DISCUSSION

January 22, 2011 vol xlvi no 4 EPW   Economic & Political Weekly80

On Mumbai Fables

Gyan Prakash

but astoundingly concludes that I have

bowed to the “accepted wisdom that has

identified the Shiv Sena and its nettlesome

offshoot, The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena

as symptoms of neo-fascism hastening the

city’s degeneration” (EP w, 40). As evidence

to the contrary, he mentions the continued

existence of the north Indian vegetable

 vendor. I never suggest that the Shiv Sena’s

nativism leads to the city’s degeneration.

Of course, migrants continue to flock to the

city, and the north Indian vegetable vendors

continue to ply their trade. Mumbai Fables

chronicles the vitality of this vernacular

cosmopolitanism in everyday life. To cite

the continued presence of the north Indian

 vegetable vendor to minimise the signifi-

cance of the Shiv Sena’s vicious politics is to

overlook the hostility and fear whipped up

by the Sena against the migrants.

Upadhyay states that three leitmotifs

“trample across the narrative”, distorting the

city’s multilayered history. These are the

colonial appropriation of land, the extreme

inequality between the mill districts and the

colonial precincts, and the decline of the

mythic city of Bombay and the rise of a dys-

functional Mumbai. He objects to my char-

acterisation of the doubly colonial origins

of Mumbai – the colonisation of nature and

the territorial colonisation by the British –

and insists that we need to acknowledge the

redemptive value of this process. “Reclama-

tion created the space for a rich bouquet of 

architectural styles”, he writes.

Perhaps a printer’s devil excised several

pages of the book he read, so I want to di-

rect his attention to the chapters that deal

 with architectural efflorescence – including

that of Art Deco – and with the activities of 

intellectuals, writers, and artists who

thrived in the city. Again, this is central to

my attempt to offer a many-sided history of 

Mumbai, of fables told and untold, of 

dreams and myths as well as the sufferings

and struggles of the working class. It re-

quired revealing the secret behind the

“comely city” of the British in Mumbai’s

double colonisation and in the ravages of 

the 1896-97 plague epidemic in the densely 

packed chawls. Upadhyay appears to want

a sunny story told – of great architecture,

and the triumphant rise of the middle class.

Upadhyay writes that Mumbai’s history is

layered, but he is preaching to the converted!

 A convert who writes in a section entitled

“Layered City” in Chapter 9 that Mumbai is

a city of layers, “with multiple and succes-

sive slices of Mumbai coexisting in the same

time and space” ( Mumbai Fables, 340).

Upadhyay cites the chapter entitled

“Dream Worlds” to damn me for writing a

book that shows Mumbai’s descent into

chaos, crime, and destruction. But even a

cursory reading by a non-specialist would

show it is a chapter about the layered city.

How else would you read the description and

discussion of Chor Bazaar as a supreme ex-

emplification of a city where the old and the

new, the official and the unofficial, history 

and memory coexist? Chapter after chapter

presents Mumbai’s history through the kalei-

doscope of varied experiences. Upadhyay’s

comment on this score is baffling.

Upadhyay states that my “competing

 voice” is a critical flaw, leading me to fit

historical events into my predetermined

schema. He concludes by offering as evi-

dence my interpretation of urban planning

as a dream image of repression and disguise.

Perhaps he skipped over large chunks of 

Chapter 7. I am, of course, alluding to the

dream image Mulk Raj Anand had himself 

referenced in his essay, titled “Planning and

Dreaming” in showcasing the New Bombay 

Plan. Reading the book should have also

told him that repression and disguise refers

not to “unpalatable reality” but to the elision

of the social. Echoing Henri Lefebvre, I argue

that planners assumed that spatial recon-

figuration would resolve social questions.

“The dream city of clear lines and coordi-

nated functions repressed the knowledge

of the city as society; the visually rich image

of the city by the sea projected the idea

of urbanism without urbanity” ( Mumbai

 F ables, 285). It is befuddling that a reviewer

reads these words, but still concludes that

my argument is that the planners’ dreams

repressed unpalatable reality.

Email: prakash@princeton.edu

R eading Ashoak Upadhyay’s puzzling

review (“The Historian as Compet-

ing Voice”, EP w, 25 December 2010)

of my book,  Mumbai Fables, I wondered

 which book he had read; it is certainly not

the one I wrote.

The running thread in the review is that

my predetermined interpretation distorts

Mumbai’s history. He starts off with a com-

plete misreading of my first chapter by 

reproducing a partial quote where I discuss

the flawed nature of certain narratives of 

change. The full quote is this:

Urban change is indisputable but the

narratives of change [emphasis added] from

Bombay to Mumbai and the rise and fall of 

the city are deeply flawed. They conceive

change as the transformation of one histori-

cal stage to another, from the bounded unity 

of the city of industrial capitalism to the ‘ge-

neric city’ of globalisation, from modernity 

to postmodernity, from cosmopolitanism to

communalism ( Mumbai F ables, 22-23).

 Astoundingly, Upadhyay concludes that

I am judging the changes themselves to be

flawed. What is “deeply flawed” about

these narratives is that they represent

complex and contradictory historical

changes simplistically in terms of one his-

torical phase giving way to another. I pro-

ceed to argue that despite their flaws,

such narratives persist because they are

produced by history. Therefore, they de-

mand a critical examination and should

not be accepted at face value. It is the rea-

son the book is titled Mumbai F ables. The

difference between calling the narratives 

flawed, as I do, and terming the changes

themselves flawed, as the reviewer con-

cludes, is key and very basic to the book.

Having set off on the wrong foot about

the very premise of  Mumbai Fables, the

reviewer stumbles ahead to totally mis-

understand other key chapters. In Chapter 6,

I tell the story of the destruction of radical

 working-class aspirations and elitist cosmo-

politanism by the populist and violent na-

tivist politics fashioned by Bal Thackeray 

and the Shiv Sena. Upadhyay seems to agree