Bourgeois residential urban form

In 1896, an outbreak of bubonic plague devastated the colonial city of Bombay, nearly halving its population and sending the public health administration of the entire province into disarray. The hastily-constituted Bombay Plague Committee commissioned a series of photographs to document the public health response to the plague, an operation which relied heavily on a staff of sweepers, scavengers, health workers and midwives from lowered caste communities. The health Reports of the Director of Public Health for the Government of Bombay show that these workers were employed by voluntary organisations and charitable institutions, who worked closely with the colonial government over four decades to institute a range of modern sanitary urban amenities (such as roads laid in a grid, piped water supply, night soil trenching, women health workers and municipal sweepers). Some of the voluntary organisations who collaborated with colonial public health authorities were upper-caste Hindu nationalists who supported sanitation work on ground while simultaneously dreaming into being a new independent India. The most prominent of these Hindu nationalists was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who idealised an ‘urban/rural utopia’, a self-sufficient village untouched by colonial modernity, as a symbol of the “real India”. In 1936, Gandhi built his own urban/rural utopia in the form of Sevagram Ashram in the Wardha district of the eastern Bombay Presidency. Although the settlement was intended to demonstrate “clean living” and self-reliance, Sevagram was built on an industrialist’s privately owned land and dependent on modern sanitary urban amenities built by the colonial public health authorities. One of Gandhi’s many followers was upper-caste engineer Raghunath Sripad Deshpande, who wrote a number of house construction manuals for his readers in the Bombay Presidency in the 1930s. Deshpande combined aspects of Gandhi’s upper-caste paternalist ethos of “clean living” and fused them with the public health department’s anti-epidemic measures to visualise a new type of middle class neighbourhood. The manuals’ instructions on site selection created deliberate caste and class homogeneity, in which marginalised populations were routinely evicted and resettled to make way for self-contained enclaves for upper-caste white-collar homeowners. In this way, the 1896 bubonic plague precipitated complex interrelationships between colonial public health infrastructure, the rise of the nationalist movement led by co-operatives and self-help organisations, and the formation of private property norms in the Bombay Presidency.