Bombay
Amit Chaudhri on Bombay in the Guardian.
A couple of days ago, after a performance in London, an old schoolfriend who had come to my concert offered to drop me at the station. He had come to listen to me sing - and to show me how to operate my first ever MP3 player, whose stock of songs he had provided. Music, which had brought us together in conspiratorial and competitive ways when we were growing up in Bombay, had continued to be a common interest even now; and this exchange of songs and information went back to when we were privileged, tie-wearing, precocious schoolboys. The one thing, naturally, we never did then, and we always do now when we see each other, is talk about the city we still refer to as Bombay; it has taken on a retrospective, definitive meaning for us, but it has also burgeoned and changed unimaginably in our absence.
As usual, our conversation on the subject registered gentle disagreements: we both admitted to still loving the city, but I said I was increasingly disturbed by its present incarnation. A few years ago, a taxi driver had told me that someone dining at the exclusive Indigo restaurant could spend in a night what he earned in half a year. On a subsequent visit, I had noticed, not far from Indigo, a woman and her children sitting on the brightly lit road, vacantly absorbed in their own universe. The disparities in Bombay had always been crude, but liberalisation and the free market had legitimised consumerism and spending, and made it seem, in the metropolis, more effective than social work. It was essential to splurge at the Indigo for the lot of the woman on the road to change: the thread connecting one to the other may not be obvious to the passerby, but it was apparently undeniable. In the process, Bombay's middle and especially its upper classes - always large-hearted and relatively free of introspection, always upbeat - had slowly but irrevocably been infantilised. It was an infantilisation that even my friend and I, after all these years, consciously re-enacted, as he showed me the buttons to press on the MP3 player, a way of connecting to the world and the past: it was, in part, why we still loved Bombay.
The Indigo is only a five minutes' walk from the Taj Mahal hotel. In the past 12 hours, I have been watching pictures of the Taj taken from different angles: trapped guests leaning out of windows; the top storey burning; swathes of smoke covering the majestic dome. I have also seen pictures of two very young men with AK 47 rifles, one of them in a T-shirt with Versace printed on it in large letters. People, including my wife calling from India, have mentioned 9/11 and New York, and I suppose there is a comparable degree of strangeness - combined with the inevitable sense of having been betrayed and outwitted - in these attacks. The comparison also possibly arises from the joy-loving nature of both cities, capitalism and the new world order after the collapse of the Soviet Union having transformed them both decisively - New York into the world's first city, Bombay into India's great metropolis.
My parents moved to Bombay from Calcutta in 1965, when I was an infant - they stayed at the Taj for two weeks while the company found them a flat. This was the beginning of Calcutta's decline, companies and professionals fleeing labour trouble, and relocating at this optimistic seaside metropolis in western India. It was a charmed life - from at least two of the flats we lived in when my father was finance director and then chief executive of Britannia Biscuits, flats in Malabar Hill and Cuffe Parade, the city's two richest localities, you could see a skyline that, with its lissom, tall buildings (Bombay is the only Indian city to have had an obsessive romance with the vertical, the skyscraper), approximated Manhattan in some ways; in its sunniness, its palm trees, its disguised but obvious carnality, it echoed what we knew of California from films; and the gothic buildings were remnants of the old history that had first brought together these seven fishing islands.
From different windows and balconies in those two flats, at different points of my life until 1982, when my father retired, the dome of the Taj (the "old" Taj, as it came to be known after the arrival of its neighbour, the Taj Intercontinental) was visible, grey, as seemingly and deceptively stationary as a low cloud. Like Calcutta, and unlike Delhi, with its Moghul and Sultanate lineage, Bombay had no really great historical or religious monuments; its landmarks, in keeping with the fact that it was the progeny of an almost innocent-seeming colonial modernity, were secular ones - hotels; cinema halls, such as the Eros, the Regal, the Metro; grand, untidy railway stations such as the Victoria Terminus. To call the Taj the "old" Taj was to deliberately indulge in a flagrant misnomer, and a reminder of Bombay's willingness to rewrite history in terms of the urban, the kitschy, the comic: it was as if the "real" Taj Mahal in Agra had never existed except in those most incredible of objects - school textbooks.
A great deal changed in the early 90s, along with the name: Bombay obliterated, and turned into Mumbai, at the behest of the rightwing Shiv Sena. The old place names then become a currency of a middle-class oral culture, and recur in slips of tongue that reveal as much as they hide.
The politics of Bombay itself became intolerant in the past 25 years, but the city, discovering its true metier with liberalisation, became more heterogeneous and variegated than I can remember, partly because its old centres of wealth had to disperse and scatter from within, as property prices rose unthinkably and offices moved to the less salubrious suburbs. Similarly, the uncontainable, swelling traffic enforced the creation of new routes, flyovers through previously unvisited (for the middle class) areas, and random, swift, and intriguingly uneven, gentrification.
As Bombay expands and shrinks, and you take the new routes and visit the relocated offices, you are struck by the architectural marvel it is: the thrilling juxtaposition of churches, mosques and small Hindu shrines, the genteel, suburban residential houses, with flower pots and swings, that you had never before noticed.
No city I know, certainly not New York, has this variety of life, except perhaps London. Its principal difference from these two cities, which, in many ways, it surpasses, is its relative intolerance of the learned, academic classes: it has ceased to have a great university. When, in a traffic jam, you look at the faces in a car near you, you do not see anyone - whether it's a trader or a corporate executive - who is lost or unfocused, who is not engaged, in some sense, in the final, unifying, daytime activity of money-making. Yet, for all its opacities and daily injustices, it is impossible to think of Bombay without a quickening of excitement and pleasure, and not to recall that quickening with awe and confusion at moments such as this one.
thanks Devis with babies for the link.
A couple of days ago, after a performance in London, an old schoolfriend who had come to my concert offered to drop me at the station. He had come to listen to me sing - and to show me how to operate my first ever MP3 player, whose stock of songs he had provided. Music, which had brought us together in conspiratorial and competitive ways when we were growing up in Bombay, had continued to be a common interest even now; and this exchange of songs and information went back to when we were privileged, tie-wearing, precocious schoolboys. The one thing, naturally, we never did then, and we always do now when we see each other, is talk about the city we still refer to as Bombay; it has taken on a retrospective, definitive meaning for us, but it has also burgeoned and changed unimaginably in our absence.
As usual, our conversation on the subject registered gentle disagreements: we both admitted to still loving the city, but I said I was increasingly disturbed by its present incarnation. A few years ago, a taxi driver had told me that someone dining at the exclusive Indigo restaurant could spend in a night what he earned in half a year. On a subsequent visit, I had noticed, not far from Indigo, a woman and her children sitting on the brightly lit road, vacantly absorbed in their own universe. The disparities in Bombay had always been crude, but liberalisation and the free market had legitimised consumerism and spending, and made it seem, in the metropolis, more effective than social work. It was essential to splurge at the Indigo for the lot of the woman on the road to change: the thread connecting one to the other may not be obvious to the passerby, but it was apparently undeniable. In the process, Bombay's middle and especially its upper classes - always large-hearted and relatively free of introspection, always upbeat - had slowly but irrevocably been infantilised. It was an infantilisation that even my friend and I, after all these years, consciously re-enacted, as he showed me the buttons to press on the MP3 player, a way of connecting to the world and the past: it was, in part, why we still loved Bombay.
The Indigo is only a five minutes' walk from the Taj Mahal hotel. In the past 12 hours, I have been watching pictures of the Taj taken from different angles: trapped guests leaning out of windows; the top storey burning; swathes of smoke covering the majestic dome. I have also seen pictures of two very young men with AK 47 rifles, one of them in a T-shirt with Versace printed on it in large letters. People, including my wife calling from India, have mentioned 9/11 and New York, and I suppose there is a comparable degree of strangeness - combined with the inevitable sense of having been betrayed and outwitted - in these attacks. The comparison also possibly arises from the joy-loving nature of both cities, capitalism and the new world order after the collapse of the Soviet Union having transformed them both decisively - New York into the world's first city, Bombay into India's great metropolis.
My parents moved to Bombay from Calcutta in 1965, when I was an infant - they stayed at the Taj for two weeks while the company found them a flat. This was the beginning of Calcutta's decline, companies and professionals fleeing labour trouble, and relocating at this optimistic seaside metropolis in western India. It was a charmed life - from at least two of the flats we lived in when my father was finance director and then chief executive of Britannia Biscuits, flats in Malabar Hill and Cuffe Parade, the city's two richest localities, you could see a skyline that, with its lissom, tall buildings (Bombay is the only Indian city to have had an obsessive romance with the vertical, the skyscraper), approximated Manhattan in some ways; in its sunniness, its palm trees, its disguised but obvious carnality, it echoed what we knew of California from films; and the gothic buildings were remnants of the old history that had first brought together these seven fishing islands.
From different windows and balconies in those two flats, at different points of my life until 1982, when my father retired, the dome of the Taj (the "old" Taj, as it came to be known after the arrival of its neighbour, the Taj Intercontinental) was visible, grey, as seemingly and deceptively stationary as a low cloud. Like Calcutta, and unlike Delhi, with its Moghul and Sultanate lineage, Bombay had no really great historical or religious monuments; its landmarks, in keeping with the fact that it was the progeny of an almost innocent-seeming colonial modernity, were secular ones - hotels; cinema halls, such as the Eros, the Regal, the Metro; grand, untidy railway stations such as the Victoria Terminus. To call the Taj the "old" Taj was to deliberately indulge in a flagrant misnomer, and a reminder of Bombay's willingness to rewrite history in terms of the urban, the kitschy, the comic: it was as if the "real" Taj Mahal in Agra had never existed except in those most incredible of objects - school textbooks.
A great deal changed in the early 90s, along with the name: Bombay obliterated, and turned into Mumbai, at the behest of the rightwing Shiv Sena. The old place names then become a currency of a middle-class oral culture, and recur in slips of tongue that reveal as much as they hide.
The politics of Bombay itself became intolerant in the past 25 years, but the city, discovering its true metier with liberalisation, became more heterogeneous and variegated than I can remember, partly because its old centres of wealth had to disperse and scatter from within, as property prices rose unthinkably and offices moved to the less salubrious suburbs. Similarly, the uncontainable, swelling traffic enforced the creation of new routes, flyovers through previously unvisited (for the middle class) areas, and random, swift, and intriguingly uneven, gentrification.
As Bombay expands and shrinks, and you take the new routes and visit the relocated offices, you are struck by the architectural marvel it is: the thrilling juxtaposition of churches, mosques and small Hindu shrines, the genteel, suburban residential houses, with flower pots and swings, that you had never before noticed.
No city I know, certainly not New York, has this variety of life, except perhaps London. Its principal difference from these two cities, which, in many ways, it surpasses, is its relative intolerance of the learned, academic classes: it has ceased to have a great university. When, in a traffic jam, you look at the faces in a car near you, you do not see anyone - whether it's a trader or a corporate executive - who is lost or unfocused, who is not engaged, in some sense, in the final, unifying, daytime activity of money-making. Yet, for all its opacities and daily injustices, it is impossible to think of Bombay without a quickening of excitement and pleasure, and not to recall that quickening with awe and confusion at moments such as this one.
thanks Devis with babies for the link.
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