Cotton Clubs: Work, Leisure, and Diversity

This 1893 map of Bombay depicts the city's individual structures in much greater detail than the "Times" map.

Looking at the map, we see that certain buildings are outlined in black, while large stretches of the city’s urban terrain are left blank. This contrasts with other contemporaneous maps, which pursued a more democratic view of the city by exhaustively depicting individual settlements and structures. The Times map’s decision to highlight certain buildings can be read as an elitist choice, reducing the city to its landmarks—i.e., its sites of economic and cultural power.

This row of "gymkhanas" lines the Bombay waterfront, and would have been situated in an upscale neighborhood in the city's old British layout.

Many of the outlined buildings are industrial sites, from salt works to cotton mills. In keeping with Bombay’s status as a center for global trade, the map meticulously depicts the branching structure of trade routes within the city. Railroad tracks link docks to manufacturing zones and extend upwards off the island, allowing us to trace the flow of goods between European and Indian interests.

The Parsi Gymkhana, one of the clubs depicted in the "Times" map, still stands today.

Areas of leisure—parks, clubs, beaches—are also frequently highlighted. In particular, the map is dotted with numerous “gymkhanas,” an Indian term for social and sporting clubs (analogous to country clubs or athletic centers).

Neither of these choices cater exclusively to a British audience. Many of the industrial buildings depicted are cotton mills, which Sven Beckert notes were primarily Indian-owned:

Located on the tip of Bombay Island, these cotton warehouses and mills may have been owned by Indian or non-European interests.

Although trade in Bombay was regulated by Britain, it was conducted by both native and European interests, something that the Times map clearly depicts. Further, the gymkhanas are demarcated according to their ethnic and religious memberships, from the “Parsi Gymkhana” to the “Hindu Gymkhana.” Based on these emphases, we can view Bombay as a city dominated by a diverse merchant elite, who would have used the Times map to locate their own loci: the industrial and social spaces owned by their own ethnic group. 

[1] Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton : A Global History. First ed. 2014. Print.