Book Review: Maya Nagari Bombay-Mumbai: A City in Stories
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Namrata reviews Maya Nagari Bombay-Mumbai: A City in Stories Edited by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto (Published by Speaking Tiger, 2024)
In the vast, pulsing heart of India lies a city that defies description, a metropolis that lives and breathes with a vibrancy unmatched. Mumbai, Bombay, Bambai—call it what you will, the city resists being captured, evading all attempts to pin down its essence in mere words. Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto, however, have undertaken the formidable task of curating an anthology that seeks to weave together the disparate threads of this great city into stories that evokes the spirit of the Maya Nagari, the City of Dreams.
This collection features some of the most brilliant names in the literary world, including Baburao Bagul, Ismat Chughtai, Vilas Sarang, Pu La Deshpande, Urmila Pawar, Saadat Hasan Manto, Mohan Rakesh, Manasi, Cyrus Mistry, Shanta Gokhale, Shri Na Pendse, Krishnan Chander, Ambai, Jerry Pinto, Udayan Thakker, Jayant Kaikini, Bhupen Khakhar, Eunice de Souza, Jayant Pawar, Anuradha Kumar, and Tejaswini Apte-Rahm. Each of these writers has attempted to capture the essence of Mumbai in their previous works and succeeded to a remarkable extent. However, as the saying goes, Mumbai is an emotion—it can only be felt, not fully explained.
Maya Nagari is not just a book; it is a celebration, a lament, and an ode to the multifaceted, ever-changing entity that is Mumbai. The editors, Gokhale and Pinto, do not attempt to distill the city into a singular narrative. Instead, they gather twenty-one short stories that together form a mosaic, each piece adding to the rich, complex portrait of a city that contains multitudes. This anthology is a testament to Mumbai’s diversity, featuring stories translated from Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, and Malayalam, alongside those originally written in English.
