Through the twentieth century, Bombay exerted a pull in the Indian imaginary as the locus of a definitive modernity. And if the stream of labor migrants that continues to pour, unabated, into the nation's largest city is any indication, its mid-1990s rebranding as Mumbai has marked no diminution in the intensity of that appeal—notwithstanding the identity politics behind the name change, a demagogic nativist populism that famously boiled over in the Shiv Sena-orchestrated anti-Muslim “riots” of 1992–93. Yet the character of the modernity the image of the city evokes has indeed changed. To track the contours of that image over the decades—and to relate them to events on local, national, and transnational levels—is a multifaceted challenge for a historian. Gyan Prakash has reached for the prize with a generous grasp and a sure touch, and Mumbai Fables is an ambitious and rewarding book.
In designating Mumbai as an “enchanted city,” the book's title cites the popular Hindi epithet Mayapuri, City of Illusion. In this long-enduring formulation, the glitter and glamour projected by India's commercial and media capital are conceived as maya—“illusion” in the classical Indic sense that reduces the phenomenal world to the play of appearances that enmesh the desiring subject. But Prakash's idea of how Mumbai works its enchantment on Indian selves is, in fact, neither philosophical nor religious, per the Hindu (never mind Weberian) concept. Rather, his study centers on the representation of the city through narrative—stories that verbalize and circulate historically nested, iterative, and contending visions of urban modernity. His archive of Mumbai fables is impressively, and engagingly, eclectic: among the texts that contribute to his collage-portrait of the city are comic books, news reports, and editorials; policy documents and architects' plans; and works of cinema, poetry, and contemporary art. The interests voiced in these sources join a concert (albeit frequently discordant) of diverse social groups that speak in the name of more broadly conceived identities laying claim to the city as a whole. Indeed, the discursive terrain surveyed here maps well, in the main, onto public culture, that “zone of cultural debate” theorized by Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge between the nation-state and the domestic sphere. The evident applicability of this category to Mumbai owes much to its authors' own experience of life and work in the city.
Prakash himself is not a native. Like so many others on whom Mumbai works its fascination, he grew up in Hindi-speaking North India. A theme woven through the first half of the book is the dissemination of the city's image through what is perhaps Indian public culture's primary channel, the Hindi-language film industry, or Bollywood. (The capital B, the distinguishing mark that Indianizes, here works also as the carrier of a certain nostalgia in that B stands, of course, for Bombay, as opposed to Mumbai.) Hindi cinema as the modern engine of the maya-machine has long been an important site of Indian cultural-studies analysis. But in introducing his own discussion through his memory as a boy growing up in provincial Bihar, Prakash revitalizes a well-visited theme. His approach—tacking between the urban modernity constructed in the “golden age” films of the 1950s–60s and the historical demise of that vision—is at once acute and affecting; to quote a line featured in perhaps every Hindi screenplay ever filmed, zamana badal gaya hai, “the times have moved on.”
Among the book's other highlights is an account of the fortunes of the English-language tabloid Blitz, which peaked in 1959–60 with the adoption as a cause célèbre of the photogenic Commander Nanavati, convicted in a sensational trial of murdering his wife's playboy lover. Also notable are several crises in the city's development and expansion the author frames as conflicts between the technocratic vision of planners and architects—whose state-sponsored projects share a telltale rationalizing tendency across the milestone of 1947—and a host of rival interests.
Less successful is the chapter called “From Red to Saffron,” which documents the epic contest for the allegiance of the Marathi-speaking working-class population between the communist-led labor movement and the nativist (and opportunistically Hindu nationalist) Shiv Sena party. Here, to cite another ubiquitous (and infinitely recursive) screenwriter's line, yeh kahani purani ho gayi, “We've heard this story before.” Prakash's narration seems uncharacteristically dry and reductive, limited perhaps by reliance on English and Hindi over Marathi sources, and by a historiographical emphasis on textual expression over ethnographic description. A consideration of aspects of cultural practice among urban subalterns, for example the religious practices that mark specific neighborhood sites as sacred ground, could have enriched the book's analysis of the pivotal Mumbai fable: the contemporary rise to ascendancy, via successive bloodlettings, of the Shiv Sena as the five hundred–pound gorilla of Bombay—make that Mumbai—politics.
