Untitled (Set of 4 prints of Bombay Observed: Social, Financial and Ceremonial Life, 1853–1878)

a) The Cotton Boom and Collapse: The Oriental Bank and Share Market, Bombay
Wood engraving on paper
10.2 x 15.3 in (26 × 39 cm)
Published in Illustrated London News, 1865

Depicting the feverish scene at Bombay’s Oriental Bank and Share Market, this engraving reflects the dramatic financial rise and collapse of the city’s cotton trade during the 1860s. The outbreak of the American Civil War (1861–65) cut off Britain’s supply of raw cotton from the Southern states, forcing Lancashire mills to turn to India. Exports from Bombay surged from an annual average of 528,000 bales to over 1.2 million bales by 1865, transforming cotton into “white gold” and unleashing immense profits across the city. Traders went to extremes to capitalise, stripping mattresses for saleable fibre, while investors poured their windfalls into an overheated share market.

At the Oriental Bank and along Rampart Row, crowds of brokers, pleaders, clerks, and even government officials jostled to speculate in shares of the Bank of Bombay and grandiose schemes such as the Back Bay Reclamation Company. Banks eagerly lent against these inflated securities, fuelling the speculative mania. Prominent figures emerged in the frenzy: Cowasji Jehanghir Readymoney, who cautioned restraint, and Premchand Roychand, the celebrated “Share King” of Bombay, whose judgement was sought by eager investors. Even Governor Bartle Frere’s warnings did little to quell the rush.

The Illustrated London News engraving captures not only the physical architecture of the Exchange but also the psychological atmosphere of financial speculation at its height. Yet the boom was short-lived: with the end of the Civil War in 1865, American cotton once again flooded world markets, prices collapsed, fortunes evaporated, and banks failed. This episode, remembered as India’s first stock market crash, left Bombay scarred by financial ruin. As a published news image, the print stands as both a record of the city’s entry into global capitalism and a vivid reminder of the volatility that accompanied it.

b) A Panoramic Prospect of Bombay from Malabar Hill
Wood engraving on paper
10.2 x 15.3 in (26 × 39 cm)
Published in Illustrated London News, 1853

This finely detailed wood-engraved panorama captures Bombay from the elevated vantage of Malabar Hill at a moment of profound transformation in the city’s history. Published in The Illustrated London News in 1853, it coincided with the inauguration of the first passenger railway in India (and in Asia) running from Bombay to Thane. The view reveals the land in a largely virgin state, poised on the brink of the rapid urban developments that would soon reshape it. South Bombay, a pincer-shaped landmass, extends with Malabar Hill at its northern tip and Colaba at its southern, while the characteristic ‘C’-shaped shoreline of Back Bay stretches between them. Against the rocky foreground of the hill, the wide sweep of the harbour is dotted with sailing craft, while the Fort precinct and outlying villages appear as a continuous whole, designed to appeal to the metropolitan eye of the British reader. Early panoramic views of Bombay from Malabar Hill were especially prized by European audiences for their blend of topographical accuracy and picturesque composition, and this example is among the most historically significant, marking the city’s entry into the railway age.

c) A Street is Bombay
Wood engraving on paper
10.2 x 15.3 in (26 × 39 cm)
Published in Illustrated London News, 20th November 1875

This engraving presents a vivid scene of Bombay’s ‘Native Town’ in the mid-1870s, the bustling quarter located immediately north of the Fort precinct encompassing Bhuleshwar, Mumbadevi and Bhendi Bazaar. For more than a century, Bombay society had been structured around this binary of the European ‘Fort’ and the Indian ‘Native Town’. The removal of the Fort walls between 1861 and 1863 began to erase this physical and cultural divide, accelerating processes of urban assimilation and hybridisation. The view combines architectural density with human activity, emphasising the multiplicity of trades and communities that sustained the city’s mercantile identity. Today, such imagery provides valuable documentary evidence of Bombay’s urban morphology in the transitional decades between colonial segregation and the emergence of a more integrated city fabric.

d) After William 'Crimea' Simpson
Unveiling the Bombay Statue of the Prince of Wales presented by Sir Albert Sassoon
Wood engraving on paper
8.4 x 7 in (21.5 x 18 cm)
Published in Illustrated London News, 2nd August 1879

This engraving records the ceremonial unveiling in 1879 of the equestrian statue of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), popularly known as the ‘Kala Ghoda’. Commissioned through the philanthropy of Albert Sassoon following the royal visit of 1875–76, the statue was sited at the northern end of the Fort near its dismantled walls. The work of colonial civic ritual and imperial iconography, the statue quickly acquired a colloquial identity, its local name giving rise to the designation of the Kala Ghoda district. The image captures the moment of public unveiling, with crowds and dignitaries assembled before the monumental bronze of 16.7-foot-tall, an enduring emblem of the layered histories of commemoration, patronage and urban memory in Bombay. Relocated in the 1960s to the Byculla Zoo gardens, the statue remains a landmark of colonial public art in the city. Another structure, titled the ‘Spirit of Kala Ghoda’, depicting a black, riderless horse, was reinstalled in the area in 2017.

BOMBAY IN PRINT: FOUR ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS VIEWS OF THE COLONIAL METROPOLIS, 1853–1879

This group of four Illustrated London News engravings offers a compelling visual chronicle of Bombay’s evolution during the mid-nineteenth century—from a mercantile port on the cusp of industrial transformation to a fully articulated colonial metropolis. Each image captures a defining episode in the city’s journey through the intertwined forces of commerce, urban growth, and imperial spectacle.

The 1853 Panoramic Prospect of Bombay from Malabar Hill marks the dawn of the railway age, presenting a sweeping topographical view of a city poised between natural landscape and emergent infrastructure. Two decades later, A Street in Bombay (1875) reveals the dense vitality of the “Native Town”, a site of convergence between communities and trades as colonial boundaries between Fort and suburb dissolved. The 1865 Cotton Boom and Collapse: The Oriental Bank and Share Market, Bombay portrays the feverish optimism and ensuing ruin of the speculative cotton economy, dramatising the city’s entanglement in global financial networks born of the American Civil War. Completing the sequence, The Unveiling of the Prince of Wales Statue (1879), after William ‘Crimea’ Simpson, captures Bombay’s ceremonial role as an imperial stage, where philanthropy, public art, and civic ritual intertwined in the making of urban identity.

Viewed together, these engravings trace Bombay’s metamorphosis from topographical curiosity to imperial capital, shaped by the energies of trade, speculation, civic expansion, and colonial commemoration. As visual reportage disseminated to a British readership, they encapsulate both the dynamism and contradictions of Victorian Bombay—its aspirations, excesses, and enduring allure within the imagination of empire.

(Set of four)

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