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WE ARE ALL MUMBAIKERS NOW

"Most British Asian journalists thrive on their dual-identity. But if I’m honest, I have struggled with mine", writes Kunal Dutta. In light of the terrorist attacks last week, he reflects on visits to Mumbai over three very different decades ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Most British Asian journalists thrive on their dual-identity. But if I’m honest, I have struggled with mine. Being a British Asian in India has never been as simple as it seems.

Throughout my childhood I would regularly fly to Mumbai to see my relatives in Cuffe Parade (an area in Colaba between the two hotels that came under fire last week). Having been raised by liberal parents who had lived in London since the 1960s, these visits to India should have been relatively uncomplicated. Yet from the age of nine, my time in Mumbai would tease apart the stitching of my Indian heritage. I was darker than an Anglo-Saxon, but still not quite Indian enough to blend into the crowd or avoid the beggars of Colaba Causeway seeking foreign sympathies. Speaking in a British accent would elicit bewilderment. (Who was this young boy with a Hindi name who couldn’t pronounce it without sounding like a sahib?) And if my jeans, trainers and insistence on socks didn’t project my differences, then my botched Hindi and substandard cricket skills certainly did.

Back then what seemed most alien of all was India’s class system. Compared with Britain, where class divisions and racist instincts have long been concealed behind a glib sense of tolerance or constrained politeness, Mumbai addressed social differences with apathy. As a child the same questions would replay in my mind: why would servants sleep on their master’s floor despite the availability of beds? Why did entire families survive in a filthy corrugated iron shack while their neighbours lived inside a gated high-rise apartment block? And how could a woman walk through five lanes of traffic clutching a disabled child without anyone batting an eyelid? “Aray! Don’t give her anything, yar,” I was told. “She’s a con artist. Everyone knows you’re a limey and is trying to jip you!”

Mumbai’s rapid modernisation had subconsciously plunged me into a corporate arms race with my cousins. It was 1988 and Coca-Cola had been banned by the Indian government under protectionist legislation. In its place was “Thums Up!” a locally produced alternative. Satellite television had yet to claw its way inside India’s living rooms. Instead the state broadcaster, Doordashan, offered a weekly episode of “He-Man”, an American cartoon (which at least became a common cultural reference for my cousins and me). We would come to Mumbai with exotic gifts from London: Michael Jackson LPs, Marks & Spencer underwear, Woolworths pick-and-mix confectionery and chunky videotapes on which I had diligently recorded episodes of “Knight Rider” and “Neighbours”, an Australian soap opera. My cousins accepted the gifts gratefully, while quietly swearing it was only a matter of time before they would not need them from us.

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Things had changed by the time I visited Mumbai again in 1996. For one, the British-title ‘Bombay’ had been dropped by the Maharashtra government, and the old name reinstated. Bans had been lifted and India’s entrance into the global freemarket altered the city’s landscape. Multinational brands had narrowed our cultural rifts. Gone was the monopoly on fizzy-drinks, and Coca-Cola was not the only new arrival. As 18-year olds we could sip drinks as obscure as Newcastle Brown Ale or Red Bull inside air-conditioned pubs, where cosmopolitan locals would come to dance to a mixture of Bhangra and Britpop. No need for those pre-recorded video tapes either: Asia’s premier satellite television, Star-TV (part-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) was busily beaming a heady mixture of raunchy music videos on MTV Asia, English sitcoms on BBC World and cricket coverage from all over.

And so my cousins began the crass comparisons. “Same-same, yar!” was a frequent taunt from my older cousin, Rohit. “You have Red Bull and vodka, we have Red Bull and vodka,” he’d say proudly, applying a higher pitch to the second clause as though it was an answer to the first. “You have BBC, we have BBC.” It was a celebration of the corporate footprints that capitalism was leaving in its trail. “Everything same-same! Ev-ree-THING!”

But India’s colonial history also made way for some striking social differences. My cousins regularly frequented the Bombay Gymkhana, a private club with Victorian architecture that resembled an ancient Oxford college. Established in 1875, when India was still under colonial rule, it was now a decadent spot for Mumbai’s elite to come and play a game of squash or sip whisky at sunset--quite unlike the local council swimming pool where I swam in London. Nearby was the Bombay Yacht Club, another hallmark of British rule in India, where both my cousins would sail every Saturday. A five-minute walk from there was the Taj Palace, an iconic hotel completed in 1903 by Jamshethji Tata, a Parsi industrialist, allegedly in response to a plea from the Times of India newspaper for a decent hotel worthy of the city. (Tata Group, his commercial legacy, has since become a multinational behemoth. Earlier this year it bought two of Britain’s prized car brands, Land Rover and Jaguar.)

The tectonic plates of affluence were changing in Mumbai, and the lifestyle that my cousins led was leaving mine behind. Could this crude emphasis on “same-same”, I wondered, be part of a subconscious need to show that India could rise without the help of the country that once colonised it?

Ultimately it wouldn’t matter. By the turn of the century we were all adults who had learned to look beyond the insecurities of our differences. Besides, globalisation had spawned a way to a new liberalism that had narrowed the mental spaces between us. London or Mumbai, we all had access to the same news bulletins, websites and Eminem and Britney Spears videos. By 2001 both of my cousins had jobs with multinational companies, and rather than wait for our visits to Mumbai each winter, they would frequently come to London on business instead. We had all become middle-class citizens of a capitalist world. Perhaps Rohit’s “same-same” principle had been right all along.

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In April I returned to Mumbai for the first time in 12 years. The scenes were unlike any during my previous visits. In the space of a decade Mumbai had transformed into a glitzy urban metropolis where even the shantytowns and the suffering had been airbrushed by a ten-year economic boom.

The streets of Mumbai--once a cacophony of noise and gridlocked traffic--now sat spotless and tree-lined. Local authorities had clamped down on the incessant tooting of cars horns, rendering them whispers compared with the din of 1988. Roads were widened and lanes were marked, imposing a sense of order unknown before. The chunky old Indian Ambassador cars of the 1990s had been largely replaced by a dazzling array of European and Japanese models. Everyone--old, young, destitute, designer-clad--seemed to clutch a mobile phone.

And no longer did I stand out. Foreigners were just as common as natives in this new Mumbai. Gap-year students and young British-Asian businessmen would rub shoulders at Leopolds, Colaba’s famous drinking hole, while women working in multinational corporations would descend on Mumbai’s thriving nightspots in slinky dresses. One of the city’s most famous bars, Indigo, now served Chardonnay in frosted wine glasses and beer from shining chrome-plated taps at prices that were steep even by London standards.

This rapid advance of capitalism over the last decade had also given rise to an underlying greed and superficiality. The chattering classes appeared fixated with wealth, corporate brands and personal success in a way reminiscent of Britain under the Thatcher years. Large quantities of disposable income pumped through Mumbai’s middle and upper classes. This largesse spilled over to the cricket field, where the Indian Premier League could attract international stars with sums of money the sport had never seen before.

A few days later I took a train to Matheran, which departed from Mumbai’s CST Station. Built under British rule as Victoria Terminus, the station is a Victorian-Gothic extravaganza through which half the city’s 19m population passes each day. Close your eyes for more than a second and chances are you’d see  completely different people when you opened them.

Waiting for our train to arrive, my girlfriend and I both made the same curious observation. Among the chaotic crowds of millions, we noticed the lonely frame of a metal detector at the entrance to the station’s main concourse. It seemed purposeless. There were no security guards nearby and too many people were free to walk on either side of it. “Good to see that security is under control,” we joked. There is an underlying sense of fatalism in the Hindu notion of Karma. Even after a spate of terrorist attacks over recent years, this was clearly a city that lived its life on little more than a wing and a prayer.

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As we sat inside the Deccan Express heading towards Neral, the underside of India’s burgeoning cosmopolitanism became clearer. It was a far cry from the glorious technicolour of the “Incredible India” advertising campaign. Crows perched upon heaps of rubbish where children played. Rows of makeshift housing were built of corrugated iron and old advertising billboards. What would the brand managers of Nestle say, we wondered, if they knew that discarded Kit-Kat hoardings were being used as shelter, a perversely cheerful showcase for India’s abject destitution?

Returning to Mumbai a few days later, we finished our trip with a meal by the pool of the Taj Palace Hotel. Shrouded in palm trees that stretched into the night sky, the inner courtyard was a sanctuary of silence from the chaos of the city. Unlike most five-star hotels, the Taj feels not only luxurious but richly significant, a product of J.N. Tata’s vision and determination. Its presence is a metaphor for the inherent pride of almost every Mumbaiker, regardless of whether they will ever get to stay there.

Within less than 20 years, the economic order between east and west had been inverted. Westerners in Mumbai now needed to be mindful of their budgets, and the city’s affluent standard of life could put London’s to shame. In 1987, as a visitor from foreign shores, I felt disconnected with the island. Now that sense of displacement was no longer about geography, but about lifestyle.

I didn’t have to wait another decade before my image of the city would change again. Waking up last Thursday morning to the worst terrorist attack in Mumbai’s history injected everything with a new significance. The central port, where my cousins used to sail everyday as children, was now where gunmen had entered the city on inflatable boats. The platform at CST where we had watched the bustle was where commuters lay in pools of blood. And the swimming pool of the Taj Palace Hotel, where we had our last supper, was where the first shots had been fired, initiating the terrorists’ 60-hour siege.

I called my cousin in Colaba. There was no need for pleasantries. “This is Mumbai’s 9/11, bhaya,” she said softly. “It’s taking place on the streets we walk through every single day.” Outside her window the city’s night sky was lit up with flames still rising from the Oberoi and the Taj Palace, while gunfire continued in the background. But Mumbai’s not a city to become paralysed in panic. Some of her neighbours had calmly begun assigning food rations, others lit candles in a show of solidarity.

Having agonised over my relationship with India for years, I immediately felt united with my cousins in their anguish and anger. Together we asked many questions, and have received no answers. Why Mumbai? Where were the city’s politicians and intelligence services? What for the future of India and Pakistan? Why had no Islamic figurehead condemned these atrocities yet? Hadn’t the election of Barack Obama somehow signalled a safer world?

We thought we finished our childhood race for progress and modernisation years ago. But things have taken an ugly turn. Mumbai had become a shining hub of economic progress and prosperity. Now it becomes another symbol, together with London, New York and Madrid, of a dangerous and imperfect world.

Picture credit: cell105 (via Flickr)

(Kunal Dutta is London-based writer and journalist. His last story for More Intelligent Life was about viewing the American election in London.)