Mumbai: Seeking truth in the ‘City of Gold’

Erich Bridges
International Mission Board

Television writer Sankalp Tak steers his late-model compact through the streets of Mumbai, India’s largest city, dodging waves of cars and motorized rickshaws to park behind a nondescript warehouse.

Inside: barely controlled chaos — like Mumbai itself.

It’s the set of a TV comedy about upscale students at a fictional Indian college. Production crew members rush to break down one scene and set up the next. The director huddles with the producer and cameramen while the actors practice their lines and check their makeup in hand mirrors.

Everyone greets Tak, age 27. He’s one of the creative forces behind the production, which airs four nights a week on India’s Star One network. He auditioned about 1,000 actors to cast the show and used to spend all day, every day, on the set as a creative director before he switched to scriptwriting.

Tak misses the daily craziness — but not too much.

“Politics is not a virtue in this business,” he says. “You have to be aggressive, even heartless sometimes, to handle the chaos on the set or push someone who’s already worked to 10 or 11 to go until 2 a.m.”

Bollywood stays busy
“Bollywood,” a combination of Hollywood and Bombay (Mumbai’s former name), is the film side of the city’s media business. It churns out hundreds of movies a year. The television side stays just as busy feeding the ravenous appetite of millions of Indian viewers for soaps, dramas and comedies.

“There’s no glamour behind the camera,” Tak confides with a weary grin. Still, he savors being young and successful in a nation where so many people struggle just to live.

But has Tak, a Hindu, found his true purpose in life?

“No, I’m still searching for the meaning,” he admits. “I mean, if you have to leave everything and go sit in the Himalayas to be spiritually satisfied, that doesn’t work. It’s not practical.”

Mumbaikars, as the city’s inhabitants call themselves, are nothing if not practical. It’s a survival skill. The city’s frantic speed doesn’t allow a lot of time for thinking about meaning. Even some Hindu worshippers zip through their pujas (worship or prayers) at roadside temples without getting off their idling motorcycles.

Tak’s show resumed shooting only a day after the deadly terror attacks that struck the city last November. Much of the city’s relentless commerce went on uninterrupted as police shot it out with the terrorists. For many who weren’t at the places where hundreds of people actually bled and died, the attacks seemed “filmy.” That’s a word you hear a lot in Mumbai, where the line between Bollywood fantasy and daily reality sometimes blurs.

“I was at home watching it all on television,” Tak recalls. “Everybody thought, ‘Is this a film? Is this a movie?’”

Tycoons and pavement dwellers
Show business — despite its quasi-religious status among the countless fans who idolize Bollywood stars — is first and foremost a multibillion-dollar business. And Mumbai has been all about business since its early days.

Opportunity: It’s why people from all over India keep coming to Mumbai, India’s money center and business capital. Hundreds arrive each day, most carrying their belongings in tattered bags.

Greater Mumbai already strains to the breaking point under the weight of more than 19 million human beings. But people keep pushing their way in. Some dream of fame and fortune. Many simply hope for a better life than they had in the parched farms and jobless villages they came from.

A few will find it. The rest will do whatever it takes for their daily bread.

The city is impossibly crowded — more than 70,000 people per square mile, on average, jammed together into a landfilled peninsula jutting into the Arabian Sea on India’s west coast. Living space, even a single room, costs far beyond what most migrants can afford. So thousands live on the streets. “Pavement dwellers,” they’re called.

Ten families occupy a sidewalk at a busy intersection in West Andheri, one of Mumbai’s huge suburbs. They dwell under dingy tarps tied to a fence. Their children sleep among the bags containing their possessions and some pots and pans for cooking. Sometimes police harass the ragtag group or ask for bribes. Municipal authorities periodically clear the area, but the pavement dwellers eventually return.

“People mistreat us,” angrily declares Shanta Bai, one of the women. “They say, ‘You people are dirty. You are poor.’ But what can we do? We have no land. We have no water. That’s why we came to Mumbai. If you want to put us in jail, go ahead!”

Slum dwellers, who comprise at least half of the city’s entire population, have slightly better accommodations. Harish and his family, immigrants from Nepal, live on “disputed land” — no one is quite sure who owns it. Until that question is settled, the trash-strewn clearing next to a construction site belongs to the squatter families. The women clean the apartments of the affluent people who live in high-rises around them. Some of the men find work at the building site.

Harish’s family of eight lives in two small, tidy rooms with concrete floors and corrugated tin walls. They sleep in one room, cook and eat in another. They share the area with a handful of other families, an unreliable water pump and a one-room schoolhouse.

“Our doors are always open to each other,” Harish says. “Slum people are also human beings.”

It seems almost livable — until monsoon rains come and flood the area with disease-laden sewer water. Then the families remember they are essentially refugees, even if they’ve been there for years.

Maximum darkness
“People come to Mumbai with big dreams,” says Arshad Kunnummal, a young executive in the city. “Unfortunately, not all of them succeed. But the striving is always there.”

The city mixes New York’s money and manic energy, Los Angeles’ glitz and guns, Shanghai’s entrepreneurs and restless masses, Mexico City’s size and organized crime — with plenty of Calcutta’s poverty stirred in.
Mumbai’s nickname among Indians is “Maximum City” — maximum people, maximum wealth, maximum poverty, maximum traffic, maximum crime, maximum entertainment.

Followers of Christ in the city add another: maximum darkness.

Most of Mumbai’s millions “are so multi-generationally saturated in darkness and tradition that they don’t know how to look for light,” says a Christian worker.

Hindus are the vast majority. But the city also is home to 2 million Muslims, as well as Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsees and members of every caste and virtually every people group in India.

Professing Christians of all varieties, including the city’s centuries-old Roman Catholic community, comprise about 5 percent of the population. Evangelical believers, however, account for just 0.15 percent.

“You see the church expanding only in the slums today, but not much among the well-educated people,” says Christian leader Ivan Raskino. “The sad thing is that Mumbai is expanding much more than the church.”

Why? Rapid population growth among Hindus and Muslims, for one thing. Mumbai’s go-go pace, for another. Christians also labor under the weight of the city’s history.

Mammon’s stronghold
Old Bombay was dominated over the ages by Muslim Mogul conquerors, the Portuguese and the British, among others. Catholic missionaries during the Portuguese era spread the faith but left a legacy of forced conversions, intolerance of other religions and “rice Christians” bribed to adopt Christianity.

Bombay reached its zenith as a great world trading center under British rule, which also fostered religious freedom. But the colonial legacy has been an albatross around the neck of Protestant Christians since India gained independence in 1947. Many urban Indians admire Christ, but not the Westernized, non-indigenous churches where He is worshipped.

But Mumbai’s Christians also bear some responsibility for their own marginalization.

The existing churches are a “big barrier” to growth, says a Christian worker. “They’ve been in survival mode as a minority for generations. If somebody happens to bring somebody, that’s a good thing, but it doesn’t happen very often.”

The ancient spiritual strongholds of religious idolatry still exert influence in the city. But so does the stronghold of greed, which fully bloomed in the 19th-century colonial era as Bombay became the money-obsessed “City of Gold.”

“Forget about (the Hindu god) Shiva” as an opponent of truth, Raskino advises. “Mammon is still the big stronghold in Mumbai. In traditional, middle-class Indian families, daughters are prostituting themselves on the side. Why? Because they want money. Values are being sacrificed for gain. And it started in the very foundations of Bombay.”

How can the Gospel penetrate such a bastion of darkness?

“If we (Christians) get our hearts right with God, if we draw close to each other, really humble ourselves and cry out to Him for the city, God will answer us,” says Raskino.

India’s national motto, which appears on every rupee coin and note, is “Truth alone triumphs.” It comes from Hindu verses written some 4,000 years ago.

May truth triumph in Mumbai, while there is still time.

Act

Pray for Mumbai using four virtual prayerwalks

• Inside Mumbai: Koli Originals
• Inside Mumbai: Reality
• Inside Mumbai: Created Equal
• Inside Mumbai: Transportation

See more about Mumbai on the Web

• imb.org
• mReport
• South Asian peoples

Get involved in sharing Christ in Mumbai and other cities in South Asia. Visit www.go2southasia.org.
(Printer-friendly version)