Top 3: Brilliant new literature about Mumbai

“The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.” -- Jonathan Raban

The Mumbai that most foreigners prefer to imagine is a gritty, dingy place, a third-world city of slums and the underworld, populated by bar dancers and hapless prostitutes, by indigent beggars and mafia dons and corrupt policemen.

But there are a hundred other Bombays that only the people who live here ever encounter, cities of the past, the present, even in some small way, the future, cohabiting side by side like unruly isotopes.

But how can you convey this complicated mess of reality and even more reality in a book? Well, three authors tried last year, and each could arguably be called Mumbai's book of the year. Let's take a closer look.

3. 'Mumbai Fables' by Gyan Prakash, Harper Collins

In third place is the intriguingly titled “Mumbai Fables,” written by Gyan Prakash, who happens to be the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University.

As the author explained in a recent interview, “My goal is not to strip fact from fiction, not to oppose the ‘real’ to the myth, but to reveal the historical circumstances portrayed and hidden by the stories and images produced in the past and the present.”

The result is a meticulously researched piece of work in praise of Mumbai.

Part urban biography, part titillating scandal sheet, “Mumbai Fables” is a journey through four centuries of Mumbai’s history, chronicling its metamorphosis from a humble trading entrepot to its current avatar as India’s most crowded metropolis.

With elegant, erudite simplicity, using neglected sources as diverse as local language newspapers and abstruse books forgotten by time, Prakash dissects the stories behind many of the salacious scandals and earth-shattering upheavals that have become synonymous with the city’s urban folklore and evolution. 

And what makes his narrative quite unique is that this is a deeply personal, very Indian hagiography, told from the point of view of someone who is not a resident but rather an outsider to the city and thus entranced by its glamour.

Unlike Gillian Tindall, whose seminal “City of Gold” was a charming ode to British Bombay, with “Mumbai Fables” Prakash gives the reader an eclectic insight into the Indian dimension of the city’s history.

He approaches this monumental task not as a historian interested only in drab and dusty facts, but rather as a storyteller, keen to entertain his readers and keep them spellbound.

From his descriptions of the beginnings of Mumbai’s earliest homegrown tycoons, Jamsetji Jeejeebhoy and Cavasji Davar, to the story of Rusi Karanjia and the tabloid circus surrounding the Nanavati Murder case, from his recollections of Sadat Hasan Manto’s Bombay to the fidelity with which he traces the birth of the Mumbai Manoos and the rise of the Shiv Sena, “Mumbai Fables” is a gripping, thoroughly enjoyable flashback through the stories that give Mumbai its picaresque pedigree. A must read for all those who enjoyed Suketu Mehta’s “Maximum City.”

2. 'Saraswati Park' by Anjali Joseph, Harper Collins

In second place we have the beautiful, lyrical “Saraswati Park” written by the beautiful and equally lyrical Anjali Joseph.

In this, her first novel, Joseph tells the story of Mohan Karekar, a professional letter writer who plies his trade beneath a banyan tree outside the grand edifice of the General Post Office.

Each day, Karekar travels back and forth from the heart of the city to his home in Saraswati Park, a distant housing enclave located in an undefined suburb, where he lives with his wife, Laxmi, who is equally frustrated with her life.

In spite of their shared despair, somehow Mohan and Laxmi have managed to live together in apparent peace, until one day, Mohan’s shy, gay nephew Ashish moves in with them, and disrupts their fragile détente, thus forcing them to question the choices they have taken for granted until then.

“Saraswati Park” is a journey through the lives of these three disparate characters as they struggle to find some semblance of meaning and a sense of purpose in a hostile and often uncaring city.

Even more so, it is a journey through Bombay: not the hackneyed Mumbai of the slums, but rather the oft unnoticed working-class Mumbai of the suburbs.

There are any myriad number of Saraswati Parks speckled around the city. Outside their rusting gates, the city speeds along at a relentless pace, but inside, a hundred domestic epics unfold, mundane legends of love and hate and rage and longing.

Joseph’s book is a deeply heartfelt celebration of these inconspicuous worlds that few visitors to the city ever see.

Written in prose that is lyrical, lucid, even poignant, “Saraswati Park” is reminiscent of Anne Michaels at her best. But beyond the pathos and the poignancy, there is something more compelling struggling to gestate into existence, a quality that Joseph manages to deftly convey to her readers accompanied by a deep and abiding love for the city which is remarkably free of the exoticizing that pervades so much Indian literature in English.

This is a book about Bombay by a Bombay-wallah in which the city is the real star, and as such, is both memorable and captivating. Definitely a writer to watch out for.

1. 'Beautiful Thing: Inside The Secret World Of Bombay's Dance Bars' by Sonia Faleiro, Hamish Hamilton

The winner of the dubious title of Mumbai book-of-the-year is undoubtedly “Beautiful Thing” in which author Sonia Faleiro revisits the noir world of the dance bars made famous by Hindi films like "Chandni Bar" and "Chameli."

However, for a welcome change, rather than romanticizing the seedy underbelly of the city, she reveals the private stories of the modern day courtesans who dance in bars, not just their experiences as bar-girls, but also the lives they live and the difficulties they endure when the music stops and the sun rises and the bright lights of the bars are shut down.

The central protagonist is Meera, a 19-year-old bar dancer whose life Faleiro followed for almost five years. “Beautiful Thing” is the chronicle of her rise and fall in twilight Mumbai, from the heyday of 2005 when she was one of the queens of the bar-world, earning a fortune each night with lines of male patrons queuing up to watch her gyrate to the beat of popular Hindi-film hits, to her slow descent into the seamy world of Bombay’s sex trade after the government decided to shut down Mumbai's dance bars once and for all. 

Interspersed with Meera’s story, Faleiro narrates the many tales of suffering faced by the women who end up trafficking their bodies in the city’s red light districts, from the hardship of finding respectable work to the brutality of the police, all told in stark detail with great sensitivity and a cogently journalistic precision. 

It is that rarest of creatures, a numbingly honest portrayal of a community that exists on Mumbai’s margins which manages to demythologize a cultural stereotype and pierce the mystique that has come to surround the famous bar dancers of Mumbai.

Best of all, Faleiro's writing manages to be neither cumbersome nor heavy-handed, and while there are sporadic moments of annoying self indulgence, “Beautiful Thing” is undoubtedly a book that anyone who loves Mumbai must make an effort to read at least once.