Mumbai Fables Read online

  In spite of attempts to process the carnage as a story of terrorism and statecraft, the dominant response at the experiential level was confusion and a mixture of fear, grief, trauma, and fatalism. Account after account in newspapers and conversations on the street highlighted the suddenness of the experience. One moment a person was standing at the doorway of the packed compartment talking to a friend, the next he found himself sprawled on the tracks, with no memory of what had occurred in between. Some passengers in the second-class compartment remembered hearing a loud blast before they were caught in the stampede to escape from the mangled smoke-filled compartments. Many were so paralyzed by the shock of the deafening blast that they remained rooted to their seats, moving only when other fleeing passengers ushered them out. One survivor said that when he heard the blast, at first he thought that it was an earthquake. Before losing consciousness, he was convinced that he was going to die but then was saved by the slum dwellers who live along the tracks. Another recounted how a young woman collapsed when she saw the lifeless body of her husband pulled out from the train. They had been married for only six months.

  The city was shaken. Wild speculations and alarming rumors flew rapidly. There were reports of a panicked citizenry taking to vigilante actions. A mob attacked four men who were thought to be carrying suspicious-looking packages; they turned out to be North Indian immigrants looking for jobs, and the dangerous-looking parcels contained nothing more lethal than their lunch. Commuters picked on people they thought were loitering suspiciously, and bomb squads were summoned to inspect numerous harmless abandoned bags and packages. Suspicion and fear became the common currency.

  Two years later, the terrorist attacks on November 26, 2008, reignited the fear and the sense of catastrophe. For nearly three days, the terrorists ran amok, holding and killing hostages at the Taj Mahal Hotel, the Trident Hotel, and the Jewish Center at Nariman House. They rained bullets on unsuspecting commuters at the crowded Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) and shot at the staff and patrons of the popular Leopold Café. Although the brutal assault on civilians was confined to particular locations in South Mumbai, bomb explosions and shootings elsewhere created an impression of roving terror squads. By the time the security forces rescued the hostages and killed all but one of the attackers, at least 164 civilians and police personnel lay dead.

  Unlike the deluge of 2005 or even the 2006 train blasts, the terrorist assault on the city was catapulted into a geopolitical event. Part of the reason was the presence of foreigners in the two luxury hotels. The attack on the Jewish Center with Israeli citizens also ensured international coverage. The around-the-clock television broadcast of the three-day ordeal circulated the brutal drama widely, turning it into a global media event. The carnage at the train station that claimed the lives of many ordinary citizens became a mere footnote to the attention showered on the Taj, the Trident, and Nariman House. Hysterical on-the-spot reports by television correspondents, frenzied news anchors, and heated talk shows whipped up fear and paranoia. As the media reported details about the attackers’ Pakistani origins, their hijacking of an Indian fishing vessel on the high seas, and the details of their murderous actions, Pakistan bashing and war talk became common.

  While those who were held hostage, killed, and injured were subjected to unspeakable horror, for the rest of the city the event was a media experience. The spectacular images of flames engulfing the historic Taj and the bloody battle between the security forces and the terrorists produced intense fear and anger. The police, ordinarily reviled for its corruption and ridiculed as incompetent, suddenly rose in the public’s estimation. The fallen policemen became instant heroes, and the security forces personnel were showered with bouquets and garlands. The verbal brickbats were reserved for the politicians.

  In the media-generated frenzy, the fury against politicians was second only to the rage against Pakistan. Reports on the apparent ease with which the terrorists had sailed into the city, the unpreparedness of the police, their inadequate equipment, and the three-day bloodbath whipped up antipolitician hysteria. A socialite-cum-journalist coined the slogan “Enough is enough” and directed it against politicians, which went viral. The slogan resonated particularly with the South Mumbai elites, who rarely bother to vote. They loudly proclaimed that the people had had enough of vote banks and slogan mongering; the need of the hour was accountability for the security failures. This opinion received prominent coverage in the media, and banners attacking politicians went up at key venues.

  Underlying the antipolitician sentiment was a desire for politics as administration. This sentiment expressed frustration with the messiness of democracy and construed politics to mean the clean and efficient management of society. Even though this emotion was stirred up by the elites, it found resonance in the general public’s widespread dissatisfaction with politics—its dysfunction, cynicism, and corruption and its power brokering and influence peddling. Sensing the hostile mood, the politicians made themselves scarce. Even the Shiv Sena, which is usually first out of the gates in going after all things Pakistani, chose to remain invisible.

  The terrorist attacks once again brought forward the frame of “crisis” to represent Mumbai’s condition. Only this time, it appeared larger, graver than on previous occasions; Mumbai’s problems became national and international. Underlying this sense of mortal crisis was an apprehension of total dysfunction expressed in the public’s antipolitician reaction. Mumbai could not even govern itself.

  In light of the recent events, the dystopic mood about Mumbai’s future is understandable. It is a mood that echoes the current discourse among urban theorists who speak of the city as a thing of the past, its identity overrun and scrambled by explosive urbanization. There is no doubt that urbanization is a central force in the contemporary world. According to UN estimates, the world’s urban population has risen from 30 percent in 1950 to 47 percent in 2000, and it is expected to reach 60 percent by 2030.17 Much of the developed world has been predominantly urban at least since the early twentieth century as a result of capitalist industrialization and colonial and imperial expansion. The recent spurt in urbanization, therefore, is concentrated in the developing regions of the world. Mexico City, São Paulo, and Mumbai are experiencing explosive growth, outstripping the populations of cities such as London, Paris, and even New York. If Mumbai points to the future of urban civilization on the planet, Suketu Mehta writes, “God help us.”18

  The spurt in urbanization is a matter not just of numbers but also of changes in the urban form. Suburbanization and “edge” cities encapsulate the transformation in the urban landscape in North America. Paris is no longer just the city that Baron Haussmann built but includes the towns connected to it by roadways, airports, and metro lines. The megacities of the developing world, swollen with rural immigrants, are burgeoning with slums and squatter settlements, pointing to the increasing urbanization of poverty and raising the specter of a “planet of slums.”19 As the urban network extends to fill the spaces between the city and the countryside, we can no longer speak of a strict divide between the two. Increasingly, there are regional urban complexes, huge urban corridors (for example, the one connecting Hong Kong to Guangzhou), and not the earlier city-hinterland configuration. Cities are no longer internally coherent and bounded entities but parts of vast urban networks that are often regional and global in scale.

  Urban theorists contend that capitalist globalization has also overwhelmed the modernist city of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.20 Prototypical political movements and ideologies nursed in the heyday of modernist cities have lost their appeal, and new informational networks and “pirate modernity” have marginalized old urban solidarities.21 As globalization produces different kinds of legal regimes and citizens, new hierarchies of cities and urban dwellers, it poses a new set of questions for citizenship, identity, and politics.22 The nonlegal basis of urban existence and politics in the slums and squatter settlements of th
e global south mocks the classic ideal of the city as the space of civil society and rational discourse.23 Never realized in practice even in European cities, this ideal lies in ruins. The contemporary urbanization and its global processes and representations have destroyed the halo of this modernist urbanism. Today it is difficult to sustain the paradigmatic notion of modern cities as unified formations, securely located within their national borders and with clearly legible politics and society.

  The media theorist Paul Virilio had predicted the dissolution of the city by media and communication.24 But it was left to the architect and urban theorist Rem Koolhaas to celebrate the death of the modernist city and hail the emergent urban form—the “Generic City.” Writing in 1988, Koolhaas, the enfant terrible of urban theory, emphasized a shift from the center to the periphery, of fragmentation, and of spontaneous processes and described his research on the contemporary city as “a retro-active manifesto for the yet to be recognized beauty of the twentieth-century urban landscape.”25 He followed this up by announcing and celebrating the arrival of “generic cities,” urban spaces indistinguishable from one another and modeled on the contemporary airport.26 Koolhaas argued that like these airports, the emergent “generic cities” will look like one another—the same constellation of shopping malls and spatial arrangements, the same lack of uniqueness. Architecture and urban design will be uniform, freed of the weight of history and tradition. The generic city will be like a Hollywood studio lot, constantly destroyed and rebuilt.

  Koolhaas’s nightmare scenario is meant to provoke, but there is a grain of truth in his interpretation and predictions. It is undeniable that certain generic urban forms and architectural designs are visible in city after city across the world. Shopping malls, cafés, restaurants, multiplex theaters, entertainment complexes, tall office towers, and apartment buildings dot the urban landscape worldwide. These are spaces that invoke a feeling of placelessness.

  Drive through Shenzhen, the special economic zone in Mainland China, across from Hong Kong. Mile after mile, you will come across fields of office and residential towers sporting a uniform style. Cafés, restaurants, and art spaces with a global look are springing up even in the old hutong areas of Beijing, now refurbished as traditional neighborhood theme parks. Walk into a mall in Tardeo or Andheri, or eat in the chic restaurants of Colaba and Bandra offering Mediterranean or nouvelle cuisines, and you could forget that you are in Mumbai. Coffeehouses filled with young cappuccino sippers dressed in generic global styles and fast-food chains crowded with families have become familiar sights, displacing the Irani cafés that have served the city’s working and lower middle classes since the early twentieth century.

  Gleaming apartment and office buildings that tower over tenements and slums in the old mill districts promise to transport the tenements’ occupants away from the grim ground reality of Mumbai’s poverty and grime. Media and advertising relentlessly express aspirations of global lifestyles and consumption. Place these developments alongside new infrastructure projects, including the recently commissioned Bandra-Worli Sealink, which is seen as a harbinger of developments to come that will lift Mumbai out of its communications misery, and you come face to face with the urban elites’ dream of turning Mumbai into Shanghai. Never mind that many planners see these projects as exacerbating the overburdened north-south axis of the city. There is also the fact that, unlike China, India is a democracy. Thus, Mumbai’s robust activism functions as a brake on the drive to impose from above the fantasy of a global city. Still, this does not prevent the elite from pushing for forms that look toward the “generic city.” In fact, the Chinese example inspires builders and planner-bureaucrats to circumvent public scrutiny while promoting their schemes of malls, apartment and office towers, entertainment complexes, and infrastructures.

  Urban change is indisputable, but the narratives of change from Bombay to Mumbai and the rise and fall of the city are deeply flawed. They conceive change as the transformation of one historical stage to another, from the bounded unity of the city of industrial capitalism to the “generic city” of globalization, from modernity to postmodernity, from cosmopolitanism to communalism. However flawed, you cannot miss the widespread presence of this narrative. Pick up recent novels on the city, read nonfiction writings, turn the pages in newspaper and magazine files, talk to people, and you will be confronted with a story that purports to tell us what the city was as Bombay and what it has become as Mumbai.

  This narrative is widely shared and deeply believed because it presents itself as historical fact. The nostalgic “tropical Camelot” and the dystopic city of slums appear as compelling bookends of Mumbai’s story because they seem to have the force of historical truth. In fact, it is a trick of history, inviting us to believe its Bombay-to-Mumbai tale as an objective reading of the past when it is a fable. To accept it at its face value is to get ensnared in the fabulous spell that history casts. What requires examination is the history of this fable. What enabled the composition of the city’s image as a “tropical Camelot” in the past, and what has produced the picture of the dysfunctional, out-of-control city of the present?

  To ask what lies behind the very powerful fable about the city’s past and its present is to excavate the history of Mumbai’s life as a “soft city”; it is to examine what permitted the telling of certain stories and not others. My goal is not to strip fact from fiction, not to oppose the “real” to the myth, but to reveal the historical circumstances portrayed and hidden by the stories and images produced in the past and the present. I am interested in uncovering the back-stories of Mumbai’s history because they reveal its experience as a modern city, as a society built from scratch. To some extent, all modern cities are patched-up societies composed of strangers. This is all the more the case with Mumbai, a city of immigrants that was sired by colonial conquest. What did it mean for people belonging to different castes, different religions, different regions, speaking different languages, to work and live together as a society? How was the image of the cosmopolitan city composed to represent the patchwork of its ethnic and cultural multiplicity, at what cost, and how did it unravel? What social fantasies and imaginations has the city repressed and expressed through the course of its history? The backstories behind the fable promise to reveal Mumbai’s experience of the modern city as society.

  Now that the images of the cosmopolitan city lie shattered, deprived of the “aura” that they enjoyed in their own time, a new historical understanding of the past becomes possible. The fables of the city can be unraveled to reveal how they came to be. We can cast a fresh look at the remains of its Portuguese history and at the monumental structures erected by the British, turn over the soil of reclaimed lands, and read between the lines of official and unofficial documents. The shuttered textile mills, now overrun by residential and commercial towers, invite a fresh scrutiny of the enchantments of industrial progress that they once exuded and the aspirations and desires they stifled. The yellowing newspaper records and archival documents, the travel writings, social commentaries, and political treatises that exist outside their time promise to reveal what was masked in the past.

  The whole city is open for an archaeological excavation, for turning over the material remains of its history to disclose what remains hidden under the weight of the petrified myths.27 We can now uncover the historical experiences of forging a modern collective of different religions, classes, castes, and languages and undo the fables to lay bare the history of the city as society.

  With these thoughts in my head, I hit the streets of Mumbai.

  * Bombay/Mumbai: Unless I am referring to the period after 1995, when Bombay was officially renamed as Mumbai, I use the name Bombay, as the city was called, for most of the period covered by the book.

  2

  THE COLONIAL GOTHIC

  Bombay, Bombay

  O my dear slut

  I may say a good-bye

  But not before

  I take you

  in m
ultiple ways

  Not before

  I will pin you down

  here and how

  thus and thus.

  —Namdeo Dhasal, “Mumbai, Mumbai My Dear Slut”

  Bombay is now officially Mumbai.1 The colonial era is abolished, dismissed as history. I encountered the most visible expression of the postcolonial abolition of the city’s colonial past in the ubiquitous presence of Shivaji, the seventeenth-century Maratha warrior and a national and regional cultural icon. Public spaces named after him abound. Victoria Terminus, the late-nineteenth-century railway station with its ornate riot of roofs, towers, and domes in the Gothic Revival style, is now called Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, and the airport is named after him. A striking statue of the warrior, mounted on his horse, sword in hand, stands near the Gateway of India. The Maratha chieftain could never have imagined that his seventeenth-century wars with the Mughal Empire would one day earn him a place in the gateways to a modern city. But there he is, miraculously installed as the city’s icon, greeting visitors, commuters, and passersby today with the memory of centuries ago.

  Soon after I encountered Shivaji on his horse at the Gateway, I discovered that he had stood earlier at Kala Ghoda (Black Horse), a spot once occupied by a huge equestrian statue in bronze of King Edward VII. In 1965 political activists defaced and removed the foreign emperor’s likeness, vacating the space for the nationalist hero. After reclaiming and occupying Kala Ghoda for the nation, Shivaji rode away to the symbolically more important Gateway while the vanquished King Edward was relegated to a museum. Many streets, squares, and public buildings that once sported European names now wear Maharashtrian and national ones. The colonial era met with its final ignominy when Kala Ghoda became an undistinguished parking lot.