Mumbai Fables and Bombay Velvet

Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables is attributed as the basis for the movie Bombay Velvet. A valiant effort at history telling, it was not appraised well by film critics and performed equally dismally at the box office. Sad. The critics had a point -- atleast going by the summary critique on Wikipedia. Priyanka, Ranbir and kJo did turn out great performances, and the script did seem rather disjoint. Was it a failure in editing, script writing or choosing a film format for the work? A case could be made for all of the above but I looked at it in relation to HBO’s The Wire. The Wire was wonderful at character development but it took several years to unfold on screen and had the sheer number of hours to paint vignettes that focused in turn across a broad mosaic of the city of Baltimore. The telling of Bombay Velvet needed this – and hence needed a series format on TV. The creators may have considered a TV series format but then decided there wasn’t an adequate segment in the Indian TV viewing market for this sort of multi-season deep dive into the machinery of a city and its history. Again… Sad. But if that day isn’t here yet, it will come. So the movie had a breathless quality to it but we should forgive its creators for an ambitious venture at the impossible.

The move piqued my interest in the book. I wanted to see what the book had to say about Balraj and Rosie the two very identifiable protagonists who purportedly existed. The book was silent on them. kJo’s character, Kaizad Khambatta, was a loose composite of various players in the book. So these characters were devices the script attempted to use to rouse our imaginations into appreciating what it must have been like to live through those times in Bombay. That’s understandable. The Wire had such an artistic device as well – all along the series they returned us to the police task force which used a wire, which cleverly served as a prism into the varying incentives and motivations of the various constituencies of a city. Now on to Mumbai Fables -- the book had something more.

Mumbai Fables is a work of history in the best sense of the term: it is an account from an economical and sociological foothold of how something came to be a certain way. Prakash winds through the various stakeholders in turn giving us the depths of their situations and circumstances, where they were coming from, and what their aspirations were. We are taken through the land grabs by developers, private and public; the press both mischievous and diligent; trade unionists; Marxist labor movements; Hindu fundamentalists; Muslim gangsters; even a revenge murder that took some remarkable back-room machinations to settle out without ruffling up communalism. The book succeeds in sequencing the plausible chain of events of how the CPI in some ways paved the road for the Shiv Sena, indeed in some sense they carried water for the Sena; in other passages we walk with the town elite and see them make unlikely bedfellows with mill workers; we see the Blitz turn into a vigorously anti-capitalist vanguard of labor rights; the intellectual repatriates who might have otherwise energized a movement of civic sensibility, indeed they tried, get coopted and ultimately sell out to the insidious Bollywood machine. And then Prakash returns us full-circle to where property developers do an end-run around the bidding process on reclaimed land. Prakash is neither apologetic nor elusive about his leftist disposition: he does not wear it on his sleeve either. His worldview simply permeates his writing:  it is simply out there so you can choose to fade his point-of-view if you wish. There is no subterfuge here. There is no hand-wringing either of the Bombay that could have been, Prakash is content simply to tell us how it was: and incidentally, how he knows all this as well, for there is ample documentation of his sources in the end-notes.

What history should NOT be is HIS-story, the telling of a tale about how something came to be the way it is because someONE made it so. Mumbai Fables is not about anyone’s HIS-story. A narrative is linear; a better narrative is perhaps several narratives threaded together. But even the best narratives cannot adequately paint the complex outcomes of feedback, a concept elegantly illustrated by Stephen Wolfram in A New Kind Of Science. A city is an organism and an organism makes spaghetti of feedback mechanisms. Prakash prudently sidesteps the fool’s errand of capturing this in prose. Rather, he lavishly develops the cast of this fable, stirs the pot once in a while and leaves to our imaginations the job of seeing how each of these moving parts instigated and constrained the others. Ultimately we end up where we started… yeh hai Bombay meri jaan.

The reader who may be discouraged quickly by the early forays into the dry and esoteric topics of architectural space and town planning should be patient. Much can still be enjoyed of this book even skipping uninteresting portions without loss of continuity. In the potpourri of the Bombay that was, we could get a lot from this book even if we shrug off the parts that are uninteresting. Indeed I found the architecture treatment boring, someone else could find Nanavati’s ‘crime of passion’ a meaningless tangent (it was) – but we readers could both get a lot from this book.

What the book is not is a prurient walk through Bombay’s seedier parts. There’s a little of that… just a little. And in the literary landscape of writings about Bombay there is little room to reprise Suketu Mehta’s salacious tripe in Maximum City  --  another captivating read.

The mark of a good book is that you regret coming to the end of it. That point came home to me as my daughter was arriving to the end of the fifth Harry Potter book just as I was coming to the end of Mumbai Fables – we shared that conflicted ambivalence of being wistful yet weary.