Mumbai Fables

A Book Review by

Simranpreet Singh Oberoi (12M89)

While reading Fables you’ll understand what all it was that drew everyone from the Konkani mill-worker to the North Indian Urdu poet here. This book traces Mumbai’s journey from the 16th century Portuguese occupation of the seven separate islets to the Mumbai of today. It’s widely known that the Portuguese had given away Bombay as dowry to the British when Catherine of Braganza married Charles II in the XVII century and since then, this dowry gift has come a long way and has been through a lot. The book makes an attempt to take you through this Merry-Go-Round.

The author opens rather differently with a scene from an unpublished novel, ‘Tower of Silence’ written by a Parsi from Bombay, Phiroshaw Jamsetjee (Chaiwala). It presents a picture of Bombay that ‘persists’. Throughout the book, the author has introduced his new chapters in a very unique narrative like fashion: “On October 9, 1947, a young Muslim woman committed suicide in Bombay” or “Haay Haay Haay Haay…, on the pavement by the sea, a dark thin man is smacking his blood-spattered naked back with a whip made of rags.” These openings convey that the writer is interested in both story and history.

This book from an overall perspective cannot really be classified as an academic reference into the history of Mumbai nor a non-fictional historical work completely. It falls somewhere between the two, as Prakash’s prose swings consistently from the academic to the journalistic and back. Since most of this book is based on archival research and some secondary sources, he frequently refers to paintings, movies, poems, newspaper articles to make his point.

Although Prakash has never lived in Mumbai, he has been able to pull together facts from a variety of sources and has thus made a very information-dense book. This work, he mentions is not just an immigrant’s nostalgia for the town left behind but an exploration of a place which was ‘out there’. His is an attempt to uncover myths of the ‘city efficient’ or the ‘city modern’. He explains in the very first chapter itself why the mythic city scores over the other metropolis in India like Calcutta, Madras, Delhi. It’s

Bombay which holds the promise of exciting newness and unlimited possibilities.

But the myth of Bombay being cosmopolitan broke when communal rights happened in 1992-93 and followed by 10 serial blasts on a Black Friday. Mumbai being called a Maharashtrian city is also in a way a myth as well, the cartographic fact is the product of political agitation, the city’s population is dazzlingly diverse. Mumbai’s map is a jigsaw puzzle of distinct neighbourhoods and the city has even concocted a hybrid but wonderfully expressive vernacular- bambaiya.

The author has connected various myths about the city and has brought out the reasoning why Mumbai is seen the way it is. He writes of the instances that shaped the city’s psyche to accommodate human greed and industrial pressures, that too at the cost of common sense. He discusses all the plans made to ‘plan’ Mumbai and to reclaim the land from sea. Interestingly, the first people to think of reclaiming land from the sea were the Portuguese, but the process began only when the East India Company took over. The complete disregard for public good was a sign of colonial times, but sadly it is seen in today’s context as well.

Slums have never been alien to Bombay, they are rather its intimate other reflecting the other side of colonial and capitalist spatialisation. As one moves from the space of the rulers to that occupied by the ruled, the population density and urban forms change drastically. Bombay had become the ‘City of the Dead’ during the plague epidemic of 1896-97. It demonstrated that the commitment of the British to the city’s welfare was limited to questions of order.

When talking of the 2005 monsoon and the litter it caused, he states, “it was as if the water had forced the city to bring its innards out into the open, exposing its decaying, putrid secret”. It was a brutal reminder of the fact that Mumbai represents the colonization of ‘nature by culture’.

Prakash, when referring to urban theorist Rem Koolhaas, hails the emergent urban form – the “Generic City”, which he thinks will be like a Hollywood studio lot, constantly destroyed and rebuilt. Gyan uses suburbanization when speaking of Paris which is no longer just the city that Baron Haussmann built but includes towns which are connected to it by roadways, airports and metro lines. The mega cities of the developing world, swollen with rural immigrants are burgeoning with slums and squatter settlements, pointing to increasing urbanization of poverty. The point here being that the cities are no longer internally coherent and

bounded, but parts of vast urban networks that are often regional and global in scale.

Prakash introduces us to the city’s icons, like Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, after whom the city has named a hospital and an art school, but reminds us that he made his fortune trading opium. His rags to riches story is the stuff that has made up the Island City’s mythic life as the ‘city of gold’. The establishment of the first cotton spinning mill in 1854 which led several rural migrants to come to Bombay to supplement their family income and by the early twentieth century, the city’s population was nearly a million, of whom only a quarter had been born in the city. The poor came to the city from all parts of the country, they built shantytowns and made the land liveable which made it a valued commodity, but it is the builders who eventually made the profits.

You’ll never look at the grandeur of the curving boulevard as it extends northward from Nariman Point to Malabar Hills, in the same way again. The street names, colleges everything will seem to develop a back-story. The write ups on Nariman, the Parsi lawyer who exposed the land scam of the government through a daily ‘Bombay Chronicle’ and the story of the eternal triangle that upsets a marriage (Nanavati Murder case) sensationalized by Blitz’s larger than life editor Karanjia, have brought out the role media played in making these cases immortal.

Here, when talking about the Nanavati case, the discussion goes too much into Karanjia, the man behind Blitz and this forces you to think of a connection with the ongoing fable. This happens more often than not throughout the book. The author tries to make a connection with the last line of a chapter but since the book is not really in a chronological order the next chapter has to begin by establishing a context first and you fail to see a direct connection and just when you are about to question the coherence of the narrative when he gets to micro, he quickly gives you a macro image and it feels as if things have fallen in place and then a mesmerizing maximum city emerges. But Prakash has this tendency to slip into parenthetical discussions, which at times makes it a turgid read.

Prakash then discusses the social realists—Sadat Hasan Manto, who is famous for his partition short stories and who later migrated to Pakistan, Mulk Raj Anand and Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, the leftists who tried to give the city a progressive hue. Some of these writers went on to pen scripts for Bollywood movies.

Gyan particularly seems most enthusiastic when writing about leftist movements in the city over time, whether the Progressive Writer's Movement of the 1950s or the agitations of the mill workers in the 1980s. The PWA and the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) feature several times in the book and the words progressives and communists seem to have been used quite inter-changeably.

But the rise of Bal Thackeray led Shiv Sena signaled the end of radical aspirations that socialist lyricists expressed. Mumbai’s transformation from a ‘red’ city to ‘saffron’ was very evident and Prakash reminds us how a cartoonist-turned-politician Thackeray used his wit to create a divisive political party. For the writer, Bal Thackeray is the original ‘angry young man’, long before Amitabh Bachchan made the screen image famous in the 1970s. 

While the author doesn’t clearly give up hope for Mumbai, it is clearly portrayed that the very inclusive nature of this city is now under siege, from within and without. Mumbai Fables isn’t at all a romantic look at the city. 

The closure of textile mills and the deindustrialization dismantled the image of old Bombay. Working class politics that once formed a vital part of city life now barely breathed. It was one thing to lead workers in strikes and quite another to turn them into revolutionaries. Dange searched for ways to deploy the working class for a wider political cause and he found it in the struggle for the linguistic state of Maharashtra.

The book does justice while covering a range of events which affected Mumbai in some way or the other. Especially the chapter on Doga is quite intriguing as it brings out the imagery of a city from a superhero’s angle and his aspirations for the city. Crime never stops in Doga’s Mumbai. It has no beginning and no end, but it endlessly changes its form. In Doga’s eyes Mumbai is never in a state of repose but in constant motion, moved by an excess of conflicting stimuli. He aptly quotes Georg Simmel here, who argues that commodity exchange erases the qualitative distinction between things, and by reducing them to their monetary equivalents, breeds an attitude of indifference.

Mumbai rejects history written as a linear story and presents it instead as a tapestry of different overlapping and contradictory experiences. I had imagined that there must be something about TATAs written in the book as they have played a very critical role in Indian Industrial circle but they had no presence in the book. Also, having stayed in Mumbai for a few years, I

was sure that there is something really peculiar about this city and more so about its people which gives them a very distinctive attitude. The aspect of why Mumbaikars are the way they are has not been taken into account. One either likes Mumbai or one doesn’t.

It was also interesting when he mentions the story told by a shopkeeper about Chor Bazaar. Even though it was inaccurate, he recounted it to show that like the bazaar which exists on the boundaries of mainstream markets, this informal representation is also out of the mainstream history.

All in all, the book’s excitement doesn’t lie in its widespread research; instead it comes from its effort to stay close to films. Maybe because people easily relate to them and the point is easily made. This book is anyhow an important one, especially today when we are on the verge of repeating history. Mumbai is degrading day by day and it’s really important that people revisit their past, learn from it and don’t repeat mistakes.