Mumbai can be repulsive yet beguiling, inviting all to enter its porous skin and become an implant in the body,” writes Priya Sarukkai Chabria.
Bombay/Mumbai Immersions conceptualised and authored by her, with photographs by Christopher Taylor, is the latest addition to the catalogue of books on the Maximum City — Chabria herself lists the more than 20 she consulted. But her narrative, imbued with poetry and pensiveness, is distinct. For she is a poet (two volumes of her poetry have been published, apart from other writings) and Immersions is like good wine that you sip slowly, turn and rotate in the mouth (or mind) till parts of it settle into your senses and your subconscious.
Chabria quotes Octavio Paz, who, way back in 1951, had written about his encounter with Mumbai: (The city is) “animated by the twin fevers of vice and money”.He said he felt “dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea, inescapable attraction.” As true today as back then, as vital and perhaps as despairing. But Chabria — with her observations of the small, the humdrum, the inconsequential even while noting all that which hits you in the eye and the stomach — offers us a meditative work. She eschews drama — there is little about cricket, commerce or crime; she opts mainly for the road less travelled, for descriptions of “small” people, places and objects which often give this hard city its soft underbelly (and we don’t always know it). In the process, Immersions becomes a personal reflection. The act of writing triggers in her feelings and philosophies that you hadn’t associated with the city. Whence the “Immersions” of the title — the immersion of Lord Ganesh — into the waters which momentarily transforms Mumbai into a heady world of noise and celebration, and the immersion of oneself into the known and the unknown as the author pursues her discovery of the new or revisitations of the familiar.
Underlying her rich and forceful descriptive powers is the idea of time. It contextualises her story. The city of opportunities is also, in a personal sense, “the keeper of solitude and secrets, while the shifting sea...(suggests) intimations of insubstantiality.” Time is all there in the flow of traffic, in the motion of the sea, in the streams of migration and “in the mosaic of movement”. It speeds, then, depending on the locality, slackens. In temples, forts and deep within the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (these forests “make you regard past-present and future as a continuum”), time appears to stand still even as traffic rushes by. And occasionally, Chabria pauses to weigh herself against space and time.
Interestingly, she traces the city’s history in reverse. Beginning with Partition and moving backwards in time to the first film in 1913, the founding of the Cotton Exchange in 1880, the first official Census, the building of Fort St. George and the leasing of the island to the Portuguese, the arrival of the Sidis of African descent, the (possibly 11th century) ruler Bhimadeva, the city’s “first benefactor”, to the excavation of Elephants and Kanheri Caves by the Chalukyas and the Satavahanas. And even further back to the age of the original inhabitants, the fishermen and the seafarers, and beyond that to what was rock and volcano.
Amidst descriptions of defunct mills and glittering malls, money matters and Mazagaon docks, Dharavi and Bhuleshwar, are tales of migrants, who have formed their own ideas of their home in this Pied Piper of a city. “You won’t get insaniyaat anywhere in India but in Mumbai”; “I can’t bear this loneliness”; “Its slogan is jeeo aur jeene do”; “It’s a city that grows in every direction, even over one’s head”. In the cemeteries and graveyards Chabria visits — some overgrown with foliage and abandoned — she reflects on death: “Curiously, rituals around death often segregate communities as much as the customs of life though the dead belong to a singular clan: those situated outside time. But we, the living, who throb inside time, continue with our separations. Do we, in some way, envy the inalterable dimension of death?”
There is much her poetic pen captures — legendary eating joints, CST, Dhobi Ghat, Muhammad Ali Road, Banganga Temple on Malabar Hill, Chor Bazaar , street children, vendors, tailors, idol makers, undertakers, adivasis — and her keen eye perceives. In a Grant Road Park, “a white cockerel, its scarlet comb in vivid contrast to sun-shot green stands sentinel to nothing but the passage of light”. In Versova drying, semi translucent fish “strung on ropes...look like strips of malleable crystal or slits of sieved shadows as the sea’s luminescence evaporates from their small bodies.”
As a chronicler, Chabria is at once an insider (she grew up in Mumbai) and an outsider (she no longer lives there). Her rediscoveries comfort but sometimes alarm her; her discoveries enthral and intrigue. On the side of the entrance to the Lakshmi Narayan temple, the religious and the material worlds connect as naturally as night and day. Impishly, she notices “a stall stacks imitation branded travel bags, on the other is a vendor of lingerie. Scarlet thongs with lips gasping erotic pleasure jostle sturdy padded bras. ‘36 B?’ the woman (who has just emerged from the temple) enquires, her hands filled with sacred prasad and flowers.”
Well-known English photographer Christopher Taylor’s photographs — mostly in b/w with some in colour in between, including murals, ads, film posters — most handsomely reflect this city of disparities. Taylor, who is familiar with Mumbai, says he used a traditional camera and b/w darkroom techniques. It slowed down the process but gave excellent results. Most photographs have a uniform light grey sky (where sky there is) and many are without shadows. Flora, fauna, faces, facades, crowds or lonely folk, sea or land, night or day, imposing architecture or derelict buildings, human beings or idols, the packed and the empty, a baby in a cradle on a traffic island or gathering monsoon clouds stride alongside the text with the same meditative quality, a ‘feel’ for the city. And restfulness.
Well researched, studded with literary allusions, stylistic flourishes, etymologies and histories of words and names, and a glow and temperance in text and image, Immersions brings Mumbai to life in a most engaging way, with valuable insights into the city, the writer and the photographer.