There is the statue of Peter the Great in the Russian city of St Petersburg, which he founded in 1703. Peter's outstretched left hand points to France. To Peter and much of the European aristocracy, France was the home of Enlightenment, science, progress; Paris was the city of art, culture, fashion. St Petersburg was supposed to be the Paris of Russia.
Alexander Pushkin in his great narrative poem, "The Bronze Horseman", questioned whether Peter should have so warmly embraced French culture. Later rulers of Russia, the Bolsheviks, renamed St. Petersburg Leningrad. The Bronze Horseman witnessed the destruction of Russian culture.
Every time I look at Mumbai I am reminded of a statue of King George V astride a black horse. This statue, which I call the Black Horseman, was demolished - and with it the city was renamed Mumbai. At one time the statue reminded the Indians that George V was the emperor of millions of Indians. Bombay, more than Calcutta and Madras, was the city of the Raj.
Here is some of the best Victorian architecture in the world. Facing the Black Horseman were Elphinstone College and the David Sassoon library. They turned out Macaulay's babus - but also some fine lawyers who fought the Raj. In a stretch of about four kilometers from the Taj Hotel to what was once Victoria Terminus, the Raj at its best is laid out. The Taj, built in 1903, is now fully restored after the terrorist attacks of 26/11 - but the exquisite stained glass windows that adorned the railway station are mostly broken. Bombay is now dead. The Black Horseman has been taken down. In its place is built a circular parking lot; that forms the entrance to the old Prince of Wales museum. Imagine entering the British Museum or the Louvre in Paris through a parking lot! That was the aesthetic standard of the "nationalists" who brought down the statue of the Black Horseman.
Mumbai was born by severing it from its history. Thousands who descend and board old double-decker red buses at Kala Ghoda bus stop do not know what stood here once. It's just a bus stop. Some remember Kala Ghoda by staging a literary festival there, but the place is now bereft of historical association.
Nilanjana Roy once cited in this newspaper an international survey of world cities to raise a question: why is Mumbai, which has all the makings of a great city, not yet a city by international standards? She thought the city didn't have large numbers of cafes, bookshops, theatres, well laid out plazas and parks to be a city the way Berlin, Paris or San Francisco are.
Perhaps there is another reason why Mumbai is not a city by the standards of the old, established cities of Europe and America. I think the loss of the city's cosmopolitan character is the principal reason why it is not a real city. Present-day Mumbai is parochial compared to the Bombay of the 1950s and 1960s. In Mumbai today, cultural vigilantes prevent Asha Bhonsle from participating in a music concert with Pakistani musicians; they drive M F Husain from the city and prevent a cricket match from being played with a country they don't like.
Mumbai could not have been the setting of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children; it would not have inspired Dom Moraes' poems. Both belonged to old Bombay and loved its cosmopolitanism. Mr Rushdie now says that the great metropolis is dead.
The death came, symbolically, with the demolition of the statue of the Black Horseman. Had we not killed him, the city would have retained its past and charted a new future for itself.
For a city to grow, it's important that it has a sense of its past. I come back to the Bronze Horseman of St Petersburg. Leningrad survived the cultural onslaught of the Soviet era; no sooner did that regime end, than its residents renamed it St Petersburg. There was the Bronze Horseman to remind its residents of their past. Today it is culturally one of the liveliest cities in Europe. Mumbai without the Black Horseman is a city torn from its history. It grows and grows, but has lost its bearings.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
