A City on the Sea!

Mumbai has been recently in the news due to the dreadful cyclonic attack of ‘Nisarga’ which eventually did not much damage the iconic city. But the Maharashtra capital keeps making news round the year. In 2020, it has become the Corona capital of India.
In most top countries, two important cities stand out, despite their basic differences on parameters like size, shape and population etc. They include, for example, New York City and Washington (US) or Beijing and Shanghai (China) or Melbourne and Sydney (Australia), to name just a few. In India, they are Mumbai and Delhi–both having their own specialities, strong and weak points, besides their beautiful historic backgrounds and special geographic features.
In the series of my city-centric book reviews, I have perhaps done more ‘justice’ to Delhi than Mumbai, incidentally, my birth place. I may have introduced about 10 or more books written on various facets of the national capital but comparatively much fewer on Mumbai’s life and history. In the meanwhile, I also took the readers of Urban Update to Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai. The last time I wrote about Mumbai was two years ago (Zero Point Bombay-a collection of knowledgeable essays) but surely that does not indicate there is any dearth of books on this lovely city which patronises sports and cinema, theatre and crime, politics and trade…all simultaneously and in a big way.
In the interesting book under review, I would like to write something about the urban perspective which the author has provided through a well written chapter–Planning and Dreaming. That takes us back into times of the last century when urban planning was in its infancy in independent India.
“The elevation of the planners authority, ironically, came close on the heels of independence in 1947. Cities had started receiving flocks of men and women in search of economic opportunities. Bombay’s population grew from 1.49 million in 1941 to 2.3 million in 1951 “ says the author. The surging urban population sharpened the sense of an urban crisis. JF Bulsara, a commentator on urban affairs, bemoaned “two hundred and eighty seven years of unplanned building”. His text catalogs Bombay’s problems–its haphazard growth, the “cheerless chawls and bleak block houses,” the amorphous architectural map and a preponderant illiterate population that lacks of art of living together in the city and whose primitive mental condition aggravates the problems of filth, the book talks about Bombay in the forties.
Besides Bulsara, local newspapers were hinting at the mounting disorder in the city. Bombay which went through a building boom in the thirties and the forties, had a sizeable number of engineers and architects who also expressed concern about the city’s future.
Author Gyan Prakash who spent 10 years in writing this book after quality research, credits two journals in triggering meaningful debate on the city’s unplanned growth. One was JIIA (Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects) and other was MARG (Modern Architectural Research Group). Famous writer, political activist and a responsible citizen, MulkRaj Anand was behind Marg and published in his magazine by the same name, issues about Mumbai. In the editorial of the inaugural issue in 1946, entitled “Planning and Dreaming”, Anand wrote in soaring rhetoric about dreaming a future. Planning is like dreaming–dreaming of a new world. Architects and urban planners were to dream of ways to usher in the good life, to produce the blue prints of a new social order” he wrote, adding “The future lay with architects because they could plan India’s cities on scientific basis”.
He just did not leave it at that. Since he had modelled MARG as the journal of art and architecture, in 1965, he published plans for a twin city as seen by Charles Correa, Pravin Mehta and Shirish Patel, three young professionals from different branches. They, for the first time, proposed the issue of having a twin city concept to deburden growing Bombay.
An early master plan (for Greater Bombay) outline had already been prepared in 1948 by NV Modak, a BMC engineer and Albert Mayer, an American urban planner. Both imagined Bombay as a city in motion and recommended the expansion of the East-West transportation links to foster an orderly westward settlement and development of satellite towns. They however, modestly stated that their plan was not a “final, detailed blue-print” but an ‘envelop’ to be filled with details. The idea was to reengineer an organic urban space to meet the needs of capitalist industrialisation, the author tells us.
But 17 years later Correa (architect), Patel (civil engineer) and Mehta (a planner) rejected the BMC plan and created an image of a city on the water and offered their own plan for ‘New Bombay’ as an alternative that would overcome the sense of lack expressed by images of congestion, crowding
and sprawl.
The trio rejected the 1948 proposal by Modak& Mayer to build satellite towns encircling the Island City as a practical and effective measure to develop Bombay as a metropolitan region. MulkRaj Anand, through MARG pushed the idea of twin city connected by ocean. Eventually, with the help of a dynamic IAS officer V Srinivasan, a new body was created called CIDCO which began work on the new urban plan in 1973. Shirish Patel was made the chief planner there and things moved a bit in the right direction of making a countermagnet city.
Those who see today’s Mumbai may not have an idea what the planners had dreamt and how a city on the sea was envisioned several decades ago. Many people still feel that like in the case of Delhi where two large satellite townships of Gurgaon and NOIDA had been planned to decongest Delhi but that did not happen, Mumbai also remained crowded and New Bombay did not prove to be the viable alternative for many years. Now both the cities are overcrowded. But what is remarkable is that in making Mumbai a modern city, a journalist-writer (MulkRaj Anand) played a vital role.
The book also talks about cultural life, role of Parsees in developing Bombay city, little history of Taj Mahal Hotel built by Sir Jamsetji Tata in 1903, about the high end Taj Mahal Orchestra and about the film industry, the crime world and so on. The author vividly provides the reader a peep into how politics changed the topography of the state and how protests succeeded in blocking Prime Minister Nehru’s plan to make Mumbai a union territory while creating two other states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. The Marathi versus Gujarati controversy resulted in creation of Gujarat and Maharashtra in 1960 but Mumbai remained with Maharashtra thanks to leaders like SM Joshi, SA Dange, PK Atre, and Bal Thackeray who fought for a Samyukta Maharashtra and won the long fought battle partly.
The author has not tried to go into deeper historical references but has given enough material for a new reader to get a complete picture of the glorious city’s past. Certainly, the commercial capital of India has now become difficult to manage, given its ever growing population and monstrous slums.