Ever since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the principal
gateway to the I
ndian Subcontinent has been Mumbai (Bombay), the city
Aldous Huxley famously described as “the most appalling of either
hemisphere”. Travellers tend to regard time spent here as a rite of
passage to be survived rather than savoured. But as the powerhouse of
Indian business, industry and trade, and the source of its most
seductive media images, the Maharashtran capital can be a compelling
place to kill time. Whether or not you find the experience enjoyable,
however, will depend largely on how well you handle the heat, humidity,
traffic fumes and relentless crowds of India’s most dynamic, Westernized
city.
First impressions of Mumbai tend to be dominated by its chronic
shortage of space. Crammed onto a narrow spit of land that curls from
the swamp-ridden coast into the Arabian Sea, the city is technically an
island, connected to the mainland by bridges and narrow causeways. In
less than five hundred years, it has metamorphosed from an aboriginal
fishing settlement into a megalopolis of more than sixteen million
people – India’s largest city and one of the biggest urban sprawls on
the planet. Being swept along broad boulevards by endless streams of
commuters, or jostled by coolies and hand-cart pullers in the teeming
bazaars, you’ll continually feel as if Mumbai is about to burst at the
seams.
The roots of the population problem and attendant poverty lie,
paradoxically, in the city’s enduring ability to create wealth. Mumbai
alone generates one third of India’s tax income, its port handles half
the country’s foreign trade, and its movie industry is the most prolific
in the world. Symbols of prosperity are everywhere: from the phalanx of
office blocks clustered on Nariman Point, Maharashtra’s Manhattan, to
the expensively dressed teenagers posing in Colaba’s trendiest
nightspots.
The flip side to the success story is the city’s much-chronicled
poverty. Each day, an estimated five hundred economic refugees pour into
Mumbai from the Maharashtran hinterland. Some find jobs and secure
accommodation; many more end up living on the already overcrowded
streets, or amid the squalor of some of Asia’s largest slums, reduced to
rag-picking and begging from cars at traffic lights.
However, while it would definitely be misleading to downplay its
difficulties, Mumbai is far from the ordeal some travellers make it out
to be. Once you’ve overcome the major hurdle of finding somewhere to
stay, you may begin to enjoy its frenzied pace and crowded, cosmopolitan
feel.
Nowhere reinforces your sense of having arrived in Mumbai quite as emphatically as the
Gateway of India, the city’s defining landmark. Only a five-minute walk north, the
Prince of Wales Museum
should be next on your list of sightseeing priorities, as much for its
flamboyantly eclectic architecture as for the art treasures inside. The
museum provides a foretaste of what lies in store just up the road,
where the cream of Bartle Frere’s Bombay – the
University and
High Court – line up with the open maidans on one side, and the boulevards of
Fort
on the other. But for the fullest sense of why the city’s founding
fathers declared it Urbs Prima in Indis, you should press further north
still to visit the
Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), the high-water mark of India’s Raj architecture.
Beyond CST lie the crowded bazaars and Muslim neighbourhoods of
central Mumbai, at their liveliest and most colourful around
Crawford Market and
Mohammed Ali Road. Possibilities for an escape from the crowds include an evening stroll along
Marine Drive, bounding the western edge of downtown, or a boat trip out to
Elephanta, a rock-cut cave on an island in Mumbai harbour containing a wealth of ancient art.