Heptanesian Archives

One of the most pathetic examples of the neglect of the city’s history is the Kala Ghoda area of South Mumbai. This sounds like a contradiction - in recent years Kala Ghoda has become synonymous with the heritage movement, with its museums and galleries, arts festivals and concerts, and recently restored colonial architecture. But if the conservationists had bothered to look behind their charming building facades and fancy street furniture, they would note that one of India’s most venerable and best-stocked repositories of historical documents occupies the back of the Elphinstone College building, in the Maharashtra State Archives (MSA). The MSA is a treasure-trove of government records, correspondence, maps, and all manner of big and small publications stretching back nearly four hundred years, from the Marathas, Portugese, British and postcolonial Indian governments.

The staff of the MSA are the real keepers of the city’s heritage, the Common Man who cannot afford the glossy coffee table books or steep entrance fees to the festivals and concerts celebrating Mumbai’s heritage. More knowledgeable than their better-paid counterparts in such places as London’s British Library or Delhi’s National Archives, these clerks and peons eagerly serve up the papers and files which are the historian’s raw material for narrating stories about the still mostly untold history of the city and its region. Everything from sewerage reports from Victorian Bombay, to the diaries and letters of Maratha ministers and chiefs, to early town planning schemes and maps for Bandra and Juhu may be found in the MSA. The tragedy is that once in your hands, many of these records crumble to pieces before they can be read, or have already been eroded over time by the elements.

In spite of the flourishing interest in researching and understanding the history, culture and politics of Bombay/Mumbai amongst various groups of academics and urban professionals - from anthropologists and activists to film-makers and architects - the career of the urban researcher in Mumbai is a precarious adventure.

The existing institutions charged with this task are, for the urban researcher, a veritable black hole, nowhere more so than the sprawling campus of the University of Mumbai. While Bombay University was in many ways the birthplace of the social science research in India - the old Bombay School of Economics and Sociology counted amongst its graduates the venerable G.S. Ghurye and M.N. Srinivas - it is nowhere on the map of the new urban research being conducted by NGOs setup in recent years to study and report on urban culture, design, governance and planning. And these NGOs themselves often function in dubious ways, setup by foreign academics for offshore influence peddling, or by the city’s elites to entrench their agendas with the BMC and MMRDA.

The unfortunate result of this situation is that coffee table heritage has replaced serious historical and social research. For example, a well-known work about the “cities within” glorifies the progressive role of the colonial era Bombay Improvement Trust in urban development. To the historian, this is something akin to calling the land-grabbing and corruption of the present-day Slum Rehabilitation Authority an enlightened civic governance. With the vacuum left behind by the collapse of genuine research institutions, critical and independent research in and on Mumbai must play second-fiddle to the whims and agendas of local socialities, foreign academics, and the racketeering of consultants and bureaucrats, all seeking to turn Mumbai into a “global city” through patronage of “urban research”.

Unfortunately, most of the best recent research on Mumbai is done by writers and academics based in wealthy private universities in the U.S. and U.K. One consequence of this is that these scholars are neither responsible to local institutions such as the MSA, nor does their work circulate back to those for whom it is an essential element in discussions about the past and future of Mumbai.

(Published in TimeOut Mumbai special issue on Bombayology Vol.3, Issue 24, 27 June to 9 August 2007)

For the past three weeks I have been involved in a seminar called “Learning from Mumbai” hosted by the Urban Age and the LSE Cities Programme. Though I had a traumatic arrival via Charles de Gaulle and Luton, the hospitality of Richard Sennett and the wonderful faculty and students at the LSE quickly put me back on my feet.

The past two weeks have been busy in writing, reflecting, and meeting new peers who work on cities within an academic culture where sociology and geography — rather than history and anthropology — approaches are preponderant.

I’ve also met with Matthew Gandy at UCL, who is finishing a film on Mumbai called Liquid Cities, and Keith Hart, who is in his last year at Goldsmith’s College and still in fine form. From Mumbai, Rahul Srivastava has accompanied me on many long walks and conversations in the streets of London about our days together in PUKAR.

Tomorrow is the final presentation, debate and reception for the Urban Age Mumbai seminar. If you happen to be in London, please come to the New London Architecture galleries at 26 Store Street, London WC1E 7BT to listen and respond to the three themes chosen by the contributors to the project volume on Learning from Mumbai: justice, prosperity, and belonging.

The people at SARAI to have been an inspiration and example in India for many years, and the discourse which they have sponsored in the varied fields of free software, media culture, film studies and urban research have been deeply influential on my thinking for nearly six years now. Indeed my visits to Delhi and for their gatherings on the Public Domain, the Tactical Media Lab, CITY One, and Emerging Urbanism over the years — and their work with the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore — have exposed me to new research networks and communities of practice. It was with great anticipation that we at CRIT co-organised our first public workshop with SARAI on 27-29 December in Mumbai, called Metrolog(ue): A Discussion on Emerging Urbanism.

The workshop was beautifully and almost single-handedly organised by Prasad Shetty and signified for CRIT our first public engagement on our own platform. You can read the problem statement of the workshop here, which was co-written by several of us (and in which it later emerged that I slyly inserted several normative, rather than purely descriptive, terms). The web-site contains further write-ups about each of the panels and thematic foci of the workshop: Emerging Morphologies, the Politics of Occupancy, New Civil Society Organisations, Urban Peripheries, New Entrepreneurship, and Publishing Archiving and Mapping. The workshop grows out of work done by members of CRIT under the SARAI Independent Fellowships, especially Rupali Gupte’s Tactical City and Prasad’s Stories of Entrepreneurship.

As the Anarchytect has elegantly stated in one of his daily reports on the conference, there was little dialogue between the innocently empirical and technical presentations on new urban environments, and the all-knowing discourse analysis which is preoccupied with the city as a field of representations. There was a perverse juxtaposition of an enthusiastic sense of improvement and development, with a pessimistic post-modernism which is sceptical of all such impulses. The arrogance of this posture is almost impossible to convey, but it was felt by many of the independent researchers and activists from Mumbai. As a social scientist, I was disappointed in my fellow academics in the room, who gave away little, and kept themselves safe and dry on the high-ground of cultual theory. Have a look at Anarchytect’s reports on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and his other scrawlings.

In the final week of the semester,I have been avidly procrastinating by reading the major works of Ravinder Kumar, the social historian of western India. Apart from the phenomenal account of the rise of British power in nineteenth century Maharashtra in his magisterial Western India in the Nineeeth Century (1968), I have been dipping into his Essays in the Social History of Modern India (1983). His long article, “From Swaraj to Purna Swaraj: Nationalist Politics in the City of Bombay, 1920-32″, written in 1977, is remarkable in anticipating many of the later historiographic debates on the nature of nationalist politics, particularly the work of Shahid Amin on Gandhi as Mahatma. Indeed Kumar’s work combines the empirical depth and richness of Cambridge School social history with the sophistication and theoretical boldness of Subaltern Studies. And his major works were all completed long before either of these schools of historical writing took over the conversation.

Yesterday my friend, the historian and collector Deepak Rao, took me for what he excitedly described as a “peep show” in the corridors of the Bombay Municipal Corporation, which are lined with glass-faced cupboards containing a veritable treasure trove of municipal archives. Deepak is the only person I know who will compare the delight of visiting a rare archive to the pleasures of a brothel. And his “peep show” was indeed titillating. Everything from the proceedings of the Corporation House, to the departmental files of the Education, Sanitation, Improvements and Standing Committee are carefully stored in bound volumes which are seemingly catalogued according to an internal file keeping system, going back to the 1880s (!). Today I again returned to the corridors of the Municipal Corporation, this time to the Estates and Land Management Department at Manish Market. I gazed longingly at the files stacked next to the desk where I was sitting, each of which contain the files for individual plots in the old Scheme no.5 of the Bombay Improvement Trust, the neighbourhoods of Dadar and Matunga. While I am scheming to get access to the records in the main office I saw in the glass cupboards today, the hope of accessing these mountains of detailed files for research is a distant dream. The builders would sooner burn the place down.

Every building has a collective memory. Imagine if every building had a blog. The funds of neighbourhood histories, social commentaries, and civic complaint would open out new geographies. One idea for the Mumbai Free Map project has been to use it to locate and localise the practice of urban blogging. So it’s a pleasant surprise to see my ancestral neighbourhood of Matunga in the forefront of this new civic geekery.

Thiru recently drew my attention to the Matunga Musings and Wadala Whispers, hosted at KeralaIyers, a site devoted to the culture and history of the Palghat Brahmins, who comprised a large part of the middle-class community that migrated to the northerly parts of the Island City of Bombay in the interwar years. As Thiru has related (in one of his most remarkable asides from his doctoral research, The Men from Matunga), Matunga emerged between the twenties and forties as a new kind of neighbourhood for the salaried masses of the city. This army of clerks, typists, and service sector employees poured into Bombay at this time, initially living as migrant men in chawls, but eventually “movin’ on up” the Island into new apartment buildings in “schemes” developed by the Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT), where they brought their families. Thus the “man from Matunga” was the archetype of the white-collar employee, the harbinger of a novel culture which has since become generalised into the common sense of India’s urban middle classes. It is also now the name of a blog by columnist Bhavin Jankharia.

Pictured here are two such early settlers in these parts, my grandfather Subbiah and his younger brother, Dr S.S. Krishnan. The middle-class neighbourhoods of Hindu and Parsee Colonies in Dadar, and the South Indian and Gujarathi parts of Matunga, comprised what was then known as Scheme 5. This section from the Mumbai Free Map illustrates the novel ordering of building plots, traffic circles, public gardens, and civic facilities which characterised one of the first modern suburbs of Bombay.

A friend from Pune, Dnyanada, while visiting today reminded me that there are two types of scholars — those who are studious, and those who are creative. And historians, in most cases, must value the former as much, if not more, than the latter. For while there is no denying the labour of creativity involved in the act of interpretation, for under-investigated areas such as the urban history of modern India, give me a studious archive rat any day. The recently deceased Raj Chandavarkar always insisted, often polemically, that the most basic questions about urban history, such as about party politics in the Bombay Municipal Corporation, have still not been written about in any serious way, and the new research interest in cities will prove ephemeral without a solid empirical focus. Indeed a basic political history of the municipal corporation is waiting to be written, and the primary materials for this task can, I am confident, be found in the Maharashtra State Archives.

While sitting there yesterday, I happened upon a reference to a compilation of files from 1920-24 on “the reconstitution of the BMC on a more democratic basis” containing a fascinating debate around the extension of the municipal franchise following the constitutional reforms of 1919. Government sought an expansion in the franchise for municipal elections, which until 1920 was based on an electorate restricted to rate payers, who numbered no more than 12,000 in the entire City of Bombay. While the directive was to seek an expansion to between 50,000 to 60,000 voters for the reconstituted corporation, a debate ensued between British civil servants, and corporators and civic representatives, and nationalist reformers on the principle of the franchise. This was to be changed from a basis in “rate-payers” to “rent-payers”, the question arising as to the minimum rent paid which would qualify someone for the vote in Bombay City. Various statistical distributions of the rent-paying populations of each ward in the city were presented in the debate as to whether to fix the minimum from between Rs 10 to Rs 25.

As I remarked to Nikhil, who initially got me thinking about municipal elections, this was the first time I had seen a real breakdown of ward-wise rates of rent in this period. This is where the debate also turned communal, as the question of reserved electorates for minorities such as Parsis, Mohammedans, Christians and others were mooted along with the new principles of expanding the franchise on the basis of rents, and increasing the number of seats in the Corporation. It seems from the correspondence between the Indian members of the Municipal Corporation and the British officials deliberating the new principles of enfranchisement that the former were concerned with the dilution in the influence of Parsi community, whom Ibrahim Rahimtoola hailed as having shouldered the great burden of local self-government (and who must have also represented a significant number of the rate payers in the old franchise). Nonetheless they rejected the idea of communal electorates as divisive and unnecessary to secure minority interests, which they still claimed would be best managed by a propertied elite. Some British officials strongly remarked that Government should not stick too closely to the “class of landlords” who on the one hand directed civic affairs and on the other hand abetted in the creation of slum areas, the single biggest problem of colonial administration in Bombay at this time. The expansion of the franchise based on rent payers was eventually accepted with some amendments, and instituted in 1923.

Download “The City as Extracurricular Space: Re-Instituting Urban Pedagogy in South Asia”

http://www.heptanesia.net/documents/urban_pedagogy.pdf

This journal article, ‘The City as Extracurricular Space: Re-Instituting Urban Pedagogy in South Asia’ (co-authored with Anirudh Paul and Prasad Shetty) was published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, London), Vol.6, No.3, 2005, in a special issue on South Asia edited by Ashish Rajadhyaksha. This extended essay originated in presentations given by myself and Anirudh Paul at the 2004 Annual Conference of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society (IACS) in Bangalore.

Whether you consider the recent floods in Mumbai to be either a natural disaster, or a man-made crisis — or a bit of both — most will agree that we have just been through the biggest social crisis to face the city since the communal riots and bomb blasts in 1992–1993. It is not often in history that an urban disaster prompts wide-ranging public reflection and institutional changes. There are many contemporary lessons to be drawn in Mumbai from the global history of urban disasters, from floods and famines to terrorism and riots. Crises such as these prompt immediate action, but often the most sweeping and epochal changes they inspire happen once the original impulses to act are forgotten. These impulses are buried away in subsequent events and history, obscuring their effect in prompting wider, often revolutionary changes. The catastrophic earthquake which destroyed most of the Portugese capital Lisbon in 1755 and wiped out most of its population — and the philosopher Voltaire’s satirical reflections on its causes and consequences in his novel Candide, or Optimism — inaugurated the Enlightenment in Europe, the tradition of thinking which questioned the divine right of kings and priests to rule.While continental monarchs were overthrown by the post-disaster polemic of Voltaire, three centuries later, disaster relief has become a golden opportunity for modern elected leaders to shore up their reputations, playing politics while appearing above it. Consider Rudy Giuliani’s live calls to the media from the New York Mayor’s Office hours after 9/11, and his constant and reassuring presence on live television in the days and weeks afterwards, constantly answering calls and questions from shocked and angry citizens. While George W. Bush seized this moment of crisis to repackage the his presidency as a permanent war on terrorism, Giuliani will probably now make a bid to succeed Bush in the White House in 2008, with the image of him in the days and weeks after the terrorist attacks still vivid in the public memory of 9/11.

Compare the response of our leaders and officials in Mumbai in the days and weeks since the flood disaster. Unlike in New York, the common man’s desire for symbols to assuage their grief, and faces to address their complaints, were conspicuously absent. On 26/7, the BMC shut its offices early, and its engineers and officers waded home, while politicians didn’t emerge into the limelight until days after the calamity. By then they were too late to do a Giuliani. For lack of braver faces, that weekend the newspapers ended up featuring two men on their front pages, both tottering on inflatable boats in the water-logged lanes of Kalina, on very different rescue missions. While Shiv Sena chief Balasaheb Thackeray was evacuating himself and his family, Police Commissioner A.N. Roy was helping stranded families and overseeing relief operations. It is a strange paradox of our democracy that our institutions remain faceless at the times when we most need them to respond with a human touch. In contrast, our leaders reach out the most when we least need them, staring down at us with their vote-bank agendas, while our institutions continue crumbling under their populist promises. Why do our institutions respond in this way?

During a visit to India last week, economist Amartya Sen argued that democratic institutions such as regular elections and a watchful media have banished the endemic threat of famine, a spectre which had plagued the Indian countryside since colonial times. By focussing pressure on politicians to act early to prevent such disasters, popular franchise and a free press have effectively regulated the performance of public institutions. However, Sen argues, while democracy has banished famines from postcolonial India, the state has been singularly ineffective in dealing with chronic undernourishment and malnutrition (in which India lags behind sub-Saharan Africa). Real development, according to Sen, means changing everyday conditions such as basic health, environment, and livelihood. The analogy with our own situation in Mumbai is instructive. For the public of the city, the monsoon flooding has provided an impetus to action, which could result in much wider changes. But while we can force action in the wake of crises like famines and floods, transforming our everyday life and infrastructure requires a much longer term effort at changing institutions.

The plague epidemic in Bombay in the 1896, which prompted an exodus of half the city’s population, and the demolition of most of the inner city north of the Fort and Native Town, gave birth to the Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) in 1898. In the thirty years of its existence — before being absorbed into the BMC in 1933 — the BIT doubled the number of roads in the city, acquired and reclaimed vast lands for development, and laid the foundations for land and housing markets on which Mumbai still operates. Many of our best-known roads — Hughes, Turner, and Cadell — still bear the names of former BIT Chairmen and Trustees who had them built. The origin of such wide-ranging reforms, and the political will to develop modern Mumbai, was not in some lofty vision plan, or in the public spirit of prominent citizens. The BIT was borne of the paranoid fear of the city’s elites of disease spreading to their bungalows from overcrowded slums in the inner city. The plague was an airborne disease, and the cure prescribed was to allow the sea breezes into the inner city, through new arterial roads and well-spaced building and plots. After ruthless demolitions of tenements and seizure of lands in the name of public health and open spaces, the BIT planned and developed most of what we still recognise as the Island City from Chowpatty and Lamington Road to Shivaji Park and Five Gardens. Crisis gave birth to change, and transformed the city in the decades that followed.

There is reason to hope that the recent floods in Mumbai, like the nineteenth century plague, could result in similarly wide-ranging reforms, in a city which has been lately preoccupied in debating its future as a global metropolis. There has been much attention given the public interest litigation (PIL) recently filed by prominent film makers and socialites on the failure of the state’s disaster management plan. What has not been pointed out is that three additional PILs, filed earlier this year on much longer-term urban development issues, are about to be given their final hearings by the Bombay High Court and Supreme Court — on land planning for the Mill Lands, on the protection of coastal mangroves and wetlands, and on redevelopment of cessed buildings as high-rises. The recent infrastructural crisis will give a much greater relevance to these judgements, which impact policies meant at regulating the abuses of private builders, land speculators, and corrupt local authorities. Also on the cards is the National Urban Renewal Mission, a central Government programme for local urban bodies to reform through better implementation of laws already on the books, of which most citizens remain unaware. Most important among these laws are the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments on decentralisation of local decision-making to non-party ward committees, which municipal corporators and political parties have actively prevented from forming in the past five years in Mumbai. Ward committees would have been a much more effective mechanism for immediate relief during the floods, and a persistent watchdog on the local elected representatives and ward officers before and after the disaster.

Long-term changes such as these are often improvised in the wake of disasters, unaware of the historical script they may be following, or their origins in immediate crises. But there are real reasons to be optimistic. It was his horror at the 1943 Bengal famine, and the flood of refugees sheltering in his childhood home in Calcutta, that prompted Amartya Sen’s lifelong academic work on hunger. This won him the Nobel Prize more than fifty years later, when he is one of the most influential voices in policy debates on social development. The plague panic in colonial Bombay set in motion the formation of the modern city, through the agency of the BIT. Today, while everyone is raising their voices, we have yet to find our Sen, or even our Giuliani. We can, however, take hope from Voltaire’s post-disaster philosophy of Enlightenment. His own literary response to the destruction of the medieval city of Lisbon in earthquake and fires scripted the next two hundred years of political change in Europe, and the birth of modern democracy. The protagonist of Candide stubbornly refuses to accept the explanations of the ruling priests and aristocracy that the disaster was ordained by either or God or Nature, mocking them with the repeated question — “is this the best of all possible worlds?” It is our own answers to this age-old question that will determine the future of our shared institutions and everyday lives in the city.

(Published as Some Reasons to be Optimistic, or, Mumbai and the Global History of Urban Disasters in TimeOut Mumbai Vol.1, Issue 26, 26 August to 8 September 2005)

Le rôle crucial qu’ont joué les grandes villes dans le passage de la production industrielle à grande échelle à la prestation de services (finance, information, etc.) est désormais bien établi. Comme bien des mégalopoles au Nord comme au Sud, Mumbai est secoué depuis une quinzaine d’années par des transformations dramatiques associées aux processus de la mondialisation, caractérisés par l’intégration mondiale des marchés financiers et des capitaux ; l’importance croissante de la sphère de la consommation pour la culture publique et politique ; le passage obligatoire des nouvelles technologies d’information et de communications par des réseaux informatiques, réorganisant ainsi l’espace-temps de la vie sociale et de la production ; la décentralisation et l’informalisation de l’activité économique ; et enfin, l’érosion des prérogatives des bureaucraties étatiques et des gouvernements à réguler et à contrôler la vie sociale et la production au sein même de leurs territoires nationaux respectifs. Cet ensemble de processus, qui se recoupent et se chevauchent, prend des formes différentes selon les circonstances locales.

Au cours de la dernière décennie à Mumbai, un large débat a émergé sur la transformation du paysage industriel de la ville – un débat qui porte sur le rétrécissement de la base industrielle et la fermeture des usines dans la ville et en banlieue ; sur l’« informalisation » de la production et l’exploitation croissante des travailleurs migrants, des femmes et des enfants dans le cadre de ce nouveau régime de travail occasionnel ou temporaire, sapant ainsi la base d’emploi et la solidarité des classes ouvrières traditionnelles ; sur l’embourgeoisement spectaculaire des quartiers populaires et des zones industrielles comme la Zone des Filatures (les Mill Lands) ; et sur la crainte de la « mort » même de la ville, compte tenu de la fuite des industries, le déclin de la qualité de vie, la dégradation écologique et le surcharge de l’infrastructure, et la perspective douteuse d’une croissance économique future.

Tous ces désirs et angoisses quant à l’affaiblissement de la base d’emploi et à l’économie changeante de la ville, comme aux transformations spatiales et sociales des deux décennies depuis la grande grève dans le textile à Bombay en 1981-82, se sont cristallisés autour d’un discours local ambigu qui cherche à attribuer ces changements complexes aux processus de « mondialisation ». Prendre position par rapport à ces questions est venu à signifier prendre position par rapport à la mondialisation, définie comme le signe du présent et de l’avenir de Mumbai. Cependant, personne n’a pas proposé une définition spécifique de la « mondialisation », et souvent l’idéologie et la rhétorique remplacent une analyse rigoureuse des processus que je viens d’indiquer. Si l’on trouve ci et là un discours critique, il a toutefois tendance à souligner étroitement les symboles d’un processus bien plus vaste et mal compris. D’où une fixation sur les symboles de consommation comme des centres commerciaux, des hôtels de luxe, des cinémas multiplex, d’anciennes usines reconverties en lofts, des enclaves d’élite protégées et des aires de loisirs privatisés. Insister de manière si empirique sur les caractéristiques du changement à l’œuvre aujourd’hui dans chaque ville de la planète est une manière de passer sous silence un contexte urbain plus large, où les conditions du travail et tout simplement de vie ont été spécifiquement transformées dans le temps et dans l’espace. A certains égards, la rhétorique anti-mondialisation finit par soutenir le fantasme de transformer Mumbai en un nœud de services de luxe et de finances – une sorte de Singapour ou Shanghai indien –, qu’elle prend pourtant pour cible, en participant à sa vision monumentale et superficielle.