Bombay, blockbuster style

BOMBAY AFTER AYODHYA: A City in Flux

Author: Jitendra Dixit

Publisher: Harper Collins India

Pages: 356 

Price: Rs 599

How does one imagine a city? The skyline, perhaps. The streets, landmarks, events and histories, the food, the festivals, and of course, the people. If the city is a living organism, then writing the biography of a city requires the biographer to connect with the cells in its blood vessels.

When I picked up Bombay after Ayodhya it was with the expectation that author-journalist Jitendra Dixit, the current West India editor at ABP News Network, would present a deep dive into the communal tensions that flared up during and after L K Advani’s Rath Yatra passed through the city in September 1990. I was expecting a view from the ground on how the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, and the subsequent communal riots of December 1992 and January 1993, changed the character of India’s “Maximum City.”

Instead, Dixit’s book is a brief biography of the city. The narrative begins before Ayodhya and expands well into the 2000s. It is, in fact, a story of evolution, much more expansive than what the title suggests. The argument is that Ayodhya’s shadow over Mumbai falls larger than the immediate political events. It seeps into the narrative of purabiya (eastern) immigrants, colours the infamous gang wars, and weaves into personalities, places and icons that make Mumbai. From Pramod Mahajan to Harshad Mehta, from dance bars to the Ganapati pujas, from scams and scandals to daily domestic rituals — Dixit’s book makes a simple, not entirely original, but powerful point. The years 1990, 1991, and 1992 have reshaped India at its cellular level, and the implications of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Ayodhya march cannot be overemphasised.

Bombay after Ayodhya is a journalist’s book, and we are following a reporter. At times he will be woken up from his sleep in the middle of the night with news of an important person’s death. Or we might find him racing to the ground zero of a riot or a political rally. The reporter meets other reporters, witnesses breaking news slipping past his grip, flags major “news leaks” and praises the tenacity of his peers. The reporter is in love with the news; he adores the news-making process. The grimy details of back-channel politics are presented as if a dish on the Michelin catalogue, with a side of context, and a generous helping of off-the-record gravy. It is a journalist’s book not only because it’s rooted in Dixit’s decades-long career and approach to writing as a journalist, but also because of how subtly it celebrates the reporter's daily job as the first chronicler of the city.

This is also a cinema book. Dixit might be a journalist, but he has a flair for drama. The narrator, whether as a school kid or as a reporter, invariably finds himself at or close to most of the crucial junctures of the city’s history. He is caught on the wrong side of town during a riot. He walks with a local politician on the eve of the latter’s assassination. He is friends with a gangster’s bodyguard. The book begins with a sweetmeat seller bashing a local goon with his  karchi and earning lasting street cred in his immediate locality; this sweetmeat seller turns out to be the narrator’s grandfather. With ample police shootouts, political schemes, and fiery personas, the book sits on the shelf right next to the S Hussain Zaidis and the Suketu Mehtas, plots ripe for the making of Bollywood blockbusters.

But most importantly, Dixit presents us with a guidebook to the cities within the city. Mumbai is nothing without its underbelly. And while this underbelly has been captured in films and books in such copious detail and exhaustive research that it no longer remains “under”, there’s always more to add, it seems. In the chapter on dance bars, for instance, there’s a subtle change of gear in the narrative approach. While the focus remains on interviews and interactions with the dances, the on-ground realities, we are also seeing the bar’s economic currency — its pla­ce in the larger financial puzzle of Mum­bai. Most refre­s­hingly, tho­ugh, the web of the economy here is not connected through tra­n­sactions but through peo­ple; it’s the usual group of pimps, gangsters, policemen and dancers themselves but we now see them step out of their immediate surroundings, walk into stock exchanges, brush up against income tax departments and dawdle at the race course.

Dixit’s book, therefore, is both about the larger machinery as well as the people who are cogs in these wheels. The guidebook is not just a walkthrough of “Bombay’s” people, places, and events, but also a history that seeps into nooks and crannies you won't expect. It is a brochure of connections you didn’t know existed.

It reads in place like a crime caper pocketbook and in others like taught journalistic inquiry. But it is definitely a contender for future web series or film adaptations.