Metropolis Bombay: Spatial Representations in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirement s for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Kalpana Bora Roll No. 06614103 Supervisor Professor Rohini Mokashi-Punekar Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati Guwahati 781039 India February 2013 Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Guwahati – 781039 (Assam) INDIA STATEMENT I hereby declare that the matter embodied in this thesis, entitled Metropolis Bombay: Spatial Representations in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English , is the result of research carried out by me in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology G uwahati, India, under the supervision of Professor Rohini Mokashi-Punekar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. IIT Guwahati February 2013 (Kalpana Bora) TH-1162_06614103 Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Guwahati - 781 039 (Assam), INDIA Dr. Rohini Mokash i-Punekar Phone: +91-361-2582555 Professor and Head Fax: +91-361-2582599 Email: [email protected] [email protected] CERTIFICATE It is certified that the matter embodied in the thesis entitled Metropolis Bombay: Spatial Representations in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English , submitted for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Kalpana Bora, a student of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India, has been carried out under my supervision. It is also certified that this work has not been submitted anywhere else for the award of a research degree. IIT Guwahati February 2013 (Prof. Rohini Mokashi-Punekar) TH-1162_06614103 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Like its subject this thesis is the product of the love, good wishes and encouragement of many who I must thank. Professor Rohini Mokashi-Punekar, my teacher, supervisor and an absolutely wonderful person. Thank you Ma’am. Ma-Deuta, I owe you everything. Ma-Pita, for immense love and faith. The members of my Doctoral Committee—Prof. Saundarjya Borbora, Dr. Liza Das and Dr. Arupjyoti Saikia—for constantly monitoring my progress. The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Guwahati, for providing me the necessary infrastructure to complete this work. The Central Library (IIT Guwahati), the Central Library (IIT Bombay), the Jawaharlal Nehru Library, (University of Mumbai), Sir Dorabji Tata Memorial Library (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai), the Asiatic Society Library (Mumbai) and the Central Library (Goa University) for providing me vital resources for this thesis. My colleagues in the Department of English, Cotton College, for making work such fun. Claudia Anderson, for providing me with a copy of her work. Professor Ravi Mokashi-Punekar, for unstinted encouragement. Prafulla Moha—for all the lessons learnt and unlearnt. Santanu Sir, Deetimali Baideo, and Merry Ba, for love, laughter and friendship. Ashima, Tejasha, Parag, Pallavi, Gopal da, Madhuri, and Jitu—life in the lab was never the same without you. Abhigyan, for the meticulous reading of the thesis and inputs. Monalisha, for friendship and much more. Himangshu and Arup, for making it possible. TH-1162_06614103 Nitu, Manu and Mayna, my ‘roots’ and ‘shadows’. Kanika, Simanta and Junuka, for the warm welcome into the family. Prasanta, for love. And little Kuhee, for the immense happiness you have brought to Mamam and Dita. TH-1162_06614103 Contents Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter II Writing the City: Theories and Representations 32 Chapter III Cosmopolitan Bombay: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Shama Futehally’s Tara Lane 67 Chapter IV The Marginal City: Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Kiran Nagarkar’s Ravan and Eddie 104 Chapter V Urban Networks, Crime and the “Unintended” City: Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games and Murzbaan Shroff’s Breathless In Bombay 141 Chapter VI Conclusion 175 Bibliography 184 TH-1162_06614103 1 Chapter 1 Introduction So this is Bombay, monster muse, part witch, part clown, always absurd, often charming—my rogue ballad; this is Bombay, meri jaan. —Siddharth Dhanvant Sanghvi Bombay or Mumbai, as it is presently known, is the most populous city in India and one of the largest metropolitan regions in the world 1. This city has been designated as India’s most modern and advanced city in academic scholarship as well as in popular literature. Post independence, as the discourse of the nation gained favor with the public imaginary, Bombay became the primary site for the development of a national modernity with its associated ideas of democracy, secularism and social justice. However, the content of Bombay’s modernity is characterized by blatant contrasts which are acutely evident in the city’s contemporary urban predicament. The city, which provides a referential map for several works of fiction by Indian writers in English as well as vernacular literature, has frequently been signified as a space of theoretical ambiguity. In such a scenario, negotiation the urban—which in itself is conflicting and implicated in new codes of utopian yearnings and social arrangements—has opened up entirely new debates on urban studies and the significance of the city. In her Introduction to the cinema of Bombay Ranjani Mazumdar writes that experience of “a new delirium of urban life” in Bombay (as well as in other major Indian cities) is informed by increasing migration, growing urban inequality, violence, fear, and terror together with the spectacle of a good life (xxii). The urban fabric thus provides a powerful metaphor to stage and examine the mise-en-scène of city life in the globalized era. The present chapter attempts to locate the city of Bombay as a site for spatial negotiations. Section I of this chapter attempts to trace a brief history of the city of Bombay. Section II examines the notion of the city in India and the relevance of Bombay as a symbol of the nation’s modernity. Section III explores the representation of the city in literary and sociological works to situate Bombay as a potential site of theoretical interventions and deliberations. Section IV contains a brief TH-1162_06614103 2 overview of the structure of the thesis and the methodology used and section V summarizes the main arguments of each chapter. I The modern metropolis of Bombay began as a group of seven islands off the mainland of the North Konkan on the west coast of India. Historical sources reveal that in the 3 rd century BC these islands formed a part of the Magadha Empire ruled by the Buddhist emperor Ashoka. The Hindu rulers of the Silhara dynasty later governed the islands until 1343 CE when they were annexed to the Islamic sultanate of Gujarat. In 1534 the Portuguese gained control of the islands from Bahadur Shah of Gujarat. In 1661 the territory was ceded to Charles II of England as dowry for his marriage to Catharine de Braganza. In turn the islands were leased to the British East India Company, and this marked the beginning of the urban and commercial development of the city writes Gillian Tindall in The City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay (1982). Gerald Aungier—the governor and “founding father” of Bombay—recognized the potential of the islands as a centre of commerce and offered incentives to attract skilled workers and traders to the colony (Tindall 44). The growing commercial opportunities brought immigrants from far and wide to form the basis of the present business community. In 1687 the East India Company transferred their headquarters from Surat to Bombay. With increasing prosperity and growing political power following the 1817 victory over the Marathas, the British embarked on several land reclamation projects and large-scale engineering works. Over a sixty-year period from the completion of the vellard or seawall at Breach Candy in 1784 to the construction of the Mahim causeway in 1845, the seven original islands were merged into a single land mass. The British Crown assumed political control of Bombay when Queen Victoria was proclaimed the Empress of India in 1877. Imperial control of the city lasted for almost a century until India gained independence in 1947. For much of its history, Tindall writes, Bombay was the archetypal British colony in the sub-continent and a leading port-city of the British empire. The major commercial base of Bombay was the flourishing textile industry in the nineteenth century. While the initial aim was to replace British cotton imports with local products, Bombay manufacturers went beyond this to win former British TH-1162_06614103 3 markets abroad, thus forcing the British textile industry to focus on finer quality production. The development of new dock facilities by Governor William Hornby, the opening of trade relations between Bombay and China in 1773, and the availability of exportable surplus of cotton in the immediate hinterland of the city ensured further growth of the cotton industry, and also laid the foundation for the industrialization of Bombay. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 facilitated the import of machinery and export of manufactured goods. The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 cut off export of cotton from American South to Lancashire and forced the British manufacturers to seek alternative supplies from India, almost all of which passed through Bombay. Extra demand pushed up prices and cotton, in its various forms (raw, spun and finished products), “provided the foundation on which most Bombay fortunes rested” (Tindall 103). The Bombay textile industry enjoyed unprecedented success and dominated the economic base of the city for a long time. However, this dominance was thwarted in the 1940s especially in the inter-war period when unemployment pressed the need for diversification. Profits from cotton were invested in new capital-intensive sectors like food-processing and petrochemicals. The concentration of India’s oil refinery capacity in the area in and around Bombay further accelerated the growth of capital.