An attack on India’s future

15 July 2006

I had seen the ghastly poverty, the wretched and ragged sleeping on the streets; I had spent days interviewing victims of the booming Aids crisis (in Mumbai everything booms) and hearing the stories of the outcast. It would have been easy to be deceived by the crumbling, mould-stained buildings, the grinding traffic and the all-too-obvious evidence of poverty.

But I had been electrified by a parallel reality. Only perhaps in Shanghai had I felt anything close to the same excitement, the sense of a ‘new world’ in the making, where the economic boom was an adventure of the human spirit. This is the future, I thought to myself, and it is happening without quibble or restraint, a hell-for-leather gallop to build, accumulate and grow. There was an explosion of energy here of a kind which occurs rarely in human history.

In other times it might have led to wars of conquest and the foundation of an empire. But in Mumbai, at the beginning of a new century, the force of all that human vigour was channelling itself in what appeared to be an entirely peaceable direction. Little over a decade had passed since the bitter Hindu–Muslim riots of 1993.

More than 1,000 people, two thirds of them Muslim, had died at the hands of mobs inflamed by the Hindu Right. The violence had erupted after the demolition of a mosque in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. Yet it seemed to me a place where the sectarian bitterness of the past had been, if not overcome, then at least set to one side. For the majority of the population the preachings of the fundamentalists on both sides were something to be ignored.

I write this homage to Mumbai to explain why I was so depressed when I heard the news of the rush-hour bombings. For beyond the explicit human cost — the dead torn apart by high explosives, the wounded and the bereaved — the bombings were an assault on what this great city, on what all great cities, can represent.

Mumbai is overcrowded, diverse, freedom-loving. It is both secular and devout, rule-bound and corrupt, an epic contradiction which should not work but magically does. It is a living challenge to the ideals of the obscurantist and the fundamentalist. In his magnificent book Maximum City the Indian writer Suketu Mehta writes of feeling crushed in the city but also comforted by ‘a lovely vision of belonging’.