Mumbai: Escaping a Reality of Socioeconomic Disparity
A final city to consider when making the argument that global cities have been an urban phenomenon not confined to the past century is the city of Mumbai, or Bombay. Originally controlled by native Indian tribes, the Portuguese conquered Mumbai in the late fifteenth century and made the city a major player in their trading empire. Similarly, when the English controlled Bombay, the city’s location on the western coast of India made it a strategic trading port. Today, Mumbai is the economic capital of India. This city, placed on seven islands in a seemingly inefficient manner, seems to have been destined to become a global power from the minute that it entered the global arena with the arrival of the Portuguese. However, perhaps the best reason that Mumbai must be considered a global city is because of its huge socio-economic divides.
In her strictly economic analysis of global cities, Sassen claims that in global cities, “the growing number of high-level professionals and high-profit making specialized service firms have the effect of raising the degree of spatial and socio-economic inequality evident in these cities” (1). Immediately, Mumbai, the richest city in India yet replete with sprawling slums and shantytowns, comes to mind. Looking at a map of Mumbai, it is apparent that the slums directly abut some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city. We get a taste of this socio-economic divide in Suketu Mehta’s novel Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found when the author goes into detail on the booming Bollywood film industry in Mumbai. Discussing the primary audience of Bollywood films, the lower and lower-middle classes, Mehta writes “[they] want to see an urban, affluent, glossy India, the India they imagine they grew up in” (2). For Bollywood fans, the reality espoused through cinema does not need to line up at all with the reality of Mumbai; the films represent an escape from the socioeconomically unjust situation of modern Mumbai. A scene where Mehta writes about the huge crowd that gathered and swarmed around an actress during a filming stands out, as it is apparent that this escape has become an obsession for Bollywood fans (2).
Though not exactly a Bollywood film, Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox isn’t a bad example of this viewpoint. The film shows a quirky and magical Mumbai completely bereft of the human suffering that Mr. Fernandes likely walked past every single day on his way to work (3). The only realistic mention of Mumbai’s economic disparities in the film comes about when Fernandes passingly reflects that most people in the city can only afford to eat a banana or two for lunch. Watching a movie like The Lunchbox, or other more classic Bollywood films, allows the viewers to escape their situation where the booming and high-profit making film industry strengthens the socio-economic inequality already present in Mumbai.
In the Omeka exhibit “Portuguese India: A Littoral History,” globalization in the city of Mumbai is readily apparent as the Portuguese naval trading empire is discussed in great detail. The discrepancy in socioeconomic justice in Mumbai extends back at least to the Portuguese rule of the city; a careful study of Portuguese maps of the city and surrounding areas show a focus on the shores of the subcontinent. Clearly, cities on the coast provide a platform to extend into the global market and the Portuguese therefore paid attention only to locations where they stood to gain economically. Maps produced during this period blatantly ignore interior India, causing a disconnect between the shores and the hinterlands, and the wealthy Portuguese settlements in the coastal cities blossom while the surrounding areas are depleted of their resources.
Portuguese Mumbai is not too different than modern-day Mumbai, therefore. In both iterations of the city, the ruling class makes a high profit margin and creates wide socioeconomic divides at the expense of the impoverished majority. Additionally, given the disconnection from hinterlands and the utility of Mumbai as a platform to enter the global market, two tenets we have already establish to be essential to the term "global city," it seems absurd not to consider Mumbai to have been a global city even as far back as Portuguese rule.