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REVIEW OF MAXIMUM CITY: Bombay Lost and Found from The Daily Oakland Press, December 5, 2004
Cosmopolitan Chaos
Author describes a Bombay crumbling under its own weight
By JOSEPH SZCZESNY of The Daily Oakland Press
The premise behind Maximum City is that Bombay, one of the great cities of the Indian subcontinent, has hitched its star to globalization long before globalization became one of the 21st century's major buzz words.
Suketu Mehta, a screenwriter and journalist who now lives in New York but also has lived in Bombay, has written a fascinating book about a distant city that throughout its history has managed to blend very different people and cultures.
"It is the most outward looking of India's major cities," Mehta said in a television interview. "It has always had the most contact with other cultures."
Bombay was settled long before Portuguese sailors showed up in the 16th century. But the arrival of Europeans put Bombay on the map, so to speak, and from the 17th century on, the city served as the primary entry port for the Europeans looking for profit, glory, escape or adventure on the Indian subcontinent.
The city got another boost in the mid-19th century with the opening of the Suez Canal, which cut the sailing time to Bombay from Europe, and the American Civil War, which opened the door for the export of Indian cotton to England and the creation of Bombay's own clothmaking mills.
Bombay today is home to more than 18 million people who have made it one of the world's global cities, even though it is hemmed in by the sea into an area of less than 200 square miles - roughly one corner of Oakland County.
From the beginning, however, the citizens of Bombay did not just export raw materials to distant ports, Mehta notes. The broad Indian influence on religion, food, art, education and design also flowed west through Bombay to Europe and North America.
Today, Bombay continues to have a profound influence on popular culture around the globe through its music and films, he says.
"Bombay is a relatively new city," Mehta says. "It's roughly like New York. It is the financial and cultural capital of India. Bombay is ideally suited for the global economy. It's a media center. It's not a city that doesn't depend on India for its wealth."
"Bollywood," the center of India's prodigious film industry, is older than Hollywood and lures thousands of new immigrants to the city every year, not only from the Indian hinterlands but other parts of Asia as well, Mehta adds.
While Bombay is booming on one hand, it also exists in a state of chronic civic emergency, he says.
Crime is rampant, municipal services have been overwhelmed and chaos is everywhere, he notes. The population density in the center of Bombay is the highest on earth, he adds, with Hindus and Muslims living in uneasy proximity.
"Every year, India looks stronger," Mehta says. "But in the case of Bombay, it's on the verge of an urban explosion. It hasn't happened yet but it could happen at any time.
"The strain in housing is just unimaginable to the western mind," he says, noting that talented computer programmers who make relatively good wages must share apartments not much larger than a small bedroom in the United States.
Bombay's rapid growth at the end of the 20th century was roughly akin to the growth that exploded the boundaries of European cities in the 19th century. As in Charles Dickens' London, great wealth and great poverty exist side by side in Bombay, Mehta says.
Even today, immigrants from other parts of India continue to move into the city.
India has been characterized as one of the great emerging winners in the global economy. However, globalization in India also will mean that millions of small farmers—many of them wedded to tiny plots of less than one-quarter of an acre—will wind up being forced off the land.
"You can't really grow wheat or soybeans on a quarter of an acre," he says.
Many of the people forced off the land will inevitably move to Bombay, with its prolific and proficient dream factories. They would compound the city's problems for the woefully inadequate police force and city services.
Bombay remains a city of tremendous hope, Mehta says: "You want to be there if you're young. So 500 new people land on Bombay's sidewalks every day."
Mehta uses the people of Bombay—the homeless who live on the sidewalk, the city's wealthy elite, police officers, gangsters, actors and film producers—to tell the city's story.
He tells the story with brio and style, and for most readers, I suspect, it will open the door on an exciting new world.
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