It’s a fleshy city. The heat of its body rises up from the pavements, smothering its people in a great swell that lifts from Back Bay and the Arabian Sea to the peachy heights of Malabar and Cumballa Hills. But whilst it has a natural geography that rides the curves and lines of the land this is a city that is ever remoulding, ever-expanding, inhaling and exhaling, reclaiming land from the sea, and spreading itself further into the hinterland.

The Weight of Heat

The weight of its heat is so heavy that sometimes it seems to melt the shapes of this island peninsula, the outline shimmering and seeming almost to reform as you watch. And indeed it is changing fast, encapsulating all that is re-emerging India with the old crushing up against the new. Acres of glossy office plate glass reflect semi-naked labourers scrambling up and down precarious wooden scaffolding on old and lavishly curlicued apartment buildings beside the sea. Beneath the lengthening high rises the heaving throng jostles for space, high end finance side-by-side with the millions pouring into the city in search of work, survival, a place to bring their families in the hope of a better future. Sometimes it feels hard to breathe.

An Empire’s Architecture

Above in the hills there is sweeter air and houses with high walls, the rich and famous shutting the world away behind electric gates and darkened limo windows. From those higher hills the hips of the city fall back down to the water, to the big old arch beside the sea, the Gateway of India, the salt-singed monument grandly commissioned in Indo-Saracenic style to commemorate the royal visit of the King Emperor, George V, in 1911, and through which that limping empire retreated just thirty-seven year later, on the tailwind of India’s independence in August 1947. Honeymoon couples pose for nervous newly-wed pictures beneath its mixture of arch and minarets, looking out to sea on one side and across to the Taj Mahal Hotel on the other. Here is another institution, part of the architectural landscape, built at the turn of the 19th century by the industrialist Jamshedji Tata, purportedly to take on the British stance that Indians were not allowed in the ‘Britishers’ hotels. Of course Jamshedji chose George Wittet, the same architect who designed The Gateway. And this is the style that echoes across the colonial architecture of the city, particularly to that of what used to be called Victoria Terminus, now renamed as Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus, all part and parcel of India’s bid to shrug off memoirs and mementos of its colonial past in a fit of renaming. But as the largest railway station in the East, with its Venetian Gothic style, it is still VT to most, just as few locals refer to their renamed city as Mumbai, sticking with Bombay, because that’s what they grew up with, the vagaries of local and national politics boring most of them into rolling their eyes and carrying on regardless.

Fantasy Machine

Though many may ignore the name changes there is no question that the city has been re-branded, and not only as India’s financial capital. Beyond the architectural landmarks of the past, this is a rapidly growing high rise city of big money, and international business. It is also a studio city, the fantasy fodder factory of the subcontinent, with a movie industry pumping out twice as many films every year as Hollywood to satisfy the romantic cravings of an audience that is more than a billion strong. Many of these films now portray a glossy modern Mumbai, an image loved by so many of the new generation of vibrant economic India. This version of the city is perhaps easiest to find in Colaba, mainline Bombay Central, where the pretty people come out to play in restaurants and bars filled with chilled air, icy beer, and even chillier expressions of cool above hipster diamante-