Bombay/Mumbai Immersions

About the Book This book of contemplative essays and art photographs gives the reader the experience of the city of Bombay/Mumbai with its pungent edginess, its geography. teeming personal histories, evidence of ruin and new rooting, its pulsing and often putrid corporality. By mapping different rhythms of time as it flows through the metropolis, Bombay/Mumbai Immersions is a cross genre book dipping into memoir, travelogue. investigation and poetic reflection About the Author The author and photographer roved Bombay/Mumbai to experience it afresh as the city imagined and desired by millions and the mean city of mindboggling inequality, demographics and vitality Through vivid and poignant stories encountered on its streets and in little known trades, delving into its history and Bollywood's branching requirements, visiting relatively unexplored precincts and the atmospherics of high-rises and heritage villages, a map of the city emerges ephemeral but as memorable as the sun setting over the Arabian Sea.

Conceptually stimulating, elegantly written and accompanied by haunting images, this book is a compassionate, dramatic and in-depth take on the life of a cruel and captivating world metropolis even as it is an intense meditation on living in the 21st century.

Priya Sarukkal Chabria is a poet winter and translator She is the recipient of the Indian Government's Senior Fellowship to Outstanding Artists. She has studied the Rasa Theory of Aesthetics co-founded a club that showed silent films and collaborated with dancer Malavika Sarukka she edits the website Poetry at Sangam. Her books include two poetry collections. a novel and a speculative fiction narrative. Her work is in numerous international journals, websites and various anthologies in India and abroad. Forthcoming are The Autobiography of a Goddess, translations of Tamil mystic Aandaal's songs, and a book on cinema: A collection of love stories. set in Bombay is forthcoming with Niyogi Christopher Taylor is an English photographer based in France A zoologist by training. this self-taught photographer mostly uses a cumbersome studio camera or else an ancient Rolleiflex even in the busiest streets. His photographs never fail to surprise. He has held critically acclaimed exhibitions in Paris, Arles, London, Beijing. Delhi, Mumbai, and Calcutta.

Introduction M any writers artists and photographers have chronicled this city in word and image and ours is one more venture journey marection But no journey of true Do y ends for the traveller for the end. pesos journey merely marks the beginning of the next one in this sense our journey i also not complete We realised that what one saw at noon must be seen again in starlight that which was seen in summer reveals another aspect in the monsoon sights and smells chetished in childhood vanish and are replaced by other sensations and a different understanding One has to retrace one's footsteps or place new ones alongside older paths as materiality and memories morph implanting on each other shaping the contours of our imagination and existence.

Some sensory Dorceptions accrete gradually to wash over earlier memories slowly dimming earlier realities At other times changes in the city occur with such suddenness that one doubts one's earlier recollections landmarks disappear and earlier realities shade into fantasy. In this way too does the Facing page Street. Tarde soled city seem like a towing river revealing other depths in the bont of experience. As the city becomes more croword, ones intama solice seems to dienabend this changes one's interaction with the city in subce wity's Over decades of living in Mumce one finds time has imperceptibly become mutable A this had to in some way be acknowledged our journey through the city.

My collaborator, photographer Christocher Taylor had photographed and exhibited in this city before he and I met one unusually sweltering afternoon in London to discuss the possibility of collaborating on this book Earlier, Christopher's meditative photographs seemed to be mainty about vestiges of colonial architecture in these he found stillness amidst chaos and sences in the city's clamour As for myself. I grew up worked and lived in this city that I now often visit. To me the city always throbbed with cultural encounters and opportunities but it was also in a personal sense the keeper of solitude and secrets while the shifting sea outside my window suggested intimations of insubstanbality-that 1 am only passing through However, even during our first meeting it was evident that we had common concerns both Christopher and i seek the sempiternal amidst the ephemeral Together, Christopher and I wished to trace the flow of time through this city how different parts of the city seen to exist, side by side in different time zones.

**Contents and Sample Pages**