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MORAL COMPETITION AND THE THRILL OF THE SPECTACULAR

At 10:15 on the night of 31 May 1903, the D–block of the recently completed Sita Ram Building in Bombay suddenly came down with a crash. Most of the building was unoccupied, but on the ground floor was a saloon bar, which over the past months had done a brisk trade with British soldiers and sailors. The customers of this bar comprised most of the dead and injured when the building collapsed. Since the bar stood across the road from the tomb of a Muslim saint, rumours spread that the disaster was the direct result of the insult to the holy man and implicitly of the transgression of Muslim space by the combined efforts of the Hindu bar–owner and his bibulous patrons. This short essay explores the moral tensions that found expression with the collapse of the Sita Ram Building through a comparison of its reportage in an English–language newspaper and an Urdu hagiography of the offended saint. At the same time, it draws attention to the neglected importance of colonial Bombay as a prime location of the early Muslim experience of globalising modernity.