Bombay that was…

“This is where I grew up,” photographer Pablo Bartholomew says of Mumbai, the city he knew — and still does— as Bombay. “It is a real city, a hard, intense place.” Bartholomew came to the city in his late teens and did a lot of his work on the urbanscape of the metropolis there. “This was a way of discovering a new city,” he explains. He showcased his ‘discoveries' recently with a show called “Chronicles of a Past Life: '70s & '80s In Bombay” at the Sakshi Gallery.

But much of what he saw then and viewers could see in his show is no longer real. The photographs are a mnemonic for those who remember the city in the 1970s and 1980s, but are unfamiliar vignettes with that otherworldly touch of the perhaps-known for those who came after. Bartholomew also did some modern-day exploration, “walking around, and found that some of the places are not there anymore... the building I shot my pictures from is not there, the scene I shot is no longer there. There are places that have closed down. This is a function of time and change; everything changes.” These are passings and passages of time. Bombay (as he and so many others who know an older, less harried city call it) for me becomes a bit of a passage where I go back to some of the older places where I had breakfast or lunch or dinner and I continue to do that today because in some way it is reinforcing memories or feelings that I have of or for the city.”

Housing many

But the draw was not the much-vaunted ‘charm' of the metropolis. It was something more, something else, something that went beyond definition. Bartholomew does not think that “Bombay ever had charm. It had a vitality. It had a democratic way that it treated many people of different faith, colour, belief; outsiders were absorbed in as long as they had something to offer the city.” But with all that, too, change has been inevitable. “I think that fabric to some degree has changed; there have been migration changes, so maybe there are many more North Indians here now. Earlier, the Parsis, the Goans, people from the South stood out much more than the Punjabis, but now I think maybe the equation has changed. There were always South Indians – Keralites, people from coastal Karnataka and Mangalore. That is what made the city so exciting and interesting! You had all this mixed with a healthy dose of Muslims added in.” The people were the driving force, the momentum that has made Mumbai the commercial capital that it is today.