Robert Stephens has been in Mumbai since 2007. But before he studied architecture at Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, and made friends with Mumbaikars studying there, he had never heard of the city.
“I grew up in Summerville, South Carolina, which is not exactly the most globalised of places. So, my introduction to Mumbai happened because of the friendships I made at college, and one thing led to the other and here I am,” says Stephens who works with RMA Architects, and is also the founder of Urbs Indis, a studio that “narrates lesser-known civic histories through the juxtaposition of archival material with contemporary aerial photographs of urban India”.
Stephens, 37, is also a rare books hunter, and it was one of these books— Professional Papers on Indian Engineering (1869)—that ultimately led to Bombay Imagined: An Illustrated History of the Unbuilt City, which is available for pre-order on urbsindis.com.
“It (Professional Papers) is a fascinating volume, published in the mid-1800s, full of information on projects throughout British India, from Bombay to Calcutta to Lahore,” says Stephens.
One of the schemes involved a large public park at Mahalaxmi, in South Mumbai. “It was Arthur Crawford’s (the city’s first municipal commissioner's) idea. He envisioned a 400-acre people’s park, but we all know that it eventually become the Race Course. So, I wanted to find out more about such unrealised micro-narratives.”
In Bombay Imagined, which contains archival drawings, contemporary speculations and artistic overlays from 31 studios around the world, Stephens records 200 such projects. Here, he tells us about some of them.
Back Bay Reclamation and Docks
In 1860, Robert Fairbairn, a British engineer, proposed a massive earth moving project. He wanted to reclaim the entire area, what we know as Back Bay, from Colaba Point to Malabar Point, and build a new town named after Henry Frere, the then governor of Bombay. This town, which was envisioned with a complex network of docks, would have been 24 times larger than Fort (the city’s business precinct) and contained the termini for two railway lines. But the project didn’t find any investors. Fairbairn died a pauper in Mumbai and is buried in the Sewri Cemetery.
Bombay Cathedral, 1903
The English Christian community was, surprisingly, not considered very affluent back in those days, but about 120 years ago, they embarked on a major plan to build a grand cathedral on the site where the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (Prince of Wales Museum) stands today. The general view was that the St Thomas Cathedral, which the proposed structure would dwarf, was an “insignificant building tucked away in a backstreet.” Several advertisements were put out to fund the cathedral, and the idea was to redevelop the property on which St Thomas Cathedral stood and use that money plus additional funds to construct a new place of worship. But, of course, it came unstuck due to lack of funds, and a newspaper report from 1906 noted: “Bombay churchmen are too poor to hope to be able to build a Cathedral out of their own resources.”
Car-free SoBo, 1973
Ajit Bhattacharjea was the resident editor of the Times of India in Bombay. Bhattacharjea had this bold idea of making the entire island of South Mumbai car-free. It was a radical idea, because, at that time, there were about 100,000 privately owned vehicles in the city. And, yes, traffic back then has also been described as a nightmare. Quite naturally, Bhattacharjea’s idea didn’t have too many takers and, in one of his columns, the journalist rued: “Presumably car-owning ministers and senior administrators, and their wives, do not wish to rub shoulders with mere pedestrians.
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