It was called Pilla House though there was no tint of yellow anywhere in sight. The name was in actual fact a corrupted form of the English term Play House, by which it was commonly known at the time of the British. It was in the heart of Mumbai’s red light district, a decrepit, wide-bodied mansion, an appropriate site for the business of lust. Every evening women painted their faces and sat outside the curtained doors while rickety staircases delivered a never-ending stream of customers to their doorsteps.Those days apparently are now over. Recent news reports claim that Mumbai’s famous cages are no longer buzzing with illicit activity, or if they are it is illicit activity of another kind, drugs to be specific. The numbers of commercial sex workers in Kamathipura and its environs are down. In their place have come shops and doctors’ clinics.The process of gentrification continues. Every day familiar landmarks get pulled down and shiny, alien buildings take their place. The old Irani restaurant with its wooden chairs and smoky mirrors has all but disappeared from Mumbai, but now even the homely Udipi is transforming itself with new menus, space age facades and smart names such as Veg-land and Step-Inn.Things of course go on, pretty much the same as before. Prostitution has not ended, just moved to a more upmarket address. And new cafes are making waves for serving the sort of home-cooked meal that got lost somewhere between the spring dosa and the dry fruit pizza.It is a cyclical process, this business of change. And if it often doesn’t seem that way, it is perhaps because the light does not shine evenly on everything. By this I am not referring to the interpretation of history, a subject that has been the topic of much debate and a keenly fought battle between the RSS and various academicians, but about the randomness of documentation.What is deemed worthy of attention, by whom it is deemed worthy of attention and how much attention is deemed enough — are all so arbitrary that what one can get of the past, even the very recent past, is often a matter of sheer luck. For the last few weeks, for instance, after scouring through dozens of bookshelves at one of the country’s oldest and best stocked libraries, Bombay’s Asiatic, I could find just a paragraph or two on the Maha-Gujarat movement of the fifties that, along with the Sanyukta Maharashtra movement, led to the break up of the old Bombay Presidency and the formation of the two eponymous states. In contrast, one could have made a substantially lengthy list of books by, say, former foreign diplomats on their experiences abroad.It is likely of course that the required literature exists and is available in the vernacular. At the same time it is intriguing that anyone wishing to pursue a research topic in English in the country’s leading city would be better placed to write about the appropriate dress code for an Indian ambassador down the ages than about an agitation that had not an inconsiderable impact on the country’s geography and politics less than half a century ago.In today’s information age, where everything — great and trivial — is recorded and available at the tap of a computer key, it might appear that such gaps would be non-existent. In actual fact, a new sort of arbitrariness is evident today. In the first place, the kind of information one is likely to obtain is highly dependent on who benefits by putting it out. Look up a history of any Indian city on the Web for instance, and one is likely to get, with almost every hit, the perspective of a tourist brochure. Second, there is a tendency towards excess. Bill and Hilary Clinton, young enough to contemplate politically active lives, have published hugely publicised autobiographies and there will surely be more books written about, if not by, them. Manmohan Singh, weeks into his job, has half a dozen books already written about him.At the same time India’s past is replete with fascinating personalities, controversies and events that have receded from public consciousness but which could, if resurrected in easily accessible forms, be processes and figures of instruction and inspiration today. How many young Indians — the resurgence of Indian pride and the growing environmental movement notwithstanding — are familiar with someone like Jagdish Chandra Bose, for instance, who is said to have given the world’s first public demonstration of electromagnetic waves (two years before Marconi successfully staged wireless signaling) and also propounded the theory that plants can actually feel? And then there is Pilla House. A great story surely? If someone would write it.
