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Bombay and Hindi are curiously intertwined. A transactional form of Hindi acted as a lingua franca for the city’s mixed population and supplied the city with a necessary ingredient for its cosmopolitanism. In turn the city helped sustain a Hindi film industry that shaped India’s modern popular culture and made Bombay India’s entertainment capital.
Besides Hindi films, the city and its lingua franca have also sustained more elaborate literary fictions. Paradoxically, some of the most vital fiction written by Indians in English has drawn upon this curious relationship between Bombay and its Hindi pidgin. Two novels that come to mind in this context are Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie and Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra.
It wouldn’t be hard to show that Midnight’s Children’s Saleem Sinai and Sacred Games’s Sartaj Singh (and even Ganesh Gaitonde) succeed as powerful protagonists because they’re buoyed up by Bombay’s Hindustani. Rushdie’s novel and Chandra’s are embedded in two different Bombays, the High Bombay of Midnight’s Children made out of Warden Road, Breach Candy, the old Willingdon Club, Kemps Corner and Malabar Hill and the low Bombay of Sacred Games, made up of Kailashpadas and Gopalmaths, but the special big city frisson of both novels is underwritten by Bombay’s Hindustani. Rushdie’s success in claiming an Indian metropolis plausibly is connected to his ability to play with Hindustani (the Rani of Cooch Naheen, ‘piece-of-the-moon’ and so on) while Chandra routinely uses an untranslated, profane Hindustani to create gangland Bombay and achieve his violent effects. Even the Marathi-speaking characters in this novel, the mafioso, Ganesh Gaitonde, for example, or Katekar, the policeman, speak a patois made up of Hindustani obscenity and Hindi film songs.
Thus Katekar and his boss, Sartaj Singh, sitting in a car, consider the specialness of Bombay.
“It could happen. It did happen, and that’s why people kept trying. It did happen. That was the dream, the big dream of Bombay. ‘What was that song?’ Sartaj said. ‘You know the one that Shah Rukh sings, I can’t remember the film….’
And they sang together: ‘Sone ka mahal mile, barasne lagein heere moti…Bas itna sa khwaab hai.’
Katekar snorted and said, ‘Correct, saab, but the big khwaab took his g**** finally.’” (p. 215)
Or on another occasion in the same novel, this is how Ganesh Gaitonde, gangland don, tells his story:
“‘Get the money,’ I said.
Two minutes later we were safely on S.V. Road. Inside the shopping bag there were three lakhs, and a new bottle of Halo anti-dandruff shampoo.
‘Bhai, that’s for me,’ Chotta Badriya said. He was full of glee.
‘Here,’ I said, and tossed the bottle into his lap. ‘You have dandruff?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘And now I won’t. I’ll prevent it. You see?’
I had to laugh at that. ‘You’re one mad ch*****,’ I said.
‘I think I should grow my hair,’ he said. ‘I think long hair will look good on me.’
‘Yes, yes, you’ll look like bh****** Tarzan himself.’”
It’s true that this particular literary trick can be overdone. From the interesting chutneyfication of Hindustani into English speech in Midnight’s Children, Rushdie moves to self-parody in The Moor’s Last Sigh. When Reverend Mother in Midnight’s Children says, “Man without, whatsitsname, shame! What will you not do to bring disaster, whatsitsname, on our heads!” she’s both in character and amusing. By The Moor’s Last Sigh, though, Cochin’s Jews and Christians are speaking the same dialect as Bombay’s Parsis and Muslims. It’s like watching Saleem Sinai grow up to become Hrundi V. Bakshi.
The reason Slumdog Millionaire isn’t a good film about Bombay is because it mishandles Bombay’s Hindi. Handling the language as an art director might, as authenticating décor, Danny Boyle makes the mistake of using Hindi to establish his realist credentials at the start of the film and then phases it out as his characters grow up. When you see Irrfan Khan, who plays a Bombay police inspector, interrogating Jamal in English, you know the film has broken down. A film about Bombay doesn’t just need to look ‘authentic’; it needs to sound plausible. To do a Bombay film without respecting the rules of its lingua franca, the contextual logic of its multilingualism, is to invite trouble.
But to return to Rushdie and Chandra: how does a colloquial Hindustani come to supply a desi vitality to these ambitious, pan-Indian English fictions? I think it’s because the idea of Bombay (regardless of what its reality is, or has become) is the fantasy of radically different kinds of people rubbing along in a language made up for getting along in. Bambaiyya Hindi isn’t simply a functional lingua franca, the act of speaking it a declaration of intent, a willingness to step back from the intimacy of a mother tongue to embrace the rough fellowship of a subliterate lingo.
The improvised oddness of Bombay’s lingua franca is paralleled by the extemporized novelty of Indian nationalism. Both of these are responses to historical circumstances. Bombay’s standing in India has something to do with the relative isolation of the city from its hinterland till the early 19th century. The fact that its indigenous commercial elites were more prosperous than their counterparts in Calcutta or Madras allowed them to play a dominant role in the life of the city. The fact that these elites came from outside the region in which the city was located meant that their cultural entrepreneurship was eclectic, shaped by the commercial considerations that needs must underwrite a pan-Indian popular theatre or cinema. The pidgin that became its language was a demotic medium which its linguistically mixed population could collectively breathe. An unlegislated lingo and a culturally uncommitted commercial elite drew a spectacular diversity of Indians to Bombay and together they created this protean city.
The Indian National Congress did something similar. Founded in 1885, at the height of the raj’s power, it found a way of speaking for the nation despite the fact that it was, in its origins, a gathering of urban notables which met once a year and had no real claim to speak for the nation. The Congress got around its elitist, unrepresentative nature by claiming that it was a small menagerie that represented India’s jungly diversity. It took the colonial census and said, look we have two of every kind on board: Muslims, Parsis, Hindus, Tamilians, Bengalis, even Englishmen. The nationalisms of Europe were founded on the assertion of homogeneity; but from its inception, the Congress’s best leaders recognized that a subcontinent couldn’t be contained within a homogenizing nationalism.
In their different ways, Bombay and the Congress accomplished similar things: they sidestepped the dangerous seduction of a single identity to create a culturally mongrel city and that unlikely thing, an ideologically pluralist nation. These weren’t self-consciously theorized projects: they grew out of the ways in which Indians tried to turn colonial conjunctures to their own account. Neither achievement should be taken for granted and both could do with some celebration. Great colonial city though it was, in its canny cosmopolitanism, Bombay remains the republic’s greatest metropolis. It isn’t surprising that both filmi fictions and literary novels find in it a fertile field.