Urbanism, mobility and Bombay: Reading the postcolonial city

Abstract

The city has been largely ignored in postcolonial studies because it is hard to fit into the classic discourse of decolonizing rhetoric. But the critical feature of postcolonial cities is that they are the first stage, and the microcosm, of the mobility and cultural intermixing that colonialism sets in motion. No city embodies this function better than Bombay/Mumbai. Bombay is the sine qua non of the postcolonial city because in every respect it encapsulates the processes of postcolonial movement and settlement that come to extend globally. An invention of colonialism, no city has been a greater focus of literary writing than Bombay, which demonstrates the mobility and cosmopolitanism of the postcolonial city, and the fluidity, class disparity and ambivalent sense of home that has come to characterize diasporic populations. This essay examines the extent to which Bombay literature, despite the devastating pressures of state control, corruption and fundamentalist violence, expresses a utopian view of the social, religious and cultural openness of this radical conglomeration of peoples, ethnicities, cultures, classes and religions.