But most important, Calcuttans are innovating again. One businessman I met — Harsh Neotia, a large and gentle forty-something — epitomizes the revived spirit of the city. His three current projects encapsulated for me the reasons to hope again about Calcutta. First, he has taken over the decaying eighteenth-century Town Hall and given it a multicrore-rupee facelift as a renewed symbol of Calcuttan splendor. Second, he has given middle-class Calcuttans a weekend escape from the city by constructing a residential resort at a bend in the Hooghly at Raichak an hour and a half from the city, a place where city dwellers can swim, boat, play tennis, watch a cultural performance, or simply enjoy the sunset from the balcony of their well-appointed room. Third and most important, he has worked with the state government to create India's first joint-sector public housing project, a twenty-five-acre development called Udayan, a beautifully landscaped complex designed by Balkrishna Doshi in which half the flats are reserved for the city's lower- and middle-income groups. The below-cost sale of these small but practical flats is subsidized by the popularity of the more expensive luxury apartments in the same development. HUDCO's dynamic former national chief, V. Suresh, has called the concept a “revolution” in the country's housing sector. It is not the kind of revolution Calcutta had become famous for.
These are just three projects pursued by one man; there are undoubtedly other Harsh Neotias in the city. It used to be said that when Calcutta catches a cold, the rest of India sneezes. The Neotia virus is the kind one hopes is infectious.
42. Urbs Maxima in Indis
TO SOME OF US, THE STORY OF BOMBAY is a story of decline. I lived in Bombay from 1959 to 1969, the formative years of my childhood, and in those days everything exciting and vital in India appeared to be happening there. As late as 1979, the only Indian selection in Time-Life Books’ Great Cities of the World series was, inevitably, Bombay (elegantly evoked by Dom Moraes and a clutch of brilliant photographers). A plaque outside the Gateway of India reminds us that it is known as “Urbs Prima in Indis.” But Bombay has been increasingly overtaken by Delhi. In the last two decades, Delhi has grown, sucking up the nation's resources and talents like a sponge — money, art, theater, publishing. Delhi is now the capital of virtually all the things that Bombayites used to pride themselves on. Gaining fast, especially on the livability index, is Bangalore, flourishing on our own Silicon Plateau.
What makes Bombay Bombay is not just that it is India's commercial capital, the home of its stock exchange, a city that generates nearly 40 percent (38 percent at last count) of the country's taxes; nor that it manufactures the grandiose dreams of Bollywood (making five times as many films annually as the United States); nor that it houses the country's most opulent hotels and boasts of commercial rents higher than Manhattan or Tokyo (in a city where half the population is homeless); nor even that Bombay supports India's most innovative theaters and art galleries and 150 diet clinics while millions of its residents eke out a bare subsistence in the world's largest slums. No, what makes Bombay Bombay is that it is a microcosm of the best and worst of India. Its 17.5 million inhabitants — more than the entire populations of Norway, Denmark, and Finland put together — hail from every part of the subcontinent. On Bombay's bustling streets you can hear every one of India's twenty-three major languages, see all of its styles of dress, taste all of the astonishing variety of its cuisines, buy and sell any of its products, pray to any of its gods. Bombay is India writ small — a marvel of cosmopolitanism, of the country's pluralism and collective energy. It is living, thriving evidence that India's diversity, when channeled productively, is its richest asset.
The expatriate writer Suketu Mehta portrayed Bombay as still the biggest, richest, most murderous city in India, in his stunning debut, Maximum City. Bombay, Mehta points out, is a city of appalling contrasts — a bottle of Champagne at the Oberoi Hotel sells for one and a half times the national average annual income when 40 percent of the city has no safe drinking water; the world's largest film industry thrives in a city where plumbing, telephones, and law and order break down regularly; millions starve in filthy slums while the city supports several hundred slimming clinics. Such contrasts can be found elsewhere, but is there any other place on earth to which immigrants continue to flock while the trains in the city alone kill four thousand people a year? Where a thug buys chickens in the morning from Muslims he will butcher in the afternoon? (“Bombayites understand that business comes first,” Mehta quotes him as saying.) Where a ragpicker can be hired to kill a man for a sum of money that would not buy a cup of coffee at a good hotel in the city?
And yet to say this is to overlook Bombay's eclectic architecture, its fine museums and art galleries, its commercial life; to forget about a boat trip in the choppy seas to Bombay's premier attraction, the Elephanta Caves, with their remarkable ancient Hindu carvings; a visit to the cooperative Aarey milk colony; paying homage at Mani Bhavan, the house where Mahatma Gandhi lived and where many of his possessions can still be seen, as well as an intriguing series of dioramas on his life. To focus only on the crime and the corruption is to neglect the remarkable buildings and beautiful views (especially from the Hanging Gardens on Malabar Hill). And if either the heat or the rains drives one indoors, one must seek shelter at the Prince of Wales Museum, which houses one of the finest collections of Indian miniature paintings in the country. Most date from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries and are from the Deccani, Mughal, and Pahari schools. There is a particularly interesting series of paintings portraying the moods of the classical ragas, and some exquisite, but poorly labeled, temple statuary.
In other words, Bombay must not be reduced to its seamy underside. How can a visitor ignore, for instance, its fabled Taj Mahal Hotel, built in 1903 and still perhaps India's finest hotel, a grand crenellated edifice facing the sea near the historic arch of the Gateway of India? Legend has it that the hotel was born when Sir Jamsetji Tata, India's leading industrialist in the 1890s, was refused entry, together with a group of Indian friends, to the British-owned Pyrke's Apollo Hotel. Tata, a visionary steel magnate, vowed to build a hotel that would exceed the Apollo in quality but admit patrons of all races. He succeeded spectacularly, so that the Taj has now sprouted a modern twenty-two-story annex and is the flagship of a chain that has acquired the Pierre in New York and the Ritz-Carlton in Boston while Pyrke's is buried in the mists of colonial memory.
Legend also has it that the Taj's architect, William Chambers, visited the hotel only when its construction was complete and, discovering to his horror that the plans had been misread and the building built back to front, killed himself. Romantics should best not explore the veracity of this tale too closely, since it is almost certainly apocryphal, though the hotel staff is careful neither to confirm nor deny it.
Which is altogether the right approach to take to the great stories of a great city.