You can’t go home again

Bombay, the biggest city on the planet, is built on a combination of palm fronds, fish entrails and the dreams of 14 million people. Originally comprising seven islands off the west coast of India, large areas of the city were reclaimed from the Arabian Sea during the 19th and 20th centuries. Nowadays, 500 people arrive in Bombay every day, filling every available square foot of land and adding to the agglomeration of dreams that sustains it. Maximum City relates some of these dreams: from Bollywood moguls to Hindu nationalists, from gang members to bar dancers.

The central theme of the book is one of nostalgia. It is a theme that characterises a great deal of the writing on Bombay available to the West, perhaps unsurprisingly given that most of this writing is produced by non-resident Indians, self-styled ‘exiles’ such as Salman Rushdie and, now, Suketu Mehta. One of the dangers of this nostalgic approach is that it risks conflating the writer’s romantic idea of home with the barbarous reality of the megalopolis, producing the sort of distorted image on which Bombay is founded and thrives.