When chroniclers of Mumbai come together

Born in Patna and educated in New Delhi, the author Gyan Prakash eventually made his way to Mumbai before heading to the United States, where he is now the Dayton Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University

Mumbai: On Wednesday, historian Professor Gyan Prakash will be in conversation with filmmaker Anurag Kashyap and Bombaywalla Historic Works co-founder Simin Patel, discussing Mumbai Fables, the book that catapulted the Princeton professor to fame among the non-academic reading crowd when it was first published in 2010.

Patel, a historian who is working on a book on the fast-disappearing Irani cafes of the city, is interested in the history of the Parsi community and the role it played.

“It seemed unmanageable at the beginning because Bombay has so many different aspects and I took time to get used to it. I didn’t want to write an outsider’s account of the city… I didn’t want to write a book that was addressed to a Western audience,” he said.

What Prakash ended up doing was writing a book that expanded our understanding of the city’s cosmopolitan nature. Thirteen years after its publication, it remains an important chronicle of our populous and fast-expanding city. Not only does it highlight important events which led to the formation of Bombay — called Mumbai since 1995 — it also explains the city to the reader. Prakash’s enduring legacy as a contemporary historian, which makes him immensely readable, is that he deploys academic terms like postcolonialism with what can only be called Bambaiya ease.

Born in Patna and educated in New Delhi, the author eventually made his way to Mumbai before heading to the United States, where he is now the Dayton Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University.

“My goal is not to strip fact from fiction, not to oppose the “real” to the myth (...) I am interested in uncovering the back stories of Mumbai’s history because they reveal its experience as a modern city, as a society built from scratch,” he writes at the start of the book, which took him nine years to research and complete.

Thus, the messy bylanes of Kamathipura and the mandis and chawls outside the Fort walls are as much the imperial urban as Oval gardens’ horse riding tracks. And the story of Backbay reclamation that gave Mumbai its Art Deco buildings and Marine Drive is also a story of urban planning that normalised cheerless three to five-storey chawls as working-class housing.

As Prakash put it, “the bleak chawls and the sordid Kamathipura do not usually enter the picture of the city on the sea composed by the sweeping promenade of Marine Drive, the aesthetics of Art Deco and the hot sounds of jazz.”

Prakash made sure they did.

All three speakers are chroniclers of Mumbai.

Kashyap said that he thought of his 2015 film Bombay Velvet while sitting with Prakash and hearing his stories about the city. “The idea of Bombay Velvet came before the book. It came from Gyan Prakash himself, germinated during our discussions about Bombay at the Princeton university campus, in his house in 2005. I was fascinated by his stories,” the filmmaker said. Prakash, in fact, shared writing credits of the film about a gangster, a club, a moll, a Parsi businessman and a cop in seedy, underworld 1950s to 1970s Bombay.

Patel, a historian who is working on a book on the fast-disappearing Irani cafes of the city, is interested in the history of the Parsi community and the role it played — as philanthropists and business owners — in building colonial Bombay. “Much of the book is stories about daring men — Gyan Prakash is drawn to these superheroes, characters from 20th century Bombay, whose lives are very much the masala of the city.”

“Many people have written biographies of the city,” Patel said, “but Prakash has done a postcolonial mapping of the city. For instance, he uses the Nanavati case [the naval Commander who admitted to murdering his wife’s lover, but was finally acquitted by the court — the case was the last jury trial in the country] brings out the transition of a post-colonial city. That is where his genius lies.”

If Patel, Kashyap and Prakash are three chroniclers of the city’s past, they are also equally concerned citizens of the city’s future. When asked what set of fables he’d write about today, Prakash said that the rise of Hindutva and a general consensus on neoliberalism and growth has resulted in a “nationalisation of politics”. “The vernacular cosmopolitanism of Bombay, the daily practice of diversity is also being transformed,” he said.

An anti-minority ideology has seeped into the general populace, Prakash said. “If I were to write another Mumbai Fables, I would trace the historical origins of this in the kind of destruction of the social fabric and organisations [such as the Unions] that took place in the 1970s and 1980s.”

The author will be in conversation on Wednesday at 5.30 pm at the Durbar Hall, Asiatic Society as part of the Mumbai Research Centre’s Bombay Booked initiative, where an author who has written about the city is invited to speak. The event is free to attend.