Bombing Bombay

On March 12, 1993, ten bombs exploded across the city of Bombay within a period of about two hours. The timed explosions were caused by large quantities of an explosive known as RDX, a black soap–like substance, which was loaded onto several four- and two-wheelers. Planted strategically in and around important city buildings, crowded marketplaces, and hotels, each vehicle exploded within fifteen or thirty minutes of the previous one. Their itinerary not only was timed serially but also, perhaps accidentally, followed a north-south geographic trajectory, beginning with a dramatic explosion in the basement of the Bombay Stock Exchange in the city’s historic, colonial Fort area and ending with a series of unexploded grenades hurled onto the runways of the airport in the northwest suburb of Santacruz.

These explosions followed nearly three months of tension and murderous riots in Bombay between Hindus and Muslims after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque in northern India by a mob of Hindu nationalist youths. While the riots took place immediately after the mosque’s destruction on December 6, 1992, followed by a second round a month later, in January 1993, the blasts came after two months of uneasy calm, on the last Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. More than two hundred people died in the blasts on that single day and hundreds were injured.

The event, simply referred to as the “bomb blasts” in Bombay (until the recent serial bombing of commuter trains), is treated as a singular event — the serial blasts — involving a vast conspiracy. Its singularity was self-evident even on the day of the blasts, when the city’s police commissioner suggested that the bombings had turned the entire city into a battlefield. Each bomb was evidently connected to the next as if in a chain reaction. And every link of the chain remained visible as people speculated on the significance of each target. As S. Hussain Zaidi, an investigative journalist and author of a recent book titled Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts, writes, “It was the first time any city in the world was subject to serial blasts” (2002: 15).¹

The serial explosions were, at that time, a unique form of attack, blurring the line between multiple and singular events because of the close temporal proximity of the bombs. This temporal proximity condensed and fused space into a unified field — that of the city. Yet despite the enormity and scale of this event, it quickly disappeared from the everyday life of the city into psychic registers rarely available on the surface except under carefully controlled judicial and journalistic conditions.

More than a decade after these bomb blasts, in July 2006, another series of explosions shook the city, which had been renamed Mumbai in 1996. At around six o’clock on a Tuesday evening, during the peak commuting hour, seven explosions ripped through the first-class compartments of commuter trains on the Western Railway lines, going off within minutes of each other. In the space of eleven minutes, seven train compartments had been destroyed and over a hundred commuters were dead, many of them waiting on platforms at the stations that the trains had just passed or were about to pull out from. Incessant, 24-7 news coverage showed gory scenes of dead passengers and injured commuters being carried away by police and local residents who rushed to the scene. Shocked spectators mutely witnessed the carnage with a sense of mounting outrage.

The 1993 blasts were recollected as an ancestor by a city still awaiting delivery of a final judgment against the perpetrators of those explosions. But this time, there was less skepticism and little doubt about the history in which this episode belonged. News media dutifully made the obvious connections to similar events in London and Madrid. Exactly one week after the blasts, at the precise moment of the first blast in the series, all traffic in Mumbai voluntarily stopped to observe “two minutes of silence” in memory of the victims of the blasts, on the appeal of a popular news channel. A chilling and eerie silence descended as the traffic ceased, a reenactment of the very scene of blockage that the bombs had achieved. Most media reports suggested that the chief victim of the blasts was the city itself, but that because peace had prevailed in the aftermath the “spirit of Mumbai” had triumphed after all.

The dispersed presence of the 1993 blasts, the lack of memorials to the victims or public remembrance, and the carefully controlled media coverage of the blasts contrasted sharply with the intense, mediatic coverage of the 2006 blasts. In 1993 the city, then already wounded severely by the riots of the preceding months and the seriously damaged relations between majority and minority communities, had chosen silence as a means of recuperating from the blasts. Yet the close kinship between the two events of serial attack, their focalization of a particular city within a particular region, subject to particular local causes for acts of terror, also haunted the coverage of what some newspapers began calling “7/11.” This essay is an ethnographic attempt to grasp the spectral presence and significance of Black Friday both in the landscape of Bombay-Mumbai and in the contemporary, global history of terrorism.2 It is not, however, a conventional history of the distance — conceptual or otherwise — between 7/11 and Black Friday but rather an attempt to grasp some of the mystery peculiar to the perceptions of Black Friday, how the denotation affects the contemporary and future life of the city, beyond the intentions of its perpetrators. It is therefore an attempt to read the City through the Bomb.