ABSTRACT
On 11 July 2006, Bombay’s status as a world city was underlined by a macabre urban experience that is fast becoming definitive of our times. A series of bombs, planted to coincide with the evening rush hour traffic, ripped apart trains on the city’s suburban railway network, killing over two hundred people and injuring scores of others. These attacks on Bombay are only the latest in a series of cataclysmic events over the past decade or so that have had a profound impact on the city’s existence and identity. Recurrent sectarian strife, mob violence, ‘gang wars’, and terrorist attacks have battered the famed self-confidence with which its residents once confronted the world. These upheavals have reinforced the perception among contemporaries that Bombay has ceased to stand apart from the rest of India as a haven of peace, prosperity and progress. A variety of reasons are commonly given to explain the city’s current travails: its crumbling civic infrastructure and antiquated rent laws, the inexorable pressure on its resources generated by an ever-expanding migrant population, the decline since the early 1980s of the cotton-textile industry, the culture of violence fostered among its plebeian classes by the Shiv Sena, the exacerbation of sectarian conflict as a result of the alienation of its Muslim communities, the stranglehold exerted on its economy by organized crime, and the abdication of social responsibility by its elites and middle classes. In the light of Bombay’s mounting difficulties, many observers are convinced that the city is in terminal decline and that it has ceded its competitive edge to sleeker rivals.
