My Promised City Mumbai

What is this City?

Cities are often understood through the perspective of stereotypes and/or systems of operation such as urban planning, politics, etc. However, cities by nature are anything but crystallised entities or systems – and a good city is one that eludes any fully successful description or analysis – and Mumbai is one such city. The city is a collection of objects and people and, as if in an apartment building, you can move through its rooms and tenements and stairways and corridors, study its floor plan or stand across the street and stare at its facade; at every point you will meet many meaning-characters and like in a jigsaw puzzle you can only hope to complete the picture, the picture of your understanding of this apparent collection of people and objects, and meanings.

Let us look at Street Corner by Sudhir Patwardhan, a painting of a landscape full of orchestrated objects and characters and to list them in a very Perec-like manner:




Three men in a red bus / A couple on a scooter / Traffic lights / A balcony with a man and woman (mostly, maybe a couple) / Four pieces of clothing drying on the balcony/ A wall with peeling plaster and a door that lets you see inside a room painted blue with a date calendar on the wall / Through a window that has shutters opening at two levels / A girl singing or arguing, an old man looking at her / Picture frame / An older man sitting on the floor, resting against the wall / A partial face / Cooking and instructing woman (mostly mother) / Studying or writing boy (mostly son) / A shelf of kitchen stores / Legs of a sleeping man (or woman) / Old lady entering through a back door / Child put to sleep on an orange mat / Black and white road divider concrete blocks / A person crossing the road with a jhola / A random rubble compound wall / Some barbed wire on the road / Wooden rafters inside the house / Mangalore tiled roof

Street Corner and Patwardhan’s The City (1979) - featuring a man sipping chai from the saucer of his cup-and-saucer in the serenity of a very urban yet crisp landscape and a man resting his back on a grille-railing much like an urban hanger-on or the loiterer, looking at the bus or at those inside it, as a pair of bare legs hang in the air, in the background – both struggle with the jigsaw of Mumbai. The metropolitan ornaments of a city that is deeply linked to its migrant past (and, as a result, its migrant present), where moving continues as an integral aspect of this metropolis, while sleeping, waiting, looking out, loitering continue to be part of this landscape, construct a space of experience and everyday living. The traffic signal (which has now given its name to a Bollywood movie „Traffic Signal“ ) and the frame of a frozen portrait in the insides of the urban tenement focus sharply on movement, speed and time – on coming, on staying, on moving on.

The details of the MS (Mild Steel) grille, the rubble wall, the balcony balustrade or the flooring start conjuring images of a city that has so much defined itself on the experience of that which is visually identifiable, and often that which can be visually differentiated from other contexts. In Gangadhar Gadgil’s „Prarambh“ , the old pundit who has just moved to the city to live with his nephew is describing his experience through the sights and sounds of that which is ‘different’ – that which is fanciful for its uniqueness compared to what he has seen before, as well as for its sheer scale and evoking of a new building material culture. The old man compares what he sees in Bombay with Pune, the then capital city of the Maratha Empire, clearly seeing the new metropolis as bigger and more impressive with its stone walls, the sounds and scale of the ports, the new buildings and bazaars larger and much more crowded.

On Thursday, 21 September1995, the phenomenon of idols drinking milk was reported widely across the country in many cities, but the hysteria had large proportions in Bombay, where by afternoon every devotee and sceptic alike was running to Ganesha or Shiva idols, trying to feed them milk. It was claimed that tons of litres of milk vanished from a city like Bombay since these idols were gulping away milk from spoons and bowls that day! It was the day of the Milk Miracle!

Thus, the objects that are scattered in the metropolis, often disconnected from one another, suddenly start coming together as if they were always meant to be part of one narrative stream, one storytelling culture. But these scattered objects form the landscape of a narrative which then itself becomes the metropolitan space – the space of a Bombay or Mumbai. Bombay/Mumbai is an essential nineteenth century city which collected objects of a modern, post-industrial landscape. But as the city entered the twenty-first century the struggle over a city’s name, the claims of one form of nationalism against another, where computer programmers and software engineers are hailed in the same space as those who believe in Ganesha idols drinking milk become the new ideas claiming the city. The city continues to grow with new objects and competing notions, that then constantly define the city; as if once, in a mythic time and space, this city of Mumbai was ordained to be ‘just this’!

The material culture of city-sites continues in a poem like ‘From Bombay Central’ by Gieve Patel.

The Saurashtra Express waits to start
Chained patiently to the platform,
Good pet, while I clamber in
To take my reserved window seat
And settle into the half-empty compartment’s
Cool; the odour of human manure
Vague and sharp drifts in
From adjoining platforms.
The station’s population of porters,
Stall-keepers, toughs and vagabonds relieve themselves
Ticketless, into the bowels of these waiting pets:
Gujarat Mail, Delhi Janata, Bulsar Express,

... ... ...



Just like the man sitting in Patwardhan’s Irani Restaurant (1977) could be thinking...

Years, years after years
They can’t return to their place of origin
A great deal lost
A good deal gained
Time offers no solace
Save for me just one moment of pain
I won’t go away from you
Like a ragged beggar
Mumbai
My beloved whore
I’ll rob you and then go

Irani restaurants are popular and very affordable café cum restaurants associated with the urban culture of Bombay. They are largely run by Zoroastrian-Iranis who migrated to the coast of Gujarat in India around the thirteenth century and afterwards. The story goes that they began to provide cheap bun-maska or brun-maska – sweet and soft, or hard crust bread with butter to be had with tea as a cheap but filling breakfast or snack for the port workers whose shifts began and ended at odd hours. Over a period of time, they brought to the city – falooda - a rose-flavoured milk drink with vermicelli and tapioca seeds. It is said that, much into the twentieth century, their ingredients were imported from Iran. Famous for being located on corners, Irani restaurants were seen to have maximum vantage points for customers and this also allowed for visual exposure as well as good ventilation. They were seen as hang-outs and meeting places for many like students, journalists, etc. However, it should be noted that many of these Irani restaurants gave way to McDonald’s, as these old establishments could not resist real estate pressure for long.

As the man on that balcony at the street corner/in the Street Corner wonders about ‘Pimps confessing / To study a group of streetwalkers’, the cold white marble of the Irani restaurants continues to be the site for conversations, sorrows and borrowed or robbed meals. The loneliness and emptiness of the man in Irani Restaurant has in his background the fine mirrors and glass paintings of ‘that’ Bombay which was proud of its trading wealth and prowess; these mirrors reflect the crowd in the restaurant, the chatting groups, the metropolitan image of many men, while the serenity of the landscape of a distant idyllic world/village in the dulled glass-painting sits as an indication to the dreams of a beautiful space or past, aspirations of a return to that which is more beautiful now than it ever probably was, and the longing for a home that is now a fantasy much more exquisite than reality. The myth of the city generates a myth of the past and the home, myths that reflect and float in the grimy Italian-patterned flooring, painted ceramic tiles or a dry tap. The man continues to sit, stodgy and nearly shapeless as ever, while everything around him, new and stylish once but now decrepit and lacking its original life and sheen indicate the shifting, yet lasting myth as well as critique of the metropolitan splendour.

Bombay or Mumbai never had a past as an indigenous city of the sub-continent. The interest in the seven islands as a site for a good port came only from the British. The Portuguese had acquired the port – ‘Bom Bahia’ or the Good Port as an outpost from the Gujarat Sultanate in 1534. The Portuguese activities and management of land holdings remained largely in the areas of Vasai (today a suburb of Mumbai in the north) and Mahim. The Portuguese, Garcia d’Orta had a great botanical interest in the island, and had his house located in the southern H-shaped island (a site behind Asiatic Building today) which later was to become the centre of the British Fort in Bombay. In 1661 the seven islands were transferred to the British as a part of the dowry of Catherine da Braganza who married Charles II; the outpost was then leased to the East India Company. Initially, the investment ran at a loss and the money for the development of this outpost came from the profits of the Company in the regions of Bengal and Bihar . In the second year, after deliberations whether the outpost of Bombay made any business sense, it was decided to pump in further finances, indicating some confidence in the new outpost - and the results are for history to note. The city had a slow but constant growth as it moved towards becoming a metropolis of great size, proportion and complexity. Even as it became one of the world’s finest neo-Gothic cities, the earlier villages and fruit groves continued to exist and mingle with the growing metropolis.

The villages of Kalbadevi, the houses along Gamdevi and Kolis in the Koliwad must have once formed the urban geography of this city. Koliwad could have got corrupted to Cavel by the Portuguese tongue, but these names are testimonials to the existence of villages and people on this island before the British. According to The Gazetteer, rice and coir formed important local economies, and the islands had fruit and palm groves besides its marshes and mangroves. Again, not only are some of the road and neighbourhood names, like Phanaswadi (jackfruit grove) or Tardeo (fruit palm grove), reminders of these pre-city groves, but so is the term wadi that attaches itself to many community quarters of housing in Mumbai - Bhatia Wadi, Bhang Wadi or Phanas Wadi. Bhatia Wadi gets its first name from the caste or community that inhabits the building. The second example, Bhang Wadi, is named after the opium (Bhang) retail trade that flourished in this building complex, and it was a popular site for the city’s famous Parsee-Gujarati theatre; today one can only, perhaps ironically, find quite a few pharmacy agent offices here! Phanas Wadi, lastly, must have once been the name given to a grove of jackfruit which would have thrived here just about 200 years ago!

The city, in its size and geography, in its busy-ness and preoccupation with work and earning, or simply surviving, is so fractured that the place is constantly a collage of images, experiences and objects. In the case of Mumbai - this fractured-collective needs a more detailed description than can be achieved by phrases and labels like ‘city of dreams’ or ‘maximum city’. Such stereotypes hide more nuanced or more violent differences and collaborations. Slumdog Millionaire, a movie that was a fabrication of a ‘no place’ called Mumbai, is a case in point. A narrative of the city was constructed by pulling and putting together a set of images and stories of the city. The images and stories might hold true, but the narrative has no real sense of place. The images were floating in a realm that had no sense of myth or materiality of either space or time or narrative. The characters inserted amongst the images of the city, were manufactured according to universal stereotypes, which was so distant from the local stereotype that the narrative could not even be seen as one more myth about the city. The narrative that this film now presented was a ‘fake’... there is yet no original, but the city clearly has its own stories, theatres and characters. The characters in this filmic narrative can never be the characters of Bombay/Mumbai.

The city of Bombay was officially named Mumbai in 1995, by the Maharashtra government, at that time a coalition of two right-wing parties, with a nativist, parochialist as well as a Hindu fundamentalist agenda. Maharashtra as a state was formed on linguistic grounds after the Samyukta Maharashtra movement in 1960 and Bombay became the capital of Maharashtra. The former Bombay State was a bilingual state with prominent usage of Gujarati and Marathi. The new state of Maharashtra was partly carved out of the former State of Hyderabad and State of Bombay.
The city continues to now operate under double names, not just the name of the city but also names of roads, public institutions like the Prince of Wales Museum (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sanghralaya for which we often simply say CSMVS!), railways stations like the Victoria Terminus-VT to CST (Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) and both the domestic and international airports, which have also been renamed after Chhatrapati Shivaji. The other contenders in this case were Indira Gandhi (former Congress Party Prime Minister) and JRD Tata (a leading Indian businessman, pioneering aviator and philanthropist). However, the winner was obvious!

The city of Mumbai is also one city where ‘urban characters’ play a significant role in constructing our myths and narratives. As much as the physical space and geography of any city primarily define its image and imagination and then the representation of that image and imagination creates a newer set of images; so also characters that occupy the city in its homes and streets are crucial motifs that construct the functioning and imagination of how the place is, and how it works and lives. The taxi driver, the auto rickshaw driver, the chaiwalla (the boy at the tea shop), the boy who runs errands at the local Xerox (photocopy) shop or the barber at the neighbourhood Persian Saloon or The National Haircutting Saloon. So is the sweeper, who has no active verbal or physical interaction with the residents of this city, but is a very strong player in the physical and cultural drama of this city. The culture of dirt and cleanliness, the culture of good places and bad ones, safe places and ‘not-so-safe’ ones makes up everyone’s own special map of Mumbai or Bombay. Especially in a city like Mumbai where people distributed across languages, ethnicities, cultures, food habits, trade and profession, pay-scales, clothing are constantly migrating to the city at all times in its history, and trying to make sense of a home in the city, the universal map of the city becomes more and more difficult to trace.