Mumbai's original transformers: 5 superheroes you should know

1. Dr. Acacio Gabriel Viegas

 It’s Independence Day weekend and I leave Metro cinema after a late-night show. 

Crossing the road, I am stopped by the sight of the good Dr. Acacio Gabriel Viegas. I look up to his statue, his right hand raised in perpetual appeal.

But tonight, it seems he wants to chat: am I dreaming?

“Bombay’s problems haven’t changed that much,” he says.

“In my time the new cotton mills had brought in an immigrant population who lived in chawls and shanties where the hygiene was poor. An epidemic swept the city, people were dying rapidly, the population actually fell drastically and people fled the city.”

Dr. Viegas diagnosed the bubonic plague here in 1896.

Today we have malaria, but the plague was deadlier. Not only did Viegas diagnose the disease, he had 18,000 people inoculated, initiated the cleaning up of the slums and the extermination of rats.

I salaam him, the doctor who reminds us that our city is still teeming with slums and epidemics waiting to happen. 

“Come on,” Viegas says. “Let’s go to my college.” So off we head to Grant Medical College.

2. Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy

Portly Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy is sitting in the lobby of the eponymous hospital he built, to which Grant Medical College is attached.

Candles burn and floral offerings have been scattered around his larger-than-life statue by grateful and poor patients in whose service Sir Jamsetjee lived.

Adjusting the folds of his long gown, Sir J. J. does not recognize Dr. Viegas or me from my days as a medical student here, or the photograph I stood for, around these very folds, on the day we graduated.

We introduce ourselves.

Turns out Sir J.J. grew up as an orphan with nothing.

“But I was young and adventurous,” he chuckles. “Bombay offered untold hope. It was just beginning to become a city in the early 1800s. In China, trading in opium and cotton, I made an immense fortune but this city gave me the opportunity to give back.”

Sir Jamshetjee Jeejeebhoy founded a staggering 126 charities which include Mumbai hospitals, schools and an art college that's still thriving today.

I ask him if, like Bahram in Amitav Ghosh’s new novel “River of Smoke”, he misses eating “samsa” in Xinjiang or was he quite happy to come home to wife Avabai’s dhansak?

“Avabai prayed at Mount Mary Church and all those embroidered silk shoes I brought back from China were getting dirty crossing the breach from Mahim to Bandra. You have to thank Avabai for having the Mahim causeway built.”

The road leading to Mahim causeway is still named after Avabai, even as our new Bandra Worli Sealink is named after a politician (Rajiv Gandhi) with no city connections.

3. Mahadev Govind Ranade

Dr. Viegas heads back to Metro while I decide to call on a true Mumbai Maratha. Mahadev Govind Ranade was a forward-thinking Brahmin, who I could complain to about the city’s disappearing liberalism.

“I fought against child marriages and for widow’s rights way back in the 1860s." says Ranade. "And I strongly advocated education for women. Sometimes my father would not speak to me because our views differed."

Co-founder of the Pratharna Samaj (a movement guided by the Vedas), Ranade was also a founding member of the Indian National Congress.

“I was lucky to receive a liberal education in Bombay,” he says to me.

If only he could get up and take a stand, 150 years later to show our current “maratha” government that there is better use of Rs 350 crores than to build a statue out in the sea.

4. Dadabhai Naoroji

As I walk down the road past the maidans, at Flora Fountain Dadabhai Naoroji, book held open in his hand, asks me in Parsi Gujarati, “Are you going to Kala Ghoda? That’s where I used to teach.” And he points to Elphinstone College.

The college has been restored well, I inform Mumbai’s preeminent professor of mathematics and natural philosophy who returned from England after becoming the first Indian British Member of Parliament in 1892.

Why did he return?

“Because I was needed here -- we had lots of work to do,” Dadabhai says.

Dadabhai Naoroji became president of the Indian National Congress in 1896, and lived to the ripe old age of 92.

“Despite being married at the age of eleven,” he laughs.

Still walking, it starts to rain; there’s been no let-up in the monsoon this year. So I run up the Town Hall steps.

5. Sir Henry Bartle Frere

Someone taps my shoulder and leads me inside.

It’s Sir Henry Bartle Frere, Governor of Bombay between 1862 and 1867. The British administrator who drew up much of the city’s current layout.

Sir Henry ordered the demolition of the Fort area walls to allow for the much-needed expansion of our prosperous city.

“I saw the need for city institutions: colleges, museums, larger buildings … if Bombay had to match its potential as the commercial capital of India,” he says.

“The population had increased and we needed a new drainage system.”

Magnificent buildings came up thanks to Sir Henry: Elphinstone College, Sir J. J. School of Art, the plots along the Esplanade and the Flora Fountain, where the original Church Gate of the Fort once stood.

“What do you think of the ad hoc rapid development of the city currently and the apparent lack of urban planning?” I ask him.

“As a citizen, you should ask them for plans for roads and drainage first,” the governor suggests, sagely.

The improbability of adequate infrastructure in a city that’s been consumed by its own wealth, compounded by the lack of administrators like him, is not lost on us.

In their heyday as young Bombayites, these Mumbaikars shaped a city they would not recognize today even as the city still reaps their munificence.

They gave to this city in a spirit of independent philanthropy. And now they're covered in pigeon poop.

As dawn breaks I head home past the new Hermès showroom at Horniman Circle.