4 min readApr 27, 2024 03:17 PM IST
First published on: Apr 27, 2024 at 03:16 PM IST
“Here people die one day; are buried the next, their furniture sold on the third and they are forgotten on the fourth.” Thus wrote Lady West, wife of Sir Edward West, who had arrived in the muggy, coastal city of Bombay as the king’s judge, sometime in the 1820s. Much has changed in Bombay since then, including its name — it was rechristened ‘Mumbai’ in 1995, ostensibly to shed the baggage of its colonial history — but Lady West’s impression of the city might, even today, strike a chord with visitors. It is not for nothing, after all, that Mumbai is known as the city that never sleeps, is always on the move and even finds a way to pick itself up and walk away from what might seem like unspeakable tragedies — a riot, a terror attack, a flood that brings the entire megapolis to a standstill for three days straight, even stalling its local train network. For visitors, perhaps, there’s something cold and unfeeling about Mumbai’s business-as-usual attitude.
Not so for long-time residents. In their eyes, Mumbai’s briskness towards life is as much a part of its charm as its tendency to throw up surprises in its many crowded bylanes — ancient stones marking a long-gone snake grove, a two-century-old Armenian church, a field of okra next to a long-shuttered mill. Mohanlal P Gandhi (1904-1996), who moved from Karachi to Mumbai after experiencing communal violence in 1948, was one of those who loved the city with a fierce and abiding passion. As a journalist, he came to know Mumbai intimately and wrote a 300-page manuscript tracing the story of Urbs Prima in Indis (Latin for ‘The First City of India’), going back to its origin as a cluster of fishing villages on India’s western coast. Although Gandhi died before he could see his labour of love all the way to publication, his children have finally brought it out as the recent book, The Making of a Metropolis: The Story of Bombay.
Written in the clean, crisp prose of a seasoned journalist, and bolstered with substantial research — including several colonial-era personal accounts and journals written by the likes of Lady West — Gandhi’s history of Mumbai devotes considerable space to the city’s ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’ and Portuguese periods, before noting that the city’s full potential as a harbour and centre of trade was only recognised by the British. Fittingly for a city that came to be known as India’s financial capital, a whole section of the book is dedicated to the various trades and industries — cotton and textiles, shipping and banking — that shaped it. Another section offers potted biographies of the men (this book is very much of its time, so there are no women mentioned here) who “built Bombay”, including not only figures well-known to this day, such as the Wadias, Dadabhai Naoroji, the Tatas and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, but also those today recalled only as names on buildings and institutions dotted across the city, like the Petits, the Readymoneys and Mountstuart Elphinstone.
While old photographs, paintings, prints and etchings liberally illustrate The Making of a Metropolis, the use of more contemporary photographs, taken long after the author had died, is an interesting choice that sheds light on a peculiar characteristic of Mumbai itself, a tendency to be simultaneously future-facing and nostalgic. As Lady West noted, life moves fast in Mumbai — at the same speed that cars today zoom down the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, whizzing past villages that have stood on the coast for centuries. Is it any wonder that it needs to occasionally stop and look back, even if only as an excuse to catch its breath?
Old photographs, paintings, prints and etchings liberally illustrate The Making of a Metropolis (Source: Amazon.in) 
Share
