Bumming in Bombay

Despite what architect Hafeez Contractor and other wannabe patricians might say, it is the socially exclusive, generic multiplex or mall that is squalid, not the insanely-crowded-with-all-comers streets outside the Andheri station

Vikram Bedi Mumbai

That ‘Bombay’ (the old name of new Mumbai) circulates not on roads and highways but on streets and public transport is something that I, a dilliwala, deeply appreciate (as do the terrorists). Bombay exemplifies the city-as-theatre, the city-as-dance, which is why, notwithstanding blasts and urban social emergency, the city remains iconic, the topic of so much cinema, literature and journalism. Easily disparaged, the city is too compelling to ignore, and I’d argue, to not learn from. Bombay is not yet all negative. Despite everything, it must be judged complexly — its iconic status, apparently threatened nowadays, is ultimately rooted in our mixed feelings about it.

When it is dark and the yellow street lights are on, the streets of Bombay become the urban equivalent of a stage, in which the spectator is also an actor. The intimidations of the city’s verticalness are almost gone; the street’s sensory overloading of the walker is lessened by the darkness. The frictions of the crowd are, resultantly, less painful. There seems, miraculously, enough room for individuals. There is a virtuous cycle between well-lit and therefore safe night streets and people trusting enough to be outdoors till late (not that they all do so out of free choice.)

Bombay’s streets, then, are gratifying and enabling despite stressful time pressures, overcrowding and infernal traffic. They forcibly expose the self to its social others. They are civic schools, insisting on the more or less safe mixing of social types. A shared space of being-and-moving-together in a chaotic and everchanging ‘dance’, of trusting strangers; they are about appearing before each other as equals. The street, then, underpins the wider public realm of citizenship — more than print, television, associations and political parties, the humble, packed, ugly city street is critical to any tolerant and inclusive ‘civic sense’. Always potentially uncanny and frictional, it challenges citizens’ tendency to overvalue privacy and predictability, but does so without violence (unless the LeT, or the Shiv Sena decides to exhibit its love of urban Indian crowds!).

The health of the street, then, is a major civic issue given the fast and vast increases in ‘gentrification’ and social sanitation that big Indian cities are currently undergoing. Their elites, egged on by developers, retailers and advertisers, are keen on spatial-segregation. Their new suburbs, often entirely developed by large private companies, are based on the logic of the enclave or, worse, the fortress. They are anti-urban in that they refuse the pleasures of the crowded, mixed-use city street, of heterogeneous urban crowds in general. Secession from the city is considered a sign of grandeur. Prominent examples of civic death-at-birth: Gurgaon, Kolkata’s Salt Lake City, the Hiranandani Complex in Bombay.

The new elites value point-to-point private automobility that dispenses with the need to walk the street. Colonised by consumerism, our old cultures of ghoomna-phirna as urban pleasure are dying. One circulates in the city only because there is a seductive magic-space (a mall, a restaurant…) at the end of the trip. The city, the result of the dense and confused throwing-together of many social differences, is no longer theatrical enough on its own without set-piece spectacle places.