Untitled [Set of 9 Books on Bombay]
a) George W. Clutterbuck, In India; or, Bombay the Beautiful — The First City of India. With incidents and experiences of pioneer mission work in Western India, illustrative of the country, customs and creeds, London: Ideal Publishing Union, circa 1897
xiii + 331 pages; 1 black and white frontispiece and 42 black and white photographic illustrations; original blue-green cloth, upper board titled “In India: or Bombay the Beautiful” in gilt with a pictorial vignette of Bombay Harbour blocked to the centre; spine lettered in gilt; edges sprinkled (as issued)
7.5 x 5.5 in (19 x 13 cm)
A missionary–travel narrative of late-Victorian Bombay, composed by the Reverend George W. Clutterbuck during service in Western India.
A richly illustrated evangelical travelogue, Clutterbuck’s In India; or, Bombay the Beautiful offers one of the most vivid English-language portraits of Bombay in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Written in the immediate wake of the 1896–97 plague and contemporary famine, the book blends topographical description with social observation, recording the city’s docks, thoroughfares and public buildings alongside the everyday geographies of mills, bazaars and outlying ghats. Issued by the Ideal Publishing Union and widely read within missionary and colonial circles, the work is arranged as a narrative of “incidents and experiences” from Western India, its didactic tone typical of late-Victorian Protestant print culture yet invaluable today for its granular detail of urban life.
The visual programme—maps, portraits and in-text views—situates Bombay as both an imperial entrepôt and the “First City of India”, a designation that speaks to the metropolis’s demographic surge and commercial pre-eminence on the eve of the twentieth century. Read alongside contemporary guidebooks (e.g., Murray’s Handbooks) and official cartography (e.g., Survey of India plans), Clutterbuck’s account documents the intersections of faith, philanthropy and municipal modernity that shaped Bombay’s civic identity: plague committees and sanitary reforms; the moral economy of mills and missions; and the spectacle of civic architecture along the Esplanade and Apollo Bunder. This book is particularly desirable to collectors of Bombay imprints and urban historiography.
b) S J George Porter, The Letters of the Late Father George Porter, S.J., Archbishop of Bombay, London: Burns & Oates; New York: Catholic Publication Society Co., 1891
xvi + 484 pp. Title with radiating IHS device of the Society of Jesus; publisher’s cloth (original period binding), gilt-lettered
9.06 x 6.30 in (23 x 16 cm)
An important primary source for the early years of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Bombay following its elevation in 1886, Porter served as its first Archbishop from 1886 until his death in 1889.
Issued just two years after his death, this volume gathers the pastoral and personal correspondence of George Porter, S.J., whose appointment in 1886 marked the creation of a metropolitan see at Bombay under Pope Leo XIII’s reorganisation of the Indian hierarchy. Porter’s brief but formative tenure—culminating with his death at Bombay on 28 September 1889—coincided with the consolidation of diocesan structures and the redefinition of Catholic jurisdiction in Western India.
The letters move from Europe to India and then across the breadth of the newly constituted province, providing a first-hand record of ecclesiastical administration and urban life in late-Victorian Bombay. The table of contents includes a pivotal chapter, “From London to Bombay”, followed by extensive sections titled “Letters from Bombay”, with vivid passages on the city’s civic institutions, population, monsoon climate, Jesuit colleges, and the social questions that preoccupied reformers—women’s education, child marriage, and the status of Parsis and Muslims—together with accounts of pastoral journeys to Allahabad, Karachi, Bhavnagar, and Ahmedabad.
As a printed artefact, the work exemplifies the devotional-didactic publishing of Burns & Oates, pairing spiritual counsel with travel narrative and administrative reportage. It also preserves Porter's reflections on the 1886 establishment of the Indian hierarchy and the transition from Vicariates Apostolic to territorial dioceses, offering scholars of Bombay's religious and urban history a text of unusual breadth and immediacy.
c) F M Coleman, Typical Pictures of Indian Natives: Being reproductions from specially prepared hand-coloured photographs with descriptive letterpress, Bombay: The Times of India Office and Thacker, 1899, 5th edition
50 pages, 24 coloured plates with tissue guards; original grey cloth, upper board lettered “TYPICAL PICTURES OF INDIAN NATIVES IN COLOURS” in red and black within a ruled panel; patterned endpapers (as issued)
10 x 7.6 in (25 x 19 cm)
A vivid artefact of late-Victorian colonial ethnographic print culture, Coleman’s Typical Pictures of Indian Natives fuses the authority of the photograph with the chromatic allure of the lithographic plate. The series reproduces hand-coloured studio photographs—then widely circulated by Bombay and Calcutta photographers—into durable colour plates accompanied by succinct descriptive notes on caste, costume and custom. The result is a portable “gallery” of social types, intended for administrators, travellers and an expanding Anglophone readership eager for visual summaries of the subcontinent.
d) Anonymous, Views of Bombay—Old and New, Bombay: Times of India Office, [c. 1903; later reissued]
[24] leaves of halftone views (as issued); original printed green paper wrappers titled on the upper cover “VIEWS OF BOMBAY—OLD AND NEW. / PRICE ONE RUPEE.”; wire- or side-stapled as issued, further rebound in half leather bound with gilt text to the spine
8.94 x 11.73 in (22.7 x 29.8 cm)
Conceived as a compact “then-and-now” portfolio, Views of Bombay—Old and New places the late-Victorian/Edwardian city against earlier vistas of the Fort, Apollo Bunder and other civic landmarks, inviting the reader to read change across streets, waterfronts and public buildings. Contemporary advertisements describe the work as portraying the principal scenes of the modern metropolis alongside images from some sixty years before—a remarkable early exercise in urban memory-making for a popular audience.
Issued by the Times of India Office—then the city’s most influential English-language press—the album belongs to a Bombay tradition of inexpensive pictorials and guide literature aimed at residents and visitors. Surviving notices document the title across decades (including prices such as Re. 1–8), attesting to its popularity and to periodic reprinting; copies carrying the “Price One Rupee” wrapper, as here, likely represent an earlier issue within that run.
For historians of Mumbai’s visual culture, the work sits between the grand photographic albums of the 1860s–80s and the postcard viewbooks of the twentieth century. The economical halftone process and robust wrappers speak to a democratisation of city imagery: Bombay was to be looked at, compared, and learnt from—a pedagogy of urban change printed for a rupee.
e) Michael Macmillan, The Last of the Peshwas: A Tale of the Third Maratha War, London, Glasgow, Dublin & Bombay: Blackie & Son, Limited, 1907
240 pp., with 5 leaves of plates after drawings by Paul Hardy; half-title; publisher’s red pictorial cloth, upper board blocked in black with a Maratha warrior and lettered in gilt; spine gilt.
An early Bombay-issue of Blackie’s juvenile historical romances, set during the Third Anglo–Maratha War (1817–18) and centred on the downfall and exile of Baji Rao II, the last Peshwa.
Macmillan’s novel is among the most accessible late-Edwardian fictions to dramatise the political endgame of the Maratha Confederacy. Published by Blackie in 1907 and illustrated by Paul Hardy—a leading hand in adventure book imagery of the period—it translates the campaigns around Poona, Koregaon and Ashti into a narrative calibrated for young readers, yet grounded in the broad historical arc that culminated in the capture and removal of Baji Rao II after the British victory of 1818. The Bombay imprint on the title sequence underlines the publisher’s robust India market and the appetite for vernacularised histories that folded local events into an imperial adventure mode.
The book sits within Macmillan’s wider cycle of Indian tales—Tales of Indian Chivalry and In Wild Maratha Battle among them—written during a phase when the late-Victorian/Edwardian press sought to codify the “making of empire” for a new generation. In the context of Bombay and the Deccan, it offers a period view of Maratha polity, court intrigue and the diplomatic theatre surrounding Mountstuart Elphinstone’s residency, refracted through popular fiction’s moral universe.
f) [Anonymous — attributed to Karsandas Mulji], History of the Sect of Mahárájas, or Vallabhácháryas, in Western India, London: Trübner & Co., 1865
xv + 182 pp + 183 pp.; frontispiece engraved plate (“A Group of the present Mahárájas”); epigraph from Ephesians on title; original publisher’s full cloth binding in deep maroon, elaborately blind-stamped with a decorative panel of palmette and scroll motifs to both covers, enclosing a central gilt medallion depicting a seated figure. The spine gilt-lettered and ornamented with a stylised foliate tool, with the publisher’s imprint “Trübner & Co.” at the foot; edges untrimmed
9.06 x 5.91 in (23 x 15 cm)
First edition of the principal English-language polemical account of the Pushtimarg/Vallabhacharya tradition, issued in the wake of the Maharaj Libel Case (1862) in Bombay.
Printed by Trübner, the foremost London house for Oriental scholarship, this sharply argued volume set out to describe and denounce the doctrines and practices of the Vallabhacharya sect as observed in western India. Although issued anonymously, bibliographies and library records consistently attribute authorship to Karsandas Mulji, the Gujarati journalist and social reformer whose articles precipitated the celebrated Maharaj Libel Case; the book follows the line of the defence and embeds long documentary passages, lists of Brij-bhasha authorities, and descriptions of temples and rites.
The work is significant on several fronts. As a source for nineteenth-century Bombay religious and civic history, it captures the collision of vernacular reformism, missionary critique and colonial jurisprudence that shaped public debate in the metropolis. As print culture, it shows how an English-language treatise—illustrated with a confronting group portrait of the “present Mahárájas”—translated courtroom controversy into a widely circulated book for metropolitan and Indian readers alike. Today it is read both as a partisan text and as an indispensable primary source for the social history of the Vallabhacharya/Pushtimarg community, the working of the Bombay courts and the media ecology surrounding the 1862 trial.
g) Hormasji Dinshaw Darukhanawala, Parsis & Sports [Parsis and Sports and Kindred Subjects], Bombay: Published by the Author (printed by F. Borton), 1935
pp. 488; numerous halftone portraits, plates and facsimiles; printed price on upper wrapper “Rs. 3/3”; original plain-grey publisher’s wrappers printed in red (as on your copy); copies were also issued in cloth. First edition, compiled under the guidance of Dr M. E. Pavri, J.P., and J. R. B. Jeejeebhoy, with a foreword by Sir H. M. Mehta.
8.27 x 6.30 in (21 x 16 cm)
A landmark of inter-war Indian sporting culture, Darukhanawala’s compendium is the most substantial single-volume record of Parsi participation in sport across the subcontinent—cricket foremost, but also athletics, wrestling and physical culture, football, hockey, tennis, cycling, swimming, boxing and scouting. Prepared with the counsel of two leading figures—M. E. Pavri (international cricketer and physician) and J. R. B. Jeejeebhoy—and issued at Bombay in 1935, the book is profusely illustrated with portraits and team groups, creating an indispensable biographical and pictorial archive of Parsi athletes in the late colonial period.
Within the longer history of Indian sport, the volume documents the pioneering role of Parsis in cricket—from the Quadrangular to the 1886 and 1888 Parsi tours of England—and situates athletic achievement within the community’s associational life (gymkhanas, clubs and charities). Because later historians repeatedly mined it for data and imagery, the book functions both as primary source and reference work, frequently cited in academic treatments of South Asian sport.
h) John William Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir John Malcolm, G.C.B., late Envoy to Persia and Governor of Bombay; from Unpublished Letters and Journals, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1856
(In 2 Volumes)
vol. I: xii + 538 pp.
vol. II: vi + 631 pp.
Contemporary polished calf, gilt-ruled boards; spines with raised bands, gilt tools and red morocco lettering pieces; marbled endpapers (each)
A major primary source for the political and military history of Western India and Anglo-Persian relations in the late Company period.
Kaye’s monumental biography assembles Sir John Malcolm’s private papers into the definitive narrative of a statesman who shaped Company rule from Mysore and the Maratha wars to the settlement of Central India, and who later served as Governor of Bombay (1827–1830). Drawing on “unpublished letters and journals,” the work documents Malcolm’s two great embassies to Persia (1800–01; 1808–09), his diplomatic style on the western frontiers, and his administrative programme in Bombay—education, judicial reorganisation and the famous jurisdictional clash with the Supreme Court—set against the wider reformist turn of the 1820s.
Issued by Smith, Elder & Co. in 1856 and still the starting point for Malcolm studies, the biography also illuminates the making of imperial knowledge: Kaye edits and contextualises dispatches, memoranda and travel journals that fed Malcolm’s own publications, including the History of Persia (1815) and Sketch of the Sikhs (1812). Read today alongside modern reassessments of Malcolm’s career, the Life and Correspondence remains indispensable for scholars of Bombay governance, Anglo-Persian diplomacy and the intellectual world of the Company state.
i) Alexander Henry Hallam Murray, The High Road of the Empire: With Watercolour Pen and Ink Sketches of India, London: John Murray, 1905
xxix; [1]; 453 pages; [1]. Illustrated with 47 plates in colour with captioned tissue guards and numerous in-text line drawings; publisher's ornately blind-stamped orange cloth, gilt titles and tooling to a blue cloth panel to spine, blue endpapers, top edge gilt
9.5 x 3.25 in (24 x 8 cm)
A richly produced record of an early-twentieth-century tour across the subcontinent, The High-Road of Empire brings together A. H. Hallam Murray’s travel narrative with his own watercolour and pen-and-ink views—temples and mosques, Mughal and Rajput monuments, river ghats, bazaars, and hill-station prospects—reproduced here in a generous suite of forty-seven colour plates. Published by John Murray, the house synonymous with nineteenth-century travel literature, the volume exemplifies the firm’s late-Edwardian shift towards deluxe, image-led books that framed India for a metropolitan readership.
Murray (1854–1934 ) - a painter and long-time partner in the family publishing business—travels the “high road” of imperial itineraries, moving through major urban centres and historic sites while pairing on-the-spot sketches with descriptive chapters. The result is both a personal artist’s journal and a curated panorama of colonial India on the eve of the great constitutional debates of the 1900s, notable for its careful draughtsmanship and the vividness of its chromatic plates.
(Set of nine)
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