Chapter 2 examines attempts to develop a new model observatory in which the physical sciences could be investigated. Although often positioned as the poor cousin to the pursuit of terrestrial magnetism, the study of meteorology was a critical component of activities at physical observatories at home and overseas and was required to conform to the same exacting requirements. The chapter focuses on Britain’s magnetic crusade and the establishment of a series of so-called colonial observatories across the British Empire. It then investigates the history of one physical observatory – the Colaba Observatory in Bombay, India. The chapter considers Colaba’s place within a set of imperial and climatic geographies that extended across the Indian subcontinent.

The chapter provides an insight into the complex sexual milieu of Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the Rajabai Tower case as a key narrative, numerous facets of the city, such as cosmopolitanism, group identities, the link between forensics and sexual assault, racial profiling, and police corruption, are discussed. Also examined are the spatial controversies surrounding Bombay’s red-light neighbourhoods and links between spatiality and the identity of prostitutes. Pop culture’s role in shaping a sexual ethos, in Parsi theatre and later Bombay cinema, and particularly the unique position of performative androgyny, is reviewed. Further, the impact of contagious disease acts and the fluid definition of prostitution is studied. Finally, the role of eugenics is surveyed, and the extremely divisive and convoluted politics of the eugenics movement is analyzed.

In the 1820s–30s, the question of “native education” generated sprawling debates involving all three Company presidencies. At issue now was not whether the Company could or should secure extensive territory but instead whether, having done so, it could or should govern it. Throughout the period, officials debated the balance to be struck in education policy between conciliation and mass education. This question was briefly conflated with issues of language, leading to the so-called Anglicist-Orientalist controversy. For a fleeting moment in the 1830s, English education appeared to have prevailed. The more lasting impact of the controversy, however, was the end of conciliation and the triumph of mass education in Company ideology.

Rushdie’s work is intertwined with a range of urban landscapes and needs to be contextualized in relation to urban planning, infrastructures, and the complex way his characters navigate these. Bombay/Mumbai remains a central focal point for his writing, from Midnight’s Children to The Ground Beneath Her Feet. The Satanic Verses is closely wedded to an exploration of 1980s London, but increasingly his focus is on New York, which provides the setting for Fury, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House. The chapter explores the wider context of the cityscapes with which Rushdie engages and how the urban environment shapes and structures his narratives, and reveals the darker undersides of crime and corruption with which these cities have become associated. It suggests that Rushdie’s formal techniques and linguistic innovativeness cannot be adequately understood without reference to the cities that have always played such an important role in his writing. Almost all of his main concerns as a writer emerge naturally, and can be examined most productively, in the space of the metropolis.

In the mid-nineteenth century, touring minstrel and Italian operatic troupes reached Bombay’s shores, exposing its residents to the delights of European and American popular tunes and burlesque Italian opera. Although reformists initially struggled to convince locals to patronise this strange warbling, opera gradually became a marker of high culture in the subcontinent. This transition was the result of the adoption of the term ‘opera’ by Parsi theatre, India’s most widespread, commercial, ‘modern’ dramatic form. The chapter traces Parsi theatre's role in the creation of a modern South Asian aural culture during the second half of the nineteenth century through the indigenisation of Italian opera. It delineates how the locus for Hindustani music shifted, from the courts of Awadh to the proscenium theatres of Asia, and how an Indian brand of opera that combined European melodies with Hindustani music became a staple not only of the theatre but also of the cinematic medium that followed.

This chapter examines the 1930s urban fiction of Mulk Raj Anand, who adopts a self-avowedly Joycean emphasis on local specificity and engages critically with the Indian cities imagined by contemporaries including Rudyard Kipling, Aldous Huxley and E. M. Forster. If the city in Forster’s A Passage to India affirms a sense of the text’s spatial and narrative limits, Anand’s detailed representation of Bombay in his novel Coolie (1936) – which follows the short life of a worker who migrates to the port city – enacts a shift away from this emphasis on unknowable cultural divides, presenting difference as integral to the organisation of the metrocolonial economy. Showing how this subverts the narrative of ‘imperial maturity’ central to the city’s colonial identity, the chapter aligns Anand’s writing with other modernist fictions from metrocolonial zones.

Although it is well known that the colonial state embarked upon creating a “rule of property” in India from the eighteenth century onward, the manner in which this project unfolded in early East India Company settlements such as Bombay was different from the territories that only later came under British control. In the latter, a confident and assertive colonial state executed its agenda; in the former, a tentative Company was concerned initially with asserting its sovereignty by asserting that all the land in Bombay belonged to it. In cities like Bombay, thus, a deep and enduring tension lay at the heart of the rule of property: between a state that endorsed a liberal vision sanctifying private property, on the one hand, and a state that jealously guarded its proprietary rights over lands, on the other hand. This tension was deployed by state and nonstate actors to pursue their own ends.

In India, the Irish came late and as conquerors. Irish Catholics – mostly soldiers – were never a significant part of the Catholic population, which traced its origins to successive waves of evangelization dating back to the seventh century. In colonial India, the Irish clashed not only with the long-dominant Portuguese church but also with long-established French, Italian, and other missionary groups.

Bandmann’s engagement with the many localities on his circuit required a degree of political activity at a level which is termed here micropolitical. This term refers to personal connections and networks and how they function in a political context. For Bandmann, who attempted to build or manage theatres on his circuit, this meant forging political and business partnerships that demonstrate a much deeper engagement with locality than is normal for itinerant theatre. The micropolitics of locality are discussed in relation to the most important cities on his circuit, which were mostly entrepôts, port cities designed to facilitate colonial trade. The chapter provides detailed discussion of Bandmann’s activities in Malta, Cairo, Bombay, Calcutta, Shanghai, Hong Kong and the Dutch East Indies, as well as in connection with the Victoria Theatre in Singapore and Parsi theatre.