Rubble among the waves

CITY ADRIFT
A Short Biography of Bombay
Naresh Fernandes
Aleph Book Company
157 pages; Rs 295

We may scoff and turn our noses up at the priest in Unnao who has triggered a gold rush with his night-time fantasies, but we have a history of following dreams. We believe in the visions that flash before our eyes as we sleep, sceptics be damned. "The modern city of Bombay owes its genesis to a dream of three goddesses," writes Naresh Fernandes in City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay. A government contractor, Ramji Shivaji, dreamt that the goddesses Mahalaxmi, Mahakali and Mahasaraswati were unhappy because they had had to flee their original haunts in Worli and hide in the creek after Sultan Mubarak Shah's men had captured Bombay (as Mumbai was then called) in 1318. Shivaji's dream came in handy for William Hornby, the governor of the city in the early 1770s who was struggling to build a wall that would dam the creek and close the breach between the islands of the city. "Though the boats kept dumping stones into the ocean for a seawall, the dike refused to hold" and that's when Shivaji, urged by the goddesses, cast his net into the creek waters and pull them out. Soon thereafter the embankment was built and Shivaji was sure to have earned himself commensurate compensation with the contract that his dream helped bag. He would also have been suitably feted by the people of his time because Govind Narayan (Govind Narayan's Mumbai, 1863) wrote that the embankment changed the fortunes of Bombay. From a swampy, disease-ridden and primitive settlement, Bombay became a city of fortunes. It became a city that would fuel the dreams of many, for generations to come.

As anyone with even a peripheral acquaintance with the city would know, Bombay has always worshipped commerce. It has idolised figures such as Premchand Roychand, whose ingenuity led many to call him a magician. Roychand's exploits led to the first big financial crash, in July 1865 and, for a while, he became the most hated man in the city. But then, as now, Bombay was quick to bounce back and Roychand won back the city's affection by funding a clock tower at the University building. He, like many others, has proved the city's longstanding "profit held primacy over principle".

In recent years, the city has seen umpteen financial scams, the frequency and magnitude of which have increased as the city has grown older. Although there is a sense of outrage that fills its streets every time a scam unravels or is exposed, with age, the city seems to have learnt to take it in its stride. What it hasn't been able to do, yet, is come to terms with the violence of December 1992.

The demolition of the Babri Masjid brought the city uncomfortably close to its violent streak, which had been kept under control by its overwhelming affinity for business. It seemed not to matter who one sat across the table with as long as it ended in a deal. But the riots changed all that. Today the city treads carefully around the divides and, perhaps for the first time in its history, does not bridge the gaps even if it means forfeiting a potential business transaction. The author paints a vivid picture of the state of the city during the riots: "…Sena cadres stepped out of the party's 221 street-corner shakhas. Every Muslim was a target. Residents of buildings from affluent Malabar Hill to middle class Borivali scrambled to unscrew the nameplates on their doors and lobbies." The fear that his words help pluck out of time is palpable.

Strangely, the book is silent on the manner in which the city reacted after the terrorist attack on November 26, 2008, which has had a huge impact on the psyche of its citizenry. The book also skirts around the change in the city's character that has come about on account of migration. While we get to see how the city's infrastructure has crumbled under the weight of the migrants and are also informed about how political parties have built their credentials on the anti-migrant plank, there is little on how the city is changing with the imposition of new customs, different traditions and diverse belief systems.

Bombay has always been an immigrant city; this gave it its cosmopolitan character. In the past decade or so, however, the people who have come to live here have changed the way the city conducts itself. Not only has the city's geography been redrawn - a whole new set of suburbs have taken centre stage - but its heart beats to a different pace. Unfortunately, this book does not venture into these spaces; if it had, we may have had a fresh perspective on a city that has been chronicled many times over.