Abstract
In this essay, attention is focused on the very centre of the neo-liberal metropolitan scene. Seen as a city which is transforming its post-independence Nehruvian character into that of a global late-capitalist conurbation, Mumbai is caught in the transition from secular to post-secular policy, while its customary cosmopolitanism appears threatened on the one hand by the phenomenon of rabid parochialism and on the other by both extreme, and/or rather subtle, forms of social violence. Since in the metropolitan compartments of media, entertainment, news, and fiction, English, as a pan-Indian, globalized language, intersperses the bhashas with unrestrained frequency, playing the leading role in the appropriation of globally inflected cultural models, the outcome is a metropolitan landscape in which Anglophone literature itself is imbricated in an ongoing process of conversation with the other agencies at work in the contemporary urban public sphere.
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- 1.
Besides songs, films, and TV series, there has lately been a flourishing of comics and graphic novels set in the city. On this see in particular Esterino Adami (2016: 216–217).
- 2.
The understanding of literature as a consciousness-generating site occupying a strategic location for processing world views and opinions, is an accepted concept in postcolonial studies. Among others, Satya P. Mohanty for example explicitly speaks of literary texts as epistemically reliable conduits of ideas and values, proclaiming an idea of literature ‘even at the formal level, as continuous with social, moral, and epistemological theory, as the extension or revision of prevailing ideas and ideologies’ (2011: 5).
- 3.
See in particular chapter 7: ‘Planning and Dreaming’ (Prakash, 2010).
- 4.
One of the characters, probably inspired by the real cartoonist Mario Miranda who worked for the Illustrated Weekly of India in the 1970s, is the painter Vasco Miranda, defined as the exponent of ‘Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art’ (Rushdie, 1996: 148–149).
- 5.
‘How many of us feel, these days, that something that has passed too quickly is ending: A moment of life, a period of history, an idea of civilization, a twist in the turning of the unconcerned world’ (Rushdie, 1996: 145). The Moor’s Last Sigh was the first novel written by Rushdie after the fatwa, and during a period in which he was banned by India’s government from entering the country.
- 6.
Contact zones are characterized by ‘the spatial and temporal co-presence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect’ (Pratt, 1992: 7). Originally limited to boundaries and colonial dominions, they have come to mark the very essence of the metropolitan experience.
- 7.
‘As a means of communicating across differences, the city has even concocted a hybrid but wonderfully expressive vernacular for everyday communication—Bambaiya’ (Prakash, 2010: 11).
- 8.
The novel is based, at least partly, on real events in the life of the author, who was a convict in Australian jails. Having escaped from prison and fled to Bombay, which was supposed to be only a stopover, the protagonist of Shantaram is deeply enthralled by the city and decides to stay, becoming a sort of chronicler of its variegated, turbulent scene.
- 9.
The metropolis has often been considered a kind of ‘acclimatization station’ for those leaving the country, with the Gateway of India, the basalt arch which faces the sea, reflecting its nature as a place of passage and connection.
- 10.
- 11.
Rushdie remembers how his parents, before the Partition massacres, left Delhi and moved south, ‘correctly calculating that there would be less trouble in secular, cosmopolitan Bombay’ (Rushdie, 2003: 195).
- 12.
As famously theorized by Arjun Appadurai, ‘The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order’ (1996: 31).
- 13.
During this period of suspension of civil rights, the most violent act of betrayal of the nationalist commitment towards social justice and equality was the forcible sterilization of the poorest sections of the population. In Mistry’s novel, Om and Ishvar, harassed by the police as well as by criminals and high-caste old enemies, are finally abducted and sterilized against their will, ending up severely crippled and reduced to begging; Dina loses her house and her economic independence; Maneck, overwhelmed by the sense of injustice and futility, in the end commits suicide.
- 14.
This refers to a shocking series of bus and train bombings which occurred in the city between 2002 and 2006, and above all to the sensational terroristic attacks of 2008, which were directed at some of the most prominent sites of the city: The Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus), the Oberoi and Taj Mahal Hotels, the Leopold Café, the Cama Hospital for women and children, the Nariman House Jewish community centre, and the Metro Cinema; and again in 2011, to the attacks on the Opera House, the Zaveri Bazaar, and other Dadar West localities.
- 15.
In the 1950s the Samyukta Maharashtra movement demanded a unified state for the 27 million Marathi speakers scattered among three states (Bombay State, Vidarbha Region, and Hyderabad).
- 16.
In the Moor’s Last Sigh, this turbulent phase is recounted through Moraes’s experience as a professional mauler employed to demolish workers’ resistance.
- 17.
Born in the mid-1960s as an anti-immigrant party, the Shiv Sena was named after a warlord hero who had fought the Mughals off Maharashtra in the seventeenth century (Shivaji). The movement’s declared intention was to convert the image of the city’s multiracial citizenship into a sort of hierarchical grid of internally homogeneous and rigidly separated communities.
- 18.
Hindu right-wing militants.
- 19.
Though obviously written in the preceding years, the novel was, nonetheless, with a peculiar sense of timing, published in 1995, the year of the city’s change of name.
- 20.
For a detailed discussion of this dangerous mix see Matthew Henry (2015).
- 21.
The novel’s last words are again dedicated to the city ‘All I did was write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay’(Thayil, 2012: 292).
- 22.
Yet at the end of the story the junkies will find themselves superseded by a city which is proving rather unpredictable and disappointing, even by their admittedly non-fastidious standards. The passage to chemical drugs for instance is invested by something similar to nostalgia for the old good days of ‘pure opium’: ‘He could see it on the faces and smell it in the air, cocaine and MDMA and Ecstasy, new drugs for the new Bombay’’ (Thayil, 2012: 281).
- 23.
As Suketu Mehta brilliantly sums it up: ‘There will soon be more people living in the city of Bombay than on the continent of Australia. […] Bombay is the biggest city on the planet of a race of city dwellers. Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet. God help us’ (Mehta, 2005: 3).
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Ciocca, R. (2017). From Nation to World: Bombay/Mumbai Fictions and the Urban Public Sphere. In: Ciocca, R., Srivastava, N. (eds) Indian Literature and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54550-3_10
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