For Bombay is full of a multitude of things for which I am unable to find a name, In a European town there is some kind of unity which explains the people and their surroundings, and enables you to think of them as a community. Here there is none. I never imagined such variety as Bombay displays in its circuit of twenty miles… Every street swarms with people, and no half-dozen seem alike. There are white men, brown men, yellow men, chocolate men, and very nearly black men. Their costume varies from the frock-coat to the loin-cloth, through a brilliant scale of orange, vermilion, green, blue, and brown. There are troops of children, apparently free of school, and some of these, again, are stark naked, while others are elaborately decked out, as for some fantastic children’s carnival. The women are as various as the men and children, and the darker skins affect the brightest colours. Scores of opulent native gentlemen thread their way in and out the crowds in the newest motor-cars; and other handsome carriages, shuttered or curtained, suggest the presence of the purdah women. There is an incessant hubbub; the slightest transaction appears to require the unloosing simultaneously of all tongues in a wide circle of disinterested spectators, as well as among those immediately concerned… The houses are as various as the people. The European part of Bombay might be Vienna slightly orientalized. The native is a grand jumble of all styles, but it gives you the queer impression of an immense hive, very intricate and deeply recessed, with layer on layer of people living in a condition of vertical overcrowding which must give the plague its richest opportunities. The absence of glass enables you to look right into the heart of the houses, and the back rooms are little dark caverns. The main impression is that they swarm with people. You might suppose them to be an amiable, tolerant people, jostling each other with a good-natured friendliness which took no account of the differences of creed or race. And so in a superficial way they must be. No multitude could live thus closepacked without establishing some rough rule of mutual forbearance. Yet those who know them will tell you that this immense jumble of humanity sorts itself into hundreds of intensely separate little heaps, each of which is guarded from the others by an unimaginable code of pride or prejudice.
Chapter II Bombay
The Indian Scene (1922)
by J. A. Spender
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