My Mumbai
by Uma Lele
Posted December 6, 2008
Like millions of others I’ve been angered and saddened by the terrorist attacks on Mumbai. While I’ve lived in the U.S. for several decades, I spent much of my youth in Mumbai. My Mumbai is not a place of terror but a place of close friendships and love among peoples of many cultures.
Since the attacks, memories of my early life experience in Mumbai, which shaped the rest of my life, have unfolded in rapid succession. My Mumbai is far more than a thriving financial and industrial center, home to India’s film industry—“Bollywood”—and the largest Indian port city. My Mumbai is a place of diversity and peaceful coexistence, of cultures coming together and thriving.
Named after goddess Mumbadevi, we Maharashtrians (people from the state of Maharashtra) have always known the city as Mumbai, not Bombay. When my father, a judge, was transferred to Mumbai in the 1950s, I was in my early teens. A large three-bedroom government-requisitioned flat assigned to my father in Waterloo Mansion, a four story apartment building in the same grey stone as the Taj Mahal Hotel, was not yet available. So for a year my parents lived in a flat in Colaba, one of the areas of Mumbai which was attacked.
Our neighbor was a wonderful Jewish family. I did not know at the time what Judaism was, and no one felt the need to explain. The wife was a kind soul who used to serve me a variety of non-vegetarian snacks after school which my Brahmin mother did not prepare at home. She wore a sari, like all others of her age, and taught in a school, but did not wear a red mark or kumkum on her forehead as do most Hindu women. Her husband managed the automatic laundry at the Taj Mahal Hotel. My mother used to say, now that the British have left, with few foreigners coming in, there is little business for the Taj Mahal Hotel and its laundry.
We moved to our flat with the Taj Mahal Hotel on the right, Bombay University in front and the Nariman Point on the left. St. Ann School, one of the best English schools was next door, but my parents sent me to a Marathi school, Ram Mohan High School, started by one of India’s social reformers.
With a huge influx of refugees streaming into Mumbai after India’s partition in 1947, my father had been appointed Custodian of Evacuee Properties. He was in charge of settling property claims of refugees between India and Pakistan. We called the refugees Sindhis, although some were Punjabis. We did not know the difference.
I used to study classical music. My music teacher had many students from the Parsi community, a Zoroastrian sect that migrated to India from Iran in the Middle Ages. It is the community to which Ratan Tata, the owner of the Taj Mahal Hotel and one of India’s foremost industrialists, belongs. Being the youngest, I was a favorite of my music teacher. I also learned light classical music from Marathi plays (natya sangeet as music from the plays was known). Natya sangeet was very popular in India in the 1930s, and ’40s.
The greatest exponent of natya sangeet was Bal Gandharva, an honorific title meaning a young singer in the court of gods. Bal Gandharva had a beautiful Muslim mistress. He was old and paralyzed and without much money. He used to come to see my father to seek help for his mistress to settle her properties in Pakistan. My father asked him once if he would like to visit us and hear his daughter sing. Bal Gandharva was in tears when I sang some of his famous songs. His beautiful mistress, with large brown eyes, blessed my good voice and style. She said it will keep Bal Gandharva’s memory alive.
We witnessed language riots from the third floor of the balcony of our flat in 1957 when the Chief Minister of the state, Murarji Desai, was a Gujarati. The former Bombay state was split in two. Maharashtrians wanted Mumbai for Maharashtra. I then noticed the anti-non-Maharashtrian sentiments fanned by the protestors which persist to date. After the split, everyone used to say Mumbai would never be the vibrant business center it was. Most businesses were owned and operated by Gujratis and Parsis. But Mumbai thrived. Maharshtrians became successful industrialists, businessmen, politicians and IT entrepreneurs. Caste and religion mattered less than the thrill of being in a bustling city with tolerance for diversity and so many talented people.
In 1961 when I went to Cornell University in the U.S., a manager from the Taj Mahal Hotel was training in the Cornell hotel school, the world’s best. He became a good friend. Mr. Tata too is a graduate of Cornell University and has recently given it a grant to bring the best of Cornell faculty to work on the problems of India’s agriculture and rural development. When I studied agricultural economics as a Ph.D. student at Cornell, India was the largest food-aid recipient. I would have never imagined that in my life time, the University’s largest foreign donor would be an Indian, inviting the best expertise to India to work on its rural poverty.
Whenever we returned to Mumbai, my husband and I always stayed at the Taj, as we fondly called it. Lunches and high teas in the Sea Lounge, overlooking the Gateway of India and shopping in the Taj Arcade used to be a favorite pastime of my high-school friends whom I would meet routinely in Mumbai on my visits.
My friends live in cosmopolitan neighborhoods, which are mixtures of Jews, Parsis, Muslims, Sindhis and Christians, mostly from Goa and Kerala. Of course the Maharashtrian community of castes, too numerous to keep track of, dominates in numbers. It has a thriving culture of theater, books, visual arts and architecture. We routinely enjoyed sweets brought by Muslim friends during Eed and Christian friends during Christmas. We shared goodies with others during Diwali.
After coming to the U.S. as a student at the age of 18, people began to ask me about the Jews and the Christians and the Parsis of India. My curiosity about the people I grew up with, but never really knew as very different, exposed me to the communities in my home town. I continue to marvel at India’s diversity and ability to thrive and accommodate all cultures, something which I took for granted growing up.
Mumbai will stand on its feet again. Its spirit of peaceful coexistence will thrive, spread around the world and will remain its lasting legacy.
Uma Lele is a former senior adviser at the World Bank and currently serves as an adviser to a number of international organizations.
