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Journalism of Courage
EVERY city has its stories. But it requires a truly great one to spout words effortlessly, memorably, interminably. The cityscape then expands to become a canvas of life. New York is one such megapolis and Scott Fitzgerald famously observed that it had 8216;8216;all the iridescence of the beginning of the world8217;8217;. As for amchi bombil-packed Bombay/Mumbai, few can walk its streets without being conscious of a rare commingling of geography, history and human enterprise. And so, over the years, bits of it 8212; never the whole 8212;have been captured in pieces of writing. It would, then, appear the simplest thing to produce a half-way decent anthology of writing on this city. But no. The abundance, far from lightening the task, only makes it more forbidding.
So how have the editors of the most recent anthology on Bombay/Mumbai fared? Jerry Pinto and Naresh Fernandes wear their anxiety on their Foreword. They have this feeling that they will be scalped for going wrong with the ying-yang of a great anthology, when what is excluded becomes as important as what is included. It is a reasonable fear that needs to be cultivated in all aspiring anthologists. You don8217;t mess around with a city like Bombay/Mumbai, valued not just by the its citizens, but by every passing itinerant who happened to have had a whiff of its acrid air, among them such purveyors of deathless prose as Salman Rushdie, Andre Malraux, V.S. Naipaul among the living, not to speak of proprietorial ghosts like Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Koestler, Mark Twain. I, for one, would recommend that bad anthologists be frogmarched to the Gateway of India and dunked 40 times in its soupy waters.
So do the editors of this book merit such treatment? On balance, no. Let me just say this bhelpuri of a book is a passable anthology which has its good moments. At its worst it appears like a badly packed holdall why include photographs and cartoons in a book on 8216;8216;writing8217;8217;?, with a great deal of journalism passing off for deep stuff. It8217;s true that both editors are rooted in the media world, but they should have made more effort to look farther afield for writing talent. It8217;s good to know Mumbai8217;s journalistic talent is alive, well and planning to take off, but in an anthology like this one they are pitted against the truly greats and could sometimes fail the test.
The nit-pickers can have a field day on why, for instance, one particular passage of Rushdie was privileged over another, but I would leave that to editorial prerogative and move on to more major lacunae. If, for instance, there could be a good piece of social documentation on Muharram, there is no reason why a subaltern account of the Ganapati festival, that becomes synonymous with the city every September, could not have been included.
The sadness of the city comes across in the powerful Dalit poetry included here 8212; and Suketu Mehta8217;s account in which a rioter describes deadpan what happens to a human body when set alight is black tragedy, if ever there is such a genre. But there8217;s humour, too, thankfully, whether it is Khushwant Singh8217;s encounter with a sewer rat or Adil Jussawalla8217;s wry comment that everyone born in 8217;40s Bombay wanted to write Midnight8217;s Children, but Rushdie beat them to it. It was great to reread Kiran Nagarkar and his description of the nakras of the pipe bringing in precious municipal water to a chawl from Ravan and Eddie and, yes, Cyrus Mistry has a surer grip on the Parsi patois than his better known brother, Rohinton, as his play, Doongaji House 8212; excerpted here 8212; reflects. I also believe there a new talent in ironical writing in Paromita Vohra. Her account of life as a female singleton under 8220;Leave 038; Licence8221; has certainly more resonance than The Dairy of Bridget Jones.
Anthologies are, ultimately, colonising projects, taking subjects and moulding them to an editor8217;s vision though a process of choice. It is apt, therefore, that Pinto and Fernandes end their volume with lines from the popular song: 8220;Come to Bombay, come to Bombay/ Bombay meri hai8230;8221; This book, in the final analysis, represents their Bombay/Mumbai.
