Old British Stuff in Bombay

What's in a name?

Bombay, because that's the name my wife insists on. The change of name to Mumbai occurred sometime in the early nineties I think, a rather obvious post-colonial reaction. "Let's change a name left over from the British Empire for something more 'Indian'." Not that everyone seems to be aware of the change. The nurse who gave me my injections before we left wasn't aware that Bombay and Mumbai were the same place. To be fair, she also said she's never visited, so why should she know? It seems a reasonable mistake to make about a country that's so far away. More interesting is the way for people who live there, the two names seem to be interchangeable, as though 20 years haven't quite managed to erase the older name.

According to my wife, they should have stuck with the older name anyway, for all its supposed imperialist associations. Without the British, there would be no Bombay. The city is built around a bay and islands which were originally little more than swamp, although I think there were still a number of fishing villages. It was claimed by the Portuguese who then gave it to the British as a wedding gift. Seeking to obscure the rather unattractive aspects of this gift, they named it (in Portuguese) "Good bay", which was then anglicised as Bombay. It was the British whose engineering and land reclamation projects transformed the place into the beginning of the huge urban environment that it's since become. The name Mumbai comes from a Hindu goddess who was associated with a village further up the coast which has now been swallowed up by the spread of the city, but which had nothing to with the original islands which became Bombay.

This at least is the story as I understand it. There's actually very little of the city that could be termed 'Old British stuff' since so much of it has been built and developed since Independence, but we saw some of it in the oldest part of the city which we were able to visit one day. I must admit that I love that style of architecture, whatever it's associations with colonialism and imperialism. Then again, without the history of the British Empire and the association between our two countries, would I have ever met my wife? It feels silly to put it like that, when we're talking about something which is history. I don't, so far as I know, have any ancestors who were involved in the British Empire beyond presumably enjoying something of the economic prosperity it must have brought to the home country. And I'm a good left wing liberal, so of course I don't approve of imperialism, but I'm becoming increasingly aware that on a personal level, the meetings between the different cultures must have been far more complex than someone like myself might instinctively suppose. That after all, is part of what William Dalrymple was trying to show in his book White Mughals.

But then again, we're part of a different story anyway. We met at a British University and are part of a more modern movement of people around the globe. Well, she is at least. I still live in the same city in which I've lived for the past twenty years. And more importantly, we're our own story. Just us.

Horn OK Please

If I say that I found Bombay to be hot and very crowded, I wouldn't be making a very original observation. So many conversations involved complaints about the traffic (which has of course gotten so much worse) or the weather (and we British think we talk about the weather a lot!). We were there for a wedding, so I didn't really get to see very much of the city, which isn't after all much of a tourist city anyway. My first Indian wedding and it was my own! I won't therefore say very much about it because that's personal. What did strike me were the commonalities I could see. In the humanities we're, rightly I think, taught to be suspicious of universals, but that doesn't mean that they can't be found. Clearly, wedding photographers are going to be really annoying wherever you are. Although to be fair, it's their job to take good pictures, so maybe that's unavoidable. More seriously, the vows (which were in Sanskrit, so I suppose I could have agreed to anything!) as far as they were explained to me, seem very similar to what we would agree to in a ceremony in the Church of England. To love and protect. Care for each other. Share all we have. Honour and obey (okay, that's been dropped from the C of E, and I don't really expect her to anyway). Really, what else are they going to be? What else is a marriage about, wherever you're from? Of course, the outward form of the ceremony is very different...

But that's what Bombay was like. Different of course, but also familiar. As a long time enthusiast for the novels of Charles Dickens, I could see something of the city he wrote about in Bombay far more than I ever have in modern day London. The again, whilst Dickens is firmly associated in our minds now with the mid-Victorian city he himself always remained attached to an earlier city, so much of which had disappeared by the middle of the nineteenth century. His later fiction is mostly either explicitly set in the past or else it overlays the city of his boyhood onto the rapidly changing present. That's what we saw in Bombay: a rapidly changing city, with whole streets transformed or newly driven through what were previously slums. And extremes of wealth and privilege jammed next to poverty (which, to be fair, can still be seen in modern day London). My Dad made another interesting comparison, to Bristol where he grew up in the 1950s. People live outside, in a way that we used to do in Britain, before poverty was drawn inside by the attractions of television. And yes, we did see poverty, mostly through the closed window of an air conditioned car. If it's worse than what you can see on the streets of Britain, that's only because there are more children. And it is saddening, heart breaking at times, but it's also frightening how quickly you can become used to it.

Too obvious

In trying to write about India and some of my impressions, I wonder if I haven't ended up focusing on the obvious stereotypes. The Empire, poverty, etc. We were also there for the Cricket World Cup and witnessed some of the attendant celebrations. I certainly didn't intend to do that when I started writing this piece.

Or else I've ended up talking about home, but perhaps that's something you do when you go travelling, or even just spend time people who are visiting from abroad (I know a lot of foreign students studying in England and it's easy to find yourself talking about cultural differences). The differences and similarities become an obvious point of comparison.

Partly, it's because the things that made the greatest impression on me - our wedding, the new family I'm now a part of - are private and I don't want to write about too much that's personal on this blog. So I fall back on trying to frame things in a more general, if cliched, framework. I was there for less than a month after all, and inevitably you visit a place with unspoken assumptions. Nor did I really visit any of the obvious tourist parts of India, apart from a few days in Jaipur. Mostly I was in an ordinary part of a working city, surrounded by people going about their daily lives and general business. It's beautiful, yes, in a way, because I'm someone who's always found beauty in urban landscapes, but that's always been a problematic beauty.

Rushdie and Kundera

I made the comparison with Dickens above, but I could have just easily made the same point about Salmon Rushdie's fiction, since Bombay is clearly his city, or at least it was in his earlier novels (I've read nothing he's written since The Moor's Last Sigh). Perhaps it's just that there's something rather Dickensian about his fiction. I do also feel as though I understand Rushdie a little better since I've seen a few Bollywood films, and yes, his fiction clearly owes something to this city. Reading Milan Kundera's Encounter over the last few days, I was especially struck by the points he makes about exile. It was similar to a point Rushdie also makes in one of the reviews collected in Imaginary Homelands. Responding to Geoff Dyer's first book about John Berger he points out that whilst Berger has always paid attention to the experience of migrating labourers, he fails to acknowledge the full complexity of the experience of migration. Berger always sees it as an essentially tragic experience, a loss of one's homeland. Rushdie, like Kundera, points out that exile and migration can be a liberating experience. Of course, Kundera, for all that he was fleeing totalitarianism in the mid-1970s, was still, like Rushdie, something of a privilaged migrant. It's still true though, we do all carry our homelands within us.

Books read during the trip:

George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical, because what else would you want to take to India with you than a Victorian classic of English provincial life?

Ruskin Bond, The Room on the Roof. One of my wife's favourites when she was growing up. It was the copy she won at the age of 12 that I read. A incredible novel of adolescence, all the more incredible because it was written by an author who was an adolescent at the time. Also interesting to read in conjunction with Rumor Godden's fiction. For her India is something which is foreign to her characters, something overwhelming. Whereas for Ruskin Bond it's precisely that sense of being overwhelmed by the life of India which his characters want to be a part of. The world is the means of discovering themselves, from which there is ultimately no way back.

J.L. Carr, What Hetty Did. Another tale of an adolescent escaping from an intolerable home life. I don't quite agree with the journalist quoted on the back cover copy; I did occasionally feel the 72 year old author behind her words, but Hetty is still a marvellously engaging creation, a wonderful example of spoken English.

Tim Pears, In the Place of Fallen Leaves. That rarest of things, English magic realism.

Francois Truffaut, The Films in My Life. Not so interesting for his critical insights (although they are there), but rather for the passion Truffaut brought to the watching of films. Similar to David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Cinema it becomes a kind of refracted autobiography, inspiring the reader not only to go and watch more films, but also to pay better attention.

Films seen whilst on board the plane:

Mike Leigh, Another Year. Where Ruskin Bond finds a metaphor for life in the river, Mike Leigh finds one in an ordinary suburban allotment. Utterly inspiring.

Red, because I like Warren Ellis' grumpy old men. Adapting a short work, the script does a very effective job of preserving his caustic voice. It's still rather irritating though that out of our 4 or 5 heroes, the only one who dies is the one black man (Morgan Freeman), and the only one who gets injured is the one woman (Helen Mirren, clearly having a ball).