Skip to main content

Mumbai: Maximum City


Book Review

Title: Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found
Author: Suketu Mehta
Publisher: Penguin Books, 2004

Every city has a fascinating history that lies beneath its imposing concrete edifices.  It is the history written on invisible pages by people who will never appear in the actual history books, people like gangsters and prostitutes.  And the person on the street too.  Suketu Mehta’s magnum opus unravels that invisible history of Mumbai in a gripping narrative that reads almost like a novel.

The book is divided into three parts.  Part 1, titled ‘Power’, constitutes almost half of the book and is about the people who actually wield the power in the city.  The book speaks about the Mumbai of 1990s and hence this part begins with the riots that assailed the city soon after the Babri Masjid demolition in Dec 1992.  The Muslims in Mumbai reacted against the Babri Kasjid demolition and Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena was quick to exploit the situation for political gains.  In Jan 1993, Thackeray’s goons systematically massacred the Muslims in the city.  Thackeray soon found his match in the Muslim mafia dons who detonated ten bombs one after the other in March.  The Hindu-Muslim divide became total.  Now, religion determined “how often you will bathe, where you will shit” because the water supply to the Muslim areas was curtailed and the toilets became unusable.

Life thrives even if you cut off basic amenities.  Life will find its own ways of moving on.  But crime becomes an integral part of such existence.  Mumbai became a city of increasing crimes.  The communal divide forced the Muslim youth to find occupations in the underworld which was dominated by Muslims.  Mehta gives us a detailed description of the Mumbai underworld.  We meet the gangsters belonging to Dawood Ibrahim and Chotta Rajan as well as of the lesser ones like Arun Gawli and Chotta Shakeel.  The writer shows us that a gangster is essentially a narcissist with a deadly mix of egotism and self-hatred.  At the same time, we also learn that the politicians are bigger criminals than the gangsters.  “We fight among ourselves, but these people (the politicians) are ruining the whole world,” says Chotta Shakeel.  It is quite true too because the gangsters never attack innocent people (except indirectly in bomb blasts or similar situations) while the politicians pervert the people’s psyche. 

Suketu Mehta
The book shows how the police are either helpless or are in cahoots with the gangsters.  The police also employ the same strategies of the gangsters and make use of encounter killings to eliminate certain people.  “The police, the newspapers, and the courts all keep up the fiction of the encounter killing,” says Mehta.  The encounter drama is an open secret.

Titled ‘Pleasure,’ Part 2 presents the dance bars and red streets of the city.  We are given detailed life stories of Monalisa, a bar dancer, and Honey who is actually a man but dances as a woman in a bar.  This section gives us enlightening peeps into Bollywood and its inevitable connections with both the underworld and the red street.

The last part deals with immigrants.  People from all over the country gravitate towards Mumbai. Once again we get some moving details about certain individuals who tried to make their life in the maximum city.  What I found most fascinating in this section, however, is the story of a Gujarati diamond dealer who suddenly gave up his lucrative business and took to religion.  He, along with all his family members, renounced the family’s fabulous wealth in order to become Jain monks.  Mumbai is paap ni bhoomi, land of sins, according to him.  He had committed his share of sins already, a fat share, in fact. 

The book is a masterpiece.  Very few writers would do the kind of research that Suketu Mehta did.  He spent more than two years with the gangsters and dance girls, with the immigrants and other strugglers, before writing the book.  He met people who matter too, people like Bal Thackeray, police officers, Amitabh Bachchan, and a host of others.  Mehta is never judgmental.  He tries to put every person into perspective; we see each one of them from various angles and feel pity rather than contempt or hatred.  We understand them better.  We understand why some people are what they are.  And that’s precisely the greatness of the book. 

A warning for the weak-hearted: you may find the book highly disturbing in many places.



Comments

  1. sounds very interesting I am googling the author and the book.
    whats the genre and is it on flipkart?-- ParwatiSingari

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I bought it from Flipkart. Easily available elsewhere too.

      Delete
  2. I've read this wonderful book and your review does it justice!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Replies
    1. More enlightening than interesting, more disturbing than pacifying, more welcome than the kind of pulp that is being sold these days.

      Delete
  4. That's an impressive amount of research. Has to be an interesting read.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Reality strikes hard. And your review gives a rightful insight.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anything to do Mumbai strikes a cord. Have added this to my reading list. Great review.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You won't be disappointed, I assure you. And thanks.

      Delete
  7. Thanks for sharing such a great information..Its really nice and informative.


    Gold Price in Vijayawada Today

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...