Maximum City

"Finalist"

"When I was moving to Mumbai, or, at least, beginning to study the city in general, I used to read this book on the local trains. It’s a book that can sometimes seem a little over the top, but, in that sense, I think it is quite accurate in terms of its representation of the city it describes. Maximum City is a very appropriate term to describe Mumbai. It’s hard to describe what you get when you pack 30 million people into such a small space and one of such dizzying complexity and diversity. I think Mehta does a good job of bringing out the many different tensions you have within the city today, and how the city has transformed since liberalisation, in 1991, where not just the Indian economy has expanded, but the government of India’s social ambit has changed dramatically and political parties have transitioned from being organisations that might have, at least rhetorically, talked about social welfare and equality and such, to being, in many ways, money-making enterprises. “Mumbai has in many ways been the lodestar of the future in India” He’s very condemnatory of organisations like the Shiv Sena, probably the dominant political party in Mumbai at the moment, which was led by a man called Bal Thackeray. Thackeray is a looming figure in modern Mumbai’s history. He was someone who made his name following a very Carl Schmitt-like orientation of ‘us versus the enemy.’ First, he did this by pitting Maharashtrians against South Indians, then, he transitioned to other groups like North Indians, and finally he made his name by demonising Muslims. He was fond of quoting Hitler and revelled in the fact that Western observers would be aghast at the fact that he idolised Hitler, which gives you a good insight into how politics in the city functions. We are all familiar with the ugly histories of urban politics in, say, a place like New York or London. In the 1800s, you have “Boss” Tweed or, say, machinations in the East End of London from 150 years ago. Reading Maximum City is a good reminder that history repeats itself, but it repeats itself in different ways. A lot of those machinations and political business combines and political criminal combines that you saw in other urban agglomerations from, say, 150 years ago, are being played out on steroids (if you will) in a place like Mumbai today. Maximum City , in many ways, stands in for the urban transformation going on in cities across India as we speak. If you look at a place like Delhi or Bangalore, the same levels of corruption and massive socioeconomic stratification are playing out. It’s just that in a place like Mumbai, they seem to be magnified, due to the size and scale and importance of the city. Guha’s book first came out in 2007, before the BJP was in power nationally, and Maximum City came out in 2004, well before Narendra Modi’s time in power as prime minister, so neither are speaking to the current political moment. I know that Guha has updated his book. The subtitle of the book was ‘ The History of the World’s Largest Democracy,’ but in the last edition he dropped that subtitle which, I think, gives you an indication of his opinions, at least, of India’s backsliding on democracy. In all of these books, you can see signs of where we are today. India has not reached this political position today just under Modi—it’s been a much longer and deeper slide. Again, straying from the mission of talking about five books, there are many other books that have talked about how India’s current democratic crisis is the product of much longer histories. I recently finished reading a book by Taylor Sherman called Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths . It talks about how even under Nehru (which is considered to be the high point India’s liberal democracy), there were grave worries about the sustainability of Indian democracy, and, indeed, grave democratic crises, from Kashmir to Kerala. Even under Nehru, the commitment to socialism might have been there, but the results could oftentimes be quite shaky. We do have a general narrative of how India has backslid democratically since Modi’s rise to power. What you and I can say in public or in print now, versus in 2014, and compare that even to 2010, is dramatically different. But, just as in the United States or Hungary or Brazil or the Philippines, there is a much longer story of populism and democratic backsliding to explore, and that story extends back decades."

"“Maximum City,” by Suketu Mehta."