The forgotten fire that reshaped Bombay: Abdul Latif Shushtari’s chronicle of 1803

Shushtari’s early life and times

Shushtari was a learned Iranian from Shushtar (in Khuzestan in modern-day Iran). He was born into a scholarly family and went on to train in literature, history, astronomy, and popular sciences of the time. Back in Iran, he worked as a trader in Bushehr. He left Basra in July 1788 and landed in Masulipatnam, in India, in August that year. Shushtari spent a good deal of his first decade in India as a diplomat, the Nizam’s ambassador to the British governor general in Calcutta, as a successor to his influential cousin, Mir Alam. Among other places, Shushtari also briefly stayed in Calcutta. In early 1801, he finished a travelogue, later published in Persian as Tuhfat ul Alam (Gift to Mir Alam). During Shushtari’s time in India, thirteen of his relatives were also in India, including Alam, with all of them being part of an elite Anglo-Indo-Persian commercial network. Unsurprisingly, Shushtari became a trustworthy political-commercial intermediary between Iranian and Arab merchants, on the one hand, and the ambassador of the Qajar dynasty (in Iran) and the British East India Company, on the other.

Bombay in the early 1800s was a busy, multi-ethnic harbour centred on the Fort, with gardens and farmhouses outside it. The town was already on a northward expansion. In the early nineteenth century, Parsis were economically dominant, being ship-owners, money-changers, cotton entrepreneurs, and traders. As such, they were closely tied to the East India Company’s commercial structures, alongside Persians and Arabs, who were also active in the cross-cultural mercantile circuit. Inter alia, Shushtari’s diary recorded Indian trade links, especially with China, its local industries (including cotton compression), coinage, financial challenges, the East India Company’s monopolies (including opium, salt, and tobacco) and the company’s introduction of paper money. More significantly, Shushtari was to become one of the rare chroniclers of the Great Fire of Bombay and of British urban planning after the fire, whereby he exhibited his close ideological affinities with the British Governor of Bombay, Jonathan Duncan.

Shushtari’s Bombay

Shushtari arrived in Bombay in December 1801 and remained there until November 1804. In 1801, an agreement between the Qajar government (which took control of Iran in 1796) and the British East India Company, Shushtari’s close aide, Haji Khalil Khan Ghazvini, was appointed as the Qajar court’s first ambassador in India. It was a period of regional instability for Bombay and its neighbourhood, marked by the continuance of Anglo-Maratha conflicts and irregular movements of goods from Pune. Meanwhile, Bombay continued to witness rapid commercial growth as an entrepôt for the Company. In some ways, Bombay, in 1803, was to India what London, in 1666, the year of the Great Fire, was to Britain — a multicultural trading port with numerous immigrant and floating populations. In the light of that analogy, Abdul Latif Shushtari would be to Bombay what Samuel Pepys was to London — in the respective years of the fires that struck the two cities — a diarist par excellence who relied on unofficial sources and eyewitness testimonies to bring alive the scenes of the fire while being in the thick of it.

Bombay Back Bay from Malabar Hill (Wikimedia Commons)

Shushtari’s Waqaye-i Hind was the work of an informed resident with privileged access to Persian-speaking merchants and Company officials. His perspective blended eyewitness reportage with interviews (with Agha Muhammad, Mulla Firouz, Kavous) and official reports. Occasionally, he even relayed local rumours alongside official data. Therefore, his diary is best read as a critical contemporary source that must be compared with Marathi, Company and later accounts, even though it remains uniquely valuable for how it captured immediate human experience, social dislocation, commercial breakdown, and the politics of post-fire reconstruction.

A rare account of the fire

Shushtari recorded that the fire began on February 17, 1803, reportedly starting at 3 pm. Upon being informed by a messenger, through a letter, he first witnessed the conflagration, in the form of a terrifying scene constituted by smoke and successive explosions of gunpowder in the Company’s armoury, from a hill near his garden house outside the principal town, about 6 kilometres from the Fort.

According to Shushtari, the fire’s origin was in the kitchen of a fellow-Parsi merchant, Ardeshir Majusi, as told to him by the Iranian merchant, Agha Muhammad. Apparently, the Parsi reverence for fire rituals prevented Majusi and others from extinguishing it — at least, as far as Shushtari’s report suggests. This, apparently, aggravated the fire. However, here — as in a few other places — Shushtari’s account differs from other contemporary reports. Shushtari termed the fire a ‘terrible catastrophe’ that caused heavy destruction. It amounted to 12 million rupees of losses for the Company, besides damaging 1,400 houses, killing 22 Indians, 3 British, and 4 Parsis, and causing widespread homelessness.

On February 18, as commercial ships and caravans continued to arrive, Duncan ordered the construction of a temporary landing outside the white town. Relief and rescue operations, and inquiry commissions, were to continue until the first week of March. On May 1, 1803, another fire, though comparatively small, broke out on the island, prompting stricter inquiries and reconstruction plans.

The original fire consumed an enormous part of the island. Several properties were ruined, while merchant stocks and goods recently moved to Bombay from Pune and consignments bound for China also suffered tragically. Other secondary effects of the fire included soaring prices and scarcity of Bengali cloth, glass, rock candy, cereals, sugar, fragile Chinese goods, and coins — particularly the last. Gold and silver coins nearly disappeared from circulation, as the Company began issuing paper money immediately after the fire.

Other adversities that struck Bombay were large rent rises, rise of thefts during the city’s recovery, and mass departures (as many as 25,000 people leaving for Surat by one count) that were compounded by the Company’s strict reconstruction policy that mandated evictions near the Fort. Countless families were forced into tents and temporary shelters. Given the island’s dense extended-family households, a single burnt house often rendered many households destitute. And, for those who stayed back, looting and opportunistic appropriation of intact properties added to survivors’ losses.

The disaster became a catalyst for decisive Company interventions that came in the form of demolitions of ruined dwellings near the Fort, extending the buffer around the Fort (from c. 600 to 800 yards), and its insistence on one-storey, detached English-style houses with wide streets and cisterns. Initially, only military and Company officials were to be permitted to occupy the Fort area. These rules precipitated protracted disputes over land, eviction threats, and resistance by previous Fort inhabitants. As Governor Jonathan Duncan set up inquiry panels, villagers and officials debated the causes of the fire. Differing from Shushtari’s theory of Parsi religious scruples, Duncan’s circle suspected deliberate incendiarism by a motivated group of unidentified people.

The antecedents of modern Mumbai

The post-fire reconstruction programme, as documented by Shushtari, and also corroborated by East India Company records, ran on lines of regulatory, spatial and enforcement measures that were targeted at reducing future risks of conflagrations and securing the Fort as a strategic nucleus of the Company’s operations in Bombay. The reconstruction began with the clearance and demolition of burnt and adjoining structures near the Fort and mandatory rebuilding guidelines that favoured single-storey homesteads instead of densely packed, timber-and-mud constructions. The policy specified wider passages and streets to permit mounted and foot movement, eviction notices, and legal measures to deter looting and unauthorised rebuilding. Duncan’s regime framed these interventions in terms of public safety and military hygiene. The reconstruction combined hazard-mitigation aims with the reordering of Bombay’s urban social geography. What Shushtari did not necessarily record, however, was that these measures were met with contested land claims, displacement of poorer households, and long disputes over property rights and compensation.

Bombay in 1843

Unlike British files, which prioritised formal appraisals of loss, supported by military and security concerns, and legal procedures, Shushtari’s diary highlighted commercial and social particulars. Compared with Marathi popular narratives that were characterised by moralistic explanations like divine vengeance, oral traditions, and in some cases — as in an account by Govind Narayan — suffered from dating errors, Shushtari supplied granular economic data and details of trans-regional linkages, especially with the Iranian Gulf. His positionality as an Iranian merchant and host to a Qajar envoy enabled even his digressions and inaccurate reports to be seen as empirical observations reflecting administrative practice and the fire’s social ramifications.

Shushtari’s representations of British actors, including Duncan, were marked by a pragmatic and frequently laudatory tone, which underplayed the local resistance to the reconstruction of Bombay, besides other expressions of popular resistance to the Company’s policies. For Shushtari, the British were largely instrumental agents of reconstruction and economic normalisation, steering India to its natural destiny by asserting the legitimacy of British rule.

Unreliable, yet indispensable

Despite the obvious possibility of Shushtari’s diary being met with an anachronistic anticolonial opposition, it remains of contemporary value today. As a non-British primary account, it expands archival pluralism by adding merchant-diplomatic perspectives to British colonial and regional Indian narratives. Besides, its micro-economic detail — on commodity flows, insurance claims, coinage and arbitrage, and market interruptions — offers empirical material for studies of early modern market resilience. Most importantly, perhaps, its details of built-environment failure furnish us with historical antecedents for debates on urban resilience and how authorities deploy emergency powers to restructure urban space.

Waqaye-i Hind, in this regard, is perhaps less of informative value and more of antiquarian value; though its records are ultimately less-than-reliable, its production was fostered by longue durée Indian Ocean trade circuits; its context is more important than its contents. Above all, the diary makes it transparent how the fire did not merely consume lives, homes, timber, and goods. In their place, the Company burned a new civic order into Bombay’s centre, as Shushtari celebrated every Anglicizing turn of the city.

References

Tajaldini, J. (2021). Bombay in the Early Nineteenth Century: From the (Almost) Lost Diaries of Abdul Latif Shushtari. South Asia Research, 41(1), 53-69.