These days desperate people still go to Mumbai to find work. There was a time fifty or sixty years ago when Indians from far-flung corners — not to say some Arabs, Iranians or Armenians — arrived in the great west-coast city mainly to chase their dreams.
That tells us something about the distance the city has travelled in only a few decades. Mumbai must these days live with the ignominy of being described as no more than the country’s “finance capital” (although its pavements are now broken) when once it could have been thought of as fabulous, as Mumbai Fables (HarperCollins), the Princeton historian Gyan Prakash’s recently published account of the city, seeks to suggest.
Rohinton Mistry, the novelist, who was a home-grown Bombay boy unlike Prakash who fell in love with the Bombay of his imagination (shared by countless of his generation) from far-away Patna, has evoked the city as “Tropical Camelot”. But that was then.
Prakash and Mistry (from one of whose novels Prakash quotes) both now believe the fizz is gone. From their writing we can only infer that Mumbai offers little solace, love there can now perhaps only be coaxed out. In Mistry’s reckoning, the moment has been reached when “epitaphs” of the once mesmerising place may be raised.
Is this dire? What does Mumbai stand for today, as distinct from Bombay in another era? Or, at a fundamental level, what does it evoke in us? Does it entice still, and give us a heady feeling? An answer may soon be had from the world of celluloid. We should wait to see which self of Bombay or Mumbai Anurag Kashyap, the director, chooses to uphold in his forthcoming Bombay Velvet, for which he last week said he means to get stars in, which is apparently uncharacteristic of his cine ventures.
Of course, Kashyap need not go with either version and opt for the middle path, stressing the sensuous quality that Bombay once strongly signified, and stopping there. But will the venture then stop at nostalgia, and fall short of invoking memory which is laid out like a painting with its interstices pulsating with conflicted stories of harmony and upheavals that add up in the end to an enviable whole, quite unlike the Mumbai as she is now in Prakash’s imagination?
A film is likely to be only as good as the director’s art and craft but there is a factor to be possibly reckoned with here. Bombay Velvet is based on Prakash’s book of history, which relies no less on myths and fables and imaginings of the eras in which the colonial city was established, and when the post-colonial metropolis expanded, than on hard facts that no historian worth his salt will forsake, facts that serve as building blocks as concrete and mortar do for buildings. Another thing — the script-writer for the film is the historian himself. This has the potential to lend a new dimension to Bombay Velvet if the director can leverage the advantage.
Films, and all that goes with the idea, were an integral part of the old Bombay’s magnetism, its romance, its beckoning spirit. And Mumbai is still the cinema behemoth. But the city that enchanted has dissipated for Prakash (and Mistry).
Mistry puts this down to people of different race and religions living in peace and humanity in the city that has been lost, with things having changed now. Prakash endorses this sentiment. Nativist passions unleashed in Mumbai have cut the city’s vigour and dented the progression of life in it in innumerable ways. The same, from Prakash’s perspective, can be said of the lost working class culture that animated Bombay from the last quarter of the nineteenth century right up to the early seventies.
Cinema, the working class, the co-mingling of religions and cultures, and the infusion of modern capital, coalesced to lend Bombay its modernity that acted as the real pull for the tradition-imprisoned youth of another time to be drawn to Bombay as the moth is to the flame. Prakash’s work brings this out with energy and elan through delving into cultures and sub-cultures: songs, poems, novels, journals, comic books, rumours, myths, and superstitions and beliefs of succeeding eras in Bombay.
This makes him a frightfully good read, although his reticence to look at Bombay in the time of the freedom struggle, in particular the Quit India movement whose underground was Bombay-based, marks a lacuna. Will Bombay Velvet cover the gap? Mind, the sub-culture of the Quit India underground had its romances, rumours and its thrills — perfect ingredients that feed the imagining of a sensuousness.