'Future belongs to megacities like Mumbai'

MUMBAI: What could account for the sudden spurt in books, especially in non-fiction, exploring Mumbai in all its Hydra-headed complexity?
Many feel that the Mumbai Muse has come of age but others are more prosaic.
Penguin India editor Thomas Abraham points out that there is a growing middle-class market for narrative nonfiction, first noticed when sales of William Dalrymple''s ''White Mughals'' crossed the 10,000 copies blockbuster mark ("And it was set in 18th century Hyderabad," he chortles).
Writer Manil Suri, whose debut novel ''The Death of Vishnu'' unfolded in a Mumbai apartment block, says the publishing spurt is simply because many Indian writers in English happen to come fromMumbai.
Agrees Harsha Bhatkal of publishing house Popular Prakashan, "It has more to do with the overall increase in Indian English writing. More people are writing and since they tend to write about their homegrounds,we''re getting more books on Mumbai. The city has always been amuse for Marathi writers."
But the boom is not just about books. International interest in Mumbai has risen in the last five years, especially among academics.
Mehta attributes this to growing concern about megacities— after all, more than half the world''s population will be urban by 2020, living in sprawling, messy metropolises like Mumbai.
"The future belongs to cities like Mumbai and the world wants to know what it will be like," he says. Taking a dig at the global PhD market, he adds wryly, "There''s gold in them there slums, there''s grants to be got."
He is echoed by Homi Bhabha, a literary theorist currently at Harvard, who says that when he first went to New York, he understood it almost immediately because "Bombay had given me the key. People say the city of the future is in New York or Los Angeles, but I would say that the future is already being experienced in Bombay."
So, what is it about Mumbai that invites homage? Rushdie loved and wrote about the more gracious city of his childhood in the ''50s and ''60s, which he considered its golden age, but today''s writers find the "sleazy underbelly" equally rich material for the mining.
As Pinto points out, Mumbai still remains India''s only real city.
"Kolkata is a village, Delhi is an agglomerate and the rest are small towns," he says, adding that one of the things that marks out a real city is being able to get a meal and a taxi at any time of night.
Bhabha, who likens the literary outpouring to a "gathering storm" rather than a sudden boom, adds that three world trends—an increasingly visual culture, consumerism and the concern with multiculturalism or how different communities can live with each other— are found in Mumbai,making it "a symbol of contemporary global life".
Curiously, Mumbai is often conjured up in metaphors of appetite or performance, suggesting that love is also hate. In ''Midnight''s Children'', it is a "bloodsucker lizard in the summer heat", a "mouth always open, always hungry".
In Arun Kolatkar''s poem ''David Sassoon'', it is "a cement-eating blood-guzzling city/pissing silver, shitting gold/and choking on its vomit". And for Mehta, Mumbai is a bar dancer who "will take your money and leave you but you will always be in love with her".
Such drama in the city of Bollywood is scarcely surprising. "Mumbai is an expressive city, a dandy city which wants to perform all the time like New York or parts of Rome, which puts its life on display," says Bhabha.
"It is a city about transition and translation rather than transformation, say unlike London which is always eager to show its continuity with the past. It (Mumbai) is generously careless about its own history and therefore more cosmopolitan and open."
Agrees Abraham, "In the ''60s and ''70s, there weremany non-fiction books about Delhi and Lucknow, on the old nawab culture for example, but Mumbai is interesting to readers today because it is vibrant and contemporary."
It remains for Eunice D''Souza to strike the discordant note. The poet, whose first novel ''Dangerlok'' was published last year, says she does not care if there is a trend or not.
"It doesn''t matter when the writing is so bad," she says.
"It is the poets of Mumbai like Nissim Ezekiel and Kolatkar who have been able to capture the city best, although the novelists have got all the attention. The Bombay book has not yet been written," she adds.
"The muse has not been found—it has turned out to be a cardboard cut-out."