Culture | Maxed-out city

How Mumbai became a capital of urban noir

In India’s biggest metropolis, art and crime have always been entwined

|MUMBAI
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THIS summer Ganesh Gaitonde’s eyes burned through the monsoon haze from billboards across the metropolis. The fictional gangster, played with seductive menace by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, is one of the heroes of “Sacred Games”, Netflix’s flagship Indian drama series. The show is based on an epic novel by Vikram Chandra, a 900-page testament to the romance of Mumbai—the biggest, baddest city in India, 18m people and counting, bursting at the seams with schemes, sex and murder.

Published in 2006, Mr Chandra’s book formed a de facto trilogy with two other works that captured Mumbai’s idea of itself at the turn of the new millennium: “Maximum City”, Suketu Mehta’s non-fiction portrait of Bombay (as it was named until 1995, and is still called by some), and “Q&A” by Vikas Swarup, which was adapted for the cinema as “Slumdog Millionaire”. In the years since, Mumbai has emerged as a gritty, glamorous epitome of modern urban life, a capital of noir for the whole world to admire, or revile.

Yet film, fiction and filth have been chasing one another up and down the city’s streets for decades. Its storytellers have often been enmeshed in the dramas they describe; their tales of Mumbai have reflected its lurching growth, the scenes and themes evolving with its criminal demi-monde and quicksilver economy.

India’s business capital, and home to its most polyglot population, Mumbai has always been a good place to make an anonymous deal. For most of the 20th century, the colonial port-city on the Arabian Sea was both the centre of organised crime on the subcontinent and the heart of Hindi cinema. Bollywood made movies that lionised the local mafia, mobsters financed productions and the nightlife bound the two together.

No bang at all

At the dawn of independence, the figures of writer and low-life flâneur came together in Saadat Hasan Manto—whom Mr Siddiqui plays in a biopic released in India on September 21st. Written and directed by Nandita Das, “Manto” weaves together its subject’s life and his stories, taking in his struggles with censorship and alcoholism and the partition of India and Pakistan.

Like Ms Das and Mr Siddiqui themselves, Manto migrated to the cosmopolitan city from the inland provinces, working intermittently as a screenwriter. Inspired by Victor Hugo and Anton Chekhov, he wrote from life. He believed in keeping the worst company, knowing it to be the best for his art; prostitutes were often his heroines, a perennial sticking point for the authorities. It can be impossible to tell which tales were invented and which reported. In one of the best known, a character who is also called Manto becomes entranced by a Bombay gangster with a heart of gold. The gangster’s rationale for carrying a dagger instead of a gun might serve as a credo for Manto’s prose style:

With this there’s no bang at all. You can thrust it into someone’s stomach just like this. It’s so smooth that the bastard won’t even know what’s going on.

The Manto of that story loved the hoodlum, and the real-life Manto loved Bombay. But these loves were complicated; muck and beauty were inextricably entwined, as they are for Mumbai’s artists today. As the character asks, “Who in Bombay cares about anyone? No one gives a damn if you live or die.” After his departure for Lahore—and before his own early death—Manto continued to set his stories in Bombay, thus creating a nostalgic precedent for Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” and Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine Balance”, both written after their authors had left the city of their youth.

Film-makers mapped the underworld. In 1955 “Shree 420” told of a small-time con artist who comes to Bombay and learns its soul-destroying lessons too late. Like many subsequent movies, “Deewaar”, released in 1975, was based on a celebrity gangster, the city’s first—an immigrant from the south who, at a time when India’s economic links to the world were flimsy, became a smuggler and ultimately ruled whole districts of the metropolis.

Mumbai noir was to become even darker and more frenetic, mirroring events on the streets. In 1991 the country’s economic liberalisation was heralded by a midnight shipment of gold, conveyed to Bombay’s airport (and thence international markets) in a heavily armoured convoy from the vaults of the Reserve Bank of India. In 1992 riots provoked by Hindu nationalists killed more than 900 people, mainly from the Muslim minority, in Bombay’s slums. In response a Muslim crime boss co-ordinated a series of bomb blasts that killed 257 across the city. In turn Arun Gawli, a Hindu don—and the model for Gaitonde in “Sacred Games”—assumed the mantle of avenger. The gangs themselves, until then as mixed as the denizens of the film world, became segregated. Bombay became Mumbai, ostensibly named after a local Hindu goddess.

Its pavements were slick with blood from daily gangland killings, plus the “encounters” in which the police became adept: extra-judicial executions, cynically presented as shoot-outs. These bad times for the city were, for a while, a heyday for killers and their bosses, and their troubadours too. This was the world of “Satya”, a brutal crime flick that was a hit in 1998. Meenal Baghel, now the editor of the Mumbai Mirror, the city’s most-read tabloid, remembers catching the picture and thinking that it “captured everything that we put in the paper, every day.”

Anything can happen

If an act of terrorism inaugurated Mumbai’s mafia imperium, terrorist atrocities ended it: first the attacks of September 11th 2001, then those of November 2008, when Pakistan-based guerrillas invaded Mumbai by boat and killed 164 people. New financial controls and better policing eventually brought down the thugs’ gold-smuggling and extortion rackets (in the globalised economy, there are better ways to make money anyway). Even the gangsters’ dance bars have been closed.

And these days Mumbai is no longer India’s sole gateway to the world. The new rich live all over the country, as do the new criminals. Delhi and Bangalore have worse murder rates; the police in Uttar Pradesh are expert in “encounters”. Residual scams, such as duping Americans into making phoney tax payments from suburban call centres, are much less cinematic. The city’s film-makers have lost their pre-eminence, just as the mobsters they chronicled have declined. Movies from other parts of the country now rival Bollywood; dubbing and subtitling are big business.

The underworld storyline of “Sacred Games” is actually an anachronism. Still, it may be for the best that the city that inspired the most fevered reimaginings has gone, even if the art endures. As Gaitonde, the gangster, growls to anyone with a streaming device (in Hindi, but subtitled in more than 20 languages): “This is Mumbai city. Anything can happen here.”

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Maxed-out city"

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