India's 9/11 strikes at the heart of Mumbai

Everything ever written about Mumbai is true, even when it seems an outrageous exaggeration. This city by the sea serves amazement for breakfast, astonishment for lunch and the unbelievable for dinner.

So I ache now when I see the television pictures of the city wounded by such a savage blow, the worst terror attack in Indian history. I know people who live in Mumbai. They have shown me around the city and restaurants they love. I have stayed at the Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels - the grand buildings turned into killing grounds.

I first went to Mumbai in the 1980s when it was still Bombay. The name was changed in 1995 but many people still call it Bombay. They prefer the tradition. At the time of my first visit the army was on the streets with machine guns because of strikes, street violence - and a police rebellion. Mumbai has ever been a place of conflict and rough politics.

And it's true that Indians are no strangers to viol ence. Their vast country of a billion people has often been torn by communal fighting, by Hindu and Muslim revenge riots, by the murders of prime ministers and by the bitter fallout from the 50-year quarrel with Pakistan over Kashmir. Last year alone 1,093 people died in terrorist incidents in India.

Mumbai likes to think of itself as India's freewheeling cosmopolitan powerhouse. And it dotes on chubby, elephant-headed Ganesh, the god of material advancement.

But a corrosive streak of violence runs through the city's recent history. From the 1980s the militant Hindu party Shiv Sena, has tightened its hold on the city and whipped up anti-Muslim feeling with speeches and fiery editorials. It is run by ex-newspaper cartoonist Bal Thackeray, the "king of Mumbai".

Now in his 80s and an admirer of Hitler, he changed Bombay's name to the ancient name of Mumbai as part of his drive to wipe out the "stain" of the colonial past. He talked of "Hindustan" rather than India. He and his underlings fanned hatred among groups that had grown up peacefully together. In 1992, 900 people died in anti-Muslim riots in the city. More than 200,000 Muslims fled.

In the following year a string of bombings blamed on Muslim militants hit the stock exchange and hotels, killing more than 250 people. Two years ago terrorists bombed trains in Mumbai and killed around 200. But this latest attack on Mumbai is different. Its scale, planning and drama was nothing at all like those bursts of violence that flare up suddenly and die down fairly quickly.

Mumbai has been targeted for its status as a powerful world city, attacked as London, New York and Madrid were attacked to make a wider point. This was a carefully thought-out multi-pronged assault by killers transported to their target and operating cynically under a stage name intended to confuse.

Of course, of all Indian cities, Mumbai was the place to hit for maximum hurt, the emblematic target. This is the Indian 9/11.

Its commercial muscle has lifted it to global significance. It invests hard. It makes India count at the world table. Its stock exchange is the second largest in the world. As the wealthiest Indian city, it ruefully pays two-fifths of India's taxes. And two-fifths of India's richest people call it home.

There's a swagger and flash about it. It's everything - the city of gold, city of dreams. You can't fail to be impressed by its creative energy. It's a fashion capital. It is also Bollywood, making 1,000 movies a year and just dripping with stars and glamour and movie money. It has an underworld and rackets to match the wealth.

But it also has its own unique allure. Mumbai is a spectacle of lights reflected on the dark sea. The fortunate have exciting views from their glittering apartments. And so many tall offices, hotels and skyscrapers seem to have come up like forced rhubarb.

The jewel in Mumbai's crown is undoubtedly the Taj Mahal hotel. Its sea-facing rooms look out over the harbour, the traffic of small boats and the ferries buzzing off with tourists to Elephanta Island. Scores of ships at anchor proclaim the city's maritime strength. At any time of day, and especially in the cool of evening, crowds walk the promenade near the Taj, watching pavement entertainers and buying snacks and sweets near the Gateway of India, that inelegant imperial paperweight left by the British in 1924.

The hotel was built 105 years ago by a Parsi businessman, J N Tata, who was asked to leave a local hotel because he was Indian. He walked out vowing to build the grandest hotel in town. And so he did.

There is no hotel in the world quite like it. It is luxurious, yes, but so are many hotels. Mumbai feels the Taj is more than a hotel, more than a place to eat and to be seen. Many local people regard it as a club, informal, gentle, a place for tea with the family, a Scotch with friends, lunch for ladies who do. Certainly it is glamorous, the people-watching rewarding and the saris gorgeous. As Mumbai's ornament it was the obvious target. Television footage of the flames leaping from the elegant architecture made grim watching.

The Chhatrapati Shivaji terminus, the main railway station, was another target for slaughter: it is always crowded and Mumbai people are proud of it. It used to be the Victoria Terminus, one of India's great Gothic buildings, completed in 1888 and a celebration of India's Victorian railways that grew into the world's largest rail network.

You can feel something of the energy of Mumbai if you watch the arrival of some of the hundreds of morning trains. It makes one of the spectacles of India. In a city where you are lucky to get even half a buttock onto a bench the trains carry more than twice their designed passenger capacity. Young men cling to the outside of carriages; and some fall to their deaths.

On the streets, police use ropes to hold back the impatient tide of commuters. As the lights go green, the police drop the ropes - and workers in their scores of thousands surge across the road.

I have always felt that the true motif of India is not the elephant nor the tiger nor the great Mogul tombs. The real motif, surely, is the seething crowd. You see crowds everywhere in India but those in Mumbai give an awesome sense of moving power.

The city of endless immigration has had to expand into distant suburbs. The dream of the better life and escape from the confines of villages makes them all fortune seekers. You can never escape the contradictions of such wealth and poverty side by side.

I have seen the city's population swell over the years from eight million to 20 million. Its buttons are popping. Half the people exist in one-room slum shanties, many of the huts barely the size of a grave. But it is also a wonder of the world, and the numerous glossy magazines live on the stories of dazzling glamour.

India's leading architect, Charles Correa, once told me that the city's planners had to keep the city both an engine of growth and a focus of hope. And he added that Mumbai "is a great city and a terrible place".

A man in a plastic sheeting hovel in a teeming slum agreed - but with a difference. "A terrible place but my home village is worse."

A successful Mumbai novelist pointed me to the special lure of Mumbai's cosmopolitanism. "Life can be awful," she said, "but it is a place of hope. People stream here because they believe they can make it. It's a city of adventurers. You can claw your way up. And a girl can sit at a bar and not raise eyebrows. Because Mumbai has class."

It combined modernity and tradition more aggressively than any other city. Even now, before any new film is started in Bollywood, the director, actors and crew gather around a ritual fire and at a time chosen by an astrologer, they break a coconut in offering, praying for success. The people of Mumbai will call on their own gods now for help in the aftermath of the terror attack. And we can expect that people who endure so much to get to work and struggle for a living in this seemingly impossible place, will eventually absorb the shock. But not soon.

The slaughter and fires, so vivid on television, confront India and Mumbai's leaders with their greatest political crisis. India has desperately wanted to take its place among the major nations: now it has the problems of a major country facing the 21st century terror threat. India is on the new world map, though not as it would wish.

Many will want to know if the attackers came from unstable Pakistan and that suspicion has already been cast. It can too easily lead to an escalation in tension between the two countries, intertwined in history and living tensely side by side.

India's relationship with Pakistan, carefully mended and smoothed over recent years, is in danger of being thrust back to the bad old days of bristling suspicion. The attackers have done their bloody work but the violence they perpetrated may spread.

I can only hope that Mumbai's people turn to their great resource, the spirit of their amazing city. But they have been provoked. Watching the horror of it all, sensing the anger of the people, I can be sure only that for the city and the country I love, this is suddenly a very dangerous time.