Vivek Dehejia
By Vivek Dehejia
This past week, when I learned of the death of MF Husain, I felt that another part of Bombay had died, perhaps a final and now irretrievable piece. The official name change to Mumbai, in 1995, was but a mile marker in a process that began at least a decade earlier. Communal riots, bomb blasts, and a parochial local politics oriented around the grievances of a majority behaving as a beleaguered minority, had already signalled the death knell of a formerly great metropolis. The passing away of Husain, living in enforced exile from this city that nurtured his art, is thus a footnote in a long and perhaps inexorable process of decline. Today, cosmopolitan Bombay has already all but become provincial Mumbai.
That lost Bombay, a romantic city of the imagination, that struggles to articulate its dying existence in the quotidian commerce of Mumbai, was always premised on the coexistence of its many founding communities, ethnicities, and faiths. It is the city not only of Husain, but of Salman Rushdie, and of the many other great writers, scholars, and artists who have flown from its bourn. The literary critic Homi Bhabha, a Bombayite himself, writes of “this teeming hinterland of the city with layered communities” in his evocation of the old Bombay’s many neighbourhoods, with Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Parsis, and Jews, living cheek by jowl.
My literary friends sometime forget that cultural efflorescence springs from economic dynamism, and very rarely the reverse. The roots of Bombay’s centrality as the commercial and financial capital of India, a position it wrested from Calcutta in the decade or so following independence, were laid much earlier, by the Merchant Princes in the nineteenth century, and by successive business houses in the years that followed. They gave Bombay the economic muscle to become the new nation’s cultural capital, a crown ceded only fitfully by Calcutta. That once-great city by the other sea tells its own cautionary tale: secular economic decline leads eventually to intellectual and cultural decay, and a once thriving bazaar of ideas becomes a moribund curatorial culture of embalming and preserving the desiccated relics that remain.
But Mumbai’s political leaders did not heed the warning of Kolkata’s demise, and have done their best to accelerate, not attenuate, this Marathi take on the Bengali syndrome. Even a casual visitor cannot help but be struck by the city’s antiquated infrastructure, creaking under the strain of its ten or fifteen million inhabitants. Even the gleaming and futuristic Bandra-Worli Sea Link, ten years in the making, punctuates the city’s failure to rebuild itself, a proudly defiant orphan rather than the first amongst siblings.
The real failure of Mumbai is a paucity of the imagination, a pettiness and provincialism in its thinking. Far all of its many faults, the old imperial capital, Delhi, has always understood the intimate, even filial, relationship between economic and political ascendency on the one hand and cultural and intellectual primacy on the other. After forfeiting these first to Calcutta and then to Bombay, it has now aggressively reasserted its position as India’s premier metropolis. Whether literary, artistic, or culinary, it’s more liking to be happening in Delhi these days than in Mumbai. In a nation in which the state still plays a dominant role, this was perhaps inevitable. But Mumbai could have done more to parlay its one remaining asset – being a financial centre – into the bait that would draw back its artists and intellectuals, and foster the growth of new, homegrown ones as well. That dream, too, remains stillborn.
As we mourn Husain, those of us who love this city mourn for much more.
Vivek H. Dehejia is an economics professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and a Mumbai-based commentator on India. You may follow him on Twitter @vdehejia
“Even a casual visitor cannot help but be struck by the city’s antiquated infrastructure, creaking under the strain of its ten or fifteen million inhabitants. Even the gleaming and futuristic Bandra-Worli Sea Link, ten years in the making, punctuates the city’s failure to rebuild itself, a proudly defiant orphan rather than the first amongst siblings.”
I’vent read a more inane comment/article from an economist than this one. What ails Mumbai’s infrastructure is not the parochial leanings of the locals but the fact that most of Mumbai’s tax revenues are siphoned off to other parts of India. The city of Delhi started its ascent only when it re-constituted as a state with a full fledged chief minister and a state cabinet, which has allowed this city-state to retain its tax revenues for investment in local infrastructure.
Let Mumbai and other metropolitan cities (including Kolkata, Chennai and Bengaluru) keep a significant portion of their tax revenues and we’ll have multiple world class cities in India with excellent infrastructure. To somehow not allow our cities to retain revenues and then rue that Mumbai is not Shanghai just doesn’t cut it any more.
I agree, I was born and brought up in BOMBAY (refuse to call it Mumbai) and have seen what has been happening to it for a long time now. Ever since those bomb blasts of 1992, the city has never been the same. The thugs called ‘Shiv Sena’ have overtaken everything in the city as your article noted. Also people have just become apathetic and un-involved – they just try to take care of themselves and no one care about their neighbours anymore. It is sad to see the fall of the city.
always loved Bombay(Mumbai)..am a jew was refused permission to purchase an apt.in 3 bldngs in lalbaug,parel area…only Jains.Was refused in 4 buildings in Lalbaug/Parel/Jacob circle….only Hindus…..ohhhh Bombay I cry for your untimely death.