India’s financial capital was a global city long before 1991. Liberalisation changed it in other insidious ways.

Long before the sabziwallah in Bandra (West) began to stock asparagus and artichoke, in fact, over 300 years previously, Bandra already had global aspirations, given as it were, in dowry with six other islands to a colonial prince. By history and evolution, and as much by the Mumbaikar’s sheer will, this was always a global city. Historians, conservationists, architects and Bombay chroniclers concur — the urbs prima in Indis was once the Manchester of the east, the Gateway of India, home to architecture of multiple styles — from Venetian to Gothic to Tudor to Art Deco, and home also to a people with a general savoir faire.

When July 1991 came around, Bombay was already pitching for a new growth phase, having readied its critical Development Plan 1991-2011, a 20-year blueprint for its continuing journey into global accomplishment. In fact, city planners took little note of the coming onslaught of socio-economic and cultural change.

“What was happening was at a macro-level,” says Sharad Kale, who was Mumbai’s municipal commissioner between 1991 and 1995. “State government departments would have felt the impact, but Mumbai’s municipality was not responsible for de-licencing of industries, nor for any other reform on trade.”

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Meanwhile, the Shiv Sena, having already tasted power in the Mumbai municipality, came to power in Maharashtra in 1995, riding a wave of Hindutva and regional chauvinism. “In a curious way, it can be compared to what’s happening in England now, although the migration there is from across the country’s borders,” says Dr Uttara Sahasrabuddhe, professor, department of civics and politics, Mumbai University.

Having begun her teaching career in the early Nineties, and having had the opportunity to closely watch youngsters over the decades since liberalisation, Sahasrabuddhe says the fruits of economic liberalisation are undeniable and plentiful, visible in youngsters’ unprecedented searching out of opportunity, risk-taking and innovation.

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Sahasrabuddhe sees the failure of successive governments to plan adequately in the marginalisation of the urban poor . “We live in this nostalgia of rural India, and, as a result, not a single government till very recently took any interest in urban centres,” she says. The result, as she describes it, was “a vibrant city decaying after the 1990s.”

This played out as rapid but haphazard development — mass transportation never caught up with the need created by the ever-growing population, a higgledy-piggledy rash of roads and flyovers was laid out, a piecemeal creation of civic amenities followed, and then plan upon plan for better drains and sewers that were uniformly delayed. Alongside, there was an alarming disappearance of open spaces. By the late 1990s, the mill lands were opened up for development, each parcel housing properties more luxurious than the last, each new property unnerving and agitating the local Marathi manoos a little more.

Those Mumbaikars who shun the cookie-cutter malls and indistinguishable coffee shops as much as they wince when they see a satellite image of Deonar dumping ground ablaze — they’re the Mumbai generation the Nineties failed.

They’re easy to spot — they’ll have that tired shuffle at weekend heritage walks and citizens’ protests, for they’ve done this before. They’ll marvel at a new standalone bookstore, be the most wistful upon seeing a double-decker bus stall on a flyover, a little in denial still at how we went from British-era sewers that Amitabh Bachchanwas shown splosh-striding in, to open gutters with their inky black sludge headed for the sea. They’re the ones who won’t argue when told it’s easy to blame the Nineties. They’re the ones who’ll go home knowing it’s easy not to blame the Nineties.