Mumbai Fables Page 35
HISTORICAL ILLUMINATION
I began the journey to Mumbai’s past nine years ago to understand the source of my childhood image of the city. As a historian, I was aware that the image did not come out of nowhere but was historically produced and circulated. The examination of this historical process took me to the shards of Bombay’s shattered image as a shining, cosmopolitan city. As I turned over this debris, it became clear that what was remaindered was not the city itself but a certain idea of it, a myth that history had produced and that many had lived.
This myth of the modern city was once a powerful, globally influential saga that sustained the worldwide and unequal expansion of capitalism for a century after the 1850s. In Bombay colonialism gave birth to this dreamworld. You cannot walk by the parade of nineteenth-century Gothic buildings without wondering about what the forces of this imperial display sought to suppress and overpower. The mythic life of the industrial city appears in another light as you wend your way through the mill districts and see the textile machinery covered in a film of dust and cobwebs, bringing into view the exploited immigrant laborers and their world. The soaring imagination of the city by the sea on the panoramic Marine Drive provokes thoughts about the history buried beneath. Probe the literary, cinematic, and artistic history of radical and anticolonial imaginations of the cosmopolitan city, and you become aware of its aspirations and limits. Now that the Nanavati case no longer casts the spell that it once did, the meanings of its legal and urban spectacle become clear. Visible is the twilight of Bombay’s elitist cosmopolitan culture of the early post-colonial era and its vision of a rationally ordered urban society.
In delving into this history, I did not oppose myths to reality but sought to gain an understanding of their history by revealing what they hid in composing their spell. So, in the destroyed remains of the “tropical Camelot,” I found an elitism that the Shiv Sena seized on to install the populist mobilization of the “Marathi manoos,” muscling out a flawed but radical challenge to capitalist modernity. In this process, the Sena also defeated the aspirations that had inspired the writers and intellectuals in Bombay in the 1940s, until nationalism and Partition forced them on the defensive. Traces of their utopian hopes, now turned to dust, are mixed with the ruins of the elitist visions of cosmopolitan Bombay. So too are the aspirations of the modernist urban plans for the failed twin-city project of Navi Mumbai in the soaring towers of Nariman Point. Examine them without the spell they cast in their own time, and you encounter the political structure that permitted the planners to dream big and that also cut it down to size.
In the city wracked by assaults on the ideal of the liberal state, by crime and corruption, Doga stands on the cusp of the old and the new. The superhero inhabits a city of lawless urbanism and dispenses street justice, but he aspires only to restoring a lawful society. He still believes in the modernist ideal of the city that the others have demolished. While he seeks to restore the dead to life, the state and private capital conjure up dreams of a “world-class city” out of the ruins. In the process, they threaten to cast off “slums,” the ingenuous urbanism fabricated with discarded and everyday objects, to freeze the “kinetic city,” to render it obsolete. This vision rests on the idea of successive historical change from one phase to another, from Bombay to Mumbai, from “poor” city to “world-class” city. But as the historical journey shows, the people and imaginations declared out of joint and discarded contain sources for a critical understanding of the present. Just as you can dig into Marine Drive’s history and find that the buried remains critically illuminate the fantasies spun by industrial modernity, the bricks appearing through the crack on the surface of the blueprint in Devidayal’s Luxurious 1,2&3 BHK Flats take the sheen off the real estate dreamscape. Note the heretical heritage revealed by the objects in Chor Bazaar.
In Mumbai, history is not easily superseded and assigned to the museum. Even cosmopolitanism, though damaged by the communal riots of 1992–93 and officially declared dead by the renaming of Bombay as Mumbai, survives as a powerful memory and an aspiration. On the streets and in everyday life, you can observe the living presence of the city’s history as a place of interactions between different communities, languages, and religions, even if this practice does not ascend to an Olympian philosophy of life.
Consider the comtemporary artist Atul Dodiya’s Bombay Buccaneer (plate 17). The self-portrait assembles multiple fragments that share no organic connection but depend on artifice and imagination. A poster of the Hindi film Baazigar (1993) is its formal inspiration. In the original, the images of two female protagonists are mirrored in the sunglasses worn by the film’s psychopathic antihero. Bombay Buccaneer replaces them with the reflections of the painters David Hockney and Bhupen Khakhar. In place of the menacing antihero, there is an ordinary office worker, collar unbuttoned and tie askew, but armed with a gun. The fixtures of everyday urban life frame the portrait—the open doorway of a suburban train, a metalled roadway, and the ubiquitous yellow and black taxi, broken down. Dodiya intermeshes art and cinema, Indian and Western, pop culture and high art, to brilliantly capture Mumbai’s kaleidoscopic urban experience.
Mumbai’s everyday practice rejects history written as a linear story and presents it instead as a tapestry of different, overlapping, and contradictory experiences, imaginations, and desires. It is in such a historical survival that I find the living imagination of the city as modern society. This renders my childhood mythic image of Bombay more compelling, enriched as it is by the historical examination of its remains.
Acknowledgments
I set foot in Mumbai nearly ten years ago as a challenge to test my childhood image of the mythic city. Contrary to expectations, the confrontation with the actual city did not unravel the myth; instead, the experience served only to heighten my awareness of its richness and compelling power. I decided to explore the history of the mythic city, to collect the stories told and understand how they were composed. It was the generosity of several institutions and individuals that made this exploration possible.
As always, Princeton University has been extremely supportive, providing time and resources to make numerous trips to Mumbai and London for research. Its grant of a sabbatical, supplemented by an award by the National Endowment for the Humanities, enabled me to spend an academic year in Mumbai, completing the research and writing of the book. The visiting fellows to the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, which I had the privilege to direct from 2003 until 2008, not only cheerfully tolerated my obsession with Bombay but also helped me figure out ways to channel it productively and critically.
One among many joys of working on this book has been the pleasure of encountering the amazing kindness and warmth of people in Mumbai. If the idea that the modern city is a place for forming a human community based on chance encounters and fabricated ties—not prior family and kin links—ever needed confirmation, you will find it in Mumbai. Sally Holkar, whom I had met only once in New York, opened her home to me when I first arrived in the city. Feroze Chandra and Chandita Mukherjee, old friends from college, insisted that I live with them as long as I wished. For several years, their lovely Colaba flat became my home away from home. Getting to know Naresh Fernandes has been one of the highlights of my experience in the city. It was an incredible blessing to be the beneficiary of his astounding readiness to help in matters both high and low, a deep knowledge of the city, including its history of jazz, and his warm friendship. Shekhar Krishnan’s resourcefulness and intimate familiarity with the city, which he offered freely and frequently, were invaluable.
Rahul Mehrotra and Sharada Dwivedi were always ready to share their significant knowledge and work on the urban form of the city. Shirish Patel helped me understand some of the complexities of urban planning in Bombay. Meera Devidayal was extraordinarily generous in discussing her art and allowing me to reproduce some of her remarkable work in the book. Atul Dodiya very kindly and promptly gave me permission to use his exceptional
painting Bombay Buccaneer as a cover image. Vivek Menezes’s enthusiasm for seeing Mario Miranda’s cartoons as art persuaded me to look at his work with a different eye. It was due to Nancy Adajania’s initiative that Muzaffar Ali magnanimously sent me a copy of his film Gaman. I will remain forever grateful to Vikram Doctor for introducing me to the comic-book hero Doga. Vivek Mohan and Sanjay Gupta of Raj Comics kindly shared their experiences of creating the Doga character, and Manish Gupta unhesitatingly allowed me to use images from the comic book.
Zainab Bawa provided valuable research assistance, including helping me to navigate the world of Chor Bazaar. I am thankful to Com. Amberkar and Sarojini Desai for talking with me and re-creating the world of Krishna Desai. Many others in Mumbai provided help and advice: Arvind and Meera Adarkar, Vidhu Vinod and Anu Chopra, Darryl D’Monte, Mariam Dossal, Rupali Gupte, Anurag Kashyap, Saeed Mirza, Deepak Rao, Kundan Shah, Prasad Shetty, and Rohan Sippy.
Meeting Philip Knightley in London at a very early stage of my research proved to be extremely helpful. I learned a great deal from his firsthand account of the city in the 1960s, told from the acutely observant journalist’s point of view. Also in London, Ian Jack was kind enough to take time out from his busy schedule of editing Granta to talk to me about my project and his time as a journalist in Bombay. I am thankful to Homi Bhabha for sharing his memories of growing up in the city, offering his characteristically sharp perceptions of its pleasures and disappointments. Arjun Appadurai, who also grew up in the city, and established Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action, and Research (PUKAR) as a uniquely innovative organization for urban research, was generous with ideas and suggestions. Carol Breckenridge, who sadly passed away in 2009, was unfailingly stimulative with her out-of-the-box thoughts. Several colleagues and friends have read the manuscript in its different stages and made perceptive comments. These include Janaki Bakhle, Feroze Chandra, Naresh Fernandes, Michael Gordin, Molly Greene, Bill Jordan, Stephen Kotkin, Shekhar Krishnan, Mark Mazower, Ranjani Mazumdar, Ninad Pandit, and Ravi Sundaram.
I am deeply grateful to Brigitta van Rheinberg at Princeton University Press and Saugata Mukherjee at HarperCollins, India, for their enthusiasm for the book. Brigitta read the manuscript line by line and made all the right suggestions to improve it, and collaborated with me about the book’s design and illustrations. I have nothing but praise for the entire production staff of Princeton University Press—Clara Platter, Sara Lerner, and Dalia Geffen. Tsering Wangyal Shawa at Princeton University spent hours working to draw maps. Michael Alexander helped to make the historical maps legible. Indra Gill worked painstakingly to improve the quality of the illustrations.
This book would not exist without the love and support of Aruna, my wife. She has lived with it as long as I have and has shared the pleasures and setbacks of my research and writing. She read the manuscript countless times, asking searching questions about the stories I wanted to tell and making vital suggestions on how to tell them. If the book is at all readable, it is largely due to her. It is to Aruna that this book is dedicated with love.
Notes
CHAPTER 1. THE MYTHIC CITY
1. Mss. Eur. C.285, Oriental and Indian Office Library and Records (OIOLR), British Library (BL).
2. Jonathan Raban, Soft City (London: Harvill Press, 1974), 4.
3. See, for example, his Crazy Bombay (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1991), a collection of his articles in English and translations of essays originally written in Marathi.
4. Philip Knightley, A Hacker’s Progress (London: Vintage, 1996), 83–97.
5. Author’s interview with Philip Knightley, London, June 2005.
6. Allen V. Ross, Bombay after Dark (New York: Macfadden-Bartell, 1971), 25, 50.
7. Captain F. D. Colaabavala, Bombay by Night (Bombay: Hind Pocket Books, 1977), 18.
8. “Protima’s Naked Run,” http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/specials/proj_tabloid/protimastory.shtml (accessed July 10, 2009).
9. See Ranjit Hoskote, “The Complicit Observer: Reflections on the Art of Sudhir Patwardhan,” in his Sudhir Patwardhan: The Complicit Observer (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2010), 7–39. See the color plates Riot, 107, and Lower Parel, 128–29.
10. Of the recent spate of novels, the two that are most acclaimed are Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram (London: Little, Brown, 2003) and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), both nine-hundred-plus pages of gangster epics.
11. Suketu Mehta, Maximum City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).
12. Darryl D’Monte and Priyanka Kakodkar, “Bye-Bye, B’Bay?” Outlook, February 4, 2002.
13. Ibid., 38.
14. Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 263–64.
15. Museebat mein Bambai (Bombay: Krunal Music Company, 2005).
16. The information on bomb blasts, here and below, is compiled from the Times of India, Bombay Mirror, Asian Age, and Indian Express, July 12–18, 2006.
17. United Nations Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2001 Revision (New York: United Nations Publications, 2002), 1.
18. Mehta, Maximum City, 3.
19. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006).
20. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
21. Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2009).
22. Arjun Appadurai and James Holston, “Introduction: Cities and Citizenship,” in Cities and Citizenship, ed. James Holston (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 1–20.
23. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
24. Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (Paris: Semiotext[e], 1991).
25. Rem Koolhaas, “Postscript: Introduction for New Research ‘the Contemporary City,’” Architecture and Urbanism 217 (October 1988), reprinted in Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture, ed. Kate Nesbitt (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 325.
26. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995).
27. On Walter Benjamin’s method of urban archaeology, see his Berlin essays in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, pt. 2, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 595–637, and Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 344–413. I have benefited from Graeme Gilloch’s insightful discussion of the concept in his Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 70–78.
CHAPTER 2. THE COLONIAL GOTHIC
1. The epigraph by Namdeo Dhasal, “Mumbai, Mumbai My Dear Slut,” trans. Vidyut [Bhagwat] and Sharmila, is in “Bombay in Dalit Literature,” by Vidyut Bhagwat, in Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture, ed. Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 123.
2. Gerson da Cunha, “The Origin of Bombay,” The Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, extra number (1900): 83.
3. Cited ibid., 109.
4. Ibid., 116–19; S. M. Edwardes, Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island (Bombay: Times Press, 1909), 2:40–41.
5. The following account comes from Oriente Conquistado a Jesus Christo and is cited in Cunha, “Origin of Bombay,” 151–53.
6. See Christine Dobbin, Urban Leadership in Western India (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), ch. 1, for details on Bombay’s merchant communities.
7. Amar Farooqui, Opium City: The Making of Early Victorian Bombay (Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2006).
8. John F. Richards, “The Opium Industry in India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 39, nos. 2–3 (2002): 168.
9. Pamela Nightingale, Trade and Empire in Western India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 17–22.
10. D. F. Karaka, History of t
he Parsis Including Their Manners, Customs, Religion, and Present Position (London: Macmillan, 1884; repr., Bombay: Indigo, 2002), 2:57.
11. What follows is drawn from Jehangir R. P. Mody, Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy: The First Indian Knight and Baronet (1783–1859) (Bombay: RMDC Press, 1959); Karaka, History of the Parsis 2:78–88; Farooqui, Opium City; Asiya Siddiqi, “The Business World of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 19, nos. 3–4 (1982): 302–24; and Christine Dobbin, Asian Entrepreneurial Minorities (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996), ch. 4.
12. Mody, Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, 28.
13. Farooqui, Opium City, 57.
14. Siddiqi, “Business World of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy,” 307–8.
15. Cited in Edwardes, Gazetteer of Bombay City 2:163.
16. Ibid.
17. Dinshaw Wacha, Premchund Roychund: His Early Life and Career, 99, cited in Teresa Albuquerque, Urbs Prima in Indis: An Epoch in the History of Bombay, 1840–1865 (New Delhi: Promilla, 1985), 17.
18. Albuquerque, Urbs Prima in Indis, 18.
19. Wacha, Premchund Roychund, 137, cited ibid., 19.
20. Raj Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 65.
21. Ibid., 250.
22. Ibid., 241–44.
23. Ibid., 128–29.
24. Ibid., 105.
25. Meera Kosambi, Bombay in Transition: The Growth and Social Ecology of a Colonial City, 1880–1980 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1986), 55–56.