Remembering Bombay

Abstract

This chapter focuses on understanding Bombay’s social and political complexities as it grew exponentially over the 19th and 20th centuries. A typical colonial city it had a function as an entrepot in the trade routes that tracked around the globe as well as about the subcontinent. Its particularity as a city however was in part a product of the mix of its produce and its industries but also of what was brought to the city – social, political and economic diversity with elements of cultural, intellectual and creative benefit. It was a city that from its beginnings gloried in accommodating a mix of populations, ethnicities, social groups and religious adherents and of the urban spaces they severally occupied. In considering the locality as a city feature and as an active phenomenon implicitly and explicitly understood by its inhabitants, the chapter uses the idea of mental maps or templates that gave city spaces their characteristics as was also evident in those times of massive social conflict evident during riots and Bombay’s other forms of crowd aggregations. In drawing on notions of physical space as represented in the city’s localities or in mental maps of what might be understood as accustomed space, the research methods adopted in this chapter involved using city space and its patterns of customary behavior through the prism of the author’s subjective memories of the city from the 1960s as also textual research and analysis.