As part of my visit I’ll be giving a short talk at the Stanford Humanities Center this Friday 8 January 2010 from 3:00 to 4:00PM in the Baker Board Room. The title, Mapping the Maximum City, is borrowed from Schuyler’s keynote at Where 2.0 in 2007 (listen to the ITConversations podcast) on our work together on the building the Mumbai Freemap database. Here’s the link to their announcement of the talk and my revised abstract (with apologies to Michael Pye and Suketu Mehta):

In social theory and ethnography, the “return of space” has foregrounded the environmental dimensions of urban power through a new critical geography. Recently a distinct “urban turn” the study of South Asian history has sought to rethink the role of cities such as Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta as more than just a physical container for colonial power, or discursive stage for nationalist politics. However the narrative frameworks of nationalist historiography and the spatial histories of cities and regions in South Asia often operate at disjunct scales and through distinct periodicities.

New mapping technologies and methods of urban spatial history dramatize these gaps in the periodization of urban change in contemporary South Asia. I will document how I have used historical maps, community geodata, and open source GIS to map a spatial framework for understanding the growth of colonial and postcolonial Mumbai. My presentation will address the hiatus between narrative and spatial history in the context of my research on the urban environment in Bombay/Mumbai in the twentieth century, as the city grew from a colonial commercial center to a global metropolitan region. Using map imagery and geodata from historical and topographical surveys of colonial Bombay, as well as development plans and community information from contemporary Mumbai, I will show how scale and form of postcolonial urbanisation requires new ways of theorising the contested spaces of the Indian city.

I will focus on the technical and analytical challenges of mapping and archiving boundaries and structures in Bombay/Mumbai between 1914 and 2001 in the Mumbai Freemap, a community mapping project initiated by CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust), a voluntary group of urban researches and designers, to use open source software, public geodata, geographic information systems (GIS), and community maps to produce an open spatial database of twentieth century Mumbai.

Shekhar Krishnan is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Science Technology and Society (STS) at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) where he is researching the history of technology and the urban environment in Bombay and Western India from 1860-1950. For the past ten years he has been involved in urban research and community organizing in Mumbai as a founding coordinator then associate director of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research) and currently as a founder member of CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust). He has been a project fellow and evangelist with Zotero at the Center for History & New Media and is currently managing partner of Entropy Free LLC, a software consultancy which builds open source tools for digital humanities and the geospatial web.

ABCD GIS Group, Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis
Wednesday 15 April 2009 from 12.00-14.00
CGIS North Building, Room S050, 1737 Cambridge Street

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Our presentation will show how open source GIS and curated “crowdsourcing” can create an infinite archive of places for digital historians and ethnographers. While the importance of space and place to their research has long been acknowledged by social scientists, there remains a wide gap between their theoretical concerns and the data-driven empiricism of GIS. For those without technical or database skills, maps and geodata are mostly commonly to illustrate rather than advance an argument. However the web can render the tacit knowledge of geography implicit in most historical and ethographic narratives available to the scholars in entirely new forms. We will showcase our ongoing work with the Maps Division of the New York Public Library on a web-based Map Rectifier and Digitizer, a platform for scholars and entusiasts to georeference scanned historical maps and digitize historical features of cities and the environment.

SHEKHAR KRISHNAN is a researcher and activist pursuing his doctorate in History and Anthropology of Science Technology & Society (STS) at MIT, where his research on the history of technology and the urban environment in colonial Bombay and western India. He has been a project fellow with Zotero at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. With Schuyler Erle, he manages geo-spatial web projects for the New York Public Library and the Network in Canadian History of the Environment (NiCHE). 

SCHUYLER ERLE has been a free and open source software developer, project leader, and evangelist for over a decade. He is a co-author of Mapping Hacks and Google Maps Hacks, both published by O’Reilly Media. He currently lives in New York City, where he leads EntropyFree, a technology consultancy focused on geographic information systems (GIS), natural language processing, academic computing and humanitarian aid.

While its cast was mostly local, Slumdog Millionaire only opened in India in late January, many months after it had become a sleeper hit in the U.S. It is a measure of the globalisation of urban India that even before the film was released, there were already protests over the apparently disparaging name of the film, and its popularity prompted Amitabh Bacchan to complain of the Western fetish for cinematic realism, while more recently, Salman Rushdie has claimed the film is not realistic or magical plausible enough.

This weekend, on the eve of the Oscars for which Slumdog Millionaire won eight awards, I was delighted to see an op-ed in the New York Times called Taking the Slum Out of Slumdog, written by an old friend and mentor. Rahul Srivastava* is a freelance novelist and ethnographer in Goa who co-wrote the piece with his collaborator, digital urbanist Matias Echanove (the original version, Taking the Slum out of Dharavi, is on their blog Airoots).

In Mumbai it is a commonplace that more than 60% of the urban population live in so-called “slums”. While the term itself is apocryphal, it has been traced to the old Irish “s lom” for a “bare bleak room”, an “impoverished place” or “barren life”. Historically, the term “slum” has always referred to both to the concrete dwellings in which the urban poor live, as well as a less tangible, but no less real, moral panic about this built environment. Until the development of germ theory and public health policies, Victorian sanitary reformers believed that overcrowding, lack of sinks, sewers, and taps corrupted both the morals and health of the urban poor.

Shocked at the growth of large squatter settlements in the first shock cities of the industrial revolution, early urban journalists and reformers such as Friedrich Engels and Jacob Riis brought the slang of the predominantly Irish immigrant slum dwellers into the popular imagination. Fear of the unwashed urban masses was inscribed into the descriptions of their housing, and this imaginative displacement was suddenly applicable everywhere that slums proliferated. Perceived as a disease on the body politic, the great reformers flipped the terms of contagion in the public mind and press for political change. From blaming the victims — the slum dwellers themselves — they identified the disease agents in the invisible hand of corrupt municipal bosses and builders who dispensed patronage to the slumlords and extorted rent from the poor.

This discourse of reform travelled throughout the British Empire in the wake of industrialisation in the colonies, first as moral reform and then as material improvement. Slums were breeding grounds for the social unrest and epidemic diseases spawned by the early factory system. Danny Boyle is a product of these connections, as a working-class Irish Catholic from Manchester, the factory city whose mills were fed by the cotton from colonial India. It was from Glasgow — the scene of Boyle’s Trainspotting — that colonial sanitary reformers modelled the Bombay Improvement Trust, established in the wake of the plague epidemic in 1896 and charged with the task of demolishing slums and building sanitary housing for the slumdogs of colonial Bombay. The moral lessons of the sanitarians gave way to material improvements by reformers who sought better housing, clean water, flushing toilets and open spaces for the urban masses.

Behind the moral language, the actual physical environment of urban slums represent a very wide spectrum of building practices and housing typologies, as my colleagues in CRIT have shown in this study of Housing Typologies in Mumbai published in 2007. The slum as place defies the slum as category. The hiatus between this abstract slum of morality and ideology, and the real diversity of housing practices in the real built environment, is the cognitive gap that many critics, designers and ethnographers have recently sought to address.

In their article where they seek to take the slum out of Slumdog, Rahul and Matias acknowledge that the generic term “slum” masks a much more complex economic and ecological reality, and focus on the centuries-old settlement of Dharavi in Mumbai. Popularly known as “Asia’s largest slum”, it has been the subject of some of Mumbai’s best journalism in works such as Jeremy Seabrook’s Life and Labour in an Indian Slum and Kalpana Sharma’s Rediscovering Dharavi. Slumdog Millionaire was extensively shot in Dharavi, to reference the archetypical slum environment of crowded and unpaved lanes, jerry-built shacks and tenements, and water containers, hoses and taps next to every home.

While Rahul and  to “take the slum out” of films like Slumdog and places like Dharavi, they seem to feel it is enough to switch the moral registers while leaving the material artefact untouched. They claim, incredibly, that “Dharavi’s extreme population density doesn’t translate into oppressiveness. The crowd is efficiently absorbed by the thousands of tiny streets branching off bustling commercial arteries”. The problem with critique is that it aestheticises slum conditions to serve up a cultural critique of urban planning and technology.

The statement that “No master plan, urban design, zoning ordinance, construction law or expert knowledge can claim any stake in the prosperity of Dharavi” is absurd when you consider that the economy of the place is entirely based around its proximity to major transport arteries and municipal boundaries. Dharavi is a triangular settlement with hard boundaries fixed by the western and central railway lines on either side, and the Mithi River and Mahim Bay on top. From here, two causeways and railway bridges lead out of the island city of Mumbai into its immediate suburbs. Dharavi’s identity is tied directly to this infrastructure and geography of transportation, which produced its central position in the urban economy.

While there is much to agree with in Rahul and Mathias’s op-ed, the argument about the resourcefulness of the poor and the marginality of the state in Dharavi is a very serviceable critique. While both are committed activists, the logic of their argument is too easily seized upon by less committed anthropologists and development practitioners as a culturalist rationale for non-intervention in the urban environment.

The role of the state in providing urban services, or its capacity to effect any positive change in the life of the poor is another matter entirely. But the idea that it has no role in Dharavi denies the poor a stake in their own political agency. Nor is this a constructive critique of the predatory ecology of urban land on which the construction industry and urban power hangs in Mumbai. Taking the state out of the slums renders invisible the entire urban regime which works to maintain the centrality of the industries and services of Dharavi, but push its people and their needs and aspirations to the peripheries. While serving as a sweatshop for multinational industries and a transport hub for Greater Mumbai, the residents of Dharavi literally live on the “other side of the tracks” of both Central and Western Railways and sleep next to the great sink for suburban effluvia and waste, the Mahim Creek.

Is it any cause for celebration that “in Dharavi… people have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state – including the setting up of a highly functional waste recycling industry that serves the whole city”? Were the citizens of Dharavi any less resourceful, they would sink in garbage, or be eaten by dogs.

* For the record, Rahul and I gave Freida Pinto one of her first breaks in show business, as she once worked with us in the organisation which we directed together in Mumbai, PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research).

The Urban Turn in South Asia

Scholarly interest in Indian cities is still quite recent. Unlike with Western cities, where there is a well-developed critical and scholarly literature on contemporary urban transformations, there are very few historical or ethnographic studies of social and technological change in modern Indian cities. In the wake of Subaltern Studies, the reasons for these are increasingly clear to young social scientists and researchers attempting to understand urban politics, society and culture in India. On the one hand, the nationalist biases of postwar and postcolonial social science and area studies deemed the rural countryside a more authentic form of society, following the well-known Gandhian dictum about “the real India”. On the other hand, the universalist biases of urban policy and technical studies in postcolonial India rendered the city into an ahistorical object of state intervention and control. While a social science of the city retained an ancillary role in development work sponsored by the state, now demoted to more instrumental forms of research, “fact-finding” and data collection tied to the objectives of social work programmes, development plans, and state-sponsored policy research.

The contemporary interest in the city in South Asia can be located a period coextensive with two distinct historical moments: the liberalisation of the national economy, and the economic and cultural globalisation of the city in the past twenty years; and more recently, the aftermath of the communal violence and rioting which rocked the country in the early nineties, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the communal riots in Mumbai in 1992-3. Across India and the global academic network of South Asian academics and intellectuals, much scholarship and commentary at the time was addressed to the religious violence and communal nationalism of the Hindu Right, and was dominated by concerns over the decline of liberal secularism in India, and specifically to the urban cultures of civic cosmpolitan in places such as Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, and other towns and cities where mass communal violence had repeatedly shattered the earlier confidence of liberal elites in India’s official secularism. In Mumbai, the new scholarly and activist literature on the city, coming in the wake of the riots in 1992-1993 and the rise of the Shiv Sena and Bharatiya Janata Party to state power from 1995-1999, was concerned with the decline of the city’s cosmpolitanism. The official name of the city was changed from “Bombay” to “Mumbai” in 1995 when the BJP and Sena formed the first non-Congress ministry in the history of the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is both state capital and commercial-industrial centre. The change of name, agonised over by the popular media and scholars of Mumbai and Maharashtra, became the basic trope of the new urban studies in Mumbai in the nineties. The celebrated cosmopolitan city of migrants and merchants had transformed into a violent and divided metropolis. How did Bombay become Mumbai?¹

The answers to these questions were sought in the deindustrialisation of the urban economy, and communalisation of urban politics which were the most powerful forces shaping the city in eighties and early nineties.² The horror over the communal violence and criminalisation of local politics in the city, tinged with the elite anxieties over the loss of the city’s “cosmopolitanism”, combined with other specific practices of writing and reading the city, forming a powerful conjuncture from the late nineties to the present in which a vibrant milieu of city activists and intellectuals, urban designers and architects, cultural and media practitioners are debating the imagined and built environments of the city.

This “urban turn” has evolved differently in specific disciplines, genres, and discursive practices. Quite apart from the flurry of new publications by social scientists, journalists and activists on post-riot Mumbai, two other genres of work defined a new ways of seeing and understanding in the city in the context of globalisation. The invention of the urban heritage of Classic Bombay by architects, heritage and civic activists and urban elites³; and the production of the idea of Bollywood both in cinema as well as television, advertising, and as a generalised media culture⁴ signified complementary movements in the direction of understanding the history, culture, and environment of the city in the cosmopolitan terms of global history.

The invention of “Classic Bombay” has occured in the context of the globalisation of Indian cities in the past fifteen years, and the question of their increasing bourgeoisification⁵. Over the past decade in Mumbai, a debate on the changing industrial landscapes of the city has been articulated by trade unionists and activists, journalists and scholars, architects, urban planners and designers, and the business and policy-making community. This emerging discourse on the city has many been voiced around many inter-connected concerns — the shrinkage and closure of manufacturing industries in the city and suburbs; the “informalisation” of manufacturing production, and the increasing exploitation of migrant labourers, women and children in this new work regime of casual and contract labour, undermining the employment base and solidarity of the old working classes; the notorious instances of high-income gentrification in former working-class neighbourhoods and industrial districts like the Mill Lands⁶; as well as the fears of the “death” of the city with the flight of its industries, its declining quality of life, environmental degradation and overburdened infrastructure, and its questionable prospects for future economic growth⁷.

The Theory of the “Global City”

All of these desires and anxieties about the city’s employment base and its changing economy, its spatial and social transformations in the two decades since the Bombay Textile Strike in 1981–2, have condensed into an ambiguous local discourse which accounts many of these complex changes to an overarching process of “globalisation”. To take a position on any of these issues means to also take a position on globalisation, understood as the sign of the Mumbai’s present and its future. However, no specific understanding of “globalisation” has been sought, and often ideology and rhetoric have filled the gap left by the lack of rigorous analysis of the various processes listed above. Where public criticism has emerged, it has tended to narrowly focus on symbols of a much larger process which is poorly understood. Hence the fixation on consumerist symbols like shopping malls, five-star hotels, multiplex cinemas, gentirifed and converted factories and mills, and gated elite enclaves and ticketed zones of leisure. This narrow empirical focus on the outward features of changes seen in every city in the world which ignores a wider urban context where the basic means of work and livelihood have been specifically transformed over time and across space. In a way, this anti-globalisation rhetoric lends support to the elite fantasy of turning Mumbai into a global node for high-end services and finance, an Indian Singapore or Hong Kong⁸ which it targets by participating in its monumental and superficial vision.

In the academic industry, the number of theoretical arguments, disciplinary perspectives, and discourses on globalisation and the city have feverishly multiplied in the past decade. However, neither the recent literature on global cities, nor the earlier research on the post-industrial society, has taken seriously the particular location of cities like Mumbai in the process of the production of space of global capital. In her well-known study, Saskia Sassen has posited as a point of departure the combination of spatial dispersal of manufacturing and the global integration of services and finance which “has created a new strategic role for major cities”. Her study of the parallel changes in the economic base, spatial organisation and social structure of London, New York and Tokyo asks how cities with such different histories and cultures could experience such a similar transformation in a relatively short period of time. “To understand the puzzle of parallel change in diverse cities requires not simply a point-by-point comparison of New York, London, and Tokyo, but a situating of these cities in a set of global processes”, examining how different cities have responded to the same dynamic. She however warns that “the term global city may be reductive and misleading if it suggests that cities are mere outcomes of a global economic machine. They are specific places whose spaces, internal dynamics, and social structure matter; indeed, we may be able to understand the global order only by analyzing why key structures of the world economy are necessarily situated in cities”.⁹

Most of the debate on global cities neglects the importance of locality: how the abstract space of global capital is made into living places by real people, through their search for livelihood and their struggles for survival. The process of restructuring is both social as well as spatial, and the social forms of Mumbai as a global city cannot be understood without reference to its spatial forms. In this essay I explore how the complex spatial and social dynamics of Bombay’s industrial landscapes in the eighties and nineties are the backdrop against which global economic processes are restructuring the city’s economic geography. These local transformations were largely set in motion in the era before the structural adjustment and liberalisation policies in the nineties.

The classic theory of the global city, conceptualised by sociologist Saskia Sassen in her study of London, Tokyo and New York in the eighties, based itself on the integration of financial markets and producer services which occurred in these key world centres. While subsequent studies have emphasised the global natures of these flows and concentrations in other cities in an emerging global economy, recent attempts at describing Mumbai as a global city have assimilated the city’s specific social and market forms, spatial and cultural practices, and political formations into another instance in the inevitable march of the economy. Thus the analysis of global politics and culture in Mumbai often misses the forest for the trees – focussing on the transformation of elite producer services such as call centres, business process outsourcing (BPOs) and high-end finance and information industries which employ less than 5% of the city’s population and constitute tiny (but growing) global enclaves within most Indian metropolises. The effort at describing Mumbai as a global city in terms of expanding elite consumption and employment opportunities ultimately founders in an ahistorical and flat understanding of contemporary politics and culture in the city.

Urban Housing as Material Culture

How can we orient ourselves towards a comparative historical anthropology of housing in modern Mumbai? It is useful to state what we should not do. A comparative study of world cities should not neglect the specific spatial, social and economic conditions in which globalisation as a process is embedded and directed in a city like Mumbai. Nor should it treat “globalisation” in the same manner as an earlier generation of theorists and policy-makers regarded “modernisation”.

Rather than an inevitable process of “transition” from one stage of “development” to another, higher stage, we must see globalisation a contingent set of processes which articulate within determinate historical conditions. While global cities of the North in the seventies and eighties experienced an economic restructuring in which finance capital and producer services entirely displaced manufacturing industries, global cities in the South experienced a similar deindustrialisation, without an accompanying concentration of finance and producer services industries in the contemporary period. While India developed in a classical colonial dependent condition, by the eighties, India was an autarkic economy, existing outside of global financial markets for at least another twenty years, until the liberalisation in the mid-nineties (though India remained largely isolated from the 1997 Asian financial crisis). In mega-cities like Mumbai, the dissolution of large manufacturing industries in the eighties, and growth of new elite-oriented service economies in the nineties, instead elevated the construction industry and land speculation into the primary circuits of cash and capital accumulation in the city. It is to property, land and housing markets that we must turn for a theory of global cities in the South.

The generic forms of housing design and construction, finance and ownership, and domestic culture by which millions of people in Indian cities live their everyday lives has still not been treated as a serious subject of social or cultural history in India. Classical urban planning practice was historically premised on the segregation of the functions of modern urban life into residential, commercial/industrial, and public spheres, and their centralised location governed by state directives. However, Asian cities have constantly demonstrate the falsity of this separation of functions — with their vast districts of dense, mixed-use settlements governed by porous legalities, popular politics, and tactical negotiations over space and survival. This vast and complex economy has been inadequately imagined as the Third World ’slum’ or theorised as the ‘informal economy’. With the retreat of the state, centralised planning practice and its technocratic spatial imagination has been appropriated into a new spatial regime in which a predatory class of private builders dominates the production of formal housing for a minority of the rich, amidst rising inequality in access to housing and basic services for the majority of the urban poor in Mumbai.

Western and modernist approaches to architecture, urban design and planning treated urban housing as a place of residence, domesticity, and leisure — as a privileged site of social relations, and a prized object of consumption. However, a greater understanding of the cultural history of Asian cities must situate urban housing as a key unit of production in the urban economy, the material grid and medium through which everyday politics and culture are experienced. While a functional and economic separation of home and workplace is a central tenet of modern urban spatial practice, in Asian cities like Mumbai this false spatial division poses severe obstacles to situating the production of housing as part of the larger ‘informal’ economy of small scale manufacturing, casual labour, and flexible employment which defines the urban landscape for the majority of the urban poor. While the Asian city is famous for its rich local geographies and exotic cultural mixes, we need more detailed studies and analyses of the cultural history of housing in Asian cities — both as a material technology and as a social practice. The tactics and negotiations of urban poor communities in the context of Mumbai’s contemporary housing crisis indicate a new form of urban politics whose future directions will be articulated by a historical understanding of the production of urban housing as material culture in the Asia Pacific.

Simultaneous to the informalisation of labour and housing markets in the eighties and nineties, the past twenty years have witnessed the decisive end of attempts at state-centred urban planning in Mumbai. The post-Independence Development Plan, which had guided land, housing, and economic growth since the sixties, has been displaced in favour of piecemeal investments in infrastructure and transport, and housing and slum rehabilitation by the state, with increased participation from private builders and agencies. With the retreat of the state from its ambitious agendas of rational land-use, equitable distribution of services, and protection of the environment, the instruments of abstract spatial planning used by the state have withered and mutated into new urban forms marked by severe exclusions and enclosures.

Modern discourses on space and the city have problematised and represented the informal, casual, or slum housing in primarily moral terms. In Jacob Riis’s classic works, the production of housing and the blight of slum conditions is situated in a wider critique of the endemic urban corruption produced by the Tammany Hall political machine in antebellum New York City. How did this late nineteenth century imagination of the slum as both moral panic and reformist impulse become transformed into the late twentieth century symbol of the slum as a sign of underdevelopment, both in Third World mega-cities and Western inner-cities? The presence of the urban poor and working classs in large numbers has always been regarded as repugnant and dangerous to urban elites in all modern industrial cities, and it is little wonder that their forms of housing, hygiene and communal living were treated as the most visible symbol of a wider social or political crisis. But the image of the Third World slum, while borrowing from the century-old polemic of Riis, and the generation of civic reformers, urban sociologists, and community activists who followed him, has a special resonance in the era of globalised markets and media. In the paranoid nightmare of urban warfare projected by defence planners prior to the invasion of Iraq, or in the abortive Mogadishu landing by U.S. Marines ten years earlier portrayed the film “Black Hawk Down”, or even in the dystopic vision of urban theorists for whom the future urban world is the planet of slums, the dark alleys of the overcrowded Third World city – with their even darker inhabitants – condenses the negative fantasy of poverty, crime, violence and delinquency.

While this imagery are mobilised within the global media towards particular ends often not directly connected with the urban poor, within India their articulation is continuous with an elite minority’s attempts to direct the commerce, labour and mobility of the majority of the urban poor into circuits of capital accumulation often outside prevailing legal and financial regimes. What we have called “predatory urbanism” is this new regime of speculative accumulation, legal exclusion, and the mass violence against the urban poor. The valorisation of the middle-class home and over-consumption in the urban media has its parallel in the marginalisation of the majority of the urban poor from land and housing — some 60% of the urban population of around 14 million citizens. Secure housing is now the most desired object of consumption by all classes, from land-less squatters and working slum-dwellers to established tenants and the middle classes.

Historical Ecology of Ideas and Institutions in Mumbai

The new social and spatial relations of global Mumbai have given rise to various movements for housing and tenancy rights, which are now becoming the main arena for public politics. Borrowed from the natural sciences, the concept “ecology” is used in the social sciences to analyse and explain the link between communities and their local environments. The concept can be used to describe the intellectual history of social movements and the non-state or non-governmental sector in Mumbai, their organisational forms, their use of different forms of knowledge, and the changing institutional, material, social and cultural environments in which these practices have evolved over the past twenty five years since the Emergency in India.

1. Gandhian or nationalist “social work” organisations with an emphasis on a philosophy of national self-reliance and self-sufficiency, cottage industries and small-scale village and rural production models, whose strategies are non-violent protest and negotiation, and non-coercive dialogue; examples include Sarvodaya Mandal, and a host of cottage industries and small-scale cooperative industries;

2. classical “social work” organisations working primarily with the health and education sectors, often with public sector, religious, Church and charitable funding; examples are many, they include the Nagpada Neighbourhood House, Nirmala Niketan School of Social Work, mobile creches, organisations for the care of the marginalised, and so on;

3. trade unions, and organisations associated with Left and radical social movements, whose focus is on the systemic inequalities and contradictions of capitalist society, whose strategies are ideological and political mobilisation and agitation for rights, resources, and power, mostly addressed to the state; examples include some affiliated and non-affiliated trade unions on the Left, especially those connected to the CPI and CPI (M), the Trade Union Solidarity Committee (TUSC), agitational groups and campaign networks, interest-based collectives such as Forum Against Oppression of Women, Left and Naxalite non-party and party formations;

4. organisations associated with the post-Emergency civil liberties and democratic rights movements, now merging into newer global discourses on human rights, whose focus is on the violations of civil, political, economic and cultural rights of the “people”, and whose strategies are issue-based mobilisation, public interest litigation, and documentation or objective/scientific fact-finding around issues of rights violations; examples are Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR), Lokshahi Hakk Sanghatana, Nivara Hakk Suraksha Samiti, Socio-Legal Information Centre (SLIC)/ India Centre for Human Rights and Law (ICHRL), YUVA, Majlis, and post-1992 mohalla committees;

5. organisations involved in research activities, resource centres, or interest-based collectives, whose strategies are discussion, documentation and research work; examples are Centre for Education and Documentation (CED), SPARROW, Majlis, and documentation centres focussed on gender issues, such as Akshara and Vacha;

6. organisations associated with international and global developmental practices, whose focus is on the assets and capital of the urban poor, where the discourse is of resources and not rights, and whose strategies are negotiation with state and non-state authorities, “empowerment” of the poor through provision of services and increased participation in governance; examples are Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA), Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), many other mainstream NGOs;

7. organisations which have sprung from civic grievances of the middle-classes and elites conceived exclusively as “citizens”, emphasising such issues as quality of life, noise and air pollution, provision of civic services and the perceived inefficiency and politicisation of these services, global competitiveness of the city as an corporate investment destination, whose strategies are negotiation and campaigning with the state authorities through the bureaucracy, elite media, private sector, and often collusion in state violence against the poor; examples are Association for Good Governance and Networking in India (AGNI), Bombay First, Citizens Forum for Protection of Public Spaces (Citispace), Colaba-Cuffe Parade, Pedder Road and other “middle-class” residents’ associations.

REFERENCES

Our lexicon was compiled of terms and phrases commonly found in newspapers such as The Times of India. While seemingly neutral devices for describing events and actions common to the Indian scene, we suggest that these terms form a much deeper sub-strata of meaning in Indian public discourse. They are in fact linguistic structures shared by both veteran editor and cub reporter, by the governing elite and the citizen-subaltern, they are both description and truth. Read the ur-paragraph of Indian journalism and leap into the fray with your own contributions here.

Given my prior, amateur forays into this rich semantic field, I was pleased to see that our theory of the deep structures of Indian English journalism was recently confirmed by noted historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam in his scathing review of The White Tiger in LRB. More recently, a new variation on our lexicon surfaced (quietly and unbeknownst to foreign audiences) in yesterday’s CSM. Anuj Chopra in Pune writes of B. Ramalinga Raju that the Indian government, “in damage-control mode, swooped in to take control of Satyam, the beleaguered outsourcing company”.

While it did not merit an entry at the time of our compilation eight years ago, this journalist has rendered yeoman service to the lexicon, and deserves kudos for a new insight into financial regulation in India. “Swooping in” is a recognisable hybrid of “swinging into” and “swopping down” — the two entries in our lexicon before “nab”. Examples of this type of state behaviour are when the Government of India or one of its state or local arms “swings into action” after a crisis, and “swoops down upon” its unlawful subjects. Recent work on the anthropology of the state in India has also confirmed this swooping tendency. While without the vertical dynamics of “swooping down upon” or the proactive posture of “swinging into”, “swooping in” is a fascinating description of the government’s actions to protect shareholders, and may even denote a new posture by Indian regulators in the wake of the global financial crisis.

Dr Singh’s genteel but firm diplomatic strategy is to present this evidence in the chanceries of the world’s great powers, who will compel Pakistan to act against Lashkar-i-Toiba and elements within its own intelligence establishment who mentored these irregulars to fight on the Kashmir and Afghan frontiers. So far both India and Pakistan have avoided war, but can there be a Third Way in the War on Terror?

This interview on All Things Considered with Siddharth Varadarajan is worth a listen, and this interview with Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence, in Der Spiegel.

In an interview today on Here and Now with Bob Baer, former CIA analyst for the Middle East, he just let drop the terrifying scenario of a jihadi mothership docking in Baltimore Harbor and launching commando attacks from a swarm of dinghies, in imitation of the attacks in Mumbai two weeks ago. Not surprisingly, the film Syriana was adapted from Baer’s intelligence memoirs.

In the weeks before the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai, a Saudi oil tanker was hijacked off the Horn of Africa. In a direct action against Somali pirates menacing the high seas, on 19 November the Indian Navy sunk what was called a “pirate mothership” in the Gulf of Aden, in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes off the Horn of Africa. This seemed to many Indians a swift and effective strike in the subcontinent’s own maritime near-abroad, the western Indian Ocean. Defence analysts and terrorism experts hailed the emergent regional hegemon taking the fight to the pirate brigands in aid the international community, with the INS Tabar swooping down on and sinking their mothership.

This proud assertion of regional sub-imperialism by India was interrupted when it later emerged that the alleged mothership sunk by the Indian Navy in the Gulf of Aden was actually a Thai fishing trawler occupied by Somali pirates. The Navy claimed it nonetheless had the pirate commanders in their sights and fired legitimately. Tell that to the Thai fishermen who lost their boat, or other coastal fishing communities such as in Kutch whose livelihood depends on the natural ecologies which cross maritime jurisdictions, and who are routinely harrased and imprisoned by the Indian and Pakistani coast guards and navies.

The Laskar-e-Toiba commandos who attacked Mumbai arrived by speed boats and dinghies on the city’s unregulated coastline in a hijacked fishing boat named Kuber, registered in the Gujarati port city of Porbander. The families and friends of the fishermen on the Kuber, when the boat failed to return home the night it was attacked by the commandos at sea, first assumed that it had been detained by the Pakistani authorities. However a body was found floating in a fishing channel, dumped overboard after the commandos changed from their boat which brought them to Gujarat from Pakistan’s main port city, Karachi.

For more than a hundred years, Western military experts have grappled with the murky geography of insurgent networks in the mountainous and rugged terrain of the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Much like the frontier and tribal agencies along the old Durand Line, the maritime frontier of the western Indian Ocean is simply impossible to police. The British Indian Empire had an overwhelming interest in regulating human and commercial traffic in the western Indian Ocean for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Few remember that Aden was directly administered by the Government of Bombay as a protectorate for a hundred years, as it was strategically located at the mouth of the Red Sea, the gateway to the pilgrimage port of Mecca and the Suez Canal.

Throughout the western Indian Ocean coastline from its formal bases in Aden to Bombay, the British assumed various roles in the development and governance of the vast maritime frontier in the Indian Ocean. As regional naval hegemon and guarantor of the security of coastal sultans and emirates such as in Bushire, Basra, Kuwait and Musqat, its commercial agents and native informants commanded political power (in this view, the British have occupied Basra on and off for more than 300 years). As its military and naval interests controlled regional traffic, it enacted traditional duties of protector of pilgrims for thousands of Hajis arrriving Mecca by boat (and increasingly by British steamships) from India or Southeast Asia. The British were thus forced to act in novel scenarios as public health inspector, to control and quarantine the decades-long global plague outbreak which spread from China and India to Europe, Latin America and Europe.

Historians have compared the relations of “informal empire” between British India and these coastal states of the western Indian Ocean as similar to the indirect rule exercised in the colonial princely states. While Bombay and Aden were directly administered as colonial cities in British India, the network of coastal port cities in their vast hinterland from Gujarat to Yemen functioned as an informal sphere of influence for Indian, Arab and Persian merchants and traders who prospered by accepting British naval protection and commercial dominance in international trade in the Indian Ocean (which, in the memorable phrase, became a British pool).

These port cities harboured ships flying flags of convenience and carrying all kinds of local regional trade from the sultanates of Yemen and Muscat, across the mouth of the Persian Gulf to the Makran Coast and the Gulfs of Kutch and Cambay in India. Today little remains of what what colonial port authorities referred to as the “coasting trade”, except for fishing. However, fisherfolk are increasingly threatened by international trawlers which have fish on an industrial scale for export, destroying what remains of the livelihood base of coastal fishing communities.

Syriana (warning, spoiler!) culminates with a pair of young Pakistani boys driving a high-speed dinghy with a warhead strapped on it at high speed into a massive tanker, just as the ribbon is cut on a new coastal refinery built by a Western oil company in a fictionalized Gulf emirate. The boys, migrant workers in a labor camp, are easily recruited to the attack, in which they will also perish. The mothership here, an oil tanker, is not the source, but the target, of the suicide attack. Visions of motherships notwithstanding, most pirates and terrorists, it seems, prefer to travel in speed-boats and dinghies.

Several years later, I was in Mumbai on 11 July 2006 — exactly one year before I got married — when a series of bombs went off at rush hour in the packed trains of the Western Railway. I was, in fact, waiting for a train at Dadar Station, travelling in the other direction, to Victoria Terminus (site of the recent attacks by gunmen). I learned weeks later that A.G. Bapat, engineer and manager of the National Textile Corporation in Mumbai, was killed on one of the bombed trains travelling to his home in the suburb of Kandivali. Mr Bapat was a friendly public sector official in the bankrupt NTC, the government company formed by the takeover of half of Mumbai’s failing inner-city textile mills in the seventies. NTC was one of the city’s biggest land-holders, and behind their mammoth compound walls and factory gates lie the crumbling treasures of Mumbai’s 19th century industrial architecture. I spent a year from 2002-2003 photographing several of these mills with the help of Mr Bapat, who was eager to support a proposal we developed for an Industrial Museum in one of the closed mills. This never materialized, and many of Mumbai’s grandest Victorian mills have been torn down in the past three years. See the photo albums in the collection Mills of Mumbai and the individual albums for Tata Mills, India United Mills no.1, Kohinoor Mills no.1-2, and the most remarkable, Elphinstone Mills, which was sold and demolished two years ago. Thanks again, Bapat Saheb, for all your help.

Another friend and colleague whom I surely thought lost in a 2005 attack in Bangalore was the brilliant scientist and entrepreneur Dr Vijay Chandru. Chandru, as he is known to everyone, was one of the inventors of the Simputer, a visionary open source hand-held computer for agrarian and rural uses in India. He now manages Strand Genomics. His wife Uma and I worked together at the Srishti School in Bangalore, where I was a part-time consultant. Chandru was sprayed with automatic gunfire at close range in a daylight attack on the auditorium where he was attending a conference, across the street from the leafy canteen at the Indian Institute of Science, where I had lunch as I stayed nearby. Much like my beloved Cafe Leopold, the Iraani cafe in Mumbai which was attacked by gunmen last week, the canteen and auditorium was open to the street. Chandru’s arms and torso were hit hard by an AK-47 shot from this street. I was not in Bangalore then, but learned on the news he had somehow survived the attack. Miraculously, less than a year later, I sat across the table from him in the Stata Center here at MIT, where he spent an hour describing his surgery and recovery at Mass General Hospital, where he has come to be treated by a renowned surgeon, Jesse Jupiter. He had already regained control of his arms and was walking, and was working at MIT LIDS.

The nature of this attack is globally unprecedented. This is not even like 9/11 — it has lasted three days,11/26-11/28, and is still not over. The first news I heard on Wednesday afternoon, was of gunmen opening fire with automatic weapons and throwing grenades in Victoria Terminus at rush hour. This immediately reminded me The last time something like this happened was July 11 2006, or 7/11, when I was on the railway platform in rush hour at Dadar, and the overhead electric lines suddenly popped and the station went dark. After learning of bomb blasts up the line at Matunga Road, I walked home amidsty an enormous jam of vehicles, as all the train commuters emerged onto the streets. It was only when I came home that I learned what had happened. Bombs had gone off all over the line, killing and injuring hundreds of train commuters.

The signature of 7/11 and terrorism in Mumbai were their attacks on the city’s vital arteries, its train and bus network, where most Mumbaikars spend hours everyday together.The nature of the targets is very different from previous terrorism such as 7/11 or the bus bombs, or at least the news coverage here would have us believe. While its sister station in India, Channel 7-IBN, is leading in their coverage in Mumbai, CNN here has focussed largely on the shootout and hostage situations Taj and Oberoi hotels. The dramatic photos of the Taj Hotel dome draped in smoke and flames on today’s New York Times front page has already become the signature image of the Mumbai attacks.

There are other ways in which these attacks are remarkable, and different. The attackers apparently arrived by sea, landing in the very heart of the Indian Navy’s Western Naval Command in Colaba, in the Sassoon Docks, where a busy traffic of fishing boats, country craft, and small vessels land everyday from Bombay Harbour. There’s been a lot of news recently about piracy in the Indian Ocean near the Gulf of Aden, where the Indian Navy allegedly sunk a pirate “mother ship” last week. In signs of the hyperbolic tendencies of Indian journalists, there were reports yesterday of a terrorist “mother ship” detained off Gujarat, a Pakistani merchant vessel.

While images of mother ships in the high seas of the western Indian Ocean might be an exaggeration, there is no doubt that strategically, an arc of coastal states from Aden to Muscat, Dubai and Karachi are key nodes in a region where Bombay has been the largest coastal city. The Taj and Oberoi hotels are perched at the very southern tip of Mumbai’s Island City. And while these hotels — and Nariman House — are located in one of Mumbai’s most posh central business districts, at their feet and edges cling crowded colonies of fisherfolk and slum-dwellers who regularly venture out to the seas. These attacks were a brazen assault on some of the key symbols of the financial, military and commercial architecture of Mumbai, and its role as a regional and global capital. But anyone who has walked the streets of Colaba or Cuffe Parade can tell you that this regional command and control centre has feet of clay

Here in the US, the attack has coincided with the Thanksgiving holidays, when many families are at home glued to their many plasmas, tubes, and flat screens. The coverage here is banal at best, parachute correspondents or terrorism experts who know little about India, using the famous backdrop of the Taj Mahal hotel — now exploding, now on fire, now duck they’re shooting. For once I wish I could watch Rajdeep Sardesai shouting his way through the crowds, or even my buddy Sreenivasan Jain on NDTV. While I am not in Mumbai today, all Mumbaikars are part of a real-time news space that is following events as they unfold. Some of the more amazing moments so far have been the top cops shot as they let down their guard outside Metro Cinema, NSG commandos landing by chopper at Nariman House and storming their way in. Stay safe friends, and pray it is all over very soon.