BOMBAY, TEMPLE OF LUXURY EMBROIDERY
"Coming back from a trip to Elephanta Island, and seeing the wedding cake of the old Taj Hotel [.] and the Gateway of India in front of them, I feel the slightest souvenir of the quickening of the heart that European travellers to India must have felt, through all those long centuries. After several months at sea, after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, after many perils and storms and illnesses, beyond this massive gate lies all of India. Here are tigers and wise men and famines." Suketa Mehta, an American journalist of Indian origin, perfectly expresses the exhilaration a 21st century tourist still feels upon arriving in Mumbai. No sickness or storms, no tigers or famine, not even the wise men. No, it is the intensity of the city itself that overwhelms the Westerner. Here, soulful eyes belie an outward nonchalance. Here, in a district at the water's edge, a kind of drunkenness grips the new arrival faced with the perceptible strength of the elements - the tormented sea
- as it converges on the massive victory arch, a witness to the colonial past battered by age and humidity. Bystanders lounge around the majestic esplanade with the indolence chronic to India. Time passes. The waves come and go in the murmur of their wake. Today the noisy megalopolis crawls with human life. The population of greater Bombay is an estimated 19 million inhabitants, the equivalent of a country. A melting-pot of men, of religions and, above all, of money. Albert Camus noted that a good way to get to know a city was to observe "how it works, how it loves and how it dies." He describes Oran, his hometown in Algeria, as a distant cousin of India's economic capital.
"In our small city, perhaps as a result of the climate, all of these happen together, in a manner at once frenetic and absent. Our fellow citizens work hard, but always with the intent of enriching themselves. Naturally they also have a taste for simple diversions, they love women, the cinema and bathing in the sea. But, reasonably enough, they reserve these pleasures for Saturday evenings or Sunday and attempt, on every other day of the week, to earn plenty of money."
In Mumbai too, everything comes down to a question of business deals, 'dhanda' in Hindi. People come here to make their fortune, to escape from the stagnation of boredom and the misery of the countryside. "Bombay is a golden bird," confides an old man, resident of a slum with neither water nor toilets, in an effort to explain to me why he came here and why the city continues to attract such crowds. The golden bird seems to have flown straight out of an Indian miniature celebrating the great deeds of the Mughal dignitaries who ruled India from the 16th to the 19th century. Or, even better, the golden bird might have escaped from an embroidery created in the central quarter of Madanpura. 'Mini-Pakistan' is another name for the epicentre of embroidery in Bombay, which is itself the key city for luxury embroidery in India. The very centre of the centre. And yet the area seems deceptively mundane from the outside. Where are the embroiderers? Busy shopping streets full of stalls crowded with cheap goods, rubbish all around, muddy pavements - it's the rainy season. While climbing up the stairs of the miserable building at the back of the courtyard or of another, by the roadside, with peeling paintwork, the walls 'repainted' with the red spit of betel, one does not expect to come across the 'golden bird' of embroidery. And yet both the bird's cage and its nest are here, in one of these workshops where men toil together at their craft. They are seated on the floor, heads bent over a frame upon which is stretched a cloth decorated with a preparatory drawing of the day's story. As the embroidery gradually takes shape, its narrative unfolds under their agile hands.
