Mumbai’s Homi Bhabha

Posted by Cindy on July 7, 2009

There are so many unique amenities in our hotels in Mumbai that it would be impossible to list them all.  There are, however, the industry standards that savvy travelers come to expect.  For a city as stunning as Mumbai, with such a wide variety and sheer number of things to do, your concierge will be a big help in guiding you toward the main points of interest.  If you can pull yourself away from the gorgeous accommodations, where style and design are impeccable, and hospitality is at a premium, almost an art form, Mumbai is full of fascinating adventures.

There are gorgeous restaurants, a sizzling night life, excellent star-gazing with the local Bollywood industry, and historical landmarks that speak of a complex past.  There is also a fantastic diversity of cultures here, in one of the most vivacious cities on the planet, and Mumbai has long been home to artists, scientists, and intellectuals.  One of its famous son’s is the U.S.-based theorist Homi Bhabha.  Currently on the faculty at Harvard, he did his undergraduate at the University of Bombay before going on to Oxford.  He lectures all over the world, and delivers some of the most prestigious addresses, as well as having written an astounding number of books and articles.

Often mentioned for his complicated writing style, Homi Bhabha has also won awards for some of the most impenetrable sentences in academic discourse.  He also has a name for being an academic rockstar, a title given to very few scholars in the past decade.  Homi Bhabha is perhaps most well-known for his notion of hybridity, where the botanical classification refers to ethnicities and cultures, to suggest that human speaking subjects, especially subjects who have lived under colonial ideologies, are a complex weave of identities, and their complexity in fact becomes a feature of the same identity.  His ideas have taken root in all sorts of contemporary discourse, and his presence is a splendid sign of life wherever he speaks his subjectivity.