Mumbai's a lifetime obsession: Gyan Prakash

The portrait of the maximum city explores its inner life through the eyes of its residents, writers, planners, artists, film-makers and activists. From the terrorist attacks of recent years to land sharks, underworld dons, poor immigrants, the Nanavati murder trial, the stories behind Mumbai's historic journey reveal how it has become the symbol of survival and reinvention. He talks about his fascination with the city and his book.An obsession. Since childhood, I have been obsessed with the city,though it is not my hometown. I grew up in a town nearly a thousand miles awayfrom Mumbai, or Bombay as it was then known. Bombay was never just another bigcity, but an idea, a figure of myth and desire. Cinema, newspapers, magazines,novels and visiting relatives all stoked this desire. After I completed my lastbook, "Another Reason," which was on the cultural authority of science in India,I decided to return to this lifelong obsession. An equally important reason wasthat I find modern cities to be experiments in fabricating societies out offragments. Immigrants from different parts, people with very littleprior links patch together neighborhoods and collective life in cities. Mumbaiis a splendid example of this process. Over the last few centuries, people havewashed up in this Island City from all parts of India and beyond to create asociety of unequalled vitality and ingenuity. For these reasons, I decided to goto Mumbai about ten years ago, trying to figure out how to approach it, how tounderstand the origins and the history of Mumbai’s imaginary life. Whatlay behind it? What were the historical forces that produced the images throughwhich it was known and that made it India's classic modern metropolis? I hit thestreets, walked the lanes and by-lanes, talked to anyone who would talk to me,scoured archives and libraries, and read everything I could find written onMumbai. "Mumbai Fables" is theresult.Book publishing is flourishingin India. Unfortunately, the non-fiction category consists predominantly ofmemoirs by prominent personalities and journalistic accounts. These obviouslyshould have a place in publishing. But it is equally important to make greaterroom for books with scholarly depth. I do not mean specialized, academicmonographs, but books that draw on scholarship but are accessible and addressedto a general audience. These need not be written by scholars alone. Consider,for example, Simon Singh's The Code Book, or more recently SiddharthaMukherjee's Pulitzer-winning book on the history of cancer. One cancite many such books in Europe and North America. Their quality raises thestandard of non-fiction in general, including of those that are topical andgeared towards current events. This also forces up the standard of reviews. Asfor my book, the response has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Almost allreviewers have found it to be a book enjoyable and informative at the same time.Many readers have emailed me with appreciative words about the book's novelisticstyle. So, on the whole, I am very encouraged by theresponse.I started work onit in 2000, and it took about eight years of research. As I researched thecity, I became convinced that Mumbai's various lives -- artistic, literary,political, economic and legal -- spilled into each other. No domain wasself-contained. People lived the map of the city revealed in the newspapers andtabloids. Street life borrowed from cinema as much as the screen drew from reallife. I saw architectural plans not just as lines on paper, but also as dreamtexts. Court trials drew from theater, and cinema placed the law on trial in itsnarratives. All this cross-pollination required that my research had to identifylateral links between different materials even as I traced their respectivelinear histories. I looked for relationships between archival documents,newspaper accounts, literary materials, cinematic representations, politicaltreatises and architectural design. This made the research very demanding butalso great fun. The research was difficult but also enjoyable. I wrote the bookover the thirteen months that I lived in Mumbai during2008-09.On different days, my favourite chapter is different! Onsome days, I like the chapter on the Doga comic book the most, on other days itis the chapter on the world of writers and artists in 1930s and the 1940s, orthe one on the Nanavati case. Really, I like all of them, it is hard for me tochoose! Doga was a discovery, but so were many other things, including thedetails of the Nariman Point scam in the 1970s, which I used liberally to writethe script for "Bombay Velvet," a film that Anurag Kashyap will produce anddirect. A wonderful discovery was Meera Devidayal and Atul Dodiya'sart.The increasing drift towards neoliberal capitalism combinedwith the powerful nexus between land sharks, politicians, and bureaucrats doesnot bode well for the city. Add to this the power of the two Senas and theopportunism of the Congress, the future looks clouded. However, I am veryupbeat about the resilience and resistance from below. Ultimately, the mountingurban problems affects them the most -- they spend more time commuting to work,have cramped spaces to live in, are paid miserably, and denied adequate publicservices. Yet, they survive and struggle. In the end, Mumbai's future dependson their aspirations and on their struggle to fight for them.Yes, I do, butI am very choosy because there is a lot else — more specialized, scholarlybooks and fiction — that I also like to read. Currently, I am readingMichael Lewis's The Big Short because he is excellent in providing you with ariveting ethnography of the Wall Street while also explaining its irrational andalmost criminal practices.