In her book City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay,Gillian Tindal evoked an image of a nascent city,a tangle of masonry,bazaar and tram lines forging into the swamp. In books set in more recent times (India: A Million Mutinies Now,Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found,Shantaram,Bombay and Mumbai: The City In Transition),we see a proud metropolis hollowed out by desperation,violent self assertion and crime. For a sense of how ordinary people,rich,poor and middle class,negotiate this turbulent landscape,we have the writings of Salman Rushdie,Rohinton Mistry,Vikram Chandra,Anita Desai,Amit Chaudhuri,Manil Suri and a host of less widely celebrated but much beloved local authors and poets. This treasure trove notwithstanding,one feels,there is still much to be said,much more to be understood about this great and complex city. And it is with pleasant anticipation that one greets Gyan Prakashs Mumbai Fables. Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton professor of history at Princeton University whose previous books include weighty titles such as Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (1990) and Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999). But with Mumbai Fables,a subject he says has preoccupied him for much of the last decade,he seems to have tapped into a less theoretical and more personal register. Explaining his motivation early on in the book,he describes Mumbai,or Bombay,as it then was,as an object of immense fascination and longing for him as a young boy growing up in Patna. His relationship with the city was not physical as it has been with so many other chroniclers of Mumbai,but ideational,born of perceptions and information transmitted through the cinema,and cartoons and reports carried by publications such as Blitz and The Illustrated Weekly of India. The glamorous and tantalising images evoked in him,as they must have in millions of young men and women across the country,a yearning for exploration and emulation. He says he hungered for the city. This passionate claim sits a little oddly with his objective and thorough treatment of his subject,but it explains the scope of his enterprise to examine the process by which the myth,which had such an impact on his youthful,impressionable mind,was created and in doing so to discover also,the extent to which it was,in actual practice,circumscribed. With this aim in mind,Prakash dives into his material,which includes flaneurs accounts,newspaper reports,short stories,films,magazines,city plans,paintings,stickers and comic books. With an unhurried self assurance he builds a solid narrative of the city. The slow-moving kaleidoscope shows families sitting on maidans eating the air; stern Gothic giving way to Art Deco,the exuberant aesthetic of industrial modernity; 41 Pali Hill,Chetan Anands Bandra bungalow,buzzing with the song and laughter of aspiring actors,poets and filmmakers; red flags fluttering over the labour district of Girangaon; the emergence of the sharpshooting underworld; the rise of Bal Thackeray and the loneliness of the taxi driver. Like Rushdie did with Midnights Children,Prakash resurrects Mumbais famed cosmopolitanism in his Fables. The city is a place of enterprise and anonymity,allowing for encounters,between men and women,between all types and manners of people (hustlers,fisherfolk,millhands,playboys) and religious and ethnic communities (Jews,Muslims,Gujaratis,Sindhis,Maharashtrians). At one point,he narrates a touching story penned by the Mumbai chronicler par excellence,Saadat Hassan Manto,that demonstrates the easy conviviality and tolerance that must have once characterised life in the mean streets of Bombay. The story is about a Jewish woman,a woman of somewhat disreputable habits and behaviour,who ends up risking her life to save her Sikh ex-lovers fiancée. But Prakashs view of Mumbais melting pot,though warm and appreciative,is not sentimental. Given his allegiance to the subaltern group of historians,one would not expect otherwise. The author repeatedly points to the grim reality underpinning the veneer of fashionability,drawing a connection between the colonial economic policy and the wretchedness of working class housing,for instance,or the repeated neglect of the poor in city plans,including the dramatic reclamation plans of the 1920s aimed purportedly at solving the emerging housing crisis. Significantly,Prakash also sees the rise of the Shiv Sena with its son of the soil rhetoric as a continuum of the citys history: he finds in an earlier elitism the foundation on which the party based its populist mobilisation of the Marathi manoos,muscling out a flawed but radical challenge to capitalist modernity. This is a departure from the generally held view that tends to represent the rise of communal and nativist sentiment as a break from the past. Unfortunately,the relentless flow of narrative does not appear to permit a more detailed and direct exposition of this argument. The other issue one would take with this substantial and marvellously detailed book is the fact that it covers ground that in many parts is familiar and has been well documented. Fearless Nadia,the Nanavati case and the Indian Peoples Theatre Association are features of Mumbais past that have been frequently evoked and recalled in recent times. In a book on urban mythmaking,one notices sharply,the absence of any reference to the Mumbai-based advertising industry which,even in an age prior to television,exercised a formidable influence through radio jingles,print ads and commercials in cinema halls. These issues apart,Mumbai Fables is a highly readable book,evocatively and gently prodding you to think about the allure and the machinery of seduction inherent in the urban dream.
