Localities, like families, can sometimes trace their existence back through many centuries and Bandra’s heritage villages belong to this category. All the old villages, like Malla, Sherly, Ranwar, Chuim, Boran and Pali among others, are mentioned by name in written records from the Portuguese period (which, in Bandra for all practical purposes ended in 1737). These can be found in a Birth/Baptism Register in St. Andrew’s Church dating from 1716, parts of which have been painstakingly translated and transcribed by Clarence Fernandes. At that time they were known as ‘pacarias’ (marathi pakhadi) and were hamlets belonging to the parent village or aldea of Bandora which was a landed estate granted by the Portuguese Crown to the Jesuits in 1658.

The pacarias, together with the ‘colarios’ or clusters of houses of the kolis along the sea shore, were the main habitations of the Bandra aldea, at least till the mid-nineteenth century. All the rest was paddy fields, coconut and mango plantations and vegetable gardens. There was also the ‘town’ of Bandra, as distinct from the ‘aldea’ or landed estate, which was the headquarters of a “Thanadar who had charge of sixty-five villages”. An English Doctor Fryer, who visited the area in 1675, describes Bandra as a town with tiled houses, clustered round the fortified enclosure of St Anna, situated on the shore front, which at that time was a broad estuary of the river Mithi, half a mile wide, with St. Michael’s visible (and within gunshot) directly opposite on the other side. During the Portuguese era, the town was relatively small. This was partly because the Jesuits, according to an Italian traveler called Manucci, used their influence, which was not inconsiderable, to discourage Portuguese traders and adventurers from settling there, because their licentious life style and shady business practices would be a bad example to the local Christians.

The heart of the town, around and close to the fortifed enclosure, was called the “Povoacao” and here the Portuguese, the mestizes of Indo-Portuguese origin, as well the higher caste Indian families lived. Most of these left the town during the Maratha war and the area, according to Braz Fernandes, an author who wrote a history of Bandra in 1927, was occupied by Hindu migrants during the Maratha era. (1739-1774).

As landlords of the aldea of Bandora, the Jesuits had rights over the paddy and plantation crops in the village. The ‘pacarias’ were the habitats of the cultivators and were of two kinds. There were the hamlets of the paddy cultivators and there were those of the husbandmen or vegetable growers. As one researcher, Larry Pereira explains, the difference lies in that the hamlets of paddy growers were always on high rocky ground, because the people grudged using any low-lying land which could grow crops for houses.. The houses of the vegetable growers on the other hand had to be in the midst of their fields to protect the produce from thieves, human and/or animal. Interestingly enough, all the hamlets which survived intact are of the paddy growers while those of the husbandmen gradually became “extinct’ as the fields were used for housing during the British era. These include Partavar which used to be in the region north of St Josesph’s Convent. Others pacarias like Dandacavar (also called Boran) were absorbed into the urban sprawl of Bandra Town in the British era.

The hamlets of the Portuguese era, for the most part, would have been rather primitive. An early traveler in Salsette Island (of which Bandra is a part) described the houses of the cultivators as being of ‘daub and wattle’ with thatched roofs. The tenants generally had few rights over most of the land they were cultivating and had to hand over as much as 50%, and sometimes more, of their paddy crop to the landlord.

This situation worsened considerably during the Maratha regime (1739-1774) when the new rulers imposed as many as a 100 additional taxes and cesses, mostly on the cultivators, in order to recoup the heavy expenditure incurred in the campaign to win Bassein and Salsette. The revenue situation remained very much the same in the early years of the British from 1774 till the end of the 18th century. Many farmers found the burden too heavy and much land was left fallow because the tax burden was much too heavy to make cultivation worthwhile.

However, there was a quick and radical change from the start of the 19th century when the British made concerted attempts to stimulate the agricultural economy in their newly won territories on the West Coast. The first attempts at a revenue settlement were made between 1796 -1798 and these were improved and broadened through the following four decades. Bandra farmers were able to take maximum advantage of the new opportunities, both because of the proximity of the Bombay markets, as also because of their reputation of being industrious workers, as attested by a British report in 1808.

This was also the period of the first building boom, when the more prosperous farmers began improving their homes. By this time too, some houses at least, were suitable for a European family ! A Protestant Missionary of the Church Missionary Society moved to Bandra, with his wife, in 1828 and lived in a house ‘on the hill’ belonging to one of the locals. Most probably this was in the Pali area since most of their work was educational with schools in Chuim and Danda.

Bandra at this time consisted primarily of the heritage villages though the town was growing in size and importance. Initially, the only road in Bandra (apart for Ghodbunder Road) was the Bazar Road which further on became Chapel Road and ended at the foot of Mt Mary steps to the east of the hill. As the town, or “Bandra Proper” as the British census termed it, expanded, it incorporated all the colarios along the shore front (which at the time was immediately south of Bazar and Chapel Road) as well as Waroda and Ranwar pacarias. With the building of the Causeway in 1845 and of Hill Road in 1854, the prosperity base would seem to have broadened considerably. With access from Bombay now relatively easy, a number of Europeans and rich Indians built and lived in villas on Mt Mary’s Hill which was the home of the elite. This in turn motivated some of the bigger local landowners, called fazendars, to follow suit and a number of large houses in Malla, Sherly, Ranwar etc date back to this time.

The next phase for building activity was after the railway line was completed in 1867, when many more Bandraites were able to commute daily to their jobs in Bombay city. In 1871 for example, the daily commuter traffic averaged about 330 persons, which jumped to almost 900 by 1880. (Not all the passengers were from Bandra. Some of these, living in Santa Cruz and Khar, - including a certain Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – would walk to Bandra to take the fast trains which stopped only there) The enterprising individuals who found work in Bombay now had a steady cash income (often supplementing an already substantial livelihood from the cultivation of rice and vegetables) which many of them invested in housing.

The coming of the Railway also changed Bandra radically by opening the door of housing opportunity for middle class families from Bombay. The process was accelerated after the plague epidemics at the turn of the 19th century when whole areas in Bombay were razed in a desperate attempt to stem the spread of the disease. This was the era of the Housing Schemes in Bandra. The first of these was at Khar-Danda and Pali Road was built in 1880 partly in order to connect to this area. This in turn opened up Pali Hill which was occupied almost exclusively by Europeans. Pali Road itself, was rapidly built up but mostly by Indians. But the boom also stimulated construction in the heritage villages and many buildings there date from this time. However, the scope for building here was limited by the layout of the villages, and the villagers utilized just about every yard of available space, giving the villages the winding lanes and kitchen gardens that even today characterize the extant villages. Gradually more and more of the rice fields and orchards and vegetable gardens were used to build houses, big and small and the face of Bandra changed irrevocably.

The major thrust of building was now on Housing Colonies, both private and government. The Town Planning Scheme in 1916, and the “Chapel Road” Scheme were government housing programmes, while the Salsette Housing Scheme around the Bandra Gymkhana and the St Sebastian Colony between Mt Carmel Church and Hill Road Bus Terminus were private cooperative programmes promoted by the local landowners. These were planned schemes with well laid roads and drainage, water connections and street lights. The cooperative schemes in particular had a relatively low FSI and limited construction size to bungalows and double-story houses. This left plenty of space for gardens and this was what contributed so much to the charm of the Bandra that was ! The villages now were like backwaters and somewhat in hiding while “Bandra” now became more and more the areas that were once rice fields, orchards and vegetable gardens.