Volume 46, Number 7 · April 22, 1999
Bombay at War
By Christopher de Bellaigue
Once India had a liberal city called Bombay. Its businessmen were cannier than those of the rest of socialist India, its rich more cosmopolitan, its cricketers more flamboyant. Bombay's was a relatively pluralistic tradition, too. In faraway Calcutta, India's British colonizers had spent the nineteenth century creating a paternalistic seat of empire with heavy-handed imitations of English buildings. In Bombay, on the other hand, prosperous native businessmen collaborated with their foreign masters to create a port city whose architecture amalgamated, with appropriate symbolism, European and Indian styles. Well into the 1990s it was possible to explain, as many did, the incidence of the city's poverty and corruption as the natural concomitants of Bombay's commercial dynamism. Compared with other places on the subcontinent, India's most complex city, its window on the world, was still considered a fine place to be.
Feature, 4315 words
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