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.
