Panoramic view of Bombay, c.1880s, attributed to Colin Murray for Bourne and Shepherd
Panoramic view of Bombay, c.1880s, attributed to Colin Murray for Bourne and Shepherd
But in a handful of decisive fields — the wholesale cloth trade, cotton-mill promotion, coastal and international shipping, and above all civic philanthropy — Bhatia merchants were not just participants but pioneers.
The Bhatias of Bombay (Mumbai)
Introduction
Bombay grew from a scatter of malarial fishing islands into the commercial capital of British India, and later of independent India, largely because of the merchant communities who settled there, financed its trade, and built its institutions. Among the most important of these was a community of merchants called the Bhatias, whose ancestors traced their roots to the Bhatti Rajputs of Jaisalmer and who, moving through Sindh into Kutch and Kathiawar, began arriving in Bombay in growing numbers from the early eighteenth century onward. This page tells that story: how the Bhatias came to Bombay under East India Company rule; how they shaped the city's cotton, textile, banking, and shipping trades; the hospitals, schools, and colleges they built; their uneven relationship with the independence movement; and their changed but continuing presence in the city today.
The Bhatias were never Bombay's largest merchant community, and they have drawn less attention from historians than the Parsis, whose records are richer, or the Marwaris, whose trading networks eventually spread across the whole subcontinent. But in a handful of decisive fields — the wholesale cloth trade, cotton-mill promotion, coastal and international shipping, and above all civic philanthropy — Bhatia merchants were not just participants but pioneers. Names that still mark buildings and institutions across South Mumbai today, such as Gokuldas Tejpal, Mulji Jetha, Khatau Makanji, Thackersey, and Morarjee, belonged overwhelmingly to Bhatia merchant families, and the decisions those families made still shape the city that visitors walk through today.
Bombay grew from a scatter of malarial fishing islands into the commercial capital of British India, and later of independent India, largely because of the merchant communities who settled there, financed its trade, and built its institutions. Among the most important of these was a community of merchants called the Bhatias, whose ancestors traced their roots to the Bhatti Rajputs of Jaisalmer and who, moving through Sindh into Kutch and Kathiawar, began arriving in Bombay in growing numbers from the early eighteenth century onward. This page tells that story: how the Bhatias came to Bombay under East India Company rule; how they shaped the city's cotton, textile, banking, and shipping trades; the hospitals, schools, and colleges they built; their uneven relationship with the independence movement; and their changed but continuing presence in the city today.
The Bhatias were never Bombay's largest merchant community, and they have drawn less attention from historians than the Parsis, whose records are richer, or the Marwaris, whose trading networks eventually spread across the whole subcontinent. But in a handful of decisive fields — the wholesale cloth trade, cotton-mill promotion, coastal and international shipping, and above all civic philanthropy — Bhatia merchants were not just participants but pioneers. Names that still mark buildings and institutions across South Mumbai today, such as Gokuldas Tejpal, Mulji Jetha, Khatau Makanji, Thackersey, and Morarjee, belonged overwhelmingly to Bhatia merchant families, and the decisions those families made still shape the city that visitors walk through today.
Bombay Before the Bhatias
The seven islands of Bombay passed to the English Crown in 1661 as part of the marriage dowry of Catherine of Braganza, and were leased to the East India Company in 1668 for an annual rent of ten pounds.10 At the time the islands mattered little commercially: Surat, forty miles north, remained the leading port and commercial centre of western India, home to long-established European trading posts and India's own oldest merchant families. Bombay's one real advantage was its harbour, the finest natural deep-water anchorage on the west coast, together with the political stability Company rule could offer merchants fleeing an increasingly turbulent hinterland.
The Company knew a harbour alone would not build a city; it needed merchants, and merchants needed reasons to come. Successive governors offered freedom of worship, security of property, and a degree of self-governance to the trading communities of Gujarat, Sindh, and the Konkan — Hindus, Jains, Parsis, Bohras, Khojas, and Memons alike. As Surat declined through the eighteenth century under Maratha pressure and weakening Mughal authority, merchant families moved south to Bombay to join a trade the Company had built around raw cotton exports to China.13 It was into this Company town, actively courting Indian capital, that Bhatia families from Kutch, Kathiawar, and Sindh began arriving in growing numbers over the eighteenth century.
The seven islands of Bombay passed to the English Crown in 1661 as part of the marriage dowry of Catherine of Braganza, and were leased to the East India Company in 1668 for an annual rent of ten pounds.10 At the time the islands mattered little commercially: Surat, forty miles north, remained the leading port and commercial centre of western India, home to long-established European trading posts and India's own oldest merchant families. Bombay's one real advantage was its harbour, the finest natural deep-water anchorage on the west coast, together with the political stability Company rule could offer merchants fleeing an increasingly turbulent hinterland.
The Company knew a harbour alone would not build a city; it needed merchants, and merchants needed reasons to come. Successive governors offered freedom of worship, security of property, and a degree of self-governance to the trading communities of Gujarat, Sindh, and the Konkan — Hindus, Jains, Parsis, Bohras, Khojas, and Memons alike. As Surat declined through the eighteenth century under Maratha pressure and weakening Mughal authority, merchant families moved south to Bombay to join a trade the Company had built around raw cotton exports to China.13 It was into this Company town, actively courting Indian capital, that Bhatia families from Kutch, Kathiawar, and Sindh began arriving in growing numbers over the eighteenth century.
Arriving in Bombay: Traders, Money-Changers, and Brokers
Popular and community accounts usually date Bhatia settlement in Bombay to the early or mid-eighteenth century, and one Gujarati-language source, Mulchand Varma's Marine Drive ni Parparthi, names a specific first arrival: the merchant Jivraj Balu, who is said to have settled in Bombay in 1720, with larger numbers of Bhatia families following over the following decades. What is well attested is the broader pattern: Bhatias came as part of a wider wave of Gujarati, Kutchi, and Sindhi traders — alongside Jains, Marwaris, Bohras, Khojas, and Memons, and Parsis — who together gave Bombay's "native town" its commercial character by the end of the eighteenth century.
The number of Bhatias in Bombay is given as 266 in 1780, rising to roughly 6,200 by 1830 and 9,466 by 1872; an 1881 locality-by-locality count puts the total at 9,417, heavily concentrated in the Mandvi and Market wards near the cloth bazaars (2,697 and 2,497 respectively) and in Dhobitalao and the northern Fort area, with only a handful of Bhatias yet living in what would later become the northern suburbs. The population dipped to 9,051 by 1891 and 7,780 by 1911 — a period that coincides with plague epidemics and emigration to East Africa and the Gulf discussed elsewhere on this website — before rising again to 14,714 by 1929 and 18,944 by 1940, as families began moving in numbers to Santacruz, Andheri, Goregaon, and Malad. Varma's figures are themselves drawn from the decennial Census of India volumes and from a Bhatia Volunteer Corps community census, both cited in his text, which makes this rare among community-history sources in giving a transparent paper trail for its numbers.
Bhatia merchants worked their way into Bombay's economy at every level. Many started as hawkers and petty traders, as the family story of the philanthropist Gokuldas Tejpal shows: his father and uncle are recorded as having begun as hawkers in Bombay, building the fortune their descendant would later spend on the city's hospitals and schools. Others worked as shroffs (money-changers and informal bankers) or dalals (brokers linking European trading houses to the Indian interior) — roles suited to a community whose existing credit networks across Kutch, Sindh, and the Gulf gave it a head start. By the early nineteenth century, Bhatia firms were well established in Bombay's bazaars, trading chiefly in raw cotton, piece-goods, and — like the wider Gujarati merchant world — the Malwa opium that passed through Bombay's counting-houses on its way to China.
The Bhatias' Indian Ocean connections are one of the community's most distinctive features, and they link directly to its well-documented history in Zanzibar, Muscat, and the East African coast. The merchant Shivji Topan (1764–1836) and his son Jairam Shivji became, one after the other, close advisers to the Omani Sultan Seyyid Said. Jairam Shivji — called by one account "the wealthiest Bhatia merchant of his time" — was made customs farmer of Zanzibar in 1819 and of the Mrima Coast in 1837, and is credited with advising the Sultan to move his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar in the 1830s. This Gulf and East African network gave Bombay's Bhatia merchant houses an edge that no colonial institution could easily copy: goods and credit could move between Bombay, Muscat, and Zanzibar along family channels built on trust rather than paperwork. The fuller story of this Zanzibar and Gulf side of Bhatia history is told elsewhere on this website.
Bhatia firms in Bombay were typically run as joint-family businesses, known by the firm's pedhi, or counting-house name. The head of the household, his sons and nephews, and a staff of clerks (munims) and agents (gumastas) — often drawn from within the community or from long-serving client families — ran the business together. This let a single Bombay firm keep resident partners in Kutch, Karachi, Muscat, and, from the early nineteenth century, Zanzibar, coordinating trade across thousands of miles through family letters and periodic settling of accounts, long before limited liability, registered partnerships, or Western marine insurance became available to Indian merchants. It was this ready-made organisation, more than any single new technology, that let Bhatia firms move so easily from long-distance trading into industrial mill promotion once the opportunity arose in the 1850s and 1860s: a firm that could finance a shipment of cotton to China could just as easily finance a spinning frame imported from Lancashire.
Popular and community accounts usually date Bhatia settlement in Bombay to the early or mid-eighteenth century, and one Gujarati-language source, Mulchand Varma's Marine Drive ni Parparthi, names a specific first arrival: the merchant Jivraj Balu, who is said to have settled in Bombay in 1720, with larger numbers of Bhatia families following over the following decades. What is well attested is the broader pattern: Bhatias came as part of a wider wave of Gujarati, Kutchi, and Sindhi traders — alongside Jains, Marwaris, Bohras, Khojas, and Memons, and Parsis — who together gave Bombay's "native town" its commercial character by the end of the eighteenth century.
The number of Bhatias in Bombay is given as 266 in 1780, rising to roughly 6,200 by 1830 and 9,466 by 1872; an 1881 locality-by-locality count puts the total at 9,417, heavily concentrated in the Mandvi and Market wards near the cloth bazaars (2,697 and 2,497 respectively) and in Dhobitalao and the northern Fort area, with only a handful of Bhatias yet living in what would later become the northern suburbs. The population dipped to 9,051 by 1891 and 7,780 by 1911 — a period that coincides with plague epidemics and emigration to East Africa and the Gulf discussed elsewhere on this website — before rising again to 14,714 by 1929 and 18,944 by 1940, as families began moving in numbers to Santacruz, Andheri, Goregaon, and Malad. Varma's figures are themselves drawn from the decennial Census of India volumes and from a Bhatia Volunteer Corps community census, both cited in his text, which makes this rare among community-history sources in giving a transparent paper trail for its numbers.
Bhatia merchants worked their way into Bombay's economy at every level. Many started as hawkers and petty traders, as the family story of the philanthropist Gokuldas Tejpal shows: his father and uncle are recorded as having begun as hawkers in Bombay, building the fortune their descendant would later spend on the city's hospitals and schools. Others worked as shroffs (money-changers and informal bankers) or dalals (brokers linking European trading houses to the Indian interior) — roles suited to a community whose existing credit networks across Kutch, Sindh, and the Gulf gave it a head start. By the early nineteenth century, Bhatia firms were well established in Bombay's bazaars, trading chiefly in raw cotton, piece-goods, and — like the wider Gujarati merchant world — the Malwa opium that passed through Bombay's counting-houses on its way to China.
The Bhatias' Indian Ocean connections are one of the community's most distinctive features, and they link directly to its well-documented history in Zanzibar, Muscat, and the East African coast. The merchant Shivji Topan (1764–1836) and his son Jairam Shivji became, one after the other, close advisers to the Omani Sultan Seyyid Said. Jairam Shivji — called by one account "the wealthiest Bhatia merchant of his time" — was made customs farmer of Zanzibar in 1819 and of the Mrima Coast in 1837, and is credited with advising the Sultan to move his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar in the 1830s. This Gulf and East African network gave Bombay's Bhatia merchant houses an edge that no colonial institution could easily copy: goods and credit could move between Bombay, Muscat, and Zanzibar along family channels built on trust rather than paperwork. The fuller story of this Zanzibar and Gulf side of Bhatia history is told elsewhere on this website.
Bhatia firms in Bombay were typically run as joint-family businesses, known by the firm's pedhi, or counting-house name. The head of the household, his sons and nephews, and a staff of clerks (munims) and agents (gumastas) — often drawn from within the community or from long-serving client families — ran the business together. This let a single Bombay firm keep resident partners in Kutch, Karachi, Muscat, and, from the early nineteenth century, Zanzibar, coordinating trade across thousands of miles through family letters and periodic settling of accounts, long before limited liability, registered partnerships, or Western marine insurance became available to Indian merchants. It was this ready-made organisation, more than any single new technology, that let Bhatia firms move so easily from long-distance trading into industrial mill promotion once the opportunity arose in the 1850s and 1860s: a firm that could finance a shipment of cotton to China could just as easily finance a spinning frame imported from Lancashire.
Cotton, War, and Fortune: The Share Mania of 1861–1865
No single event concentrated wealth in the hands of Bombay's merchants — Bhatias among them — more than the American Civil War. Before 1861, roughly three-quarters of the raw cotton reaching British mills came from the American South. The Union blockade of Confederate ports cut that supply off almost overnight, and British manufacturers turned to India instead. The effect on Bombay was immediate: cotton acreage in the Bombay Presidency roughly doubled between 1861 and 1865, the value of cotton exports to Britain rose from about sixteen crore rupees to forty crore, and by 1862 some ninety per cent of Britain's raw cotton imports were coming from India. Contemporaries called the speculative frenzy that followed the "Share Mania": within a few years, dozens of new joint-stock companies — cotton-pressing firms, land-reclamation ventures, banks, insurers, shipping lines — were formed and traded at the corner of Meadows Street and Rampart Row, later Dalal Street.
One history of Bombay's cotton mills states that "many local merchants became overnight rich because of this trade including Premchand Roychand and other members of the Bhatia Community." Roychand — the "Cotton King" and "Bullion King" of 1860s Bombay, founder of the body that became the Bombay Stock Exchange, and builder of the Rajabai Clock Tower — was a member of the Jain community, not the Bhatia community. This article treats Roychand as an important contemporary of Bombay's Bhatia merchants, not as one of them, while noting that some looser popular sources group him with the Bhatias. What is not in doubt is that the cotton boom, and the speculative institutions it created, drew heavily on Bhatia capital and generated the surplus that Bhatia firms would soon direct into mills and philanthropy.
The crash that followed the war's end in May 1865 was as sudden as the boom. Cotton prices collapsed as American supply returned, and share prices fell just as fast — Back Bay Reclamation shares reportedly dropped from fifty thousand rupees to under two thousand, and Bank of Bombay shares from 2,850 rupees to 87. It is generally reckoned India's first stock-market crash. As the Bombay writer D. E. Wacha put it at the time, some fifty million pounds of paper wealth "disappear[ed] like the baseless fabric of a vision" — yet the docks, mills, and reclaimed land the boom had financed remained, and became the physical basis for Bombay's growth in the decades that followed.
Two points about how this trade actually worked are worth adding for readers unfamiliar with nineteenth-century commodity markets. First, "cotton" was not one product: long-staple varieties from Dharwar and Broach fetched premium prices as the closest substitute for American cotton, while shorter-staple Deccan and Khandesh cotton, though far more plentiful, sold for less — and which merchant houses profited most depended on which growing region their networks reached. Second, much of the profit did not come from exporting cotton directly, but from the merchant's older role as financier: advancing credit against future cotton deliveries to cultivators and village dealers across the Deccan and Gujarat. That practice, as the agrarian unrest recorded in the 1875 Deccan Riots shows, carried real costs for indebted farmers even as it produced extraordinary returns for the Bombay firms extending the credit.
No single event concentrated wealth in the hands of Bombay's merchants — Bhatias among them — more than the American Civil War. Before 1861, roughly three-quarters of the raw cotton reaching British mills came from the American South. The Union blockade of Confederate ports cut that supply off almost overnight, and British manufacturers turned to India instead. The effect on Bombay was immediate: cotton acreage in the Bombay Presidency roughly doubled between 1861 and 1865, the value of cotton exports to Britain rose from about sixteen crore rupees to forty crore, and by 1862 some ninety per cent of Britain's raw cotton imports were coming from India. Contemporaries called the speculative frenzy that followed the "Share Mania": within a few years, dozens of new joint-stock companies — cotton-pressing firms, land-reclamation ventures, banks, insurers, shipping lines — were formed and traded at the corner of Meadows Street and Rampart Row, later Dalal Street.
One history of Bombay's cotton mills states that "many local merchants became overnight rich because of this trade including Premchand Roychand and other members of the Bhatia Community." Roychand — the "Cotton King" and "Bullion King" of 1860s Bombay, founder of the body that became the Bombay Stock Exchange, and builder of the Rajabai Clock Tower — was a member of the Jain community, not the Bhatia community. This article treats Roychand as an important contemporary of Bombay's Bhatia merchants, not as one of them, while noting that some looser popular sources group him with the Bhatias. What is not in doubt is that the cotton boom, and the speculative institutions it created, drew heavily on Bhatia capital and generated the surplus that Bhatia firms would soon direct into mills and philanthropy.
The crash that followed the war's end in May 1865 was as sudden as the boom. Cotton prices collapsed as American supply returned, and share prices fell just as fast — Back Bay Reclamation shares reportedly dropped from fifty thousand rupees to under two thousand, and Bank of Bombay shares from 2,850 rupees to 87. It is generally reckoned India's first stock-market crash. As the Bombay writer D. E. Wacha put it at the time, some fifty million pounds of paper wealth "disappear[ed] like the baseless fabric of a vision" — yet the docks, mills, and reclaimed land the boom had financed remained, and became the physical basis for Bombay's growth in the decades that followed.
Two points about how this trade actually worked are worth adding for readers unfamiliar with nineteenth-century commodity markets. First, "cotton" was not one product: long-staple varieties from Dharwar and Broach fetched premium prices as the closest substitute for American cotton, while shorter-staple Deccan and Khandesh cotton, though far more plentiful, sold for less — and which merchant houses profited most depended on which growing region their networks reached. Second, much of the profit did not come from exporting cotton directly, but from the merchant's older role as financier: advancing credit against future cotton deliveries to cultivators and village dealers across the Deccan and Gujarat. That practice, as the agrarian unrest recorded in the 1875 Deccan Riots shows, carried real costs for indebted farmers even as it produced extraordinary returns for the Bombay firms extending the credit.
From Trade to Industry: The Cotton Mills
India's first cotton mill, the Bombay Spinning and Weaving Company, was built at Tardeo in July 1854 by the Parsi entrepreneur Cowasjee Nanabhoy Davar, and began production in February 1856. By 1865 Bombay had ten mills in total employing 6,600 workers. Twelve more mills followed by 1870, when Bombay had thirteen in total; the number passed a hundred by the mid-1890s and reached 136 by 1900. This was overwhelmingly an Indian-financed industrial revolution: of the fifty-three mills running in Bombay in 1925, only fourteen were British-owned, and of 386 directorships recorded that year, only forty-four were held by Englishmen. The mill-owning families of the Girangaon district included the Tatas, Petits, Wadias, Currimbhoys, Sassoons, and Greaves — and, prominently, the Thackerseys, the Khataus, and the Goculdases.
India's first cotton mill, the Bombay Spinning and Weaving Company, was built at Tardeo in July 1854 by the Parsi entrepreneur Cowasjee Nanabhoy Davar, and began production in February 1856. By 1865 Bombay had ten mills in total employing 6,600 workers. Twelve more mills followed by 1870, when Bombay had thirteen in total; the number passed a hundred by the mid-1890s and reached 136 by 1900. This was overwhelmingly an Indian-financed industrial revolution: of the fifty-three mills running in Bombay in 1925, only fourteen were British-owned, and of 386 directorships recorded that year, only forty-four were held by Englishmen. The mill-owning families of the Girangaon district included the Tatas, Petits, Wadias, Currimbhoys, Sassoons, and Greaves — and, prominently, the Thackerseys, the Khataus, and the Goculdases.