Colaba, the southernmost tip of Mumbai, is the city’s most iconic neighbourhood. This bustling locality—with the Gateway of India, the world-famous Taj Mahal Hotel, and the Colaba Causeway, a shopper’s paradise—is an unparalleled tourist attraction. But barely 200 years ago, it was a rocky, jackal-infested island, separated from the rest of Bombay by a temperamental creek.
In this compelling biography of the neighbourhood, Shabnam Minwalla, journalist, author and long-time resident of the area, tells the tale of the unexpected forces that reshaped land and sea; and allowed this remote corner of the city to evolve into one of its liveliest, quirkiest areas. As she sets to find out the area limits, she unravels accounts of colonial rivalries and dowry negotiations; and of shrewd industrialists who transformed this doomed island into the centre of trade during the cotton boom of the 1860s. She navigates through the sometimes charming, sometimes seedy streets to track its evolution from a spiritual and recuperative retreat for British soldiers to a coveted residential area for the Brits and Indians alike. She digs into her childhood memories to tell us of the eccentric Parsis of Cusrow Baug, the warm yet persistent shopkeepers and hawkers of Colaba Causeway and the industrious Sindhis who introduced Mumbai to co-operative housing societies. Her corner of Colaba is populated with musicians, theatre artists and writers, as well as the Arabs who come every year to witness the city’s monsoons. She mourns as she records how the neighbourhood rose like a phoenix from the ashes after the vicious 26/11 terrorist attack.
Shabnam Minwalla draws from three generations of family memory and combines it with her flair for storytelling and journalistic groundwork to paint an intimate and dynamic of portrait of Colaba.