Salam Mumbai: An Elegy to the City of My Dreams

How Mumbai has changed: For Raj Thackeray, even Amitabh Bachchan is an alien!


FOR GENERATIONS of Malayalees, Mumbai, once called Bombay, has been their maximum city: It was the culmination of their hopes for a better life, the end of their aspirations of a world of glamour and glitter and for those poor ones who took a train there, often without a ticket, it was the only hope for survival.

It is surprising the way this city has changed: From a city of hope and asylum to a city of bigotry, hatred and racial oppression. In the forties and early fifties, there were huge number of people from Mabalar who took to Mumbai in the overnight buses and lorries, that returned after delivering their wares, and by the train that left Mangalore, and took the long and winding route via Coimbatore, Jolarpet , Vijayawada to Mumbai. There were thousands from the northern parts of Kerala who went there, worked their way through the life, made the city rich and enriched themselves in the process. Even today, when an election takes place in Kerala, candidates in northern areas like Kasargode, Uduma, Manjeswaram and Hosdurg take a trip to Mumbai to meet the thousands of voters who live there. During the 2006 State Assembly elections, I remember witnessing around a dozen buses, all air-conditioned video coaches, that took voters from Mumbai back home for the election-day and then toot them back, all five star comforts paid for by the candidates and their parties.

Bombay, in its earlier days, was a city known for its courage and progressive ideas: It was workers from this city who in early 1920s took to the street, for the first time in India, in protest against the arrest of a nationalist leader, Lala Lajpat Rai, an event that was taken note of even by Lenin. Then in 1942, Bombay erupted in a nationalist fervor as Gandhi made the historic call, Quit India, on August 9, electrifying the whole nation. Once again in 1946, workers of this city marched on the streets in support of the valiant sailors in the Royal Indian Navy who had taken control of the battle ships, a mutiny that shook the empire to its roots.

Mumbai has always been a center of Indian left wing, a place where socialist and egalitarian world view had an upper hand. It had a vibrant working class, a dedicated and highly motivated leadership, and a progressive mass base. It had some of the best progressive writers, theatre activists, playwrights, painters and other intellectuals that made the city India’s cultural capital.

But how things have changed, especially in the past two decades!

The left is no longer a force in Mumbai, thanks mainly to the decline of its strong trade union base. Even the progressive and liberal views, a tradition from the days of nationalist movement and for long held and supported by the middle class and secular forces like the Congress, are now facing severe threat. Instead, Mumbai has embraced the hard core, bitter, right-wing sloganeering and racial hatred that has become the hallmark of the Hindutva forces. Shiv Sena and the Sangh Parivar have taken over the soul of Mumbai. Mumbai today is a ghost of its past, a mute reminder of its glorious days.

Mumbaikars are now paying a price for allowing their soul to be hijacked by the forces of darkness and hatred. And the rude reminder came once again the other day, when a bunch of hoodlums who swear by Raj Thackeray, went on a rampage against Pratheeksha, where India’s cultural icon Amitabh Bachchan and his family live. It has been in the making when M F Husain, India’s best known artist, was hounded out of the city. It is going to be an unending tragedy, unless Mumbai of the past rebounds.

But is it possible? Is it possible that Mumbai would once again return to its former self; shedding its hatred, its bigotry, its racial mindset? Those who have watched the hounding of the Malayalees and other South Indians in the formative days of Shiv Sena by Bal Thackeray, witness the ongoing hate campaign against the Hindi-speaking North Indians, including even the Bachchans who through generations made the city proud, would think it to be a tall order. But for Mumbaikars, there is nothing impossible: They have proved it many times in the past the way they faced the agony of explosions on their trains, massacres on the streets, floods that stopped life for days…and came back with a smile on the face once again.

(Cartoon courtesy: Sudheernath, New Delhi.)