A Ghost comes to Bombay after Three Centuries

Note - This is available in the archives of Asiatic Society.

The Bombay Chronicle

BOMBAY: OCTOBER 26, 1941

A GHOST COMES TO TOWN

Antonio De Mello De Castro Revisits Bombay After Three Centuries!

By G. N. ACHARYA

Straight out of the pages of history he walked up to me.

Bridging the gulf of three centuries, the great Viceroy of King John IV of Portugal, who, in the face of the definite treaty between his king and his royal son-in-law, the British king, Charles II, had quibbled and hoaxed the British and postponed the cession of Bombay for nearly two and a half years, came and stood near me with imploring looks. The statesman who had so clearly foreseen that "India will be lost the same day on which the English nation is settled in Bombay" now stood before me with an humble request, writ large in his gleaming eyes.

"Do you know me?" he asked.

"I know you, Antonio de Mello de Castro", I said. "I have heard much of you."

"And do you know Bombay very well."

"I do."

"Please, will you take me round Bombay, and show it to me," he implored.

Then And Now

"Are you mad, De Castro" said I, "show you the whole of Bombay; it is impossible. Do you think that Bombay is still a series of swamps and mud flats, with paddy fields and palm groves and a few villages and fishermen's settlements dotting its coast, as it was in your days. No, no. It is a great city now. From Mahim where in your days may still have lain the ruins of Mahikavati, the ancient town built by the Rastrakuta king Bhimadeva, right away and inclusive of the two southern islets which in your day were peopled by deep sea-fishers; from the western promontory of the wooded hill of Malabar where stood the cleft rock known to the pilgrims of your days as 'Srigundi', to the flourishing docks in the East whose foundations were laid in later years by Lowji Nassarwanji Wadia, there stands now a solid phalanx of no less than 65,000 buildings. In the place of the bare 10,000 people who were spread over the seven villages and a few smaller settlements of your day, there now live in this city as many as a million and a half human souls."

"I know," interrupted De Castro. "I have heard that through a series of geographical, political and social transformations, the poor island which I knew has grown up to be a splendid and populous city. That is why I want to see it, the whole of it. Not only do I want to see this city from outside, but I want to go into the homes and hearths of its denizens and watch their lives, their sorrows and sufferings, their pain and travail, their pleasures and joys, their hopes and aspirations; I want to see them in the exultation of their desires fulfilled, their tasks achieved, I want to see them in their despair and despondency of frustrated wishes. I want to watch them at labour, I want to watch them in the monotony of their leisure and employment, I want to see the whole of the human drama, which every day is enacted in the thousands of homes and other resorts of the people of this city."

Rock of Regeneration

It was a tall order. But there was no resisting De Castro. Somehow I was carried away by his request and agreed to survey the city as a whole.

And so, in order first to give him a bird's eye-view of the whole city, I took him up the Malabar Hill. Going along the well kept roads, lined by the houses of the leisured rich, De Castro told me how the whole area was in his day a thickly wooded hill. As late as 1842 there were but four bungalows on Malabar Hill. But near the southern tip of the hill, about the place where now stands the Government House, were the ruins of the temple of Walkeswaram or the Sand God which had been put up by the Silahara Kings of Chaul between the eighth and twelfth century A.D. The present temple of Walkeshwar was yet to be built by Rama Kamati early in the 18th century. To this temple and to the cleft rock, known as 'Srigundi' or the rock of regeneration, a long line of pilgrims wended its way up the hill along a narrow flight of steps whose memory is retained to us in the Siri (Sidi or steps) Road. It was reputed that even the great Shivaji who was a contemporary of De Castro, had come secretly and crawled through the rock-cleft, as it was considered to be very meritorious to do so.

And may be in the near future, the jungle path up the hill, once trod by devoted pilgrims' feet, will be spanned by a rattling, electric trolley-bus.

From the commanding position of the Malabar Hill, we looked down on the endless forest of buildings, packed close to each other and spreading far and away to the harbour and northward in a bend beyond our view. There stretched at our feet the heart of stirring and living commerce, the noise and bustle of a city in which beat the quick pulse of gain, and watching it we exchanged notes on what it was on that first day of February in 1665, when the British took possession of it and what it had grown up to be.

"Giri-Gaum"

The most important point of the island, then, De Castro told me, was a pretty, well-seated, but ill-fortified house, situated behind the present site of the Town Hall. About the house was a delicate garden, supposed to be the pleasantest in the land. To the south-west of this house and garden, was a certain area of open ground, and somewhere about the present site of the Elphinstone High School was a Franciscan Church. From here right away up to the foot of the Malabar Hill and the limits of the modern section of Mahalaxmi, was an almost unbroken line of cocoanut plantations, interspersed with paddy fields. Scattered among the palms were small villages, composed for the most part of rude, palm-roofed huts. Here and there might be seen a few better class dwellings, tiled and glazed with oyster cells, the property of the white men, across the sea, the Portuguese, who had acquired ownership of these lands.

To the south of the house, already mentioned, was the parish of Polo (the present Apollo Bunder) which contained a few huts and looked across an arm of the sea to the island of Colaba. To the north was a congeries of rude dwellings and a 'Mandovim' (a corruption of Mandvi) or Custom House. The modern Mandvi which to-day echoes the rumble of the bullock-carts and the shrill creaking of lorries, was lost in the voice of the waves which claimed the neighbourhood as the ocean's portion. Across a creek which separated it from the island of Bombay was the hill of Dongri and next to it the great fishing village of Mazagaon or Mazgaon. There was here a manor house and a Franciscan Church and a fairly prosperous township of Bhandaris and Kolis.

Still farther north was the village of Parel with yet another Franciscan Church. This Church was later converted to the use of the British Governors and still later came to be used as a plague hospital. Due west of Parel was the island of Vadali or Worli containing a small fort and hut settlement of the fisher folk. And farthest of all was Mahim where the Church of St. Michael, the first church to be built by the Portuguese, was the centre of Christian life.

But in three centuries the whole scene has been changed beyond recognition. "Let us go down and see things more closely" said De Castro. "Take me first to where the mountain village of Giri-Gaum stood."

Girgaum to-day is neither a mountain nor a village and the scenes and sounds of Girgaum made De Castro sick and dizzy. The 'hoot hoot' of the fast moving automobiles startled him; the rattle of trams and the roar of the trains distressed him. He was positively afraid of the huge double decker buses of which the B.E.S.T. is so proud. Those red-breasted monsters, hurtling along the highways, like temple cars in flight, struck terror into him.

(The article is incomplete. I had kept it for the notes on Walkeshwar and Shrigundi)