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Bombay’s curse: No sense of history

Shobhan Saxena
10 February 2010, 11:17 PM IST

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Istanbul: Last week, I tried to argue for making Bombay a more inclusive and liberal city, and my comment box was filled with filthy abuses and self-righteous reactions from Mumbai fanatics who believe that the city belongs to only the Marathi Manoos. Of course, there were comments from others as well, heaping scorn on the champions of the Marathi cause. In the end, it turned into a slanging match between the two factions, with the main issue – whose city is it, anyway? – lost in the cacophony.

Sitting in a café in a street opposite the magnificent Blue Mosque in this city, Bombay looks like a bad dream and a distant memory. Reading stories of lumpen violence in Bombay on the Net is like watching a surreal comic opera which is getting dirty and vicious every day. Here, as snowflakes float down from the murky sky and the city’s cobbled streets turn wet with rain, it’s impossible not to ask yourself this question: Why can’t Bombay, or for that matter Delhi, be like Istanbul? What does Istanbul has we don’t have back home.

Istanbul is beautiful. The city is green. The streets are clean. There are beautiful mosques. There are magnificent churches. And the people are lovely, walking around and singing in the rain. There is something peaceful about them. Nobody seems to be rushing anywhere. And nobody seems to be jobless. The city is as exotic as a city can be. Every piece of rock here seems to be telling a story – of its glorious past, its golden present.

Sophaya mosque

(Local people near the Sophaya mosque in the heart of the city. Picture: Shobhan Saxena)

But it’s not Istanbul’s exotic value that makes it a wonderful city. It’s the people of this city on the Bosporous that make it a lovely place to live. They are proud of their city. But it’s not a nationalistic, chauvinistic love, it’s an emotional attachment with the city and its past. In his book Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk called this feeling huzun. Loosely translated the word huzun means melancholy, but in this city it means just one thing: shared feeling, shared experience, a shared sense of history. Everyone here -- rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, old residents or recent arrivals – share this feeling. They are aware of their past. They are not lost in some myths.

The Sophaya mosque
(The famous Blue Mosque in Sultanahmet area of Istanbul. Picture: Shobhan Saxena)

Last week, in my post, when I said that the name Bombay is a distorted form of Portuguese term Bom Bahia (good bay) given to the small port by the Portuguese merchants, some fanatics accused me of distorting history. They based their argument on mythology. They have no sense of history and that’s Bombay’s biggest curse.

The vandals, who are going around smashing cinema halls and taxis, and the hate parties that are creating an atmosphere of fear have one thing in common: they want to interpret the past in the terms of present. That’s their way of grabbing the city which has become what it is – a megapolis and the country’s financial capital – due to the hard work of millions of people who went to Bombay to make a living and in the process contributed to its growth. The list is quite long – the Portuguese, British, Parsis, Gujaratis, Tamils, Malyalis, Biharis, UPiites, Sindhis, Punjabis, Sikhs and Marathis who migrated from other parts of the state to the city. There are many more communities and castes that have made Bombay a city of dreams.

All these people not only share the future, they also share a past. It’s time we recognized that. If we continue to deny history and define the city in narrow, linguistic-chauvinistic manner, Bombay will become a dangerous, violent place. It has already begun to look like that.

It’s time Bombay discovered its huzun and accepted it.

PS: The history deniers should know that there would be no Vada Pao and Pao Bhaji, Bombay's trademark, and Shiv Vada Pao without the Portuguese who brought both Pao (bread) and Batata (potato) to Bombay. In fact, both Pao and Batata are Portuguese words that have become part of Marathi and Bombayia Hindi. In fact, there are dozens of Portuguese words that have become part of our languages. A few examples: Sabun (soap), Taulia (towel), Chaabi (key), Almari (almirah), Mez (table) and Kameez (shirt).