Maximum City - more excerpts ...

Here are some more quotes from Suketu Mehta's honest and refreshing look at life in Bombay. It really is a quality read.

The Bombay police see Muslims as criminals, much as some American police view African-Americans. (p46)

Bombay has one and a half times the proportion of Muslim residents as the country has overall; Muslims in Bombay comprise more than seventeen per cent of the city’s population. In India as a whole, Muslims number 120 million, twelve per cent of the general population. That makes India home to the second largest Muslim population in the world. Half a century after Partition, there are still more Muslims in India than in Pakistan. (p48)

The Muslims of Bombay are the most diverse group of the followers of Mohammad in the country. It’s not just the division between Shia and Sunni; there are Dawoodi Bohras, Ismailis, Deobandis, Barelvis, Memons, Mopalis, Ahmadiyyas, and so on. The Hindutva parties spread fear of the Muslim horde as if it were a monolith. The truth is that many of the groups, such as Deobandis and Barelvis, or the traditional and the reformist Bohras, often hate each other more passionately than they do the Hindus. But the riots united them. The Dawoodi Bohras of Malabar Hill discovered what they had in common with the Bihari Sunnis in the Madanpura slums: a very public questioning of their claim to be citizens of India. They discovered their biggest crime was that they were Muslims. (p49)

In the Bombay I grew up in, being Muslim or Hindu or Catholic was merely a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle. (p54)