While Bombay Deco is associated with the last days of the British Empire, it also reflect a darker, earlier period — the ravages of the Bombay Plague of 1896, which halved the local population as residents died or fled their urban quarters for the openness of the countryside.

Until the start of the 1900s, Mumbai’s skyline was dominated by grand Victorian-era Gothic buildings along the city’s docklands, which fed and funded the British Crown and some Indian business houses through the trade of spices, cotton and opium. But most poorer residents lived in cramped chawls — tenement-style dormitories with shared toilets that became ideal breeding grounds when the bubonic plague arrived on ships, possibly from Hong Kong.

After the first wave of fear and desperation eased, the British authorities created the Bombay Improvement Trust, which embarked on a plan to improve streets, sewers, and housing to decongest the city and flush out the “bad air” in which disease was believed to flourish. The plan consisted of two broad elements: reclaim land from the sea to create suburbs in the north that would affordably house workers, and offer tracts of land closer to downtown where richer Indians could build themselves airy new apartments.1

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• 1. “When Marine Drive’s Art Deco was completed, prominent city architect Claude Batley wrote that the buildings looked like an ill fitting set of false teeth — because of the setbacks and gaps that allowed for the movement of sea air between them,” says Alisha Sadikot, founder of the Inheritage Project, which is dedicated to promoting engagement with Mumbai’s historic urban spaces. “Those are the visible remnants of the plague in neighborhoods built immediately after — where there is a sense of space and breeze even today.”