The City Unraveled

These are two literary pieces that show two different authors’ attempts to characterize two different cities.

In the opening of “The City in its Limits”, Daniella Gandolfo talks about the definition of a city’s character by sensing its taboos in the city of Lima. These taboos, she opines, become evident when the taboos are transgressed.  This enlightenment was afforded her when a news article about a middle aged woman who went topless in public for absolutely no reason, while protesting as she had recently been fired from a sweeper’s job, came to her notice. The following days saw newspapers characterising the woman as a “mother” rather than as a “sweeper”, thus negating the Mayor of Lima’s attempt to cleanse the city centre of its undesirables in his campaign to resurrect the city centre to what he considered its heyday – the early history of the city when it was built to accommodate castes in distinct localities. She returned to the city in subsequent years and used this technique identifying disruptive events (transgressions of taboos) to trace the ethnography and character history of the city.

The second article is about the exploration of the various aspects of the mythology that is Bombay – addressed, in part, by the author through his tracery of the evolution of Bombay into Mumbai as seen through the eyes of an outsider. The author uses various examples such as novels set with Bombay as one of the locales within them, cartoons on Bombay life and cartoonists with their own unique understanding of Bombay, Hindi film music lyrics, the history of the rise of ethnic politics as different from the earlier working class politics  etc, to show his understanding about Mumbai. He talks about not only the glitter, “cosmopolitanistic” aspirations and stylistic posturing of “Mumbaikars” that sets the trend for the rest of India to follow, but also about “gangsterism”, apathy in civil society there, the rampant corruption of money mixed with politics and a city regularly besieged with catastrophes – both manmade and natural.

Without being judgemental, he begins a journey of historical exploration of the city that he had seen till now or read about only in all the mythic forms talked about above.

Both the articles are prefaces to the main body of work which, it is supposed, thoroughly explored the two cities of Lima (through its taboos) and Mumbai (through its history).

-Anjali Sivaraman