The Indian metropolis of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) has for long attracted the gaze of many. For people across all classes and castes seeking opportunity of some kind in the economic capital of India and to those seeking a transit point from a historic port to the rest of the world, Mumbai/Bombay has been a presence as a city and an idea. This book is a contribution to understanding the city through religion. Religion here is clearly approached in terms of faith, communities, theology, beliefs and practices, and is treated as a presence that is simultaneously intimate, social and political. To regard religion in its varied forms and communities ‘Mumbai Style’, already suggests a sense of the city providing an experience that is a part of India and simultaneously ‘apart’ from the rest of the country.
The book features thirteen chapters by scholars from a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences who have long explored the city. The focus of all the chapters is not merely religion per se. Rather, the contributions throw open important questions about life marked by the immense diversity of people and practices in a dense and vast urban space. Many scholars and artists who engage with the city, whether as a subject or a setting for other projects, often bring up the question of diversity against a series of shadows—from the industrial strikes in the 1980s to the communal violence in 1992-93 following the destruction of the Babri Mosque and the bomb blasts that followed shortly after, to larger nationalist movements. What emerges in many engagements with Mumbai/Bombay, and which also circulates in the chapters of the book in review, is an interest in balancing diversity as an idea and in everyday life amidst moments of violence in the past and the possibility of tension in the future. Thus, the chapters reflect a concern with the idea of the city as a cosmopolitan space. As Stausberg (pp. 14-22) points out in the Introduction, there is a sustained interest in cosmopolitanism as an idea by scholars and even the diverse inhabitants of the city. However, local engagements with the cosmopolitan ethic defy the ideal as it is imagined, often riven by the pragmatics of everyday life, as well as local conceptions of community, caste and other potential boundaries. The question that appears to resonate across the book is seeing how a tenuous dignified peace is worked at by Mumbai’s inhabitants.
The chapters can be read together in different ways. Every chapter is deeply informative about critical ideas and of the city and its inhabitants. Religious difference, especially in the context of religious minorities comes out very well in chapters by David J Strohl on Ismaili Muslims, Tanvi Patel-Banerjee on Middle Class Muslims, and Claire C Robinson on members of ISKCON in the city. Difference emerges in these chapters as an engagement of fundamentally working out a sense of self, community and belonging to the city in ways that defy homogeneity. These chapters complicate diversity, not only between religious groups, but also within a community.
Another major grouping of chapters focuses on public culture. The ability to access the public after figuring out where one can inhabit space emerges very well in Patrick Eisenlohr’s contribution on Twelver Shia Muslims and their engagements especially in media publics. The chapter by Raminder Kaur and Faisal Syed Mohammed looks at the Ganpati festival, a major Hindu festival which has become synonymous with the city. While it builds on earlier work, it provides a fascinating view of how festivals can often provide spaces of participation across religious boundaries, despite prevailing tensions between religious groups, in a city where living spaces remain segregated on communitarian grounds in practice. Anna Charlotta Laine’s chapter in turn pushes the tensions of public space in terms of roadside shrines. Roadside shrines are common across many urban spaces in India. This chapter acknowledges possible tensions as they mark out space. Yet these shrines also allow a certain liminality and possibility of intermixing in public as well. Stausberg’s chapter provides an interesting departure by looking at taxis as ‘micro-spaces’ of religion which resonates in different ways. Apart from recognizing that space is also inhabited in motion, the intimacy offered by a taxi becomes a point of exploring personal religious space.
In a city that has been historically marked by events of violence and structural violence, violence remains a possibility in shaping space. This comes across very well in Sumanya Anand Velamur’s chapter on Mumbra, a nieghbourhood (or ghetto) that has emerged as a space for Muslims seeking to escape violence and discrimination. On one hand areas like Mumbra may seem safe havens. Yet they are also marked out by the state and larger public as ‘minority’ areas in need of surveillance. Martin Fuchs, a long-time observer, looks at the Dalits in Dharavi. While Dharavi is well known, his chapter shows how Dalits carve out a life at the margins of caste and religion alongside forms of socio-economic marginalization, which in turn shapes urban space. Gopika Solanki’s chapter studies how social workers manage intercommunal conflict through intimate sites such inter-religious love affairs, which in the context of caste and communal politics in India, have been treated as sites and triggers of extreme violence and misunderstanding. The role of kinship and neighbourhoods emerges as especially significant. These chapters clearly demonstrate how the city’s inhabitants struggle to maintain peace with some dignity while resisting the tensions that shape urban life. They also show how violence is constituted by and in turn constitutes life and urban form. The final two chapters bring in scholarship from literary studies. Heinz Werner Wessler’s chapter covers the various literary imaginations of modern Mumbai in Hindi and Urdu, tracking the different motifs writers have dealt with on the city. William Ellison’s contribution takes readers into the world of Arun Kolatkar, a poet who emerged from a group of artists tied to Mumbai and whose members reflected the religious diversity of their city. These chapters offer important insights into the diverse imaginations and poetics about the city of Mumbai.
On the whole, this is a thought-provoking collection of essays put together. While it is focused on Mumbai, many of the chapters resonate across India. The tension that underlies the management of diversity, the potential of violence and how very often diversity involves interactions between discrete (even segregated) spaces across the socio-economic and political spectrum complicates how cosmopolitanism is actually experienced and lived. The chapters by themselves are also very informative, especially those that cover minority populations. There is a sense that the city of Mumbai appears to be relatively exceptional for authors. The city comes across as an island affected by the larger world outside and yet retains a sense of being a world on its own.
Ankur Datta is Associate Professor of Sociology at the South Asian University, New Delhi.