Posts Tagged Bombay

Part I of the series can be accessed here

In Part II of this series, Raza Rumi travels to India’s thriving megapolis with a media delegation

After a whirlwind Delhi tour, the Pakistani media persons set off for a fleeting visit to Mumbai. If I am not mistaken, ours was the first big delegation to this megapolis that crossed the contemporary fault line between India and Pakistan. Less than a dozen zealot-mercenaries terrorized Mumbai twenty months ago, and now the issue of terrorism has derailed the formal Indo-Pakistan talks.

This was not a very comfortable journey. Not that we were not looked after by our hosts. It was a well-organized tour. But the overdose of Mumbai mantra in Delhi had rattled some of us. What happened there in November 2008 was ghastly and inhuman; and Ajmal Kasab’s nationality stirred public opinion like never before. Thanks to a belligerent media and live telecast of terrorism (almost to the point of glorifying it) the result was what the jihadis had hoped for. Jingoism flourishes in such odd climes and the Mumbai hangover, as we all found, is a potent reality in India.

Within the delegation, I underwent a strange sensation – of a remote, awkward connectedness with the place. Twenty years ago, as an apolitical and naive student I had arrived in Bombay to see my friends from the London School of Economics. This was a ten day long trip, which I shall not forget for many reasons. I found a cosmopolitan buzz, abject poverty and immense human bonding then. I stayed in a building where Bollywood’s long-lasting diva Helen lived, and met scores of young men and women who looked the same but adhered to a different lifestyle. (more…)

(Published in The Friday Times) – The twentieth century trajectory of Pakistani music and stardom are epitomised in the life and works of Madame Nur Jehan (1929 – 2000) also known as Malika-e-Tarranum. Had there been no partition of boundaries, musicians and composers in 1947, she would have been a subcontinental diva. A common Punjabi aphorism, loosely translated, states that there never was and never will be anyone like Nur Jehan. With her incredible talent, fiercely independent persona, flamboyance and ingrained humility, she surpasses even the best of global icons. The complexity of her life and times have yet to be appreciated: breaking with convention, she defined a new set of rules in the patriarchal entertainment industry, manipulating it where possible to ensure that she would not become the archetypal exploited South Asian singer. Her wit and lust for life remained till the end, and with the exception of not having died in her beloved Lahore, she died with no regrets.

When nine years ago, the Queen of Melody breathed her last breath in a Karachi hospital, the circumstances of her death were considered peculiar by Believers. Even in death she achieved what ritualistic Muslims seek all their lives – to die on the holiest day of the year. The twenty-seventh night of the holy month of fasting is widely believed as a night when all prayers are answered and the gates of forgiveness are let open. This is reportedly the reason that her Karachi-based daughters hastened her burial. (Other less spiritual accounts explain it as a consequence of conflict among her children by different husbands, and the struggle to control family assets). (more…)

Dr. Visho Sharma

In keeping with the promise made by me while writing the mail on Shri Dushyant Kumar, I am here again with a piece of information on the legendary singer Shrimati Shamshad Begum. It was decades ago that the gifted crooner decided to call it a day and lead a private life away from the glitter of the film world. She has seldom been heard of as a person ever since, though her songs continue to be an important part of the Hindi film music lexicon even today. It was, however, a big (and a very pleasant one, too) surprise to find a very well documented article on the media shy artiste in the September issue of the Hindi magazine Ahaa! Zindagi.

The writer of the rare article Shri Rajeev Shrivastav met the affable singer in her Mumbai home and recorded for the posterity many hitherto unknown facets of the life of one of our most admired, and yet least covered, female playback singers. It is a matter of great satisfaction that she was conferred Padma Bhusahn. This gesture, though too late (more…)

Dr. Visho Sharma has been kind enough to send me this guest post that pays tribute to a legendary poet of the subcontinent who was committed to his principles and ideology throughout his life. RR

Jo bejaan khilonon se bahel jaati haiy

Tapti saanson ki haraarat se pighul jaati haiy
Paaon jis raah mein rakhti hai phisul jaati haiy
Bunkey seemaab hur ek zurf mein dhul jaati haiy
Zindagi jihad main hay sabar kay qabu main nahin.
Jannat ek aur hay jo murd kay pahloo main naheen.
Uski azaad ravish pur bhi machalna hay tujhey
Zeest key aahni saanchey main dhulna hai tujhey
Uth meri jaan mere saath hi chalna hai tujhey.”

These verses are from the Urdu poem “Aurat” (Woman) written by the famous Urdu poet from India , Kaifi Azmi. What is remarkable is that Kaifi wrote this poem in the 1940s before the independence of India . In that era when the Indian society was very traditional and very much a man’s world, such thoughts were almost unheard of. But then Kaifi was always decades ahead of his time. (more…)

Read the captioned story in the Times of India today- politics of war mongering can be such a disruptive influence on ordinary lives. In Pakistan, we have shops and businesses named as Bombay restaurant, Bombay cloth house and even a Bombay sweet house. And of course Hyderabad’s premier bakery – the Bombay bakery as reminded by Kazim. I am posting an image of the Hyderabad outlet during my recent, fleeting  visit to the city.

Deep down, the links continue despite 61 years of turbulence…

MUMBAI: Karachi Sweets in Mulund is not the only business establishment that bears the name of a Pakistani city. TOI came across at least seven shops, offices, halls and restaurants named after Karachi, Peshawar, Multan, Sindh and Lahore-most of the owners probably could never forget their hometowns that they had to leave during Partition.

“How can the MNS ban shop names like Karachi, Lahore or Sindh as most of the owners are refugees from Pakistan?” said a shop owner in Bandra. “Even my shop is named after a Pakistani city and we have been running this business for the past 100 years. A lot of sentiment is attached to the name.” He added that it was unfair to target innocent shop owners who have settled down in India and are patriotic. “We just carry a Pakistani city’s name on our signboard. We are true Indians and not Pakistanis.” (more…)

My friend Annie’s post on Mumbai is a remarkable piece of writing. I am cross-posting it here:

The other day, I went shopping for veggies at the nearest supermarket, and found it almost empty. The girls employed there were kidding around with each other. I heard the word ‘terrorist’. One girl told another she’d set the terrorists after her friend. The other one alleged that she was one herself. Light laughter. Odd, somehow. Perhaps, necessary, somehow.

Yesterday, I’d stepped out with my own bag and a laptop, boarded a train and opened a book. My station arrived, I got off and ten seconds later, wondered why my shoulder felt light. I’d forgotten the laptop in the Ladies compartment.

In a mad rush, I turned back. I had no way of tracking down that same train even if I did follow it in the right direction. The train had started moving by then, so I jumped into the nearest compartment. I almost fell. A stranger reached out and grabbed me at the door, pulled me inside. Others asked me to sit down, catch my breath, relax. I was too worried to step away from the door. (more…)

Courtesy Three Essays Collective, I found this book review on an important yet less known facet of South Asian History:

Opium City
The Making of Early Victorian Bombay
By Amar Farooqui

REVIEW in ‘Mid-Day’

MUMBAI’S OPIUM PAST
by Mahmood Farooqui
December 23, 2005

It sometimes appears, from the nature of current historical debates, as if the British empire in India was purely an orientalising mission whose discourses generated a politics of identity but that it was little more than an ideological apparatus that hegemonised us. It is difficult therefore to connect back to the earliest nationalists who decried the drain of wealth from India, who lamented India’s deindustrialisation and the economic exploitation of our people by foreign occupiers.

It is easy, in the miasma of post-colonialisms emanating from American universities, to forget that the Empire came into being and remained in force as an economic entity, that it was instituted by traders, that there was also something called economic imperialism.

Amar Farooqui’s Opium City — The Making of Colonial Bombay is welcome because it reorients us to the fundamentals of how and why we were colonised by the East India Company. It is a new title by the Three Essays Press, a Delhi-based outfit, which has been publishing tracts in the form, as its name implies, of three essays in slim volumes by renowned and radical academics in a style and on subjects that are of general interest. (more…)