suppose that it was a good opportunity for a politician to have another name in here. It was absolutely lovely to be there on that rainy morning - I explored the green and happy garden, people-watched, sat for a few minutes under some very intriguing looking trees. I later found that while they had a very fancy name in the local language - the ‘Nag Champa’ (the snake flower) because...apparently the flowers look like hooded cobras to fanciful people...but it had an even more fascinating name in English - the ‘Cannonball tree’ - because of its round and hard fruits.
It was a lovely place to visit, and it was a bit of a pang to leave that lovely garden and that awesome view - but it would be even more awesome to cycle on the ‘Queens necklace’ and enjoy the views of the Arabian sea as it washes up on Bombay shores.
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Hi thereI blog about my travels - and the thoughts they set off! Sometimes the simplest destinations can be the most thought-provoking! Archives
May 2022
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