Film steps into the mind of this stairway

MUMBAI: Like Rome’s famed Spanish Steps, Mumbai’s majesterial flight of stone soaring up to the neo-classical Town Hall has hewn its way into urban legend.
Lovers meet here, students solve the equations of life leaning against the tall white Doric columns, and the idler, his head pillowed by dreams, watches the world speed by.
But perhaps one should say the steps have sculpted, not hewn, their way into the annals of local history, for the latter suggests a crudeness unbecoming of this solid waterfall, blessed with a breadth that only a Roman boulevard deserves.
The Asiatic steps, as they are popularly known, will be given their moment of glory in a film being made by Rafeeq Ellias to commemorate the bi-centennial year of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bombay, which is housed in the Town Hall.
Mr Ellias who has been camping at the Society for the past few months and returning home “full of dust’’ is also bursting with fascinating Asiatic trivia such as the fact that Dr Livingstone once lectured here before setting out for Africa.
But creditably, the filmmaker has also chosen to bring the street into this world of gravitas by recording the life of lesser mortals who spend hours on the stairs outside, which, in a strange way, accord them a privacy that home denies.
He is particularly keen to record quintessential Mumbai stories of youngsters studying on the stairs by streetlight and making a success of their life, or of couples meeting here and marrying later.
Prabhakar Mogaveer, for example, cleared his B.Com by using the stairs as his study. Like other regulars, he has his favourite corner, the top right-hand one, and uses it now to study for his CA. A Mangalore boy, Prabhakar has rented a tiny space in Khar, but prefers the freedom of the steps.
On this Saturday, however, the steps are deserted except for a solitary group of students preparing for their IAS exams. “It’s Valentine’s Day,’’ giggles one, explaining the thin attendance. She points to the garden ahead, and says, innocent of any desire to pun, “They’ve gone to Horniman.’’
What has really frozen the steps in public memory is Bollywood. Critic Firoze Rangoonwalla recalls the irony-tinged Town Hall scene from Pyaasa where Guru Dutt goes to attend his own condolence meeting organised by a group of schemers. It was to theAsiatic that Anupam Kher went in his star turn in Saraansh , seeking employment.
Film archivist Amrit Gangar recalls Muzaffar Ali’s 1978 film Gaman where a rustic Farooque Sheikh asks his taxi driver friend, “ Yeh sidhi waale makan kya hain? “ and the 1951 film Hulchul , where Dilip Kumar comes to Bombay and climbs the stairs, only to be imperiously shooed away. Less imperiously, Anil Kapoor dances down the flight in Tezaab , in the Ek Do Teen number that had the country grooving.
Designed by Colonel Thomas Cowper of the Bombay Engineers in 1833, the Town Hall has been alternatively praised and panned, its classical look being provocateur in both instances.
The Bombay Builder , a 19th-century publication which took a sledgehammer to the architecture of its day, calls it “a decayed old beau of the last century, whose wig sits awry and whose false teeth are falling out’’. But a century later, Aldous Huxley held it up as the only gentleman among the numerous bounders and cads, and hailed it as Bombay’s Parthenon.
The Asiatic Society is an impoverished royal, its membership stagnant, its finances in deficit. It remains a shrine for a handful of scholars but as the city’s premier repository of knowledge, it has dismal public recall. The measure of fame is the all-knowing taxi driver, who will respond to ‘Asiatic’ by driving you to a shiny department store at Churchgate which sells you everything under the sun apart from books.
(If you have a struggle-to-success story, please email the Asiatic Society at asbl@bom2.vsnl.net.in)