Mumbai Fables

Gyan Prakash

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781400835942
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

A sweeping cultural history of India's largest city A place of spectacle and ruin, Mumbai exemplifies the cosmopolitan metropolis. It is not just a big city but also a soaring vision of modern urban life. Millions from India and beyond, of different ethnicities, languages, and religions, have washed up on its shores, bringing with them their desires and ambitions. Mumbai Fables explores the mythic inner life of this legendary city as seen by its inhabitants, journalists, planners, writers, artists, filmmakers, and political activists. In this remarkable cultural history of one of the world's most important urban centers, Gyan Prakash unearths the stories behind its fabulous history, viewing Mumbai through its turning points and kaleidoscopic ideas, comic book heroes, and famous scandals—the history behind Mumbai's stories of opportunity and oppression, of fabulous wealth and grinding poverty, of cosmopolitan desires and nativist energies.Starting from the catastrophic floods and terrorist attacks of recent years, Prakash reaches back to the sixteenth-century Portuguese conquest to reveal the stories behind Mumbai's historic journey. Examining Mumbai's role as a symbol of opportunity and reinvention, he looks at its nineteenth-century development under British rule and its twentieth-century emergence as a fabled city on the sea. Different layers of urban experience come to light as he recounts the narratives of the Nanavati murder trial and the rise and fall of the tabloid Blitz, and Mumbai's transformation from the red city of trade unions and communists into the saffron city of Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena. Starry-eyed planners and elite visionaries, cynical leaders and violent politicians of the street, land sharks and underworld dons jostle with ordinary citizens and poor immigrants as the city copes with the dashed dreams of postcolonial urban life and lurches into the seductions of globalization.Shedding light on the city's past and present, Mumbai Fables offers an unparalleled look at this extraordinary metropolis.

1

THE MYTHIC CITY

It is just before two o’clock in the afternoon in April, the hottest month of the year. A tiny speck appears in a cloudless Poona sky, moving steadily toward the Tower of Silence, the funerary place where the Zoroastrians expose their dead to be consumed by birds of prey. It is not an eagle; nor is it a crow, for it could never fly that high. As the speck approaches the tower, its outline grows larger. It is a small aircraft, its silver body gleaming in the bright sun. After flying high above the Parsi place of the dead, the plane disappears into the horizon only to double back. This time, it heads determinedly to the tower, hovers low over it, and then suddenly swoops down recklessly. Just when it seems sure to plunge into the ground, the plane rights itself and flies upside down in large circles. A bright object drops from the aircraft into the well of the tower, illuminating the structure containing a heap of skeletons and dead bodies. As the light from the bright flare reveals this gruesome sight, the plane suddenly rights itself and hovers directly overhead. The clock strikes two. A camera shutter clicks.

The click of the camera shakes the Zoroastrian world. The Parsi head priest of the Deccan region, taking an afternoon nap, immediately senses that foreign eyes have violated the sacred universe of his religion. Parsi priests, who are performing a ritual at their Fire Temple, feel their throats dry up abruptly and are unable to continue their chants. As the muslin-covered body of a dead Parsi is being prepared for its final journey to the tower, the deceased’s mother suddenly lets out a piercing shriek. When the sacred fire burning at a Zoroastrian temple bursts into sparks, the assembled priests agree that a vital energy has escaped the holy ball of fire.

Thus begins “Tower of Silence,” an unpublished novel written in 1927 by Phiroshaw Jamsetjee Chevalier (Chaiwala),¹ a Parsi from Bombay.* After setting the scene of this grave sacrilege to the Zoroastrian faith, the novel shifts to London. On the street outside the office of the journal The Graphic is a large touring Rolls-Royce, richly upholstered and fitted with silver fixtures. In it sits a tanned young man in a finely tailored suit, with a monocle in his left eye. He is Beram, a Parsi who blends “the knowledge of the shrewd East” with that of the West and is a master practitioner of hypnotism and the occult. He is in London to hunt down and kill those who have defiled his religion—the pilot who flew the plane over the tower, the photographer who clicked the snapshot, and the editor who published it in The Graphic. This locks him in a battle of wits with Sexton Blake, the famous 1920s fictional British detective, and his assistant Tinker, who are employed by the magazine. As Beram goes about systematically ferreting out his intended victims, with Blake and Tinker in pursuit, the novel traverses London, Manchester, Liverpool, Burma, Rawalpindi, and Bombay. It concludes with Parsi honor restored.

In Chaiwala’s thrilling fable of Parsi revenge, the protagonists slip in and out of disguises and secret cellars. They follow tantalizing clues and leave deliberately misleading traces, practicing occult tricks and hypnotism to gain an advantage in their quest. Magic and sorcery, however, operate in a thoroughly modern environment. Industrial modernity, in the form of planes, trains, and automobiles, figure prominently. The high-altitude camera and the illustrated magazine reflect a world of image production and circulation. The novel travels easily between Britain and India and comfortably inhabits British popular culture. Imperial geography underwrites this space. Colonialism conjoins Britain, India, and Burma and produces the cosmopolitan cultural milieu that the novelist presents as entirely natural. Beram dwells in this environment while proudly asserting his religious identity. He is no rootless cosmopolitan but a modern subject, deeply attached to his community. His quarrel with the pilot, the photographer, and the editor is not anticolonial. Chaiwala mentions the Gandhian movement against British rule, but Beram expresses no nationalist sentiments; his sole motivation is to right the wrong done to his faith by modernity’s excesses, by its insatiable appetite to erase all differences and violate all taboos. He represents a form of cosmopolitanism that is based on an acknowledgment of cultural differences.

The novel bears the marks of its time, but it also presents a picture of Bombay that persists. This is evident as much in the depiction of the city, where Beram and Sexton Blake play their cat-and-mouse game, as in the whole imaginative texture of the novel. A Bombay man himself, Chaiwala celebrates the city’s mythic image when he describes it as “gay and cosmopolitan,” a heady mix of diverse cultures and a fast life. Its existence as a modern city, as a spatial and social labyrinth, can be read in the detective novel form. The sensibilities and portraits associated with Bombay are inherent in the novel’s geographic space, in its characters and their actions.

When I came upon Chaiwala’s typescript in the British Library, I found its fictions and myths resonate with my childhood image of Bombay. Cities live in our imagination. As Jonathan Raban remarks, “The soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”² This is how Bombay, or Mumbai, as it is now officially known, artlessly entered my life. Bombay is not my hometown. I was born more than a thousand miles away in a small town named Hazaribagh. I grew up in Patna and New Delhi and have lived in the United States for many years. Mine is not an immigrant’s nostalgia for the hometown left behind, but I have hungered for the city since my childhood. Its physical remoteness served only to heighten its lure as a mythic place of discovery, to sustain the fantasy of exploring what was beyond my reach, what was “out there.”

This desire for the city was created largely by Bombay cinema. Nearly everyone I knew in Patna loved Hindi films. Young women wore clothes and styled their hair according to their favorite heroines. The neighborhood toughs copied the flashy clothes of film villains, even memorizing and mouthing their dialogues, such as a line attributed to the actor Ajit instructing his sidekick: “Robert, Usko Hamlet wala poison de do; to be se not to be ho jayega” (Robert, give him Hamlet’s poison: from “to be” he will become “not to be”). No one knew which film this was from, or indeed if it was from a film at all. Ajit’s villainous characters were so ridiculously overdrawn that he attracted a campy following that would often invent dialogues. Then there were Patna’s own Dev Anand brothers, all three of whom styled their hair with a puff, in the manner of their film-star idol. Emulating their hero, they wore their shirt collars raised rakishly and walked in the actor’s signature zigzag fashion—trouser legs flapping, upper body swaying, and arms swinging across the body. Like many others, I remember the comedian Johnny Walker crooning in Mohammed Rafi’s voice, “Yeh hai Bambai meri jaan” (It’s Bombay, Darling) to the tune of “Oh My Darling, Clementine,” in CID (1956).

Hindi cinema stood for Bombay, even if the city appeared only fleetingly on-screen, and then too as a corrupt and soulless opposite of the simplicity and warmth of the village. I understand now that underlying our fascination with Bombay was the desire for modern life. Of course, the word modernity was not in our vocabulary then; we spoke of Bombay’s charms with signs and gestures, with wistful looks and sighs, expressing desires for self-fashioning and deprived pleasures. We knew of New York, Paris, and London, but they were foreign places, holding no emotional resonance. To us, the most familiar large city was Calcutta, in the neighboring province of West Bengal. Many, particularly the poor, from my province of Bihar went there to work. But the proverbial Bengali cultural arrogance was a hurdle in developing any lasting love or longing for their city. New Delhi was just a dull seat of government, heavily laden with a bureaucratic ethos, and Madras was too culturally and linguistically remote. Although far away, it was Bombay that held the promise of exciting newness and unlimited possibilities. It reached out across the physical and cultural distance to stir desires and kindle imaginations. Even my father was not immune to Bombay’s magnetism. When he built the family house in Hazaribagh, the facade was modeled on the Marine Drive Art Deco apartment buildings that he had seen in photographs.

The Bombay tabloid Blitz epitomized the city’s mischievously modern spirit. The only one of its kind in India at the time, this provocative weekly unabashedly presented itself as the voice of the citizenry, excoriating officialdom with over-the-top reports and articles. Adopting the loud and brash character of its larger-than-life Parsi editor, Russi Karanjia, the tabloid was identified with the city. So was Behram Contractor, known by his pen name Busybee, who wrote his popular and characteristically witty “Round and About” columns, first in the Evening News of India and subsequently in Mid-Day, before eventually settling on Afternoon Courier and Despatch, a tabloid he founded and edited. Poking gentle fun at everyone while offending no one, Busybee became known and loved as a classic Bombay figure—at home in its metropolitan chaos while remaining alive to the absurdities of its everyday life. Similarly playfully critical was Gangadhar Gadgil. Trained as an economist, he wrote both in Marathi and in English with equal facility and prolificacy, his satirical eye alighting on an eclectic choice of subjects—from an encounter with pickpockets in the city to the experience of traveling in its crowded trains to the obsessions and practices of tea drinking in Bombay.³

1.1. Mario’s Bombay. Source: Illustrated Weekly of India, October 18, 1970.

And then there was Mario Miranda, whose cartoons on the pages of the Illustrated Weekly of India leaped out at you with their wit and biting commentary. He gave us memorable city figures—Miss Fonseca, the buxom Anglo-Indian secretary; the office clerk Godbole; the corrupt and rotund politician Bundaldass; the seductive actress Miss Rajni Nimbupani; and the Catholic girl Petrification Pereira. Using the cartoon form, Mario’s pictorial illustrations were works of art that depicted Bombay’s mongrel and chaotic world with humor and acute observations.

The Illustrated Weekly, which featured Mario’s art, and Femina, both owned by the Times group, were two widely circulated magazines that also disseminated the city’s metropolitan image. The Weekly lived up to its promise, featuring stories with photographs that showcased modern life. Whether they were accounts of dance bands, cabaret acts, architecture, cinema, and art or famous murder cases, exposés of brothels, illegal gambling, or the manufacture of illicit liquor in the Prohibition era, the magazine covered them all with lavish illustrations. The popular glossy women’s magazine Femina, which started publication in 1959, featured mainly articles on style, health and beauty, relationships, and celebrities. Its vibrant pages flaunted the latest trends in clothes, cosmetics, and home furnishings. Its splashy coverage and proud sponsorship of the annual Miss India contest paraded Bombay’s trendy fashion sense. Addressed as it was to the English-reading public, there was no doubt about Femina’s elitism. But this only added verve to Bombay’s image as a place of high style.

Philip Knightley, the Australian journalist, writes of the excitement of the Bombay of the early 1960s.⁴ He arrived in the city on a voyage from Britain via Basra, intending to lay over only until a ship was ready to sail to his home country. But he stayed for two years, working for a literary journal. Unaware that the journal was funded by the CIA—a fact he discovered only years later—Knightley ended up playing an unwitting role in a Cold War cloak-and-dagger drama when the KGB also tried to recruit him. In retrospect, he saw the international espionage angle as part of Bombay’s dynamic milieu. “Everyone seemed to be on the move,” he remembers, “even though they did not know where to.”⁵

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...