Washington College Magazine
Cultural Collision: Meditations from Mumbai
MY WIFE, PARMITA, and I arrived in Mumbai in late May at two a.m. We had not come to the city, formerly known as Bombay, to stay in a Western-style hotel, visit Raj-era architecture, and tour India’s ancient temples, forts and mausoleums. We had come to visit Parmita’s Indian relatives, most of whom live in Mumbai. For the next month, I would be surrounded by a city and people I didn’t know.
Although it was almost three when we exited the airport terminal, we were greeted by at least twenty of Parmita’s family members. Her brother Anu, whose family we would be living with, took the luggage trolley from me and headed down the sidewalk. Bereft of the familiar comfort of my suitcase, I suddenly felt surrounded by the unfamiliar. The chaos, though, was not as great as I—having heard numerous stories about the crowd and traffic at the airport—had eagerly anticipated. The crowd was large but waited in an orderly mass; the traffic was light and well behaved. As I tried to keep my mind on the names of relatives I was meeting, the closeness of Mumbai’s thick, humid air enveloped me, bringing with it smells both fragrant and malodorous. The green, gentle bend of palm trees with long fronds rose from the parking area, and the city’s street lights, large globes of yellow mounted on thin, black poles, which give Mumbai its unmistakable nighttime appearance, dotted the sidewalk—where I noticed a trolley with my luggage disappearing into the traffic and crowd.
Sometime later, after having met all the relatives and navigated through the traffic, I caught up with the trolley, the contents of which were being hoisted onto the top of a Toyota Land Cruiser. An oddly familiar sight, the SUV seemed a perfect fit in an increasingly Westernized Mumbai. But perched atop it, tying the luggage into place, was its driver, sitting back on his hams, flat-footed, rear-end not much higher than his feet. It was a pose that I’d never seen a man adopt before, but one in which I would see Indian men innumerable times, and it transformed the SUV from an imported commodity to an integral component of a culture whose uniqueness could not easily be erased by Westernization. The scene evoked a feeling I would have many times in India, as mundane objects and events—a Toyota, a child’s magic show, a Spider-Man outfit—would suggest to me that as Western culture increasingly changes the lives of non-Western people, there is still something, sometimes indescribable or indefinable, that it cannot change—at least not yet.
The next morning, I stood on the balcony of Anu’s third-floor flat, observing the life of F-Road, a street off the main thoroughfare of Marine Drive. This would become my ritual while we stayed in Mumbai: Every morning, I would take my position on the balcony, sipping fresh, hot Chai, watching the people walk by. The streets were busy, but here, in an upper-middle-class neighborhood near the Arabian Sea, not crowded, at least not in comparison with other Mumbai neighborhoods. Nearly all the women wore saris, and a few men passed by in traditional jhabbha, but most wore Western clothing, their button-down shirts of plaid or other dark colors tucked into long, gray or black trousers. Occasionally one of the men would see me on the balcony and stare at me for as long as he could, his head swiveling awkwardly up and back to keep me in sight as he walked by. In the mornings, people walked purposefully: men with briefcases on their way to work, women and servants on their way to the street vendors or markets, and worshippers dressed in robes of white or cream on their way to temple. Later in the day, the street would become more social, with women and men gathered into separate, small groups. At night, the men would dominate almost entirely, gathered into groups of three of four, squatting on their hams, talking and watching.
On the Friday night of our first week in Mumbai, Parmita and I made a trip to the neighborhood of Khetwadi to visit her uncle Jitu and his family. Heavy traffic careened through the streets, and our taxi weaved among slower cars. Vehicles moved haphazardly, many without their headlights on. Around us, zipping through the slower-moving traffic, passed an endless number of motor scooters. Almost all were driven by young men in Western dress, the dark colors of their shirts and trousers nearly camouflaging them against the dark of the streets. But on the back of nearly every scooter was a young woman in traditional dress sitting side-saddle as a brightly colored sari or more subdued chador billowed around her. The pulsating colors stood out from the rest of the city, enlivening the atmosphere. As the scooters buzzed past, carrying their images of contemporary Mumbai, I felt that I was catching a glimpse of a hidden part of the city that is rarely explored. It doesn’t exist in a geographical space. It exists in the cultural space created by the interaction of old and new, traditional and contemporary, Asian and Western, but not as the latter replace the former. Rather, it is created as the different elements crystallize into a cultural formation that is neither traditional nor simply Western. It is its own space that cannot be assigned to or confined by any cultural moment that has come before it.
In Khetwadi, the taxi dropped us in the midst of a street under construction. Disoriented, we wandered the neighborhood until we found the building in which Jitu lives. Its hallways were dark, and people watched us through the open doors of small, dimly lit flats. We climbed a flight of stairs and walked down a gloomy passageway toward the collection of small flats that Jitu owns. Suddenly, we were engulfed by sound and color. Although Parmita and I had been married for five years, this was our first trip to India since our wedding, and Jitu’s family was performing the jamai ne paunkvun, a traditional ceremony welcoming the son-in-law. More than a dozen members of the family filled the hallway, chanting a welcome and throwing a mixture of rice and pearls on us. Then, the chandlo, a red dye, was applied to our foreheads, and we were accompanied into one of the flats, taking off our shoes as we entered. We were each seated, and the extended family gathered, arched around us in a semicircle compressed by the small room. In the subdued light, they formed a dimly lit tableau of young children, parents and grandparents. More than a dozen pairs of eyes gazed at us with expectation, and occasionally someone who spoke some English would ask us about our visit to India. Feeling as though we were on display, I tried to help Parmita, who was moving between English and Gujerati, keep the conversation going, but my linguistic limitations were too great. The awkwardness of the visit was mitigated, though, as two of the children came forward bashfully to give us homemade welcome cards. The girl handed one to me, while the boy gave one to Parmita. To everyone’s delight, the boy, remembering that he was supposed to have given his card to me, and his sister hers to Parmita, snatched the card back from my wife and thrust it into my hands. After a few minutes of now lively conversation, we left to return to F-Road.
The next night, Parmita and I—along with Anu, his wife, Priti, their fifteen-year-old son, Aniket, and Anu’s sister, Swati—took a horse and buggy ride through Mumbai. Anu negotiated the price with a driver at Chowpatty Beach, a popular recreational site on the northern end of Marine Drive. After riding along the edge of the Arabian Sea, we headed into one of city’s wealthier districts. This part of Mumbai—noisy, crowded and vibrant during the day—was peaceful, even secretive, at night. We passed green, quiet parks, and turned onto narrower streets, passing through affluent areas. The affluence, however, extended above us, lodged securely in the high-rise buildings. At street level, a different city extended horizontally. In the darkness, people lay in and under trees, on large pushcarts, across the sidewalks, and in the streets themselves. Dogs curled up among these human sleepers. It was not the first time I had encountered Mumbai’s large number of homeless people, but their presence here created a strange feeling in me. In the dark and quiet, the existence of so much poverty did not seem to be a reason for outrage. It felt neither threatening nor depressing, but serene, just another part of the city at night. It felt natural—and this, I think, is the insidious danger of Mumbai. The contrast of increasing wealth with great want ceases to be a contrast at all. It is simply normal, another feature of the landscape, its human dimension erased by the city’s daytime energy or nighttime calm. And as the buggy passed into the area around the Gateway, its immediate presence was erased by the route of our journey. The luxurious Taj Mahal Hotel emerged in front of us, and the sleepers were replaced by affluent Indians and the occasional Western tourist, out on the Mumbai weekend. I saw no sign that the sleepers may sometime get up again.
Later during our stay, to celebrate Parmita’s and my visit, Anu arranged for a family party on one of the tour boats that leaves from the harbor near Mumbai’s famous Gateway of India, a triumphal arch built to celebrate the 1911 visit of George V. As I stepped on board that evening, I felt that I was leaving for a new world, but one that was social, not geographic. The boat was already packed with family members, and many had climbed the steep, narrow ladder to the small upper-deck. (Watching women in saris trying to climb back down that ladder was one of the night’s amusements.) I climbed to the upper level so that I would have a better view as we motored out into the harbor.
As night fell and I watched Mumbai’s skyline light up, the partygoers came to greet me. Men gave me their business cards and invited me to visit their offices. Women, politely overcoming their hesitancy to speak English, asked me what I thought of India. Parmita’s cousins, Sweta and Swati, played with their eighteen-month-old nephew, Dhruv. But the main event of the evening was the magic show put on by ten-year-old Dishali, the girl who had handed us one of the cards at Khetwadi. With great confidence, she played to her audience of fifty, performing one trick after another with the magic words, “Abracadabra, Gilli, Gilli!” As I listened and watched, the very familiarity of what went on disoriented me. I hadn’t expected to be reminded of home, but I was: A child’s magic show, aunts playing with nephews—I might have been at a family reunion in the U.S. The interaction of different generations, the spotlight on the children, and the pockets of intimacy created a familiar atmosphere that surprised and delighted me. Yet, at night on the Arabian Sea, with the skyline of Mumbai in the background, there was also something subtly unfamiliar about what I was witnessing. Even in the relaxed, convivial atmosphere of the party, there was a formality to social relations that bespoke a cultural organization different from that to which I was accustomed. Men and women played their gender roles with more rigidity. The older generations dispensed advice, and the younger listened to it, with greater intensity. My wife and I, as guests, were treated with a heightened ceremoniousness: Forbidden from seeing the food the caterers were preparing until it could be presented and served to us, we sat on the upper deck while family members—some distant relatives by Western standards—lined up to give us gifts. We were absorbed into the family by the kindness and distanced from it by the formality. The events of that night seemed simultaneously so familiar and yet so unfamiliar that, as I tried to take them in, I was confronted by that conundrum of how we can all share a fundamental humanness and yet possess the differences that our cultures instill in us. In a city very different from any that I had visited before, there was much that I recognized. But, even in an increasingly Westernized Mumbai, there was something distinctive that had not been touched.
Near the end of our month in Mumbai, Parmita and I returned to Khetwadi for a dinner. Before the meal we were entertained by Jitu’s sons, Nilesh and Himanshu, and their wives, Sajel and Mona. Despite the high cost of housing in Mumbai, Jitu has been able to buy flats for his sons, and although these flats are on a different floor than those occupied by the rest of the family, their being in the same building is a convenience—a luxury—not often available in Mumbai. About the size of a guest bedroom in a middle-class American home, each flat has shelves lined with the possessions of these young couples: CDs of contemporary Indian pop, books on astronomy, jars of beauty cream. The flats do not, however, have cooking facilities: When Jitu gave them to his sons, the one rule he imposed was that they are not to cook in them; they must come upstairs to the family’s main flat for meals. As I listened to stories from lives that seemed very different from my own, familiarity, once again, took me by surprise. Nilesh’s young son, Akshat, came into the flat. Dressed in a Spider-Man outfit, he might have been a young boy in the U.S., shyly meeting his father’s cousin and her husband. I began to tell him about how, when I was his age, I watched Spider-Man cartoons every morning when I woke up, before I remembered that he couldn’t understand anything I was saying. Yet as I watched him play, the familiar became unfamiliar, as an icon of American mass culture was absorbed into a way of life that maintains its uniqueness. I often had this impression of Mumbai culture, as small events made me think of larger cultural trajectories and transformations. The trappings of Western culture that I saw everywhere—clothing with images from American pop culture, halter-tops, capris, blue jeans—seemed merely to decorate the surface of life in Mumbai. No doubt the entrance in the last decade of Western multinational businesses—McDonald’s, Pepsi and Pizza Hut are becoming ubiquitous—is helping to transform Indian culture in fundamental ways. Certainly the changes in dress, particularly women’s dress, are lamented by some conservative and religious elements as a disturbing, large-scale development. However, for me, the transformations seemed not to touch, at least not yet, something fundamental about life in Mumbai, as day-to-day activities preserve the uniqueness of the culture. But experiencing this unique culture requires leaving the area around the Western-style hotels and stepping into a Khetwadi flat.
My imagination conjures a time when all the world had not been Westernized, when capitalism, the mass media, and multinational chains had not homogenized the experience of even daring travelers. It leads me—secretly—to romanticize European colonizers as they entered the harbor of what would become Mumbai and experienced an untrampled culture, even as they began trampling. It makes me lament a world in which only the bravest, perhaps only the most foolhardy, adventure traveler can go somewhere really different. But as I reflect on Mumbai, I imagine that beneath the Westernization, there is difference; there is something that is not changing, or changing only very slowly. And what it is changing into is its own thing, no mere mimicry of what exists elsewhere. Has there ever been a culture that was not becoming other than it was? There are other worlds to experience, but they often hide beneath the everyday. With some persistence, a little luck, and a flat near Marine Drive, we may still find them.
Barclay Green ’90, who holds a Ph.D. in English literature from University of Massachusetts, teaches Renaissance and 17th-century literature at Northern Kentucky University, where he specializes in sneaking philosophy into English courses.
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