India: Hustler's Reward

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In centuries past, Bombay was considered so unhealthy that "two monsoons were the life of a man." Bombay is still relatively dangerous to life and limb, but what its citizens feared last week was not malarial fever or dengue but hurtling autos, gangsters, and commuter trains so jampacked that festoons of passengers hang perilously from the doors. "What can we do?" shrugs Mayor Eshakbhai Bandookwala, resplendent in a red turban and seated behind a huge desk topped with black glass. "This city is growing; it leads India. Everybody wants to come here because we have work for them."

Country Swarm. To U.S. visitors, Bombay seems the most American city in India. In a nation that is currently stagnant, both economically and socially, Bombay is noisily on the move, ablaze with neon signs and with a skyline of high-rise office and apartment buildings. Bustling Bombay pays fully a third of all India's income taxes. Its wide harbor handles some 15 million tons of cargo annually, and its burgeoning industry ranges from the traditional textile mills that owe their beginning to the U.S. Civil War, when the Union blockade cut off cotton from the South, to brand-new petrochemical plants. The city's 4,500,000 people are crowded into a narrow, palm-dotted peninsula that has a greater population density than London or New York, and hundreds more swarm in each month from the hinterland, hoping for a taste of Bombay's better life.

The rewards for hustling are there for everyone to see in the ornate homes of the wealthy on Malabar and Cumballa hills. Bombay's sleek women, who set India's fashions, wear slacks by day as they whip about the city in sports cars, and are lovely by night in sheer, gold-encrusted saris. The new and old rich frequent the marble-floored Willingdon Sports Club, where vegetarian diners are discreetly noted by chalk marks on the backs of their chairs, and gather on Sundays for horse racing at the Western India Turf Club, where a sign at the entrance displays an untypical bit of Bombay intolerance. It reads: "South Africans not admitted."

Ringed City. Unlike Calcutta, where long British ownership of the jute mills left a distinctly British tone to the city, Bombay has its own cosmopolitan, fiercely independent stamp. From the beginning, the flourishing textile industry was owned and operated by the Indians themselves. Bombay industrialists were treated by the British as potential customers for machinery rather than as colonial underlings. Textiles spurred the city's growth, but Bombay has confidently gone on to such new industries as oil refineries, fertilizers, synthetic fibers, and assembly plants for Italian autos and motor scooters. The city is ringed by plants making everything from biscuits and pharmaceuticals to machine tools and tires.