Mumbai Fables Page 2
Harry Roskolenko, an American writer who also made his way to the Island City in the sixties, thought that Bombay was the world’s most open city after Tokyo. What he meant by “open” is manifest in the title of his book. Bombay after Dark is a racy travel account that he published under the pen name Allen V. Ross. The book describes his sexual romp through Bombay, including the experience of a young college student “pressing her rubbery young body against mine” in a temple during a religious celebration and of his “water circus” with an Anglo-Indian woman in the Arabian Sea.6 Though he finds that vice and commerce are “natural handmaidens,” the book is not a judgmental account of the flesh trade but a celebration of “a man’s city, sensual and open to pleasure.” Bombay by Night, a book published a decade later by the Blitz crime reporter Captain F. D. Colaabavala, adopts a shocked tone, but it too offers a titillating, voyeuristic account of Bombay as a haven for erotic pleasure. While purporting to expose vice, the book invites you to do a little “undercover research” in “Bombay after Dark,” promising that no matter what your desire, taste, or mood, you will find what you want in India’s commercial capital, “where the history of commerce is often written on the bedsprings.”7
Such accounts of sex and vice sketched a free-spirited city, a palace of pleasures. A photograph published in newspapers and magazines in 1974 served only to reconfirm the city’s freewheeling spirit. It showed a woman streaking on a busy Bombay street in broad daylight. The nude photograph attracted much attention because the woman was Protima Bedi, a glamorous model and the wife of the handsome model and rising film star Kabir Bedi. The fashionable couple was frequently in the news. In her posthumously published memoir, Bedi acknowledged that the nude photograph was genuine, but she alleged that it had been taken while she was walking naked on a beach in Goa and was then superimposed on a Bombay street to produce the sensational copy. A rival account is that the streaking was staged to gain publicity for the launch of Cine Blitz, a new film magazine.8 Whatever the truth, no one questioned the photograph’s authenticity because it played into Protima Bedi’s image as a model with a swinging lifestyle. The shocking picture also contributed to Bombay’s mythology as a city with an uninhibited and audacious ethos, a place where the “iron cage” of the dull routines—the familiar and regular—of modern life was shaken loose with the energy and excitement of transgression.
If films, newspapers, and magazines broadcast Bombay in glamorous, sunny hues, they also narrated tales of its dark side. These impressions were powerfully amplified by the lyrics of several film songs penned by progressive poets that inveighed against the unjust social order. So, while Johnny Walker romps on the breathtaking Marine Drive in the film CID, sweet-talking his girlfriend in the voice of playback singer Mohammed Rafi, the song warns of the perils that await the unwary in Bombay and offers a biting critique of the industrial city’s soullessness: “Kahin building, Kahin tramen, Kahin motor, Kahin mill, milta hai yahan sub kuch, ek milta nahin dil, insaan ka hai nahin namo-nishan” (In this city of buildings and trams, motorcars and mills, everything is available except a heart and humanity). Though the song speaks of a callous city habitat in vivid and richly textured lyrics, it also offers hope. Johnny Walker’s girlfriend responds to his evocation of Bombay’s capriciousness and contradictions by rewording the song’s idiomatic refrain. In place of “Ai dil hai mushkil jeena yahan” (It is hard to survive here), she sings “Ai dil hai aasaan jeena yahan, suno Mister, suno Bandhu, Yeh hai Bombay meri jaan” (O gentlemen, O my friends, living here is easy, it’s Bombay, darling). She does not deny his sentiments about hypocrisy and injustice in the city but counters them with an optimistic one of her own. There is a sense of confidence and optimism, even appreciation for the city, despite its conflicts and contradictions. References to the Hindi-speaking “Bandhu” (friend) and the English-speaking “Mister” suggest a feeling of belonging in Bombay’s socially and linguistically mongrel world.
Ironically, even as the song celebrated Bombay’s mongrel world, a political movement for the creation of the linguistic province of Maharashtra, including the fabled city, was heating up. This was followed by the rise of the Bal Thackeray–led Shiv Sena, a nativist party named after Shivaji, the seventeenth-century Maratha warrior. The Sena’s growing influence signaled the eclipse of the radical aspirations that socialist lyricists expressed. The challenge came not just from the Sena’s right-wing populism but also from political stirrings among the formerly “untouchable” castes. The strong protests against centuries-old caste discrimination included the rejection of the name “untouchable” because it carried the stigma of the Brahmanic caste hierarchy. Demanding equality, justice, and dignity, the leaders of the discriminated castes called their group Dalit (the Oppressed). Like the African Americans’ proud embrace of the term “Black” during the 1960s, the adoption of a new name signified an insurgent consciousness. The parallel with African American militancy and its influence went even further when the poet Namdeo Dhasal formed the Dalit Panthers in 1972, a powerful group of writers. The Panthers penned insurgent poetry and prose that challenged the centuries of discrimination and exploitation the oppressed castes had suffered.
The Dalit Panthers added to the sense of crisis that gripped the city in the 1970s as sharp challenges from below tested the governing political and social order. The populist mobilization against elected governments, led by the Gandhian socialist Jai Prakash Narayan, and the National Emergency that Indira Gandhi declared in 1975 pointed to the erosion of liberal democracy and constitutional politics. National events and political crises bore down on Bombay, taking the shine off its image. But what gave the city’s portrait a decidedly dark turn were the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992–93. The riots were followed by a series of bomb blasts—ten in all—on March 12, 1993.
The communal violence and the explosions left many wondering if Bombay’s cosmopolitanism had been just a facade, now as charred as the buildings damaged by the explosions. After all, Mumbai is no ordinary city. An island city of nearly twelve million, according to the 2001 census, it is the ur-modern metropolis in India. Kolkata (Calcutta), Chennai (Madras), and Delhi are also major Indian cities, but unlike them Mumbai flaunts its image as a cosmopolitan metropolis by transcending its regional geography. The map locates it in Maharashtra—the cartographic fact is the product of political agitation in the 1950s—and Marathi-speaking Hindus constitute the largest group. However, the city’s population remains dazzlingly diverse.
Attracted by the city’s position as the hub of manufacturing, finance, trade, advertising, media, and the film industry, people from all over India have washed up on the island. They speak different languages—Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, English—and practice different faiths—Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Judaism. Historically, immigrants from villages and small towns have managed their assimilation into the modern metropolis by maintaining their native tongues and cultures in their homes and neighborhoods. Mumbai’s map is a jigsaw puzzle of distinct neighborhoods marked by community, language, religion, dress, and cuisine. As a means of communicating across differences, the city has even concocted a hybrid but wonderfully expressive vernacular for everyday communication—Bambaiya.
For a metropolis that prided itself on its cultural diversity and that staked its claim on being a modern capitalist city where the worship of Mammon trumped the worship of all other gods, the communal riots and bomb blasts appeared atavistic. When the Shiv Sena–led government officially renamed Bombay Mumbai in 1995, the rechristening seemed to formalize the transformation that had already occurred.
The breakdown of the cosmopolitan ideal occurred against the background of a runaway growth in population and the closure of textile mills and deindustrialization, which together dismantled the image of the old Bombay. Where once the city had hummed to the rhythm of its cotton mills and docks, now there was the cacophony of the postindustrial megalopolis. Working-class politics that
had once formed a vital part of city life now barely breathed, leaving the toilers unorganized and defenseless. State policies and urban government had done little to relieve, let alone improve, the condition of those who struggled to survive. Armies of poor migrants, slum dwellers, hawkers, and petty entrepreneurs occupied the city’s streets, pavements, and open spaces. Mumbai appeared under siege, imperiled by spatial mutations and occupation by the uncivil masses, a wasteland of broken modernist dreams. Currently it enjoys the dubious distinction of being home to Asia’s largest slum, Dharavi.
Sudhir Patwardhan, a leading Bombay painter, poignantly registers the anxiety caused by urban change. Patwardhan, a politically conscious artist, had made a name for himself as a social realist painter of the city during the 1970s and the 1980s. A radiologist by profession, he had used his penetrating vision to focus on figures set against Bombay’s social and spatial contexts. The destruction of working-class politics, followed by the 1992–93 communal riots and the ruination of liberal ideals, introduced a discerible change in his art.9 His Lower Parel (2001) depicts the space of the old mill district worked over by deindustrialization and globalization. In Riot (1996), we see communal vitriol at its rawest. The image of society as a collective recedes.
If Patwardhan paints a violence-ridden, splintered city, writers depict Mumbai as a place stalked by corrupt politicians, shady real estate tycoons, bribed policemen, brutal underworld bosses, and compromised film stars.10 Mumbai pulsates, but to the throbbing beat of greed, ambition, jealousy, anger, communal passions, and underworld energies. Suketu Mehta’s “maximum city” is a place bursting with not just urban desires but also urban problems.11 Here and there, Mehta finds honest and straightforward characters, but his city is a cabinet of curiosities peopled by violent policemen, vicious killers, crazed communal rioters, brutal underworld foot soldiers, and troubled but kindhearted beer-bar dancers.
In 2002 Outlook, a popular newsmagazine, published an issue on the city that stated, “Yes, Mumbai exists, but India’s most liberal, economically vibrant, multicultural metropolis is no more.”12 The lead article recited killer statistics and facts. The population, already a “scary 11 million,” was estimated to reach 28.5 million by 2015, making Mumbai the world’s most populous city; the infrastructure in this city of slums and high-rises has already reached a breaking point, and the suburban trains are packed four to five times their capacity.13 A picture of Queen’s Necklace, Marine Drive’s signature nighttime image, on the magazine’s cover was emblazoned with a bold title: “Bombay: The Death of a Great City.”
Literary writings on Mumbai register the anguish over what has occurred. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1983) portrays the Bombay of his childhood as an island of raucous and colorful coexistence of different communities. In The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), however, the Island City is lashed by angry tides of ethnic strife churned up by cynical and corrupt politicians and businessmen. The chaotic but robust coexistence of different communities and cultures now appears as a remote figment of the city’s imagination. In Rohinton Mistry’s 2002 novel, Family Matters, a character called Mr. Kapur desperately seeks to recapture the spirit of the shining city on the sea, “a tropical Camelot, a golden place where races and religions lived in peace and amity.”14 But he despairs of ever resurrecting his tropical Camelot: “Nothing is left now except to talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs. . . . Let us sit upon these chairs and tell sad stories of the death of cities.”
Events in the twenty-first century appear to give credence to the prophecies of Mumbai’s demise. On July 26, 2005, the rain gods attacked Mumbai with relentless intensity. Over thirty-nine inches of monsoon rain lashed the city within a twenty-four-hour period, submerging some areas under fifteen feet of water. Transportation came to a standstill, flights were canceled, the stock exchange was closed, and schools and colleges were shut down. People in the streets tried to wade or swim to safety. Over four hundred people drowned or were killed in stampedes while trying to escape the onrushing water.
When I arrived in the city on July 29, the affected neighborhoods were still slushy. Cars and motorcycles stood forlornly, covered in mud. A sense of the wet, mildewed aftermath hung in the air. The brightly lit shops on the main streets could fool you into believing that nothing had happened. But the garbage piled on the sidewalks broke this air of eerie normality. Mumbai’s streets are not clean at the best of times. But this was not the usual litter and trash; it was heaps of household garbage refuse and commercial merchandise covered by a rotting, deep black sludge. It was as if the water had forced the city to bring its innards out into the open, exposing its decaying, putrid secret.
The idea of a city destroyed by a deluge is the stuff of myths. The 2005 flood evoked just such a primeval image, of nature biting back, punishing humans, its fury leveling their prized creation—the city. The urban government and infrastructure appeared defenseless against the wrath of the celestial powers. Just a few months earlier, business and political elites had been retailing dreams of turning Mumbai into a “world-class” city, of transforming it into another Shanghai. But those dreams had literally gone down the clogged drains. Monsoon waterlogging is commonplace, but this was a frighteningly different sight; the city was sinking inch by inch.
Mumbai’s confidence was shattered. Every time it rained over the next few days, one could detect anxious looks. This was unusual, for the monsoon is always greeted with happiness in India. In the countryside, a timely monsoon augurs a good crop, and in the cities it spells relief from the searing summer heat, but the experience of that terrible Tuesday had changed Mumbai’s disposition. It was as if the urban motion arrested by the flood had spilled onto people’s nerves and battered their psyches. Mumbai appeared imperiled; it was no longer a dream city but a nightmare.
A Bhojpuri music video called Museebat mein Bambai (Bombay in Trouble) conveys the gloomy mood.15 A mournful ballad, serving as the background score to images of the flood, tells us:
Kahal ja la Bambai kabo sute la nahin
Kabo ruke la nahin
Kabo thake la nahin
It is said that Bombay never sleeps
Never stops
Never tires
Cutting to visuals of cars and trains screeching to a halt, a voice intones:
Lekin ai bhaiyya chabbis July din mangalwaar ko
Bambai ruk bhi gayil
Bambai thak bhi gayil
But Brother, on Tuesday 26 July
Bombay stopped
Bombay tired
A little later, accompanied by images of people repeatedly trying to make calls on their mobile phones:
Band hoi gayile sabke phonwa mobile
Bambai pe jaise baadalwa tooti aayee
Bijli katal tab le bhayil ba andheriya
Every mobile phone went silent
When the cloudbursts struck Bombay
Darkness prevailed when the power went out
As the ballad relates the city’s sudden collapse, it locates the catastrophe in the abrupt failure of the machinic city. One would think that the experience of floods and their destructive force would be familiar to rural immigrants. After all, almost every year the monsoon submerges roads and villages in the countryside. But Mumbai? How could anyone imagine a devastating flood here? It was as if the country, banished by urban modernity, had stormed back to the city with the rage of the repressed.
A year later, just as the city had recovered its spirits, signs of trouble reappeared. In early July 2006, the monsoon pelted the city with high-velocity winds and heavy rains. There was a sense of déjà vu. Frustration with both the city and nature boiled over. The authorities were excoriated for their inaction in spite of the previous year’s terrible events, and a newspaper columnist threatened to file a lawsuit—against the monsoon! No sooner had the ground dried than on Sunday, July 9, the Shiv Sena, Mumbai’s nativist party, went on a rampage. Seeking vengeance for the alleged desecration of the statue of Meenatai Thackeray, the wife
of their supreme leader, Bal Thackeray, the Sena mobs stopped traffic, burned vehicles, smashed shop windows, and shut down Mumbai. The shuttered city trembled helplessly in ghostly silence.
Two days later, on July 11, the silence was shattered by a series of terrifying bomb blasts in Mumbai’s commuter trains, within minutes of each other. They occurred with sickening regularity—6:24, Khar; 6:25, Jogeshwari; 6:25, Mahim; 6:26, Borivli; 6:27, Bandra; 6:30, Matunga; and 6:31, Mira Road. With all local train service suspended in the city, everyone took to the roads. Cars, taxis, buses, trucks, and auto rickshaws blared their horns as they snaked through streets clogged with pedestrians. Traffic slowed to a halt on highways packed with panic-stricken people who, in desperation and with no alternatives, had decided to walk home. The commuter-hour traffic jam escalated into an exodus.
The television networks flashed images of mangled bodies, severed limbs, blood-soaked bags, shoes, umbrellas, and newspapers belonging to either the victims or those who had escaped the carnage. Frightened survivors spoke of their brush with death and the pain of seeing their fellow passengers consumed by the explosions. The hospitals were choked with the injured and their grieving relatives and friends. Politicians and officials appeared on television to condemn the blasts and to reassure the public that the administration was acting to help the victims and to catch the perpetrators. Television “experts” speculated that the culprits were Kashmiri militants and jihadi terrorists, masterminded by Pakistan’s intelligence agency. The next morning, screaming newspaper headlines promptly named the tragedy 7/11, as if the American 9/11 had become the global frame for viewing violence.16