Mumbai residents may take pride in being the most cosmopolitan and westernised of Indians, but figures tell a slightly different story.
At the same time it is not so westernised, says a study based on newspaper readership
Seetha & Anushree Madan Mohan. New Delhi. Mumbai
Mumbai residents may take pride in being the most cosmopolitan and westernised of Indians, but figures tell a slightly different story. Mumbai is the most cosmopolitan of cities - it tops in a list of 100 - but it doesn’t make it to the list of top 10 westernised cities.
The honour of being the most westernised goes to four capitals in the Northeast - Aizawl, Gangtok, Imphal, and Kohima - while Goa, Vadodara, Delhi and Bangalore are placed higher than Mumbai, which ranks eleventh.
That’s because The City Skyline of India 2006 report, brought out by a Delhi-based economic research firm, Indicus Analytics, measures westernisation not by the prevalence of Western lifestyles, but as a ratio of the number of English newspapers and magazines sold to the number of language newspapers and magazines sold.
By that token, more people in Mumbai read regional-language publications than they do English ones. Mumbai not only ranks just 11 (high category) among 100 cities in this index, but also comes third among the alpha cities (an elite club of 10). Delhi at nine and Bangalore at 10 are in the ‘very high’ category.
The measure of cosmopolitanism is closer to the dictionary definition - multi-cultural. Cosmopolitan rankings are measured on the basis of a formula that uses the variation of circulation of newspapers of various languages. Mumbai, in this case, tops in the number of people reading publications in various regional languages.
It’s a classification that many people find a tad oversimplified. Cities ranking high on the cosmopolitan index, said Santosh Desai, president, McCann-Erickson, appear to be home to at least three linguistic groups.
But while multilingual is a kind of proxy for cosmopolitan, this may not reflect tolerance or acceptance of different cultures, he said.
Indeed, as Amit Ray, vice-president, Reliance Industries, observed, the readership of English publications is higher in areas like Matunga and Chheda Nagar, which have a high South Indian population. But, he said, these groups are inward and ethnic in outlook, demeanour, and dressing. “Lifestyle is the true parameter for judging the nature of a city, not the consumption of media.”
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