Defining Dwelling Spaces: The Rationality of Industrial Housing in Post-Plague Bombay

By the late nineteenth century, Bombay had emerged as a leading commercial
and industrial city in British India. Its expanding textile mills, docks, and a
growing ‘informal’ economy attracted scores of migrant workers who settled down
in the underdeveloped outskirts of the city in haphazardly constructed tenements.
The bubonic plague that struck Bombay in 1896 was especially virulent in working
class neighborhoods. Unprecedented mortality rates combined with the mass
exodus of people unsettled Bombay’s economy and emphasized the urgency for
improved industrial housing. The intensity of plague in poorer localities reinforced
localist assumptions that linked the epidemic with squalor and overcrowding.
Unsurprisingly, the ‘unsanitary’ working class areas became prime targets of
post-plague urban reconstruction. The provincial government instituted specific
agencies to build clean industrial housing while the Municipality was entrusted
with the responsibility of extending sanitary infrastructure to hitherto neglected
neighborhoods. Thus, the outbreak of plague generated a consensus that the twin
objectives of controlling epidemics and creating a stable laboring class depended on
an equitable redistribution of civic facilities.

The miserable failure of ensuing schemes betrayed the entangled bureaucratic
problems and financial conservatism of the government and millowners. By the late
1920s, the urgency to create sanitized housing was replaced by haphazard attempts
to minimally accommodate the working class. Despite their multiple differences
over the funding and execution of industrial housing projects, urban planners
and millowners were unanimous about one issue: the housing needs of the poor,
and the location, size and ‘type’ of tenement they thought were most suitable for
working class people. Their ‘rational’ schemes defined dwelling spaces in relation
to class. This paper documents that despite its earlier enthusiasm to redistribute
civic facilities, post-plague urban renewal programs accentuated spatial inequalities
along class lines.