My Bombay vs Your Bombay: An Exploration of Metropolitan Attitude Portrayed in Altaf Tyrewala’s No God in Sight

Abstract

The city is a heterogeneous space. It is home to large numbers of people belonging to diverse classes, religions, gender, and ethnicity. This paper is an exploration of the questions, what makes it possible for all the diverse groups to be able to call the same city their city? How does the city accommodate such a divergent population? Such questions will be explored through an interdisciplinary study of a particular metropolitan character, Rahul Adhikari, a Mumbaiite from Altaf Tyrewala’s work No God in Sight. The character Rahul Adhikari is peculiar, as he differentiates the city of Bombay as he calls it, ‘My Bombay’ and ‘Your Bombay’. Tyrewala addresses Rahul Adhikari as ‘Siddhartha in denial’, giving his character a religious colour. Hence the first part of the study is an analysis of the religious significance of his story. The second part will inspect how far the attitude of Rahul Adhikari can be equated to the ‘blasé attitude’ of metropolitan citizens which George Simmel claims is characteristic of city life. This will be done by inquiring how the diverse population of the city experiences the city and how they react to the multiplicity of sensory experiences the city exposes them to. Also, since the character under study traverses the city in his car, the effect of mobility on the social relations of the urban citizens will be investigated.