BOOK REVIEW

practised among prisoners in jails with better living conditions being reserved for Europeans while Indians were herded into overcrowded cells as r evealed in two contemporary reports that were produced in 1865. There was just one exception to this, however. Educated middle class Bengali detectives became the desideratum in colo nial policing in the 19th century, prized for their superior local knowledge and intellect, as compared to mere informers. A Bengali darogah, Priyanath Mukhopadhyay (1855-1907), trained as a detective and had a remarkable career in the Calcutta police. His memoirs record his experiences as a darogah, an extra ordinary testament of personal courage

and professional skill, narrated simultaneously as a thriller and a moral statement. Mukhopadhyays interrogations of criminals and his own quintessentially male middle class reections on the conversations offer an interesting glimpse into the contemporary bhadralok conscience.

Stimulating Further Research

This is a valuable survey of crime and puni shment woven in the context of a very 19th century Bengali milieu. It is captivating and intricate in its details, spun from a wealth of contemporary sources and o ffers a compelling narrative. What is missing, however, is a wider take on related histories, spaces and peoples. How does crime transform the social and cultural spaces of

the city? In what ways do women emerge as mere public spectacles in law courts and jails within the states penal system? Can the history of labour unrest be simply clubbed together with nationa list mass strikes? Another interesting avenue of i nquiry could be the relationship b etween journalism, print and crime, for as a lways criminals are often made by the media, and 19th century Calcutta was a fter all a very vibrant scene for sensational print journalism. The book nevertheless opens up all these questions for future r esear chers and is all the more valuable for d oing so.
Anindita Ghosh (anindita.ghosh@manchester. ac.uk) is at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom.

The Historian as Competing Voice

Ashoak Upadhyay

iven Mumbais importance in the material and mental landscape of this country for two centuries it is surprising that it has not claimed the a ttention of historians, sociologists, nonction and ction writers in quite the way that New York, London or Paris have. Books on Mumbai would barely ll a d ecent-sized shelf; one could virtually count off the titles on ones ngertips. Gyan Prakash teaches history at the Prince ton University and his latest book, Mumbai Fables has the advantage over other books on the city in the elegance of his prose and the perspectives he brings to bear on his project: To ask what lies behind the very powerful fable about the citys past and its present His goal he asserts is not to separate fact from ction, not to oppose the real from the myth but to reveal the historical circumstances portrayed and hidden by the stories and images produced in the past and the present (23). It is unclear which powerful fable Prakash is referring to but the project at once marks him out from the extant works on Mumbai that have largely focused on e ither the cultural/ctive representations of the city or its socio-economic histories. By blending stories, lm themes and songs

Mumbai Fables by Gyan Prakash (India: HarperCollins Publishers), 2010; pp 396, Rs 599.

and urban poetry into the narrative of h istorical circumstances, Prakash breaks new ground in Mumbais historiography covered earlier by Sujata Patel and Alice Thorners (1995) pioneering collection of writing on diverse aspects of the citys life and times. That cross-disciplinary, non-chronological style suits the study of
the narratives of change from Bombay to Mumbaithe transformation of one historical stage to another, from the bounded unity of the city of industrial capitalism to the generic city of globalisation, from modernity to post-modernity, from cosmopolitanism to communalism (22-23).

Prakash tells us that these changes are deeply awed. At the outset, the historian who plans to u nfold the citys ensemble of histories has already passed judgment. But which one does he nd deeply awed: the journey from industrial capitalism, from modernity to postmodernism or all of them? One gets the distinct i mpression that all but the move from c osmopolitanism to communalism were awed. The citys passage away from

cosmopolitanism has been the favourite villain of not just sociologists eager to nd traces of neo-fascism on the sub continent but of the articulate middle class yearning for that mythic city which P rakash attempts to show died long before the Shiv Sena came to power. At rst glance, the idea that every change was awed excites the reader: almost no one has described the slide to communalism thus. By the end of the book, however, the reader is disappointed for Prakash views the emergence of communalism as a awless demolition machine, relentlessly trampling, rst the leftists, and then the cosmopolitan spirit of the city. In the process, Prakash bows to the accepted wisdom that has identied the Shiv Sena and its nettlesome offshoot, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena as symptoms of neo-fascism hastening the citys degeneration. Had he scratched the surface of this nativism he would have found that the intrusion of alien elements (234) that Bal Thackeray has persistently ranted against never had the ring of an authentic sons-of-the-soil world view so prevalent in the north-east and in the Kashmir Valley. It smashed trade union militancy and the cultural tradition that fed off and nurtured it to the late early 1980s when the last great general strike led by Datta S amant ended forever the industrial character of the city. But the death of industrial capitalism and the emergence of globalisation

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also frittered away the foundation of Marathi manoos nativism. Globalisation has meant mobility for Maharashtrian youth as much as for the rest of the middle class that embraced it shamelessly but not quite awlessly. The mall has yet to replace the vegetable vendor just as the Shiv Sena has yet to throw him out for b eing north Indian.

Precooked Reference Frames

More than of any other city in the world, Mumbais history is a living, indeed a throbbing palimpsest wherein layers seep into one another. Her ensemble of histories criss-cross in time and space and dene a uniqueness all her own. Prakash does not try hard enough to weave a tapestry from the citys rich and often leached colours; instead he uses metaphorical frames into which to t his material to blend fact and memory in a sometimes faux rendition of magical realism; in his rst chapter he uses the statue of Shivaji at the Gateway of India built in 1911 juxtaposing it with the Kala Ghoda where the statue of King Edward VII vacat(ed) the space for the nationalist hero (26). The

passages are unconvincing both as ction or as a historians attempt at an evocative narrative; at best they suggest an imaginative style. Nowhere does this fail more than in his account of the citys birth: Mumbai he says has a parasitical foundation occupying lands stolen from the sea. Then, bowing to some vengeful god of the environment he thunders: The deluge of July 2005 was a brutal reminder that the city represents the colonisation of nature by culture (27). This is bad history writing; it does not enlighten the reader at all though it might make her grateful for small mercies if she were Dutch.

Typecasting Sources
The overblown style of the narrative and particularly of the section captions often forces the historian into typecasting the sources he examines. The second chapter opens with a few lines from Namdeo Dhasals poem, Mumbai, Mumbai My Slut that Prakash uses to pose urgent questions. These questions are appropriate not just to Mumbai but to any citys production of both enchantments and exploitation.

Dhasal is a dalit poet like Daya Pawar who also berates the city as a temptress while admitting to a mad attraction for this ruby in a ring. Both Pawar and Dhasal are urban warriors so to speak, having ed the accumulated injustices of the village; they cannot live anywhere else, they are condemned to the charms of the ne lady and the whore with the heart of gold (cited in Jerry Pinto and Naresh Fernandes rendition of the poem 2003) to whom Dhasal appeals Come, throw open the gates of heaven to the poor devils. As Dhasal told the journalist Fernandes in 1996, Mumbai is my oxygen, my blood; I cannot live without it. So was it for Narayan Surve, the quintessential working class poet, born to it, raised in it and an active member of the Communist Party of India. The poem P rakash opens his section Gothic City called Mumbai ends with the lines that the historian views as conrmation of rejection of this Dickensian world. But when Surve declares, For it was my father/ Who sculpted your epic in stone he lays claim to Mumbai as the proud member of

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Economic & Political Weekly EPW december 25, 2010 vol xlv no 52

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BOOK REVIEW

the working class, not as the helpless victim of capitalism on the cheap. The literary references that come later suffer from the same misreading of a w riter or poets work, dressed up in lurid catch-phrases. In his rendition of a Hindi novel about two men from north India drawn to the city by its fabled opportunities (326) the author comes close to the heart of the city, its alluring promise and the mythic struggles of immigrants to survive and forge the modern city as society (327). One becomes a gigolo, the other joins the underworld perhaps reecting a grim reality of lumpenism; in Surendra Vermas ctional work the historian nds a corroboration of Suketu Mehtas Maximum City, a non-ction work that dramatises crime in the city in a way that would show up the 1930s Chicago as an arcadian playground. Now Prakash is up and running with his overblown rhetoric of a maximum city destroying mangroves, polluting the air, its migrants the graceful line of bungalows (327), built,

let it be known, by the colonial masters and their henchmen. The chapter is tellingly titled Dream Worlds.

Factual History
The authors factual rendition of the city is equally bereft of the multilayered histories and the complex motives that guided actors on this stage called Bombay- Mumbai. Throughout the book three leitmotifs trample peremptorily across the narrative. One is the colonial appropriation of land and most quaintly, of the sea whose reclamation gave rise to recurring scandals of nancial misconduct. The s econd is the extreme inequality that emerged between the scabrous lth of the chawls and tenements, the mill districts and the comely city of the Elphinstone Circle ending in the wide expanse of the western shoreline a portion of which in the 1930s became Marine Drive. The third is the decline of the mythic city a phrase Prakash is unduly fond of into the dysfunctional city of the present with its

roaring tiger, rampant crime most often unpunished and congestion. As is his wont Prakash invokes over- textured catch phrases as canopies to enve lope the historical drama he investigates: but they are too thin, the drama too vast and varied. The chapter City by the Sea has a section Stealing Land, Colonising Space that covers the period from early 19th century when the Fort walls were demolished to expand the city limits. What was built? For Gyan Prakash the colonisation of nature (51) built a comely city (in the words of a contemporary traveller), a London-bythe-Arabian Sea and the mill districts north of the Esplanade with overcrowded chawls and tenements, that bred bubonic plague; the comely city next to the city of the dead (67).

Where Is the Middle Class?

But the colonisation that Prakash spews his rage upon did more than build the Gothic City for colonial masters their

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BOOK REVIEW

unkeys and the Urban Horror for workers. Reclamation created the space for a rich bouquet of architectural styles reflecting cultural patterns and lifestyles of migrants from all over India. Both, Sharda Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra (2001) and sociologist Meera Kosambi (1986) in their respective works testify to this harvest of communities both within and without the British settlement. If Elphinstone Circle was reminiscent of London, the wadis in Bhuleshwar replicated Rajasthan, those in Girgaum the Konkan so that by the turn of the 20th century the city was not one but many cities mirroring a collective yet distinct desire to retain subcultures within the dominant colonial one. The author tiptoes around this unique development in the citys physical growth and the birth of the middle class (and the expansion of workers and the artisanal classes) without the violent hostility that successive waves of migrants faced in c ities such as New York or London. Which is why the Urban Horror had its redemptive quality: the density of workers and the emergence of a middle class intellectual from the Bombay University campus built on the colonised sea inspired class consciousness and the rst stirrings of nationalism towards the end of the 19th century. As Raj Chandavarkar (1984) showed, by the late 1920s strikes had entered the social fabric of the city with its vanguard the Communist Party of India and its middle class leaders. Prakash prefers the apocalyptic retribution for the moral depravity and disease bred in Tom-all Alone in Charles Dickens Bleak House (69) that eggs him on to nd a real-life similarity in an immediate and v iolent response of the affected dwellers to the British attempt at cleansing the chawls. Not for him the protracted birth of working class consciousness.

Life Mirroring Fiction

Not that Prakash could have seen his subjects any other way; his work is far too self-referential. By focusing on the Backbay Reclamation scandal of the late 19th and mid-20th centuries as one of the f ables borne from the colonisation of the sea he misses out on one of the most p otent ones; nationalism, working class

radicalism and the emergence of a cultural renaissance the likes of which Mumbai has not witnessed ever since. To be sure he mentions the textile districts, the rise of unions and the communist party just as he also makes mention of the citys artists and writers their radicalism drawn from the spectrum of politics then heaving the city; he devotes some r efreshing space for Manto (124). The Art Deco style begun in the 1930s gets a condescending nod; Prakash seeks guidance from Louis Bromelds the best-selling novel Night in Bombay to capture the connection between capitalism and the modern architectural style. He loses more than he gains by such literary allusions. The period of the mid20th century was Bombays golden age and it all came together in an almost magical way. It was not just radicalism on the streets but the radicalism of thought and ideas that marked this period. The Art Deco movement was just that: a highly charged intellectual search for the right architectural style for the new India based on the outright rejection of the NeoGothic; Gyan Prakash hints at this revolt (103) but does not bother placing it in the context of a erce debate among Bombay architects; nor does he bother about the clash of opinions among painters of the day. The uniqueness of these debates carried on in professional journals and the popular media transcended the narrow connes of a colonial-traditional frame of reference; artists were eager to absorb inuences and movements from around the world. So his original premises of change from industrial capitalism to globalisation is itself awed because in the high noon of Bombays industrial capitalism with strikes and all, globalisation was embraced by the artist, the architect and the lm-maker each seeking to dene a perspective appropriate to both the new age dawning and to his creativity. Much b efore Walmart the city was global.

self-referential: Tropical Camelot, The Other Side of Eden, captions that exclude the complexity range of motives and events that are part of multiple histories being played out. And of course the constant a llusions to literary sources might have worked had Prakash used them with caution: the novelist and most of all the poet always works on and with, mans deeply awed and ambivalent emotions and motives. This brings us to the most critical aw in the book: as historian he const antly steps onto the stage. His self-referentiality, the eagerness to t historical events into his allusions and readings (for instance his strange interpretation of urban planning as a dream image of repression and disguise of unpalatable reality), and the overcooked text not only blind him to his actors many voices, their cadences, but also turn him into a competing voice.
Ashoak Upadhyay (ashoak1@gmail.com) is a Mumbai-based journalist with Business Line.

References
Chandavarkar, R (1984): The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay 1900-1940, Cambridge University Press. Dwivedi, Sharda and Rahul Mehrotra (2001): Bombay: The Cities Within, Eminence Designs. Kosambi, Meera (1986): Bombay in Transition: The Growth and Social Ecology of a Colonial City 18901980, Almqvist and Wiksell. Patel, Sujata and Alice Thorner, ed. (1995): Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture, OUP. Pinto, Jerry and Naresh Fernandes (2003): Bombay, Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai (India: Penguin Books).

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The Competing Spectacle

Mumbai Fables is not a chronological narrative; it is spatially and temporally spliced in an attempt to create a dramatic history. But the chronicle is always

Economic & Political Weekly EPW december 25, 2010 vol xlv no 52