place become diffused. He urges you to forget that Bhuleshwar could be confined by a fixed address, and places his commentary in the world of fantasy by alluding to the imagery of a wonderland.
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Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood kaiwan mehta, yoda press, delhi, 2009 Rs 295, Pp 188 |
The source of that fantasy is the colonial moment. Bhuleshwar becomes a way of reaching out imaginatively to the nineteenth and earlytwentieth century past of Mumbai and seeing it refracted many times over in our contemporary lives. It is a touch of small-town India, complete with temples, shrines, narrow streets, caste-inflected enterprises and both the freedom from one’s roots as well as the abrupt tightening of tradition’s stranglehold should you stray too far. A glimpse of Surat here, a touch of Goa there, an entire lane of Konkan-style coastal homes turning into a small street that could well have existed in colonial, equally cosmopolitan Karachi. The neighbourhood becomes a means to understanding Mumbai as a whole through a process of both forgetting and remembering.
Walking through the streets of Kolkata/Calcutta, we quickly pull the Bengali carpet over the thick layer of Bihari undergrowth in its dusty bylanes. We develop blind spots in our vision when confronted with a touch of Malayalam in Chennai/Madras or Tamil in Bengaluru/ Bangalore. We may celebrate the simulated memories of Lahore in the streets of Old Delhi, but the city’s modern self-image has little to do with that past. Cities often suffer from an identity crisis linked to remembering and forgetting. Naming and re-naming is only a mild expression of this. Wholesale battles in neighbourhoods, fiery debates in Parliament and scuffles on the streets are other spin-offs, which no city in the world is really free from.
However, Mumbai seems to be particularly afflicted. Few metropolitan cities in contemporary India – the world even – reveal similar levels of anxieties, unleash as much passion, demand such unstinting loyalty, or threaten straying citizens with ultimatums of excommunication the way Mumbai does. Present-day Mumbai urges you to forget that it was once Bombay. It is as much about giving up colonial symbols as dealing with the constant fear of remembering – even by accident or a slip of the tongue. The cost of breaching memory can be serious, as Karan Johar recently found out when his scriptwriter forgot that Mumbai should not be called Bombay, even on the screen.
And yet no matter to what extent Mumbaikars like to think of themselves as being distinct, either in terms of identity or character, their lives are a familiar amalgamation of several histories and accidents. Mumbai is as much a case of mul-tiple-personality syndrome as the other great urban conglomerations.
The denial of this manifold character generates crazier notions – the idea that the city belongs to just one language or community, for instance, which is simply not true. Not because Mumbai is especially cosmopolitan relative to other Indian cities but because in denying its own diversity it also tacitly denies the multiplicities inherent in every urban space – whether it is Nasik or Kolhapur or Shillong or Delhi. Mumbai’s cosmopolitan self-image was often derived from a larger urban mythology, which pretended that other cities were cultural monoliths. This may have retroactively distorted its own past and now tragically affected its future.
When a part of Mumbai denies its connections to Surat, Sangli, Goa or Kanpur – connections that are historically configured – then this denial creates fertile ground for the rise of hysterically nativist ideologies. When it glosses over the realities that have shaped its histories, when its official or popular imagination doesn’t allow for inherent multiplicities to be expressed – both in the form of a varied vernacular or a cosmopolitan sensibility – it’s easy to construct an extreme identity.
| ALL PHOTOGRAPHS © URBZOO FOR THE CARAVAN |
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The JJ flyover runs from the Crawford Market all the way to Byculla, spanning some of Mumbai’s densest neighbourhoods. |
Never in their colonial history were Calcutta, Madras or Bombay anything but urban centres with continuous inflows of people from Karachi, Goa, Patna, Cochin or Surat. And these populations always saw their presence in those cities as extensions of their past identities. Goan clubs in Kalbadevi and Dhobi Talao were named after the particular villages that their members came from. Slices of Surat were reproduced in the alleyways of Bhuleshwar, as Mehta points out.
Neither were cities like Delhi or Lucknow, in a pre-colonial context, confined to the boundaries of their own modern-day geographies. This is even truer of Bhopal and Hyderabad. As bazaars and trading centres, cities – as any urban historian will confirm – are intrinsically diverse places that tend to reach out into the hinterland. And yet, when considered with a nationalist gaze, they harden. No wonder Calcutta became ‘Bengali’ and Bombay had to become Mumbai after the vast urban systems they were part of were reorganised according to newer boundaries, and the states of West Bengal and Maharashtra caged them in the name of providing distinct, stable, sub-nationalist identities.
The effortless way in which Mumbai used to absorb its multiple selves – local railway stations would be simultaneously named in the Gujarati, Devnagiri and English scripts, for instance – soon broke down, like any other nervous personality made to feel abnormal for no fault of its own. The multiple scripts on Mumbai’s railway stations eventually faded away before being painted over permanently—with tremendous sharpness and clear omissions. The Gujarati heritage of the city started to fall apart, a heritage inextricably intertwined with the Maharashtrian ethos that flowed through the city’s native-colonial past. And one that is most vivid and alive in Bhuleshwar.