Urbanism, mobility and Bombay: Reading the postcolonial city

Abstract

The city has been largely ignored in postcolonial studies because it is hard to fit into the classic discourse of decolonizing rhetoric. But the critical feature of postcolonial cities is that they are the first stage, and the microcosm, of the mobility and cultural intermixing that colonialism sets in motion. No city embodies this function better than Bombay/Mumbai. Bombay is the sine qua non of the postcolonial city because in every respect it encapsulates the processes of postcolonial movement and settlement that come to extend globally. An invention of colonialism, no city has been a greater focus of literary writing than Bombay, which demonstrates the mobility and cosmopolitanism of the postcolonial city, and the fluidity, class disparity and ambivalent sense of home that has come to characterize diasporic populations. This essay examines the extent to which Bombay literature, despite the devastating pressures of state control, corruption and fundamentalist violence, expresses a utopian view of the social, religious and cultural openness of this radical conglomeration of peoples, ethnicities, cultures, classes and religions.

Keywords:

• utopianism
• mobility
• transnation
• postcolonial
• fundamentalism
• multiple modernities

Notes

1. The British acquired the Bombay islands from the Portuguese in 1661 as part of the marriage treaty of Charles II of England and Catherine Braganza of Portugal. The wedding took place in 1662 but it was not until 1665 that the islands were reluctantly handed over to the British.

2. I will refer to the novels as “Bombay novels” and to the city as Bombay because for the most part the flowering of the Bombay novel occurred either before, or often in resistance to, the name change to Mumbai. Bombay best captures the identity of the city as a colonial construction. The name “Mumbai” is, paradoxically, the sign of an ethnocentric identity that the postcolonial city earnestly resists, despite the name’s obvious decolonizing intent. In many respects “Mumbai” indicates a much deeper change than the mere name.