Mumbai

In 1996 Bombay was renamed Mumbai, as part of a wider policy instigated by the right-wing Maharashtrian nationalist Shiv Sena Municipality to replace names of any places, roads and features in the city that had connotations of the Raj. The Shiv Sena asserted that the British term “Bombay” derived from the Marathi title of a local deity, the mouthless “Maha-amba-aiee” (Mumba Devi for short). In fact, historians are unanimously agreed that the Portuguese, who dubbed the harbour “Bom Bahia” (“Good Bay”) when they first came across it, were responsible for christening the site and that the later British moniker had nothing to do with the aboriginal Hindu earth goddess.

The name change was widely unpopular when it was first imposed, especially among the upper and middle classes, and non-Maharashtrian immigrant communities, who doggedly stuck to Bombay. Some fifteen years on, however, “Mumbai” seems to have definitively taken root with the dotcom generation and even outgrown the narrow agenda of its nationalist originators – just as “Bombay” outlived the Raj.

Despite all the previous terrorist outrages against Mumbai, none succeeded in capturing the world’s attention in the same way as the attacks which rocked the city in November 2008, during which a group of Pakistani gunmen embarked on a three-day orgy of murder and destruction at a string of high-profile locations across the city – India’s own 9/11, and a chilling display of Islamic militancy at its most deadly.

The ten attackers, all men in their early twenties, travelled by boat from Karachi (hijacking an Indian fishing trawler and killing its crew en route) before coming ashore at Cuffe Parade on the evening of 26 November. Two of the attackers headed to CST station, where they opened fire in the main hall, killing 58 people before fleeing the scene, after which they continued to run amok across the city, machine-gunning seven Indian policemen and attempting to massacre patients and staff at nearby Cama Hospital before being intercepted by security forces. Two others headed to Leopold’s café and began firing into the crowd, murdering ten people before escaping. Two more seized control of the Jewish centre at Nariman House, holding its six inhabitants hostage – all were subsequently killed, apparently after having been tortured. Two bombs were also left in taxis which later exploded, killing a further five people.

The main focus of the attacks, however, were two of the city’s most prestigious hotels, the Oberoi Trident and the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower. At both, gunmen entered, firing randomly at guests in the hotels’ public areas, before retreating upstairs, where they began setting off explosives and taking large numbers of guests hostage. The sight of smoke pouring out of the central dome of the old wing of the Taj became an almost permanent fixture on TV screens around the world, as Indian commandos began the hazardous task of flushing the terrorists out of the hotels and freeing their hostages, fighting floor by floor to clear the buildings – a job which took three days in the case of the Taj.

By the end of the attacks, some 172 people were dead, including 28 foreigners from sixteen different countries ranging from Mexico to Mauritius as well as 17 Indian policemen and commandos (including Mumbai’s own Anti-Terrorism Chief, Hemant Karkare). Given the chosen targets, including two landmark luxury hotels, a Jewish centre and a café heavily patronized by westerners, suspicions inevitably pointed towards the various militant Islamist operations based in Pakistan. The Pakistani government initially denied that any of its citizens had been involved in the attacks, attempting to place the blame on jihadi organizations in Bangladesh and Indian criminals. Despite Pakistani denials, however, it soon emerged that all ten gunmen were in fact Pakistanis, all of whom had been trained by Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the leading Pakistan-based militant organizations, originally founded to fight the Indian presence in Kashmir and subsequently connected with a string of high-profile attacks in other parts of India. Interrogations of the one surviving terrorist, Ajmal Kasab, revealed that the gunmen had been hand-picked during Lashkar-e-Taiba training camps in Pakistan, given advanced training in weapons and explosives and sent into “battle” fuelled by a heady mix of LSD and cocaine. Kasab also stated that the gunmen had hoped to kill five thousand people, an aim in which they mercifully failed. In November 2009, Pakistani authorities belatedly arrested seven men in connection with the attacks, though the Indian government continues to insist that those self-same authorities have not done enough to bring those responsible – the leaders of Lashkar-e-Taiba in particular – to justice.

Its name suggests some kind of fowl curry, but Bombay duck is actually a fish – to be precise, the marine lizard fish (Harpalon nehereus), known in the local dialect of Marathi as bummalo. How this long, ribbon-like sea creature acquired its English name no one is exactly sure, but the most plausible theory holds that the Raj-era culinary term derives from the Hindustani for mail train, dak. The nasty odour of the dried fish is said to have reminded the British of the less salubrious carriages of the Calcutta–Bombay dak when it pulled into VT after three days and nights on the rails, its wooden carriages covered in the stinking mould that flourished in the monsoonal humidity.

Mumbai’s size and inconvenient shape create all kind of hassles for its working population – not least having to stew for over four hours each day in slow municipal transport. One thing the daily tidal wave of commuters does not have to worry about, however, is where to find an inexpensive and wholesome home-cooked lunch. In a city with a wallah for everything, it will find them. The members of the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust (NMTSCT), known colloquially, and with no little affection, as “dabawallahs”, see to that. Every day, around 4500 to 5000 dabawallahs deliver freshly cooked meals from 175,000 to 200,000 suburban kitchens to offices in the downtown area. Each lunch is prepared early in the morning by a devoted wife or mother while her husband or son is enduring the crush on the train. She arranges the rice, dhal, subzi, curd and parathas into cylindrical aluminium trays, stacks them on top of one another and clips them together with a neat little handle.

This tiffin box, not unlike a slim paint tin, is the lynchpin of the whole operation. When the runner calls to collect it in the morning, he uses a special colour code on the lid to tell him where the lunch has to go. At the end of his round, he carries all the boxes to the nearest railway station and hands them over to other dabawallahs for the trip into town. Between leaving the wife and reaching its final destination, the tiffin box will pass through at least half a dozen different pairs of hands, carried on heads, shoulder-poles, bicycle handlebars and in the brightly decorated handcarts that plough with such insouciance through the midday traffic. Tins are rarely, if ever, lost – a fact recently reinforced by the American business magazine, Forbes, which awarded Mumbai’s dabawallahs a 6-Sigma performance rating, the score reserved for companies that attain a 99.9 percentage of correctness. This means that only one tiffin box in 6 million goes astray, in efficiency terms putting the illiterate dabawallahs on a par with bluechip firms such as Motorola.

To catch them in action, head for CST (VT) or Churchgate stations around late morning, when the tiffin boxes arrive in the city centre. The event is accompanied by a chorus of “lafka! lafka!” – “hurry! hurry!” – as the dabawallahs, recognizable in their white Nehru caps and baggy pyjama trousers, rush to make their lunch-hour deadlines. Nearly all come from the same small village near Pune and are related to one another. They collect around Rs350–400 from each customer, or Rs5000–6000 per month in total – not a bad income by Indian standards. One of the reasons the system survives in the face of competition from trendy fast-food outlets is that daba lunches still work out a good deal cheaper, saving precious rupees for the middle-income workers who use the system.

Business leaders who have taken more than a passing interest in the dabawallah phenomenon include Sir Richard Branson: the Virgin tycoon spent a day accompanying a tiffin carrier on his round. If you’d like to do the same, contact the NMTSCT via its website, wwww.mydabbawala.com, and look for the link to their “Day With a Dabbawala” scheme.

Flying into Mumbai airport, your plane’s undercarriage will almost skim the corrugated-iron rooftops of the vast shantytown spread across the middle of one of India’s largest slums. Sprawling over 550 acres, Dharavi’s maze of dilapidated shacks and narrow, stinking alleyways is home to more than a million people. An average of 15,000 of them share a single toilet. Infectious diseases such as dysentery, malaria and hepatitis are rife; and there aren’t any hospitals.

Despite the poverty, Dharavi has been described by the UK’s Observer newspaper as “one of the most inspiring economic models in Asia”: hidden amid the warren of ramshackle huts and squalid open sewers are an estimated fifteen thousand single-room factories, employing around a quarter of a million people and turning over a staggering £700 million (US$1 billion) annually. The majority of small businesses in Dharavi are based on waste recycling of one kind or another. Slum residents young and old scavenge materials from across the city and haul them back in huge bundles to be reprocessed. Aluminium cans are smelted down, soap scraps salvaged from schools and hotels are reduced in huge vats, leather reworked, disused oil drums restored and discarded plastic reshaped and remoulded. An estimated ten thousand workers are employed in the plastics sector alone. Ranging from Rs3000–15,000 per month, wages are well above the national average, and though Dharavi may not have any health centres, it does hold a couple of banks, and even ATMs.

As India’s largest and most iconic slum, Dharavi has also found an unlikely niche in the history of Indian and international cinema. The district provided many of the settings for Mira Nair’s seminal portrait of the city, Salaam Bombay!, and has also featured in numerous other Bollywood and Tamil flicks from the 1970s onwards. Dharavi’s defining moment of celluloid fame, however, came in 2009 with Danny Boyle’s multiple Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire. The slum provided many of the film’s locations, as well as several of its leading child actors – although controversy subsequently dogged their involvement in the project, with one British tabloid making (unsubstantiated) claims that nine-year-old Slumdog actress Rubina Ali had been offered for sale by her father to an undercover reporter for £200,000 following the film’s global success.

Despite its burgeoning international fame, however, Dharavi’s future remains uncertain. The entire district is living in the shadow of a proposed $40billion redevelopment project which aims to bulldoze the entire slum. In return for agreeing to eviction, Dharavi’s residents will be entitled to 225 square feet of apartment space per family in new multi-storey tower blocks. Schools, roads, hospitals and other amenities have also been promised. Opposition to the scheme among Dharavites has been all but unanimous, however, with slum dwellers insisting any future development should focus not on erecting a swanky new suburb but on improving existing conditions. Despite these protests, and extended bureaucratic delays, a new masterplan for the project was approved in early 2010 amidst rumours that private investors had already begun buying up thousands of shanty properties in the expectation of imminent redevelopment. Exactly when and how this will happen, however, remains unclear.

Mumbai is a major centre for traditional performing arts, attracting the finest Indian classical musicians and dancers from all over the country. Frequent concerts and recitals are staged at venues such as Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, KM Munshi Marg (t022/2363 0224), the headquarters of the international cultural (Hindu) organization, and the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Nariman Point (NCPA; wwww.ncpamumbai.com).

For more contemporary live music, the leading venue is Blue Frog, in North Mumbai at D/2 Mathuradas Mills Compound, NM Joshi Marg, Lower Parel (t022/4033 2300, w www.bluefrog.co.in), opened in late 2007 and recently named by the UK’s Independent newspaper as one of the world’s top live music venues. Performances are staged inside a huge old warehouse in Mumbai’s former mill district, showcasing leading Indian and international live music acts and DJs – anything from rock to hip-hop.

For theatre, head out to the Prithvi Theatre (t022/2614 9546, wwww.prithvitheatre.org) on Juhu Church Road, a small but lively venue focusing mainly on Hindi-language theatre, along with some English productions.

The home of the Hindi blockbuster, the “all-India film”, is Mumbai, famously known as Bollywood. Visitors to the city should have ample opportunity to sample the delights of a Hindi movie, traditional or otherwise. To make an educated choice, buy Time Out Mumbai magazine, which contains extensive listings and reviews. Alternatively, look for the biggest, brightest hoarding, and join the queue. Seats in a comfortable air-conditioned cinema cost Rs120–200, or less if you sit in the stalls (not advisable for women).

Of the two hundred or so cinemas, only a dozen or so regularly screen English-language films. The most central and convenient are the gloriously Art-Deco halls dating from the twilight of the Raj: the Regal in Colaba; the Eros opposite Churchgate station, and the Metro at Dhobi Talao junction – the latter was recently converted into a state-of-the-art multiplex. Down on Nariman Point, near Express Towers, the Inox (wwww.inoxmovies.com) is another big multi-screen venue, built only a few years ago in retro Mumbai-Art-Deco style.