FACING the Arabian Sea in a spectacular crescent, the Art Deco ensemble of Marine Drive in Bombay (now Mumbai) spells the advent of modernity in India. This was an ambitious sea facing urban development along the western shore of Bombay’s island city. Built in the early 20th century on 552 acres of reclaimed land west of the Esplanade, the Backbay Reclamation Scheme propelled Bombay from a 19th century Victorian town to a modern, international city as it reinvented itself as a 20th century metropolis. The new modern age heralded a new global aesthetic and as always, Bombay kept pace with international trends.

This expanse of newly reclaimed sea fronting land set the stage for a modern urban development, unveiling the Art Deco style in India. The Back-bay Land Reclamation Scheme (1928-1942) was unarguably the first Art Deco district in India, creating blocks of Art Deco buildings by 1929 facing the Oval Maidan and extending the construction in waves from the 1930s to the 1940s, with the buildings of Churchgate and Marine Drive. This ensemble of Art Deco buildings stretching from the sea facing Marine Drive on the West, to the row of residential buildings facing the Oval Maidan on the East, created the densest concentration of Art Deco buildings in India. Decades before the construction of Le Corbusier’s modern icons of Chandigarh, Bombay’s Art Deco had given India its first tryst with the new architecture of reinforced concrete.

The sweep of early 20th century urbanism is evocative of internationalism in modern architecture and was part of similar experiments across the globe, from the White Town in Tel Aviv Israel, to the Miami Beach Architectural District in the United States and later, Bandung in Indonesia. With its origins in France at the 1925 Paris Exposition, Art Decoratifs came into vogue and this trend caught on with Bombay’s Gujarati and Marwari businessmen, Parsi industrialists, as well as with the fashionable royalty of the Indian princely states who went on ocean liners to Europe and brought back many of these ideas to Bombay, favoured for its horse races and high flying social life.

 

Bombay was truly the Gateway to India for international trends – in fashion, music, cuisine and architecture and it was the Art Deco aesthetic that influenced furniture, graphics, jewellery, architecture and even film posters. A new generation of Indian architects trained abroad or at the JJ School of Art, had set up their practices and these buildings of Marine Drive and Backbay Reclamation announced that new aesthetic to India – the Art Moderne or Art Deco.¹

This created a truly modern urban enclave, with cinema halls and cricket stadia, corporate offices and residential blocks that heralded a new ‘modern’ lifestyle – of jazz and moving pictures, cricket clubs and stadia, automobiles, reinforced cement concrete construction, terrazzo floors, elevators and apartment living. The architecture celebrated patterns influenced by tropical themes, streamlined and curvelinear forms from automobiles, porthole windows from steam-liners, nautical themes, jazz, geometric patterns and Egyptian motifs influenced from the recent discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. With the fluidity offered by reinforced cement concrete, the new buildings along Marine Drive and Backbay Reclamation could show off curved cantilevered balconies, porthole windows, spiralling forms and streamlined architectural shapes, a striking visual contrast to the heaviness of the stone masonry buildings of the Gothic Revival genre. India had embraced modernity.

 

While corner plots were punctuated by dazzling ziggurat like shapes of cinema halls such as Eros and Metro, the residential blocks conformed to the more horizontal Art Deco style. These residential blocks fitted out with modern apartments advertised as the ultimate in comfort with automobile garages, frigidaires and mechanized elevators, defined modern living. The apartment blocks built over a few decades from the 1930s on, spread right from the western shore, further East to face the imposing Gothic public buildings across the Oval Maidan in a spectacular architectural standoff between two centuries facing one another across an open expanse.

Collectively, all the various Art Deco styled buildings in these newly reclaimed lands at Marine Drive, Churchgate and Queen’s Road created a cohesive image of the modern city. Like the neo-Gothic buildings in their time represented a new face of the city and an expression of power, so too the Art Deco ensemble. It symbolized the shift in expression to represent contemporary aspirations. This time in the 1920s and 1930s, the city had once again renewed itself to keep pace with international trends, thus truly making Bombay India’s connection to the west and the world – the Gateway to India.²

 

Art Deco adapted to the Indian context and in its new avatar, Bombay Deco, assimilated local influences and spread northwards from Backbay throughout Mumbai’s neighbourhoods and from Mumbai, to the rest of the rapidly growing urban centres in India. The royal and industrial elite who championed the new architectural style to signal their uncompromising embrace of all things modern, facilitated this. It was reinforced and glamorized through Mumbai’s cinema that used the sweep of Marine Drive’s Art Deco buildings to visually symbolize India’s modern age.

 

Marine Drive, with its strong architectural sweep created a strong visual impact and its backdrop of concrete buildings and apartment blocks heralded the new India. No wonder it caught the imagination of the masses, with generations of film makers using it as the backdrop to their films: Dev Anand and Shakila in the film C.I.D. (1956); Navin Nischol and Priya Rajvansh driving in the rain with the song Tum jo mil gaye ho in the background from the 1970s film Hanste Zakhm; the iconic scene of Amitabh Bachchan riding his motorbike in Mukaddar ka Sikander (1978); and the millennials perhaps relating more to Ranbir Kapoor meeting Konkona Sen Sharma in Wake up Sid (2009).

While the five to six storeyed residential buildings with their smooth corners and balconies were punctuated by zigzag patterns, tropical motifs and sunburst patterns, the new building typology of cinema halls with their characteristic Art Deco profile and ornament, became the symbols of urban cosmopolitanism, moving images and the jazz age. Regal cinema, designed by Charles William Stevens, son of the illustrious Victorian architect Frederick William Stevens, completed in 1933, was the first to be built, fitted with central air conditioning and neon lighting.³ Eros Cinema designed by Sohrabji Bedhwar and built in 1938 on a triangular plot, celebrated a towering profile of receding ziggurat like towers. It included a European ballroom, a 500-seat restaurant, shops, luxury offices, a smaller private preview cinema and even an ice skating rink.⁴

 

Metro Cinema, built the same year to the designs of New York architects Thomas White Lamb and the local firm of David William Ditchburn, exclusively screened movies by MGM. Liberty Cinema was built a decade later in 1947 designed by M. A. Riddley Abbott of the U.K., local architect John B. Fernandes and artist Waman Namjoshi, catering to a Hindi cinema audience. The interiors of these were equally breathtaking. Whereas Regal’s interior panels were designed by the Polish émigré Karl Schara, Metro and Liberty’s luxurious Art Deco interiors were in shades of red and pink. The marble foyer and staircase at Metro had murals executed by students of the JJ School of Art under the direction of Charles Gerard. These cinema halls were soon to find smaller prototypes across many large and small cities of India – often named Eros, Regal, Metro and Liberty.

 

The style spread to other parts of Bombay’s Fort area and was adapted for corporate and office buildings. Significant among these were the iconic Industrial and Prudential Assurance Company building constructed opposite Churchgate Station to the design of Master Sathe and Bhuta who also designed the Bombay Mutual Life Building and the New India Assurance Company with its entrance framed by two colossal figures sculpted by N.G. Pansare and stunning bas-reliefs depicting industry in a marked Indo-Deco style.

Other such buildings include the Laxmi Insurance Building, Mercantile Bank (now HSBC) building by J.A. Richi, and the Bank of India building designed by the famous Mumbai firm of Gregson Batley & King, displaying influences of Hindu architecture with its trabeated openings and carved stone brackets supporting overhanging chajjas, as well as Egyptian inspired columns on the façade. Art Deco murals and sculptural friezes effortlessly merged with Indian imagery as the facades of the New India Assurance Building and Bank of India building paid homage to Indian figures. The Vatcha Agiary adapted Art Deco to assimilate Assyrian motifs for a Zoroastrian fire temple.

Second only to Miami’s Ocean Drive, Mumbai’s Backbay Reclamation contains the largest number of Art Deco buildings in the world. Much like Mumbai’s collection of Art Deco buildings along the Backbay Reclamation, Miami’s Art Deco buildings were constructed over a similar time period through private investment and initiative. In Bombay the result was a homogenous collection of buildings built on reclaimed land from the sea. Miami’s Ocean Drive finds an Asian reflection in Bombay’s Art Deco precinct with its strong sweep of the sea facing Marine Drive. Tropical imagery shown on the facades of many buildings in Miami and Bombay share a striking resemblance; however, Bombay’s designs incorporated local materials and colours and local Indian aesthetic, not seen in any comparative localization in Miami Art Deco.

 

Art Deco virtually swept across the island city of Bombay northwards towards Malabar Hill, Cumballa Hill and Altamount Road. Mohammed Ali Jinnah designed his private residence – South Court at Malabar Hill – in the Art Deco style complete with spring loaded wooden floors designed by Claude Batley. With its strong geometric silhouettes, it made its appearance in the Breach Candy area with buildings like Keki Court and Vithal Court, Wankaner Palace, Anand Bhavan, Beach View, Breach Candy Club, Breach Candy Hospital and Dil Pazir.

The many princely families commissioned palatial homes for their stays in Bombay. Many of them such as the royals of Baroda, Indore, Wankaner, Bansda, Hyderabad, Gwalior, Rewa and Kutch constructed their homes in architectural styles ranging from the Neoclassical, to the Art Deco at Breach Candy. Wankaner Palace (later the U.S. Consulate) was designed by the architectural firm of Gregson, Batley & King in a Bombay Deco hybrid blending the Art Deco with Indian elements. Mafatlal Park was among the earliest modern apartment housing schemes complete with a swimming pool built in 1939 through a private entrepreneurial scheme, advertising its flats to the urban elite. Mafatlal Park and Bansda residence (Anand Bhavan) were both designed by Master Sathe and Bhuta, prolific in their Art Deco practice.

 

Bombay Deco spread further north towards Dadar, Shivaji Park, Matunga, Sion, Juhu, Chembur and beyond. Soon, the Parsi and Hindu colonies in Dadar were adopting the fashionable style for more modest bungalows and apartment blocks in central Bombay. The style had made its shift from the homes of the rich and famous to more public and democratic buildings – with the Bombay Central Railway Station designed by Claude Batley, firmly stamping the Art Deco style on the city’s public domain. Batley also designed some iconic residential housing schemes – baugs for the Parsi community with the beautiful Cusrow Baug at Colaba and Ness Baug at Nana Chowk. He also designed the Breach Candy Hospital, Dariya Mahal for the Maharaja of Cutch, Lalbhai House, Bombay Club and Natraj Hotel in the Art Deco style.

 

What is unique about Mumbai is the concentration of the Art Deco buildings in what can be called a Deco District defined by a five mile long promenade of Marine Drive – the Queen’s Necklace, to Marine Lines (Maharishi Karve Marg), Dinshaw Wachha Road, Veer Nariman Road (Churchgate Street) and Jamshedji Tata Road. This urban scheme implemented from 1928 to the 1940s makes for a cohesive urban development, homogenous in its character and clear in its delineation.

This Deco precinct consists of cinema halls, residential apartments, commercial and office buildings that lend a 20th century layer to the city’s narrative and is now part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Victorian and Art Deco Ensembles of Mumbai, representing the first Art Deco composition developed in India. The area offers an architectural manifestation of a modernizing India on the verge of independence between 1928 and 1947, propelled by private entrepreneurship, princely patronage and the newly acquired wealth of modern industrialists.

Standing on two sides of the legendary cricketing ground of the Oval Maidan, the 19th century Victorian Gothic and 20th century Art Deco of the Backbay Reclamation Scheme confront each other in a theatrical architectural display that is unique to Bombay. Centred within this urban ensemble, the Oval Maidan acts as the unifying element, binding this urban fabric together. The open space of this public green acts as both the centrepiece of this ensemble, as also the viewing gallery that allows for the public viewing and enjoyment of these urban and architectural expressions – a spatial vacuum that allows for the showcasing of each of the 19th and 20th century groupings. Marine Drive extends this idea of a viewing gallery to the seafront, retaining the visual and spatial integrity of the seafronting development as a brilliant sparkling Queen’s Necklace to which the thronging citizens flock as a vital city space.

Together, this ensemble constitutes the proposed World Heritage Property, creating a formidable architectural dialectic that influences the narrative of modernism in Asia. Both these architectural genres bring together not only the modern aesthetics of two successive styles, but also reflect the materials, technologies, structural systems, and building typologies that enabled the architectural transition between the 19th and the 20th centuries. Standing on two sides of the legendary cricketing ground of the Oval Maidan, the 19th century Victorian Gothic and 20th century Art Deco of the Backbay Reclamation Scheme confront each other in an architectural display unique to Bombay.

Through the decades since its appearance in Mumbai in the 1930s, Indo-Deco held sway across the Indian subcontinent until the arrival of Corbusier in Chandigarh with Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of India championing modernism as the style appropriate for a strong, independent, progressive and secular India.⁵

 

* Drawings of the Victorian and Art Deco Ensemble of Mumbai, Abha Narain Lambah Associates.

Footnotes:

1. See Navin Ramani, Bombay Art Deco Architecture: A Visual Journey 1930-1953. Roli Books, Delhi, 2017.

2. UNESCO Nomination Dossier for ‘The Victorian & Art Deco Ensembles of Mumbai’, Abha Narain Lambah Associates, 2017

3. Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra, Bombay Deco. Eminence Designs Pvt Ltd., Mumbai, 2008, p. 93.

4. Mary N. Woods, 2006. The Other and the Modernism: Art Deco Picture Palaces of Bombay in Everyday Modernisms and Urban Environment. Proceedings, 2006, p. 362.

5. UNESCO Nomination, op. cit., 2017.