Amar Farooqui’s slim but potent, ‘Opium City: The making of Early Victorian Bombay’ (Three Essays Collective, 2006) takes you on a journey of Mumbai darker than the city’s industrial waste.

Farooqui, makes absolutely no compromises. He leads us out of the sepia-tinted memories we fancy so much and forces us into the squalid eighteenth and nineteenth century streets of Bombay in a manner that would make most heritage conservationists squirm.

You get to see the city in pretty much the way we know it today – a city of crowds and pathetic facilities for those unlucky to live outside its privileged, inner circle. A city dominated by administrative uncertainty, yoked to the larger imperial project headquartered in Calcutta much in the manner that it is today to Delhi. A city energized by small business communities from across the region, but who are always kept subservient to its suspicious rulers. A city economically addicted to forbidden trade – opium – an addiction that shaped the rules of the trading game and one, which remains a shadowy presence in the city’s underbelly, where the lines between business and crime are still seen as blurred.

Such an account of the city’s past means that those who lived through the city’s effervescent post-independence optimism – the celebrated decades of the fifties and sixties – have to re-cast their nostalgia and see them as freak moments. As soon as the dust settled, the city reverted to its wicked old ways.

But then, Farooqui’s story is still half-told. Historians often get so carried away by the austere fact that lies in the archive that they forget there’s more.

And one is not talking about the spirit of the city at all. That has been done to death, by novelists and writers – and with good reason. One is talking about the fuel that keeps the city going – the act of exchanging goods and services.

We detect in Farooqui’s rendering a lot of prejudice about conducting business itself. And the familiar disdain that many misguided historians in India have towards this act. A disdain that is a mirror image of the equally pathetic attitude that the city’s economic elites show towards the traders that rule its streets – the feriwalas or the hawkers – treating them like criminals.

Such extreme attitudes yield two contrary but complementary stories; of the city’s heroic working class past that focuses exclusively on its industrial, trade union-lead history and the false hagiographies of its corporate heroes.

In reality, the complete story of Mumbai lies in its very humble origins as a trading city, which incidentally, Farooqui draws quite accurately. The problem is the way he tells his story.

He does not do adequate justice to these real characters – the petty traders, small shopkeepers and street-hawkers – who were crushed in the past by a colonial regime that treated them suspiciously. But they were all over the place, building the foundations of the city and making it what it remains – an economically successful and cosmopolitan city.

The tragedy is that even such well-researched historical accounts condemn these characters into insignificance because they do not fit into a larger story of working class history.

And that’s the reason the city keeps stumbling.

Instead of making the symbol of the feriwala or the street trader, its mascot, the city criminalizes them while the prejudiced scribe ignores them altogether.

No wonder the city’s thwarted identity spews out weird mythologies where the underworld refers to itself as a business company!