Salaam Bombay: An ode to the glorious city before it became Mumbai

Deluged with unpleasant news every Monsoon, Mumbai had a different face to show the world when it was Bombay. The writer takes a trip back in time

It’s open season now, a sort of rite of monsoon. Wet-behind-the-ears television reporters, sometimes in ankle-deep water, breathlessly intone about flooding or the latest building-collapse that has trapped people under the debris; anchors put on sombre faces and ask them inane questions; and pundits gravely bemoan urban decay as yet another affliction troubling India. Even worse, events in other big cities don’t draw such harsh attention. As the media has anointed Mumbai “Maximum City”, it surely cannot crumble.

They are right, of course, but Mumbai when it was Bombay was never so vulnerable. I have known the city all my life and have spent my formative years there. It is indelibly etched in my earliest memories of over seven decades. Lyricist Majrooh Sultanpuri aptly captured the impression of the megalopolis in the hit song of the 1956 film, CID: Kahin building, kahin trame, kahin motor kahin mill (buildings here, trams there, cars and mills everywhere).

And what buildings they were! The landmarks included the Gothic masterpiece Victoria Terminus (only old names and spellings in this piece of nostalgia), the Indo-Saracenic domed structures of the General Post Office and the Prince of Wales Museum, the grand Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal Hotel opposite it, Art Deco cinema houses in South Bombay and apartment buildings along Marine Drive, fittingly dubbed the Queen’s Necklace. (Bombay had the second highest number of Art Deco structures in the world, after Miami Beach in Florida.) Sprawling mansions of the rich and the powerful on Malabar Hill, cathedrals, churches and mosques (but no imposing Hindu temples), Bombay’s tallest Rajabai Tower at the High Court and granite-faced academic institutions and government offices populated South and Central Bombay.

General post office, Bombay: Rajendrakumar Sahani/ Wikimedia Commons

Numerous crowded chawls housed the lower middle classes. The middle class occupied modest apartment buildings in mid-town areas between Dadar, Mahim and Sion. Bandra was the East Indians’ own distinct habitat. The noveau riche film folks preferred Pali Hill and Juhu.

The Bombay mass transport was truly wondrous. Engineless electric local trains ran on three parallel north-south corridors. Red double-decker buses and trams crisscrossed the entire island city. And they were not the rickety contraptions that plied in other cities; they were easily the best east of London, in fact imported from the Blighty. They were cheap, reliable and well-patronised. While Bombay took them for granted, visitors gawked at these modern marvels, the likes of which no other Indian city had.

Railways were the lifeline of the port-island city; they not just moved its people but also connected it to the mainland. The two systems, the Bombay Baroda and Central India (now Western) and the Great Indian Peninsula (now Central), had their termini at Bombay Central and Victoria, respectively. The former was relatively drab, livened by the huffing and puffing of the mighty steam locomotives of about a dozen trains. The Victoria Terminus, now a Unesco World Heritage edifice, was something else, a Gothic masterpiece with stained glass window panels. A K Bir caught the spirit of the bustling station through overhead gantry shots of trains arriving at overcrowded platforms in 27 Down (1974). Its review (regrettably, I cannot recall by whom) likened it to little trains coming to pray in the cavernous cathedral. Neither terminus was the noxious foul-smelling mess it now is.

Victoria Terminus, Bombay: Rajendrakumar Sahani/ Wikimedia Commons

The city roads boasted a galaxy of automobiles – an occasional Cadillac, pre-war sedans like Packards, Oldsmobiles, Buicks and Studebakers, as also the downmarket Dodges and Plymouths, and post-war smaller British cars like Austins, Morisses and Hillmans. You name it and Bombay had them all! The wide boulevards had central tram lanes and smooth traffic. Marine Drive, Hornby Vellard and Worli Sea Face provided magnificent vistas of the Arabian Sea. Black-and-yellow cabs, in three sizes, small, medium and large, all metered and driven by men in prescribed livery, took you to all corners of the city. Refusing fares and cheating were unknown. Horse-drawn carriages with collapsible tops, called victorias and run by North Indians, provided cheaper, if more leisurely, conveyance. The rare two-wheelers mostly belonged to the police.

The Bombay Police – constables in blue tunics and “half-pants” and officers in white – were masters of not just managing traffic but also crime detection. Modelled after New Scotland Yard, the Bombay Police boasted that they always got their man (there were hardly any women felons then).

A hundred chimneys belching smoke dominated the mid-town skyline of Parel, Worli and Naigaum. Their sirens at change of shifts added to the urban cacophony. Bombay’s textile mills produced the world’s best and cheapest cotton fabrics. They attracted labour mainly from the impoverished Konkan coastal belt, but also smaller numbers from upcountry areas. The mills were mostly owned by Gujaratis and Parsis, but class and community differences had not yet become issues.

Elphinstone College, Bombay: Rajendrakumar Sahani/ Wikimedia Commons

The Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC) managed the civic affairs efficiently. It ran profitably the Bombay Electric Supply and Transport Undertaking (with a befitting acronym BEST). Water from Powai, Tansa and Vaitarna lakes came in eight-foot-diameter pipelines. Filtration plants ensured entirely potable tap water. Conservancy and sewage services were again remarkably effective. BMC ran kachra special trains carrying garbage to landfills in and out of the city.

Famed educational bodies made Bombay the preferred destination of aspiring Indian scholars. Its university was one of the first three established in 1857. Elphinstone, St Xavier’s and Wilson colleges in South Bombay and Ruia in Dadar provided quality undergraduate instruction. Grant Medical College and the attached Sir Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy Hospital were for long the premier Indian medical institutions. Seth Gordhandas Sunderdas Medical College attached to the King Edward Memorial College were not far behind, making Bombay the proud city with two leading medical organisations. Students and patients alike flocked to them. The J J School of Art rivalled Santiniketan as the country’s leading visual arts centre, with its own galaxy of renowned artists.

Performing arts flourished in Bombay. Marathi theatre thrived in Girgaum and Dadar, while Kalbadevi was home to Gujarati, Parsi and Urdu drama companies. The Indian People’s Theatre Association and Prithvi Theatres (of Prithviraj Kapoor) produced progressive Hindi plays and nurtured talented playwrights and artistes albeit in genteel poverty. Many of them later gravitated to the more lucrative film world.

Bombay tram, 1952: Rajendrakumar Sahani/ Wikimedia Commons

Bombay became synonymous with Hindi cinema after 1947, when Lahore went to Pakistan and Calcutta withdrew into Bengali pictures. Film studios sprang up all over the city, from midtown to far-flung suburbs. The Bombay film moguls counted A R Kardar, Chandulal Shah, Mehboob Khan, Sohrab Modi among the old guard and Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt and Dev Anand among the young Turks. Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand were the reigning superstars (the term was coined some two decades later). Suraiya, Nargis, Madhubala, Meena Kumari and Geeta Bali were the nation’s sweethearts. Music was Hindi cinema’s staple and the true expression of the newly independent India. Lata Mangeshkar was its diva supreme. The film world was genuinely secular. The arguably greatest bhajan of all time, Man tarpat Hari darshan koaaj, was written by a Muslim (Shakeel Badayuni), tuned by a Muslim (Naushad Ali) and sung by a Muslim (Mohammed Rafi).

Some Bollywood (as it is now called) films, notably those by Guru Dutt, Dev Anand (his Taxi Driver mentions Bombay in title credits), were specifically located in Bombay. They gave you alluring glimpses of the city and its working. But while they were in Bombay, they were not all about Bombay. That distinction belongs to a handful: Bimal Roy’s Naukri, which describes the tribulations of a nameless job-seeker in the metropolis, Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420, about the nefarious get-rich-quick exploitation of the gullible, and Guru Dutt’s Kaagaz ke Phool, about a filmdom lion in his winter and his disenchantment. Johnny Walker, a must in the 1950s’ films, deserves a special mention. This Bohri actor played Everyman. His cast and community were immaterial. What mattered was his ne’er-say-die spirit despite limited means, with nary a trace of evil even when he committed shady deeds, and his steadfast support of the hero through thick and thin. He personified the undying spirit of Bombay.

Victoria Terminus, Bombay: Rajendrakumar Sahani/ Wikimedia Commons

All that began to change in 1960. Trams, considered dinosaurs of the pre-oil crisis, pre-global warming era urban traffic, were the first to go that year. Mills took a little longer.They were going downhill thanks to mill-owners cashing in their inheritance unmindful of the imperative of modernising. A spitfire doctor-turned-labour-leader, Datta Samant, shut them down with an indefinite strike in 1982. They never recovered from that mortal blow, their idle workers seething with anger. Underworld forces shot dead Samant. Organised crime discovered a lucrative sideline – politics, besides the mainstay, smuggling.

Bombay suffered ugly agitations in the mid-1950s in the Maharashtra cause. Bombay’s inclusion as Maharashtra’s capital, which Jawaharlal Nehru, the then prime minister, and Morarji Desai, then the Bombay State chief minister, strongly resisted, was the focal point of the agitation and later developments. Desai had to quit, but not before forcing a bilingual Marathi and Gujarati state of Bombay in 1956, when other states were reorganised linguistically. Desai’s successor Y B Chavan managed to make Maharashtra and Gujarat separate states in 1960. The old coexistence was permanently shattered.

Two small-time cartoonists, brothers Bal and Shrikant Thackeray, started a Marathi comic weekly, Marmik (loosely translated as the connoisseur), in the early 1960s. Witty caricatures and pithy writing popularised it. Soon, Bal decided to speak out against the “injustice” done to the original inhabitants, the Marathi underclass. That narrative quickly gained traction and the Shiv Sena, advocating militantly the Marathi cause, was born. It directed its fire not at those responsible for the Maharashtrians’ distress but the supposed “outsiders” – Gujaratis, South Indians, Muslims – and quite successfully at that. In the 1967 Lok Sabha election, the central minister S K Patil, known as Bombay’s uncrowned king, lost to a stormy petrel named George Fernandes. At about the same time, chief minister Vasantrao Naik’s Backbay Reclamation project ushered in big, mostly black, money and builders into the city and state politics.

Johnny Walker

This change for the worse was irreversible. BMC became a cesspool of corruption. Councillors, including the newly elected Shiv Sena members, made more money than they could count. Bal Thackeray replaced Patil as Bombay’s uncrowned king, allegedly with the Congress’ tacit support. The flow of outsiders turned into a veritable flood spawning shantytowns all over the expanded city. V S Naipaul wrote of choking on the stench of human excreta on his maiden trip going from the airport to his hotel. Bombay had begun turning into Mumbai.

Mumbai today is home to some 20 million souls, five times more than Bombay. But it is not just another megalopolis by the sea going to seed. True, it regularly faces many calamities: monsoon ravages, building collapses, water shortage, and tragically, organised, unspeakable terror attacks. But it always picks itself up in no time. Its gallery of heroes includes Joint Commissioner of Police Hemant Karkare as well as Constable Tukaram Omble.  

When I feel low about Mumbai, I recall Bombay and watch Taxi Driver. Try it; I guarantee it works and lifts the spirit instantly. There is a bit of Johnny Walker in every Mumbaikar.