Was the 1882 Great Bombay Cyclone a hoax?

MUMBAI: As the city braces for a possible impact of the predicted cyclone making its way towards the Maharashtra coast, officials might find it hard to call upon lessons of a previous cyclone alleged to have originated in the Arabian Sea and hit the Mumbai almost 140 years ago.

Available newspaper reports from the time indicate that a tropical cyclone had made landfall on June 6, 1882 in then Bombay that led to more than 100,000 deaths. However, the Columbia University (CU), New York, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune published a peer-reviewed research paper in May 2019 stating the event never occurred.

According to Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay of IITM Pune, one of the contributing authors, the purported event was nothing but smoke and mirrors. “After CU professor Adam Sobel raised a query about the authenticity of the Great Bombay Cyclone, which has found its way in various research papers and books internationally, we decided to probe the source and found the entire thing was a hoax,” he said.

“Them os tim pactfulcyclone of these was Phyan in November 2009, when high speed winds were recorded,” he said.

The paper stated that no maps of the cyclone, a usual practise, are available from the time. “The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has maintained archives of cyclone tracks as well as daily weather summaries from 1877-1970 for both, the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. Maps are available for all cyclones in each calendar month during 1877-1883. The map for June shows no cyclone in Arabian Sea in 1882.”

LS Rathore, the former director general of IMD disagreed. “This is not a hoax. Owing to improper dissemination of information at the time, the true facts were never published or recorded. Even if they were, they have been lost. We were told data had been lost since the then Bombay was a much smaller city with hardly any infrastructure, and occupations were mostly dependent on port activities, which was most impacted. One would have to speak to a historian.”

City-based historian Deepak Rao said there is no comparison between the situation today with what may have happened in 1882. “Extension of Greater Mumbai, including Mumbai suburbs, started from Mahim, added only in 1945. In 1882, the seven islands were not seen together and the population would have been devastated completely if a cyclone would have taken place,” he said.

Mukhopadhyay said that if more than 100,000 people had died in a city as small as south Mumbai alone, the British would have documented it as a record. “But we found nothing,” he said.