Everyone has loyalties, like the devotion to one’s local variety of mango (eg Apoos Pyrie vs Dussehri). Close after mangoes on the loyalty scale would come ardor for one’s city. Mumbai, like its mangoes, never lets down its loyalists.
There is something oddly appropriate about the shape of this island in the glance of a map. It looks like a hand extended in greeting, or help. It’s symbolic of the way the city is.
Mumbai is its people. It is the city’s people, generation after generation, who have caused a glittering metropolis to rise where seven lumpy islands had dozed before, amid drying fishnets and bombil. Here, in an abandoned Government House, the plague vaccine was given to the world – needing of course a prior outbreak of the bubonic variety. The silver lining was the package of urban improvements that followed, first as therapy then taking graceful form as broad avenues and causeways, some conceived as cross-island ventilation against noxious vapors, setbacks from them, parks, gardens and vistas.
The city’s Indo-Saracenic public buildings live haughtily on, from the High Court and University to two great railway termini and a museum, not so much edifices as imperial fanfares. Here, too, stands a treasure of Art Deco buildings, second in number and scale only to Miami, which together with the city’s colonial past constitute a unique corner of world heritage.
Modern art in India was born in the Progressive Artists’ Group on Rampart Row, the street connecting "Kala Ghoda," – a square with Edward VII as Prince of Wales rampant on a leaping steed, all in bronze – to Lion’s Gate, the main entry into the dockyard of the home port of India’s Navy.
The mind was encouraged to flower here, some in ways that history records: the birth of atomic research and space science in the land. In humbler ways, too, minds were nurtured in classrooms and lecture halls. Mumbai’s robust cosmopolitanism is unusual, with its happy babble of Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil, Konkani and 14 other languages with their own schools here, to say nothing of the French and German medium schools.
Two of Mumbai’s greatest riches are the magic of the sea and the monsoons. Visitors from the Gulf and Arab countries still come to marvel at torrential downpours and the violet clouds of the season. These are the same mild, moist breezes that through history have blown trade here, to and from Africa and the Gulf. Greeks and Arabs came and went, sheltering among islands that its fisher folk called "Mumbadevi," after their kindly Mother Goddess. The Portuguese came and gave away, in a style we understand as dowry.
In the hands of the bridegroom’s nation, the city corrupted from "Mumbadevi" to "Bombay." Later, there would be other, less innocent corruptions. Today, politics trails "Mumbai" not "Bombay" in its wake. The city’s human energy and the power stroke of its thought have made this the country’s commercial and financial capital. Its very riches and success have crafted its problems.
The hand-shaped island has welcomed all, some would say too many for an infrastructure born in the horse-drawn tramcar and the delicate bronze-held gaslight lit by a marathon runner with a pole bouncing on his shoulder. But from the strangulating streets and illegal constructions on the gold of a slipper island, from the Irani shops with bent wood chairs and marble-topped tables serving buns and butter sprinkled with sugar; from the flamboyant dons whose dreams are a clutter of Bollywood maidens jostling RDX and extortion, from here rises a thunder of crowds cheering their Tendulkars’, as they had their Merchants’ and Mankads’ in an earlier time.
Read the entire transcript in India Today Plus (November, 2003)
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