History of a City's Fables

-- Pritam Mukherjee

Gyan Prakash,Mumbai Fables, HarperCollins Publishers India, Hardback, 978-93-5029-007-1, Rs 599/-

Mumbai or Bombay has attracted attention from many creative writers of our age. Be it in fiction or in non-fiction Mumbai remains India's one of the most interesting and dynamic cities. Of all the writers who have explored the inner mechanism of India's biggest metropolis Suketu Mehta stands out for his warmth, humanity, dramatic and fragmented narrative. Maximum City has shown us how a spiritual biography of a city can be written by putting together fragmentary narratives. It has certainly created a new benchmark for all the future writers of Indian cities, especially those who are interested in Mumbai. Gyan knows that and his challenge was not to repeat what the earlier author has done, and done very well. Gyan's book, though stressed on the fragments of a city's life, has traversed in a completely different path. Heavily padded with academic references this book surely is meant for a specific readership, and yet it cannot simply be termed as purely a book of history. Gyan's book, in fact, draws its strength from a well qualified doubt on the craft of history itself. Is it possible to faithfully and objectively chronicle Bombay—to—Mumbai tale? If yes, How?

It is the inner urge to find a proper way of expressing this transformation that led Gyan to bank on fables:

“The nostalgic 'tropical camelot' and the dystopic city of slums appear as compelling bookends of Mumbai's story because they seem to have the force of historical truth. In fact, it is a trick of history, inviting us to believe its Bombay—to--Mumbai tale as an objective reading of the past when it is a fable.” (2010: 23)

The degeneration of Bombay into Mumbai is not a tale of prelapsarian innocence going wrong. It would be naive to think in that way. The birth of Bombay itself is a complex manifestation of the colonial modernity. A city which rose out of reclaimed land, and increasing mercantile activities of the British colonial rule is somehow destined from the beginning to be what it is today. Gyan's book moves from Bombay's colonial cosmopolitanism to post-colonial communal hatred, and in pursuing this trajectory he unravels the complex nature of India's modernity. In fact, liberal cosmopolitanism of the colonial period itself contained the seeds of future violence and hatred.

The title of the book draws our attention to the crisis that besets the recent crop of historians. Uncomfortable questions regarding form and techniques have gained so much strength after the advent of post-structuralism that the historian's craft has also gone through radical shifts. But what promises to be a journey through the mythical fabled city ends in a regular 'historical illumination'. Gyan's reiteration and recapitulation of some of the main arguments of his book time and again, proves his confidence or lack of it in his readers. He seems to be too eager to fix the reader's response. This is the problem with any book that tries to be judgmental from the very beginning. Suketu's Maximum City does not have intellectual paddings but it will be forever celebrated for its openness, ambivalence, love of human warmth, and a sense of belonging. Though Gyan has tried his level best to shake off the ghostly influence of a professional historian; in the end the work remains a purely academic one. Gyan is simply trying to find newer ways of rehabilitating history in its moment of crisis. Reinvention of history through fables is perhaps the best part of this salvage enterprise.

In MumbaiFables Gyan has tried to incorporate various disciplines to explore the mythical existence of Mumabi. Geography, architecture, politics, popular culture, and so on have been called upon to stand as witness to the causes that have led up to the creation of our contemporary Mumbai. The city's tragic failure in realizing its urban dreams, gradual corporate takeover, ambitious plan for reclamation of land from the sea – all have been placed side by side in this episodic narrative. But one can easily discern the unifying thread that runs through them. Mumbai fables are everywhere to be seen scattered in the many lives of the western Indian megalopolis. It is there in its films and songs, in its poems and novels, in its Gothic revivalist architecture and Art Deco buildings, in its still vibrant cosmopolitanism and rising communalism, in its chawls and crony capitalists, in its comic strips and high arts and so on. Bombay or Mumbai has fashioned a whole new way of expressing, living a city life whose inhabitants are always under threats from multiple forces including nature, communal tensions and international terror attacks.

Gyan has amassed huge information for his work. In one chapter [chapter 6: “From Red to Saffron”] the number of end-notes have gone up to one hundred and four. In all his chapters Gyan has profusely quoted from other sources, making the reference section quite lengthy. Gyan has taken particular interest in citing even the minutest details of his source materials in most of the time. But there are occasions when he lapses into some sort of amnesia. It surely defies logic why such slips would occur in a book like this. An example in this connection will surely help us in understanding the problem:

“By this time, the energies of the state throughout the colonial world were increasingly directed towards managing and developing a healthy and productive subject population.” (2010:70-71)

It surely reminds one of Foucault's famous book History of Sex[vol. 1] where he first introduced this concept. An acknowledgment of Foucault's 'bio-power' would have increased the clarity of the argument. But Gyan has somehow forgotten to insert the end-note in this case. Similar things have occurred again in the text in page 164, where the author says:

“It has been said that in modern city life, the secular ritual of reading the newspaper replaces the Morning Prayer.” (2010: 164)

I don't know who else but Benedict Anderson, who first formulated this argument in his now famous book – Imagined Communities. But his name has not been mentioned either in a book where every chapter is so heavily referenced. Then there's this passage:

  “ Antiques emerge only with modernity, when mechanical  reproduction deprives objects of their originality and authenticity. Devoid of any original essence and uniqueness, industrially produced goods acquire an aura only when the lose their novelty.” (2010:344)

This vaguely reminds me of Walter Benjamin. But again there's no reference to double check or do further research.

These are not the last words about this excellent book. Our problem is that we tend to focus too much on minor aspects of a book. The real strength of Gyan Prakash's Mumbai Fables lies in its ability to show the readers that the colonial fractured modernity has so successfully dislocated our cultural moorings we now experience reality in bits and pieces and try our best to live with that fragmented self, and our city is just a physical extension of that fragment. For this alone the book will be regarded as an important addition to the lore of Mumbai .