In this month’s article, we depart the hills of western Bombay and head north closer to Sion Hill, atop which was built a fort by the English East India Company in their early days of acquiring the erstwhile Bombay Island, in order to keep watch over the more prominent Portuguese possession of Salsette Island (much of suburban Mumbai today) across the navigable former Mahim River that divided the two dominions. The hill is prominently visible in the distant background of this image, but let us shift our attention to the rest of the image and try to discern what we see.
It is generally scarce but at the same time heartening to see the depiction of local religion by a British artist at this point of time in the history in Bombay. It is thanks to Mr. Bharat Gothoskar of Khaki Tours that I was able to identify the precise location of this view. What we see in the foreground here is a relief carving of Lord Ganesha at the base of a banyan tree, with village locals worshipping next to it. In the middle is the still-extant Sion Talao, seen here characteristically with a commonly-used meru pole in it’s centre. Behind the tank stands a little known and also still-extant Parvati Shankar temple which, if one looks closely, our regular readers might recall, looks very similar to the Sunkersett family temple from last month’s issue, sketched by the same artist as this view, Maria Graham, in 1809.
This was done deliberately by Graham in order to make a point regarding gender, class, and caste, specifics of which might be too detailed to enter into here. Considering that later in her life Graham was seen as a “controversial” female writer (albeit famous) for her approach on complex gender issues in England, it falls within reason that this depiction of daily Bombay life was purposefully approached.
Graham describes getting to Sion as being akin to riding through an English park, a view which was commanded by the hill and fort, but as the English by 1809 had complete control of the region, there was no longer significant military importance attached to it, and it mostly served to beautify the surroundings, along with serving as an asylum for retired and injured Company soldiers. Also, just some years earlier, the then Governor of Bombay, Jonathan Duncan, had commissioned for the Sion Causeway (also called the Duncan Causeway) to be built, the first of such vellards connecting Bombay and Salsette, and was mostly used by bullock carts to carry daily supplies and provisions into Bombay from the more verdant and fertile Salsette. There was an inscription over a small house at the end of Bombay Island which stated that construction of the vellard was begun in 1797 and finished in 1805, at the “expence” of Rs. 50,575!
A description from about half a century before this view was sketched perfectly encapsulates what we see here: “The Brahmins, who thus ‘find a fane in every sacred grove’, spend much of their time in religious solitude under the shade of the Banian tree; they plant it near the dewals, or Hindoo temples, improperly called Pagodas; and in those villages where there is no structure for public worship, they place an image under one of these trees, and there perform a morning and evening sacrifice.”
(Picture and article by Mrinal kapadia, resident of Cumballa Hill, he is a collector and researcher, and can be reached on mrinal.kapadia@gmail.com or via instagram on @mrinal.kapadia )
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