Shantaram

As the city where most of the novel is set, Mumbai (known in Western countries as Bombay from the British colonial period to the mid-1990s) is a symbol of India. However, the city also serves as a character in the novel. Lin quickly realizes that “[a]bove all else, Bombay [is] free—exhilaratingly free” (21). Anything can happen in this city, including receiving a literal bear hug from a friend. Because of this freedom to do as one pleases, the city and its inhabitants are free in a way that he and some of the other expatriates are not. Later, Lin will credit Mumbai for forming much of his identity: “The heart, for me, was the city. Bombay. The city had seduced me. I was in love with her. There was a part of me that she invented, and that only existed because I lived there, within her” (459).

Mumbai is also a symbol of acceptance. Didier says that only Mumbai can accept a man who is gay, Jewish, and French, all at once. Didier says, “This is not like any other place. This is India. Everyone who comes here falls in love—most of us fall in love many times over. And the Indians, they love most of all” (85). Because Mumbai is populated by these loving people, it is also a representation of love. This level of acceptance is almost magical to Lin, who calls it “the trick that connects the ordinary to the impossible” (66). Didier here points out that he is a white Western man experiencing India, as is the main character Lin. In this way, even when describing Mumbai in complementary terms, Didier and Lin are enacting a gaze on the native culture that is filtered through a historically tinged lens that “perpetuates the Orientalist fantasies that much of Western art does when depicting India and Indians” (Badami, Sunil. “Shantaram—the Black White Man’s Burden.” University of Technology Sydney, 7 Oct. 2022). Referring to native Mumbaikars as “loving” en masse presents them in magical realist othering terms in the same way the “magical Negro” does in American fiction. In addition, Bombay is the European colonialist term for the city of Mumbai, and while the novel’s setting is the late 1980s when Mumbai was referred to on the global stage as Bombay, it was written in 2003, long after the city had reclaimed its original name. The distinction between the city’s history and the way in which a white expatriate experiences it is ignored throughout the novel. Still, Mumbai presents an alluringly beautiful beacon of hope in Shantaram.