World Policy Institute

Bombay/Mumbai: The Postmodern CityAuthor(s): Mira KamdarReviewed work(s):Source: World Policy Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 75-88Published by: The MIT Press and the World Policy InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40209533 .Accessed: 07/04/2012 08:20

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REPORTAGE Mira Kamdar is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute.

^^^ Bombay/Mumbai ^^^m The Postmodern City ^^^r Mira Kamdar

Bombay is no longer Bombay. The official name of the city is now Mumbai, after a local female deity whose distinguishing charac- teristic is the lack of a mouth. In the wake of decolonization and the retreat of the West, many cities in Asia that formerly sported Anglicized names have reindigenized them. We are now used to Beijing instead of Peking. We are getting used to Yangon for Rangoon. Across India, the recovery of city names from Anglicized versions has been going on for some years: Baroda is now Vadodara, Poona is now Pune, Banares is now Varanasi. But in Bombay's case, there is much more at stake in changing the name to Mumbai than the simple recovery of a name repressed under colonial rule.

In I960, Bombay was made capital of the newly created state of Maharashtra. In 1966, the radically pro-Maharashtrian party, the Shiv Sena, w;as founded by a former newspaper cartoonist, Bal Thackeray. The party's name, which literally means "Shiva- ji's army," refers to the Hindu king, Shivaji, who defended the kingdom of the Marathas in the seventeenth century. One of the Shiv Sena's stated goals was to drive all non-Ma- harashtrians out of Bombay. Exploiting the frustrations of Maharashtrians, who made up roughly 40 percent of the city's popula- tion but who remained excluded from the top of the economic heap, Thackeray stead- ily expanded his political base over the next two decades. In 1985, the Shiv Sena took control of the Bombay Municipal Corpora- tion, and its influence continued to grow.

It was not until 1995, however, when a coalition of the Shiv Sena and the right-

wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party was elected to run the government of the state of Maharashtra that the name of the city was officially changed to Mumbai. Many residents do not like the new name at all and defiantly continue to refer to their city as Bombay. Even the national govern- ment of India has announced that, to avoid unnecessary confusion, it will continue to re- fer to Mumbai as Bombay (and to Chennai as Madras, but that is a different story).

The name "Bombay" almost certainly de- rives etymologically from the word "Mum- bai," which got altered as it passed through the mouths of first the Portuguese and then the British colonizers. Indian speakers of Marathi, Gujarati, and Hindi have always called the city Mumbai when referring to it in the vernacular. Still, for anglophones, for- eign and Indian alike, who know and love Bombay, it is hard to swallow the name change. Even to nonspeakers of English in India, the name "Bombay" has an allure, a magical quality (which derives in no small part from the city's film industry), that "Mumbai" does not. "Bombay" is as evoca- tive in its own specifically resonant way as are "Paris," "Berlin," or "Rio." Nor does Mumbai refer to quite the same city as Bom- bay. More important, the city of Mumbai does not belong to the same people as Bom- bay does, and a rather vicious fight is on to see whose city Bombay/Mumbai will be.

Many believe that Bombay, a city that prided itself for centuries on its cosmopoli- tanism and its tolerance, died in 1993. Fol- lowing the razing in northern India of the Babri Mas j id mosque by Hindu national ex-

Bombay /Mumbai 75

tremists in late 1992, two large-scale riots, one in December 1992 and another, far worse, in January 1993, racked the city. Sixty-seven percent of the hundreds of vic- tims were Muslims, who make up only 1 5 percent of the city's population. In March 1993, in apparent retaliation for the target- ing of Muslims during the riots, bombs ex- ploded at the Bombay Stock Exchange and the Air India Building in Nariman Point, two visible symbols of Bombay's standing as the business capital of India.

The riots provided the Shiv Sena with an opportunity to display the extent of its con- trol over the city. Hundreds of Muslims were systematically hunted down and mur- dered, their homes ransacked, their shops looted, their factories burned to the ground. Bombay's police, once considered one of the finest forces in India, aided and abetted the instigators of the carnage and looked the other way as innocents were slaughtered. Bal Thackeray openly bragged that the Shiv Sena was directly responsible for the riots and threatened to exercise his power to in- cite such mass violence on any future occa- sion he might deem appropriate. Although attempts were made, all the way up to the Supreme Court of Maharashtra, to hold him responsible for the bloodshed, the various cases were dismissed, and Thackeray has to date suffered no ill consequences from his in- volvement. What shook up the elite of the city was that even wealthy Muslims in posh areas were targeted, further underlining Thackeray's impunity and driving home the point that no one, no matter how rich, was safe. For the first time in Bombay's history, where money has always meant power, the rich were vulnerable.

Under Thackeray's leadership, the Shiv Sena is fighting to seize control of the city's identity. Its members do not want Bombay to be a cosmopolitan city; they want Mum- bai to be a Maharashtrian city. Hence the name change, the terror, the ongoing extor- tion and strong-arming, the mass spectacles designed to fire up supporters. The Shiv Sena

has been adept at channeling the pent-up frustrations of millions of the city's residents who, having come to Bombay from rural Maharashtra in search of opportunity, find themselves relegated to low-level clerical and civic posts if they are educated, or work as domestics or casual laborers if they are not.

New York Plus Hollywood There is a lot of money in Bombay, not to mention glamour. Bombay is New York plus Hollywood, home to a film industry whose distribution range stretches from the Persian Gulf all the way through Southeast Asia. The city is a magnet for the dispossessed, the ambitious, and the star-struck from the en- tire subcontinent. Yet, though it attracts le- gions, it grants success to very few, and by and large these have not been Maharashtri- ans. The big money in the city is, for the most part, in the hands it has been in since the seventeenth century: with the Parsis, the Gujaratis, and, of course, the foreigners. Many of the city's dispossessed resent this unfair division of wealth and live in a state of constantly frustrated expectations. The Shiv Sena's organizing strategy has been to focus the frustration of unemployed and un- deremployed Maharashtrians against those, particularly Muslims and South Indians, with whom they must compete for scarce, marginal, and ill-paid jobs.

The struggle between Mumbai and Bom- bay is not only a struggle over the identity of one of the world's great cities. It is a con- test between provincialism and cosmopoli- tanism; a struggle between a city defined by its relationship to the territory contiguous with it, in this case the state of Maharashtra, and a city that is the economic engine of an entire country. Bombay ,with a population of 12-15 million (there are no reliable fig- ures for a city in which so many lack perma- nent housing), accounts for 38 percent of the total income tax revenues of a country whose population exceeds 900 million. The port of Bombay is India's biggest; its inter- national airport the country's largest. It is

76 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 1997

the home of the largest film industry (in terms of number of pictures produced per year) in the world. It is India's financial capi- tal, and the Bombay Stock Exchange is the largest and most active stock market in South Asia. Most of the world's leading in- vestment houses, including Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Morgan Gren- fell, have offices there.

A great national and regional city, Bom- bay aspires to become a truly global city de- fined primarily, as such cities are, by its relationship with other global cities. The struggle for Bombay is a struggle between an internationalized, wealthy elite, which is allied with an emerging middle-class that increasingly identifies with and participates in the global consumer culture, at one ex- treme, and, at the other, the vastly more nu- merous poor who have become more or less irrelevant in the global, postindustrial world but who nevertheless still need to eat, con- tinue to dream, and keep coming to the city.

This struggle is not unique to Bombay. Most of the metropolises in the southern half of the world face similar problems. A new geoeconomic reality has emerged in which it appears that cities that cannot gain admittance to the network of global cities defined by New York, London, and Tokyo risk becoming irrelevant to the global econ- omy altogether. Meanwhile, they must deal with a hopelessly overloaded and crumbling infrastructure while parceling out to their growing urban populations ever scarcer re- sources in an increasingly contaminated en- vironment. One need only mention Manila, Jakarta, Cairo, Sao Paolo, or Mexico City to conjure up images of severe pollution, traffic jams that slow commuting to a crawl for hours, shantytowns mushrooming on every spare square foot of available land. When de- cent housing, potable water, full-time jobs with benefits, and usable roadways exist in sufficient quantities for only a very few, peo- ple fight tooth and nail to be among the lucky ones. For despite their problems, these cities are centers of wealth, industry,

and entertainment, and as such they con- tinue to attract far more millions of refugees from rural poverty than they can possibly ac- commodate decently.

Bombay is indisputably India's best can- didate for global city status. But can Bom- bay make it into the global league? The optimists among those who love the city bet that it will. The more clear-eyed believe its chances are slim.

The Death of Cosmopolitanism I have never lived in any of the other major cities of the Southern Hemisphere. I have lived in Bombay. As a child, I attended school there, collected shells on Juhu Beach, and marveled at the carefully pruned topiary of the Hanging Gardens. I visited the Tara- porewala Aquarium in awe because my cousin had caught, with his bare hands, a baby shark that was subsequently taken to live there. I played kite war from the roof of our building against children on the roofs of surrounding buildings. (Almost all children in Bombay, rich or poor, become adept at maneuvering the string of a small tissue-pa- per kite, which has been dipped in glue and then coated with crushed glass, against an adversary's kite with the goal of severing the other's string.) I attended many, many wed- dings (the prime social occasion in Bom- bay). I still visit often, and I have enough relatives and friends there that I never have to stay in a hotel. All my life, I have known the city as "Bombay," and that is how I will refer to it in the rest of this essay.

When I arrive in Bombay, family mem- bers inevitably greet me with the words: "Welcome home." I cannot say it is my home. My home is New York. But Bombay is like a second home; a city whose smells, sounds, rhythms, and landmarks are inti- mately familiar to me because I have lived there on and off over a period of several dec- ades, and because my family and friends live there. Although they complain about how polluted and crowded the city has become, most of its rich residents are passionately in

Bombay/Mumbai 77

love with it. Many have spent time in New York, London, Paris, Singapore, or Tokyo, yet they choose to live in Bombay, and they will tell you they would not live anywhere else in the world.

The less successful, those who are re- spectable but threadbare members of the middle class, are planning their escape. They hate the pollution and the daily commute that has lengthened from one hour to two hours or more; they are frightened by the Shiv Sena's rise to power. I have an uncle who has lived in Bombay for over 40 years. He says that, as a Gujarati, he feels that the city under the Shiv Sena has become a hos- tile place. When he retires in a few years, he will leave Bombay for Gujarat where, he says, "at least I will be among my own peo- ple." I find this unspeakably sad. The death of cosmopolitanism is not a happy thing.

The Naked Spirit of Enterprise Of course, few of Bombay's inhabitants have the luxury of leaving the city. They are refu- gees from places to which they can never re- turn. They have no peaceful retirement to look forward to. An estimated 70 percent of Bombay's residents live a highly precarious existence on the streets or in slums. They have little or no access to the most basic civic amenities (potable water, toilets). Most work in the "informal sector," selling any- thing and everything they can. Yet Bombay offers them more than they are likely to find where they came from: in the city, if noth- ing else, they will eat. The city also offers hope, dreams, and even real opportunity.

To illustrate her view that the essence of Bombay is its entrepreneurial spirit, one of the city's most glittering and smartest celeb- rities, the writer Shobha De, told me about her cook. While working for her, he has been running a canteen operation on the side in which he now employs four people. He has saved enough for a down payment on a new two-bedroom flat in the suburbs into which he has just moved his family. His children attend private schools. In all of In-

dia, only in Bombay could a domestic ser- vant hope to improve his or her lot by this

degree in a single generation. Bombay is In- dia's America, a beacon of opportunity for the country's huddled masses.

Dharavi, a huge slum that lies in a sort of marshy pit at the northern boundary of

Bombay proper where the infinitely expand- ing suburbs begin, is the quintessential ex-

ample of this spirit. Here, people live in

appalling conditions, crowded day and night in swelteringly hot tin-roofed rooms, con- stantly subjected to the nauseating odors of

rotting animal carcasses, raw sewage fer- menting under the tropical sun, and chemi- cals from the many tanneries that form the core industry of the settlement.

Dharavi is said to be the largest slum in Asia. Certainly, it is one of the most horrible anywhere. A couple of months ago in Bom- bay, I met a team of young American tele- vision journalists one evening just after their first visit to Dharavi. They reported them- selves to be more "shell-shocked" than they had been a few days earlier at the front of the civil war in Afghanistan. They had returned to their hotel from Dharavi and scrubbed themselves under a pelting shower trying to remove the terrible smells that, hours later, they felt still clung to their bodies. "We re- ported on the Gulf War. We've reported on the Kurds. We've seen horrors. We've been to Cairo. We've been to Rio. We thought we'd seen the worst there was to see but nothing compares with what we saw today."

What they did not see in Dharavi, or did not comment on, was proof of the power of the enterprising spirit of the poor against unimaginable odds. There are many success stories in Dharavi. People who perhaps be- gan at the very bottom, removing by hand the bits of meat clinging to animal skins so the tanning process could begin, eventually coming to own their own processing facili- ties. Along with this progression come im-

provements in their dwellings, from simple huts made out of scrounged materials to two-story brick buildings of perhaps 240

78 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 1997

square feet with real roofs overhead. Even those who live several to a room in which they sleep by night and do piecework by day, sending every spare rupee home to fami- lies who would perish without the money they provide, have more opportunity than they did in their moribund villages in, say, Bihar or Uttar Pradesh.

There is genuine fellowship and solidar- ity in Dharavi. It is a real community where people know and look out for one another. There have been various schemes to move people out of Dharavi into subsidized hous- ing in the suburbs but most refuse to leave. Much of the land on which Dharavi is built did not exist before the poor who squatted there began to reclaim it bit by muddy bit from the sea. It is now, as is all land in pen- insular Bombay, extremely valuable. Bi- sected by shop-lined lanes with cheerful fronts, it is a hive of human endeavor.

Not everyone profits in this process, of course. There are millions of tragic tales of human suffering in Bombay. It is a very tough place, unforgiving in the predatory nature of its business ethic. Most entrepre- neurs in Bombay, whether factory owners or pimps, use the most freely available raw ma- terial around - other human beings - to make their fortunes. The grotesquely unbal- anced distribution of wealth and the near total lack of investment in basic civic ameni- ties that force the majority of the city's resi- dents to live in subhuman conditions, along with the rampant air and water pollution that plague Bombay, are evident side effects of the predatory profit principle.

It is easy to feel utterly overcome by the magnitude and severity of Bombay's prob- lems. This is true not only of first-time tour- ists who retreat in befuddled horror to the make-believe world of their five-star hotels but also of long-time residents who find numbness to be a workable strategy for cop- ing with the daily sensory and moral over- load. It is only in specific experiences that one can begin to grasp with human feeling the dark side of the Bombay success story.

As a train I was traveling on recently brought me into Bombay from a nearby hill station where some of the wealthier resi- dents of the city have their weekend retreats, I had a chance while we waited to enter a suburban station to observe a family of rag- pickers as they went about their morning ab- lutions in front of their shack built against the inside of the retaining wall along the railroad track. There were bundles of dis- carded plastic bags piled high around the hut, which they had collected to sell to recy- clers. The mother walked down to the ditch next to the track and collected some water in a small bucket which she then took up to her naked son of about six or seven. She pro- ceeded to wash him with the greatest tender- ness imaginable, making sure, as I do with my son, to get behind his ears and under his arms. She used her wetted finger to clean his teeth. She washed down his legs and feet as he stood patiently in the dust. Her daughter had just undergone the same treatment and was busy pulling on a grayed dress, obvi- ously washed and air-dried overnight.

I turned my eyes away from this scene into which I felt I had no right to intrude. Somehow, despite living under the gaze of the passengers of hundreds of passing trains, this family manages to preserve its dignity and humanity, while eking out an existence by collecting the plastic refuse of the con- suming classes.

One of the most vivid memories of Bom- bay from my childhood is of a trip from the suburban residential neighborhood of Juhu Beach into downtown Bombay in a second- class car reserved for women and children. (My mother had decided we children should realize that not everyone traveled first class.) I was ten years old. Suddenly a little girl of perhaps three was thrust into the car by a pair of adolescent boys. She made her way through the compartment, dancing.so as to make the bells around her ankles tinkle, her

palm extended for coins. The girl had been blinded, her arms broken and reset at odd angles, and several of her fingers cut off, all

Bombay/Mumbai 79

in order to incite more pity in spectators. The boys either owned her outright or were agents charged with working her through the trains and bringing in her take for the day in the evening. I will never forget the look of rapacious greed in their eyes as they pushed her into the compartment, watched her progress, and collected her at the end. In his poignant novel about Bombay, A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry brilliantly profiles the beggars of the city who have un- dergone similar "professional alterations" and their handlers - just one of the city's many industries.

The City of Gold It is this naked and limitless spirit of enter- prise, this infinitely inventive drive to turn anything into money that is the essential characteristic of Bombay. The goddess Mumbai may well have been worshipped on the islands that later would be patched to- gether to form the firmament of the city, but it is Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, who is the real propitiatory deity of Bom- bay. Unlike Calcutta's Kali, a horrible-look- ing martial goddess whose thirst must be satisfied every day with the blood of hun- dreds of sacrificial goats, Lakshmi is always pictured as serenely beautiful, bedecked in silk and jewels, standing on a lotus flower, a smile on her lips, gold coins spilling from her outstretched hand. Glittering and glam- orous Bombay, like Lakshmi, holds out the promise of fortune but exacts cruel sacrifices from her devotees even as she continues to entice them.

As every British and Indian school child knows, the territory around the loose collec- tion of malarial islands that was to become Bombay came to the British Crown as a dowry gift from the Portuguese Infanta Catherine of Braganza upon her marriage to Charles II in 1662. The British built the city of Bombay for the sole purpose of mak- ing money, and they made a lot of it. In the process, a few Indians got rich too. By the mid-nineteenth century, Bombay had be-

come the commercial and industrial capital of India, home to the great business houses of the Tatas and the Wadias, Bombay's Carnegies and Vanderbilts. There were two classes of people who came to Bombay: merchants and laborers. First came the merchants from Gujarat: Jains and Parsis. Baghdadi Jews came, and Sassoon eventually became one of the most illustrious names in the history of commercial Bombay. The la- borers poured in from neighboring Ma- harashtra. Later they came from South India, from Bihar, from as far away as Bangladesh, from anywhere poor to seek a better life in the great city.

One of the hallmarks of Bombay, which was commented upon by nearly every visitor who happened to stop by in the last 300 years or so, was its cosmopolitanism, its rich conglomeration of different ethnic, regional, and religious groups whose members went peacefully about their business because all differences were subservient to the require- ments of commerce. Until recently, it never mattered in Bombay where people came from, what religion they professed, what food they ate, what language they spoke, what their caste or class was: one made one's reputation in Bombay on the basis of achievement alone.

Bombay is the city in India in which women are the most free. They drive cars, wear jeans and miniskirts, and run compa- nies: activities that are infinitely more rarely undertaken by females elsewhere in the country, where a woman who dared to move about with half the freedom of a Bombayite would face social censure or even physical violence. As Bombay's fore- most restaurant critic, Rashmi Uday Singh, said to me: "Nobody bothers. I go back and forth between my flat and the club where I swim in a swimming suit and shorts, and no one could care less. They're too busy doing their own thing, and any- way, what does it matter? Bombay is simply the best city in the country as far as women are concerned."

80 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 1997

Changing Bombay's name to Mumbai is an attempt to transform this cosmopolitan city, to localize it, to tie it to the state of Ma- harashtra, and more specifically, to Thack- eray and his Shiv Sena party. I have been warned by friends and family not to write "Bombay" on letters addressed to them be- cause postal workers will not deliver them. A letter addressed to Bombay is a dead letter.

Greatly simplified, the question at the heart of Bombay/Mumbai's identity crisis is this: is Bombay - the financial capital of the world's fifth largest economy, the largest producer of feature films in the world, and the advertising, marketing, and fashion capi- tal of India, with a mindbogglingly cosmo- politan population of Gujaratis, Punjabis, Sindhis, Jains, Parsis, Jews, Christians, Mus- lims, and Hindus, many of whom are as at home in New York, London, or Dubai as in their own city where they can watch The Bold and the Beautiful or CNN while drinking a Coca-Cola like any other global citizen - to become a global city?

Or is Bombay to become Mumbai, to be- long to the Maharashtrian Hindus whose rightful role has been usurped by the South Indians, Gujaratis, Muslims, and other "for- eigners" who have prostituted themselves shamelessly to the rapacious interests of mul- tinational capital or, at the least, taken away their jobs?

The fact is that most of Bombay's resi- dents, rich and poor, including the Maha- rashtrians, most of whom come from villages in the rural hinterland of their state, are mi- grants from somewhere else. Everyone comes to Bombay for the same reason: for the op- portunity to reinvent oneself, to make one- self over, to make it big. For the better-off, Bombay is where the attributes of caste, class, and gender, which dictate destiny in most of the rest of India, can be shrugged off, where one can dream of becoming a film star, a wealthy industrialist, or a successful stockbroker tooling around town in a Lexus like the legendary market manipulator Har- shad Mehta, making deals on a cell phone.

For the young growing up on a diet of inter- national pop television culture, Bombay is where they can participate in the happening club culture, wear the newest styles, and party down to the beat of the latest Indo- pop hit their ex-pat counterparts are danc- ing to in London and New York.

For the very poor, who make up the great majority of the residents of Bombay, the city is a place where a landless peasant, an untouchable, or an indentured laborer starving to death in rural or small-town In- dia can find work, eat, maybe even buy a television set one day. Only one thing drives the city and all its citizens: the relentless pursuit of money.

The Postmodern City The American journalists who were so af- fected by their visit to Dharavi found what they had seen there hard to reconcile with the clubs they had visited the previous night where the entry charge was 2,000 ru- pees (about $55) or more, and where, by the time they had had one drink and gotten out, they had spent more than the equivalent of $85 apiece. These clubs are packed with the golden youth of Bombay, dressed in the lat- est designer clothes from New York, Paris, or Milan, dripping with gold and diamonds, their chauffeur-driven cars waiting outside.

Such contrasts are the essence of contem- porary Bombay. People who possess noth- ing, not even themselves, live on top of the most atrocious human and toxic waste while, in the same city, people drink the best im- ported champagne for $100 a bottle. Many commentators on the city have opined that to understand the existence of such extremes in Bombay at the end of the twentieth cen- tury, one should reflect upon the contrast be- tween rich and poor that existed in London or New York at the end of the nineteenth century, when the robber barons amassed huge fortunes in a free-for-all environment unfettered by unions, workplace safety con- cerns, or minimum wage requirements while the masses of the poor crowded into filthy

Bombay /Mumbai 8 1

tenements, their smallest children forced to work. There is truth in the analogy but the context has evolved from an industrial one to a postindustrial one, and therein lies a huge difference. Bombay in the 1990s is not so much a replica of the age of inequality the West left behind long ago as the proto- type of an urban future that may await us all.

Bombay is the postmodern city par excel- lence, where past, present, and future collide and fragment, where the local and the global and everything in between mix together in a heady masala all the city's own. The most as- tounding contrasts meld into combinations that are impossible to decode.

In Bombay in the 1990s, what deter- mines who is in and who is out, who is rich and who is poor, is the global consumer culture flowing out of and back into the image industries. The golden youth seen in the clubs will happily point to the new Benetton, the new Ford auto dealership, the availability of Coca-Cola and myriad American television serials freshly beamed in on Star TV as tangible signs of the city's improvement.

If you are what you consume, if the me- dium is the message, and if image is every- thing, then the availability for local pur- chase of the things one sees on television is critical to feeling that one exists. One of In- dia's most famous advertising executives, Alyque Padamsee, calls the new hipped-out youth in Bombay "zuppies" because every detail of their dress, language, manner, and consumer habits are modeled on what they see on the local ZTV network.

Many of Bombay's privileged youth who formerly would have wanted nothing more than to leave for the promised land of the West would not consider leaving now. The very hippest among them are working or as- pire to work in Bombay's image industry -

film, television, advertising, fashion. As they do, they conjugate the global culture streaming in with the mix pouring in from every region of India and spin out new com- binations of looks, sounds, and tastes. Some

of these leak out to the West: Indo-pop mu- sic, chat (Indian-style spiced tea with milk, which is served in the coffee houses of New York's East Village), fashion elements quoted by Calvin Klein. Others are con- sumed regionally: Bombay is the tastemaker for all of South Asia in matters of dress, slang, music, and video.

The Struggle for Land In Bombay, money almost always has some-

thing to do with land. Every day, scores of destitute people come to Bombay in search of nothing more than survival. I have seen them, whole families huddled together on the floor at the end of "non-air-conditioned second class" train compartments (since they have no tickets, they do not dare occupy seats): scrawny women in threadbare saris who appear to be 60 but in fact are probably no more than 35 or 40 years old, with small snot-nosed, bare-bottomed children cling- ing to them, the men squatting nearby smoking bidis. Next to them are the bundles of bamboo poles and plastic sheeting that will constitute their homes.

Other than that, they have nothing; nothing more than a semblance of shelter and the clothes on their backs. It will not be easy for them to find space for their tents. They will soon discover that every inch of sidewalk, every easement, every empty drain- age pipe waiting to be installed has been claimed.

With its 12-15 million people crowded into 600 square kilometers, Bombay has a population density of more than 20,000 peo- ple per square kilometer. Built on islands that were connected by dredging and drain- ing marshlands, the city is a long narrow peninsula hemmed in on three sides by the sea. A plot in an established slum big enough for a tent such as these people have can cost one lakh rupees (100,000 rupees, or about $3,000), or more than ten times the average per capita annual income. At the other end of the scale, a 1 ,200 square-foot apartment in posher Bombay proper, say in

82 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 1997

Malabar Hill or Breach Candy, easily fetches over a million dollars, payable in cash only. It is extremely difficult to find rentals be- cause India's well-intentioned laws protect- ing tenants make it such that once a family is in, it is nearly impossible to get them out, so owners are reluctant to rent. When a rent- al can be found, a deposit equivalent to half the market value of the property must be paid up front in cash. A standard two-bed- room apartment in Bombay proper rents for anywhere from $3,000 to $6,000 a month. Even far out in the suburbs, a two-hour or more commute from the city's commercial heart, an 800 square-foot apartment sells for as much as $350,000.

One of the biggest issues in the Bombay/ Mumbai struggle is the fight over who con- trols and who will profit from the city's land. Within the last 15 to 20 years, many of the textile factories that had formed the industrial base of the city since the mid- nineteenth century have gone out of busi- ness. But because of India's extremely con- voluted laws governing industry and labor, they cannot easily be sold off. Moreover, unionized labor (the mills are practically the only place in Bombay where unionized labor ever took hold in the private sector) might protest too strenuously. The land on which these mills sit has become enormously valu- able, worth several hundred million dollars or more.

As the value of this land has increased and the value of the mills on it has plum- meted, a complex and violent tug-of-war has broken out over getting this land freed up for development and over who will sub- sequently reap the enormous profits that will be made in the process.

A couple of years ago, Sunit Khatau, a wealthy textile mill owner, was assassinated in broad daylight when his Mercedes was stopped at a light at one of Bombay's major intersections. A wealthy construction com-

pany owner, O. P. Kukreja, was also mur- dered in a separate incident. Earlier this year, when I was in Bombay, the city's most

famous labor boss, Datta Samant, renowned for his leadership during the unsuccessful but extremely protracted 1982 textile mill- workers strike, was gunned down in front of his house in a contract-style killing.

The day after his murder a bundb, or clos- ing of all places of business, was called, and the entire city waited tensely to see whether or not there would be mass bloodshed. As it turned out, there were only isolated inci- dents of stone throwing but offices and schools were closed, children's birthday par- ties were canceled, public transportation was suspended, and servants failed to show up for work. The memories of the riots of 1992 and 1993 are still very fresh, and peo- ple watch anxiously for any ripple of mass discontent on the city's deceptively calm sur- face. For a day following the killing, the city ground to a halt, then breathed a sigh of relief and got going again.

Everyone knows, however, that a new ex- plosion could occur at any time, depending, they say, only on the whim of Bal Thackeray and the Shiv Sena. In Bombay today, the cost of a supari, a contract killing known for the name of the fragrant nut placed in the killer's palm to seal the deal, is reportedly 10,000 rupees, or less than $300.

Around the nexus of closed textile mills, faltering labor unions, and land that has be- come way too valuable has coalesced a shady marriage of organized criminal elements and, it is rumored, the Shiv Sena, which are using the unions to muscle their way in as this land is converted into residential and commercial properties. Sunit Khatau, the mill owner, was reportedly killed for failing to come to an understanding with rival ma- fia gangs trying to take over the union in his mill. The builder Kukreja is said to have been killed for not paying off rival gangs who wanted a piece of one of his construc- tion projects. Datta Samant, the theory goes, had to be eliminated so that criminal elements could take over the unions. The word is that the Shiv Sena is intimately in- volved in all this. At the least, the party is

Bombay/Mumbai 83

said to have promised the mill owners that there will be no trouble from the unions over sales of mill lands so long as its own designated leaders are allowed to run the unions and the party gets a piece of the pie when the land is sold and developed.

"Black Money" Bombay, a port city where customs agents and the police have traditionally looked the other way for a consideration, has always been a haven for smugglers and gangsters. A significant proportion of the economy of the city is and has always been in "black money." I remember once at a wedding being stunned by the diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and huge South Sea pearls on display. When I commented on this to an uncle, he replied: "How else can we spend our black money?" In this kind of an envi- ronment, where even legitimate business owners more often than not do a significant portion of their business off the books and where the corruption of officials is legen- dary, criminal business endeavor has always existed.

Even in the days of the East India Com- pany, a company man made his real fortune "on the side." Until very recently, smug- gling was the primary criminal economic ac- tivity. Drugs, guns, human beings - or just foreign consumer goods in an era when duty on some items was as much as 300 percent -

you could always get anything you wanted in Bombay. But tariffs have been substan- tially reduced and much of the smuggling into India is now done by air.

The feeling is that the really big money in Bombay will now be made from the trans- formation of an economy based on industry and manufacturing to one based on financial and other high-value services. One of the first steps in that process is the conversion of the land on which old factories sit into resi- dential and commercial properties.

Certainly millions will be made, if for no other reason than the incredible surplus demand for housing in an impossibly over-

crowded city. But if the manufacturing base of the city is dying, what will happen to the workers? Bombay, like the rest of India, suf- fers from high rates of illiteracy. In a high- value services economy, such as the one Bombay covets, where will unskilled and often illiterate factory workers find jobs? In the United States, the mantra of the last few years has been that only superior education and technical know-how will preserve the competiveness of the American worker. This is no less true of the worker in Bombay, if it is truly to become a global city.

Of course, there is a significant work- force in India of highly educated people, many of whom already work in the financial or high-tech areas. Microsoft's Bill Gates vis- ited Bombay this last March, subsequently commenting in a Fortune magazine inter- view that he was impressed with the caliber of the high-tech workforce in India and an- nouncing his intention to off-load there some of the excess work piling up in the United States.

This layer of Bombay's citizenry will have no trouble finding work in a service economy. However, they are a proportion- ately small part of the total population of the city. Moreover, the competitive advan- tage they offer over their counterparts in the United States, Europe, or Japan is their rela- tively cheap cost. Kirit Mehta, the owner of CMM Studios, Bombay's state-of-the art video and audio production and postproduc- tion facility, is confident his company will be hugely successful in a global context. (When I visited CMM, a technician was busy in one of the soundproof studios dubbing an episode of Bewitched into Hindi for local ca- ble broadcasting.) He says his animators - who do first-rate work, he assures me - earn about 12,000 rupees a month (a little more than $300). He tells me the international rate for a good animation artist is $125 an hour. The competitive labor advantage is stunningly obvious. How the Bombay ani- mator is going to afford a decent place to live on $300 a month is less clear. How his

84 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 1 997

uneducated fellow city resident is going to survive at all is even more mysterious.

A "New" Bombay One of the biggest obstacles Bombay faces as it contemplates this transition is the woeful lack of adequate infrastructure. Kirit Mehta has millions of dollars in state-of-the art pro- duction equipment running constantly. But Bombay does not have a dependable source of electrical power to keep everything going. So, like everybody else, Mehta has a system of back-up generators. Even private citizens of means in Bombay (and in other cities all over India, including New Delhi) have diesel

generators that kick in when the power goes off, as it does with unpredictable frequency.

This is a severe national problem: follow- ing the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991, there has been an enormous growth in the consumption and production of appli- ances and activities that require electricity. The large-scale advent of computerization, the explosion in the local production of tele- vision programming and advertising, the dramatic increase in households possessing refrigerators, radios, televisions, stereos, fans, air conditioners, and the like have gen- erated a demand for electrical power that cannot be met by existing capacity. Progress in this sector has come slowly and in fits and starts.

The travails of life without adequate electricity are compounded by poor tele- phone facilities. Anyone with money these days tries to get around the antiquated and hopelessly inefficient telephone network by using a cellular telephone. However, unless the person being called also has a cellular

telephone, this is not a solution. It can be maddeningly frustrating to try to get a local call to go through. When you do reach your party, you often find yourself screaming into the telephone in an attempt to be heard and/or talking over the other conversations to which you are suddenly privy in a sort of

party-line situation where no party line is

supposed to exist. Often, inexplicably, the

line just goes dead. If you want to call an- other major city in India, you may do so reli- ably at any one of the new STD telephone service booths around the city (and country), but it is a horrendously expensive and rarely private undertaking. If you have long-dis- tance dialing privileges at your home or business you may call from there, but you also run the risk of receiving extraordinarily inflated, non-itemized bills that can neither be explained nor contested. If you do not have long-distance capacity, you must book a "trunk" call and wait for an operator to call you back with your party on the line, paying a premium for each such call.

At a more sophisticated level of commu- nication, e-mail and access to the Internet re- main tightly controlled and are expensive unless one is a member of a university or other such institution. Still, many multina- tional financial institutions and businesses with offices Bombay are now able to com- municate efficiently via e-mail. Others do so via fax, which is less expensive than the telephone.

The infrastructural deficits in housing, electricity, and telecommunications are bad enough. Worse than these is the transporta- tion crisis. Bombay does have an excellent municipal bus system, but buses, as all other vehicles, move at a snail's pace on vastly overcrowded roads. Bombay also has, or had, an excellent commuter rail system but it has more than exceeded its intended capacity. Hundreds of thousands of people take the train into downtown Bombay and back home again every day. These trains are packed to an extent that defies imagina- tion - people hang out every door, holding on with their fingers. They pour out of the trains at Churchgate Station in a solid stream of humanity that makes the rush- hour commuter trains of New York, Lon- don, Paris or even famously dense Tokyo look like empty pleasure carriages.

The worst aspect of the transportation problem is the roads. Automobile sales in In- dia are soaring but there is no room for the

Bombay/Mumbai 85

new cars on the existing roads. The entire city of Bombay has just one main road run- ning down the middle of its main north- south axis, which, for much of the way, is just two lanes wide. It is the road by which the city's food comes in every day. It is the road to the airport. Traffic often slows to a dead standstill.

As a consequence of increased traffic and poor quality fuels, the air pollution has got- ten so bad in a city that always prided itself, as against New Delhi, for example, on the cleansing quality of the sea breeze, that it is the number-one topic of complaint. The city's residents are so hyperconscious of the deterioration of their air quality that the ad- vertising industry has attempted to capital- ize on their feelings with such slogans as: "Pollution Solution? Rinse with Listerine."

Near the airport, the road becomes a four-lane highway, improbably lined with lollipop-shaped billboards painted with fad- ing flowers and the names of private corpo- rate sponsors. The effect is not attractive. Neither are the open sewers running along both sides of this most modern of Bombay arteries. It struck me this last trip, as I made my way by the familiar side roads from the airport at Santa Cruz to nearby Juhu Beach, a posh area inhabited notably by several movie stars that is a sort of Bombay variant of Mali- bu in California, that the same open sewers and drains I first saw in 1967 are still there 30 years later. Spectacular private bungalows draped in bougainvilla surrounded by high walls with luxury cars in the driveway and satellite dishes on the roof are surrounded by open sewer drains in which rats, pie dogs, and pigs rout and mosquitoes breed.

The abysmal lack of adequate sanitation facilities - from clean running water, to toi- lets, to sewer lines, to sewage treatment plants - is one of the scourges of Bombay. In the heat of most of the year, the stench emanating from the city anywhere north of Worli, which, as far as I can ascertain, is where the sewer lines cease to be buried, is indescribable. The formerly rich fishing

grounds around Bombay have died out un- der the onslaught of untreated sewage and industrial effluent.

Why in such a rich city - and Bombay is the richest municipality in India and one of the richest in the region - are these condi- tions tolerated? There is lots of money in Bombay but very little of it is used where it is most needed. It is possible to understand how this, alas, could be so when only the welfare of the poor is at stake, but the situ- ation has deteriorated to a point where not even the rich can escape.

I have spoken with a variety of the city's civic, cultural, and business leaders about this problem and have gotten a variety of re- sponses, most of which are the predictable it- erations about entrenched corruption and graft: the same old story of allocated funds disappearing rather quickly into private pockets. However, there is also a consensus that the seriousness of the situation has fi- nally forced a recognition on the part of the elite that something has to be done, if not by the municipality, which has so far proven itself hopelessly unable to cope, then by pri- vate means.

When pressed, these leaders told me about schemes to build new private toll roads, both along the north-south axis and between Bombay and the city of Pune to the east, and about a plan to introduce hydrofoil commuter ferries up and down the west coast of the city and between the city and New Bombay on the mainland. It all seems a bit too fantastic.

But then, Bombay is a fantastic city and it is blessed with people of enormous drive and creativity. The potential in Bombay is great, the energy palpable, the faith in the future strong. Whether the city will be able to overcome the obstacles that threaten to thwart its dreams is an open question. There are real efforts being made. A young woman named Shaheen Mistri has started a project called Akanksha to educate children in the slums of Bombay. She has garnered a lot of support for her project from private sources,

86 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 1997

and when I visited one of Akanksha's liter- acy classes, I was as struck by the bubbling enthusiasm for learning of the very poor children the project serves as by the obvious dedication of the teachers and volunteers working with them. It is just one of thou- sands of private charitable initiatives that, each day, make a small but positive differ- ence in the lives of a few hundred or a few thousand people. Certainly basic education is one of the primary investments the city should make in its future.

On another level, Alyque Padamsee, the advertising executive, has started a project to educate the elite about their responsibil- ity for the city's welfare. It is his belief that the root of Bombay's problems, as of India's, is the lack of a sense of civic duty. Working with a couple of leading citizens, he has started a group called "Society for Public Ac- countability." His group's point of departure is that there are laws aplenty that address all the social and environmental problems the city faces but they are too rarely enforced, so it is initiating lawsuits against government authorities who have failed to enforce laws that protect the people's welfare.

Bombay was where India's independence movement was nurtured. Gandhi made his famous "Quit India" speech there in August 1942. An aunt of mine, who was seated on the dais with Gandhi in her volunteer's or- ange sari on that day, considers every grain of sand on Chowpatty Beach to be sacred be- cause India's national leaders have addressed the people from there and walked on that sand. Bombay has been the leading city of India for at least the last century and will probably remain so for the foreseeable fu- ture. The question is, Can it hope to become a global city and, by extension, can India as- pire to become a global power?

End of the Goonda Raj? As I sat in Bombay one recent evening, sip- ping a draft beer at Cafe Naaz up on Malabar Hill with the "Queen's Necklace" of lights arcing around Marine Drive below, I very

much wanted the answer to be "yes." In the twilight, the city looked enchanting. Driv- ing through the old fort area later that eve- ning, I admired the classic Indo- Victorian buildings of Bombay's British colonial hey- day, which were all lit up, looking every bit the magnificent architectural jewels they are. It may seem an extravagance to put scarce electricity to use illuminating build- ings, but the former sheriff of Bombay, Nana Chudasama, has organized sponsor- ship of this as part of his "I Love Bombay" campaign. Chudasama believes that small things, like building clean public toilets, whitewashing walls, and planting trees can go far toward inspiring civic pride, which in turn can be turned into a sense of civic responsibility.

Later that night, I visited Banganga Tank, the most ancient sacred temple pool left uncovered in Bombay. I had heard ear- lier during my stay from a couple who be- long to one of the city's great commercial aristocratic families their inspired descrip- tions of the private Indian classical music performances they regularly host in their pa- latial home. They had also sponsored a per- formance of devotional music on a platform in the middle of the tank, small oil lamps floating on the pool's surface, the music echoing off the surrounding walls.

Thinking about that concert there in the dark, the sounds of the city stilled for once, I could imagine a Bombay before the cur- rent chaos. But then, this same couple had also told me how the business elite from the old families is quite pessimistic about the future. Many of its members have not done as well as they had hoped in the post- liberalization era. Wealthy though they re- main, their influence is waning. They are not part of the cultural mainstream of the city, which is eagerly vulgar, crassly materi- alistic, criminally spectacular.

In November 1996, Michael Jackson gave a concert to an audience of 35,000 fans in Bombay. One of the most consistent planks of the Shiv Sena's platform has al-

Bombay/Mumbai 87

ways been its commitment to indigenous cultural values, yet Bal Thackeray and his

party eagerly embraced the Jackson concert. In fact, at the concert, the entire Shiv Sena

entourage was prominently on display in a

special enclosure. Saffron-tinted flags and banners were evident everywhere, and saf- fron bandannas graced the heads of many concertgoers, some of whom had paid as much as $500 for a ticket. (Saffron is the Hindu holy color and the official color asso- ciated with the Shiv Sena, whose leaders often dress in saffron-colored robes.) Photo-

graphs of Michael Jackson paying darshan at

Thackeray's home appeared in the press. (Paying darshan is, literally, to take in the

sight of a revered entity - a god, a holy per- son, or a senior politician.) After Jackson's visit, Thackeray shared with the public his fond remembrance of the totally natural way the international superstar had interacted with his grandchildren and how he had even used the toilet at the Thackeray home.

Whether it is a Michael Jackson concert or a riot, the Shiv Sena knows how to rev up youthful energy and channel it to its own

purposes. In this case, beyond underlining the Shiv Sena's international pop status, there was a lot of money made. Estimates of the total take from the concert (Jackson gen- erously waived his own fee) was 200 million

rupees, or a little more than $5 million.

Eighty-five percent of this was to go to the Shiv Udyog Sena, a charitable youth organi- zation run by Bal Thackeray's nephew, Raj. The state of Maharashtra was by law to have collected approximately 114 million rupees in entertainment taxes, but Jackson's music was put into the "classical" category, and the tax was thus evaded.

For the Shiv Sena, the management of the collective enthusiasms of mass spectacle, including riot, is an integral part of how it

preserves and expands its power over the

city. It is a political marriage of image and

money where definitions are fluid and infi-

nitely manipulable; a regime that may per- fectly suit the postmodern city.

The most hopeful sign I had about Bom-

bay's future came from one of the taxi driv- ers I met in my rounds of the city. A native of Bombay, he was, by his own definition, a

"pure Maharashtrian, 100 percent." He was 30 years old and had been driving a cab for 16 years. He drives a ten-hour shift from 6:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., at which point his fa- ther takes the cab out for another ten hours. He lives in a single room measuring eight by ten feet with his parents, his two broth-

ers, and his wife. He has a bachelor's degree in economics but has been unable to find work and cannot afford to go back to school to try something else. His favorite actress is the (now deceased) Smita Patil. His favorite actor is Nasruddin Shah. These are not stars of "Bollywood," as Bombay's commercial film industry is called, but stars of films that are shown in the art houses of Paris and New York as well as India.

When I asked him what the greatest problem facing Bombay was, he replied: "Fi-

nance," by which, it turned out, he meant a lack of good job opportunities. When I asked him what he thought about the Shiv Sena, he hesitated at first but then he said: "You were here in 1993? That trouble? It was all caused by them. They are nothing more than goondas [hoodlums]."

I asked him whether or not the Shiv Sena would remain in power. He said defi-

nitely not. Everyone knew they were thugs. They had not made good on any of their

promises to the poor. There was no way they would last. Those who love Bombay can

only hope he is right.* This essay is fourth in a series on the global city.

3g WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 1997