Journey
Parsi Bombay — dockyard, mill and mission
A community of about a hundred thousand built a disproportionate share of Bombay: the dockyard that made Royal Navy ships in Indian teak, the mills, the hospitals and libraries with Parsi names on the foundation stones, and then the steel town in Bihar that became the first planned industrial city in India.
Stops (5)
- Wadiaji Atash Behram, Mumbai · Wadiaji Ātash Behrām — the shipbuilders' fire
One of nine Ātash Behrāms in the world, consecrated in 1830 by the Wadia family, who had come from Surat in 1736 to run the East India Company's Bombay dockyard. They built some three hundred and fifty ships in Malabar teak, including Royal Navy vessels; HMS Trincomalee, laid down at Bombay in 1816, is still afloat at Hartlepool.
- Towers of Silence & Parsi Mumbai · Towers of Silence — the community and its difficulty
Dokhmas on Malabar Hill where the dead are exposed, because burial defiles earth and cremation defiles fire. Diclofenac given to cattle collapsed India's vulture population by over ninety per cent in the 1990s, and the community has argued about solar concentrators and burial ever since — a religious practice broken by a veterinary drug.
- Victorian Gothic & Art Deco, Mumbai · The Gothic and Deco city they paid for
Bombay's Victorian Gothic ensemble and the Art Deco frontage facing it across the Oval are substantially Parsi-financed — Cowasji Jehangir, the Petits, the Readymoneys, with the Baghdadi Jewish Sassoons alongside. Hospitals, libraries, schools and drinking fountains across the city carry their names on the foundation stones.
- Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus · Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus — the railway city
F. W. Stevens's station of 1888, Gothic Revival with Indian detail, built for the Great Indian Peninsula Railway whose lines carried the cotton that the Parsi mills spun. The building is the point where the port, the railway and the mill economy that Bombay ran on meet in one piece of architecture.
- Jamshedpur · Jamshedpur — the steel town
India's first fully planned industrial city, laid out from 1908 around the works Jamsetji Tata had spent his last years trying to site. It had piped water, electricity, schools and playing fields from the start. He died in 1904 without seeing the place chosen; his instruction to his son about wide streets and shade was largely followed.