J-zine - Bombay

Bombay, Gateway of India

Gateway Of India Bombay, the powerhouse of the Indian economy, is bustling with energy, loud and dirty. The city arose from the sea, so to speak, because when the Portuguese ceded the islands to the English King Charles II in dowry on his marriage to Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza in 1662, it was just seven small islands. Nature, with generous help from human hand, has filled in the gaps with silt and created the city we call Bombay. Blessed by its geographical location and the hybrid vigor of a population drawn from the whole of India, Bombay has grown and flourished. The British developed Bombay and gave its title Gateway of India, also the name of that imposing monument in the picture. It was built to commemorate George V's visit to the city in 1911.

Driving in Bombay

Bombay renamed

Where Streets have two names

Family ride Today, Bombay -- now officially renamed Mumbai -- is a paradoxical mixture of East and West. Fancy air-conditioned shops display the same luxury goods that you expect to find in any major city. Yet the roads outside are pot-holed and the pavements broken. To go shopping, a family of four may ride on a battered old scooter; the husband driving, the wife sitting side-saddle on the pillion, the elder child standing between the handle bars and the youngest on the mother's lap or wherever there is place.

Bombay socialites may dine at the Taj or Oberoi hotels at prices that are steep even for those who earn their salary in dollars or pounds. Or they may buy a snack from their favourite road side vendor for next to nothing. The tastiest food is often the served on the road side or in dabhas - rather disreputable looking small roadside eating places that no tourist would dare enter.

People It is, of course the people, more than anything else, that makes a city. Bombay citizens look as much to what the rest of the world is doing as to their counterparts in India. College girls wear clothes that would not look out of place in, say San Francisco or London. In the other Indian cities, young girls still dress far more conservatively, though with the satellite TV available even in remote villages, it is an open question how long this will last. Fashionable restaurants are full of serious looking people with cellular telephones in their hands. They talk about cricket scores, share prices and exchange rates. And, of course, about the latest hindi films. The film industry in Bombay -- dubbed Bollywood by Indians -- is big business. Fortunes are made; and lost. Film stars are worshipped. Cinemas are so full that there is a thriving black market selling tickets to people who simply must see the movie everyone is talking about.

I would give you a wrong impression of Bombay if I were to only tell you only about the glossy side. Bombay boasts -- if that is the word -- of the largest slum in Asia. Among the approximately 12 million people who live in Bombay, many live in huts and makeshift shelters. Most have travelled to Bombay attracted by lure of easy money. Conditions in Bombay, however bad, are better than their villages where jobs are few and wages miserable. Among the very few who truly can call Bombay their native place are the Kolis, descendants of the fisher people who inhabited the islands long before the Europeans came. The photograph, taken a stone's throw away from the most expensive area of Bombay, shows a Koli woman preparing lunch for her family.

Served, Bombay Style

Photo. John Lloyd-Jones. Bombay, 1989
Illustrations, R.K.Laxman