Girgaum Chowpatty is one of the most politicized sites of the city, notwithstanding a court ruling some years ago that declared the beach strictly for recreational purposes only. Even then, the ruling had qualified that the Ganesh visarjan ritual was a ritualistic recreational act, and made official one more moment in the neighbourhood’s long lasting trysts with politics.

After all, the Saarvajanik Ganesh mandals were an innovative attempt by Tilak at politicizing what was essentially a domesticated ritual. He made it a Mumbai event, one that would bridge divides between castes, classes and even religions to help prepare a united front against colonial powers. It was a master stroke. In one swift gesture, the meaning and significance of recreation, ritual and politics got merged into one quivering mass of humanity.

Tilak’s move was truly radical – he wanted the ritual to break through caste barriers, question prejudice and become a forum for discussion and debate. After 1893, community participation in the festival became huge, with poetry recitals, performances, intellectual discussions, music and dance becoming integral to the events and the tenth day procession to submerge the idol in water bodies becoming one more way of bringing the divided city together.

The Girgaum beach would never be the same after that, much to the chagrin of the elites who lived across on Malabar Hill and other posh neighbourhoods in the vicinity. Very much like their descendents today – who were the prime movers in banning political rallies near the beach – supposedly for causing traffic jams. Most of them didn’t seem to care that the site had been anointed by politics and that it was a historical space precisely because rallies helped the city come together in the name of some worthwhile cause or the other.

A few decades after Tilak’s move, another resident in the neighbourhood managed to transform the beach into a moment of ferment. Gandhi, who lived down Laburnum road, had inspired most of the neighbourhood to support his clever moves. When he started the famous Dandi march as part of the satyagraha to protest against the infamous salt tax in 1930, Girgaum Chowpatty resounded to his call with great gusto. Thousands and thousands of Gandhi’s followers descended on the beach to symbolically create salt echoing his act in Dandi, Gujarat. And when the followers were lathi charged and attacked by the police, they found an unexpected ally across the road – in the form of Wilson College. According to some records, its principal, opened the gates and transformed the space into a refuge for the Gandhians in open defiance against the colonial rulers.

For several years after that the beach was constantly used by Mumbaikars to voice their concerns. Especially since the powers ruling their lives, resided close by and could be heckled on their way home in the evenings. Along with Azad Maidan and Shivaji Park, the city repeatedly bristled with concern about different issues ranging from Dalit radicalism, to peasant movements, to fighting against the brief stint with authoritarianism during the Emergency in the mid 1970’s.

It was thus a pleasure to see how the gay movement too kept up an old Mumbai legacy celebrating the reading down of Article 377, and held one of the biggest gay pride marches in the country that made Girgaum Chowpatty resonate with politics. Once more the neighbourhood supported a stand against a colonial moment and celebrated along with the marchers fighting against discriminatory prejudice.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, August 26, 2009

Institutions have been much misunderstood entities. In strict anthropological terms they refer to any stabilizing of ideas, beliefs, practices, traditions, lifestyles, knowledge practices and skills that one generation wishes to pass on to the next.  By this definition, families, guilds, community associations, art schools that are based on the practices of a teacher – all qualify to be institutions. Musical traditions in South Asia codify themselves around gurus and become institutions of sorts. In Japan, martial arts, tea ceremonies and other arts and cultural practices center around the sensei and institutionalize themselves over generations. Much of knowledge, insights and learning have been generated through such inherited and evolved practices.

It’s only in the nineteenth century, with the emergence of the modern bureaucracy that a distinction came to be made between the primary and secondary nature of all organizations, with the former being part of the realm of domesticated, ethnicized or personal spaces and the latter being shaped by impersonal, universal principles that were sharpened by the development of bureaucracies. What such a distinction meant for knowledge and cultural practices was quite special. It privileged the development of modern day institutions only if they walked down the path of bureaucratic organization and relegated traditional knowledge practices to an informal realm – contained and preserved by traditional customs and private resources. As a result, the state, and subsequently large resource rich establishments, shaped the emergence of modern day educational, cultural and arts institutions, and made them more bureaucratic and impersonal. This was also the process through which the idea of tradition as a hyper-conscious space became more prominent pushing forth for a whole lot of speculation about the invention of traditions. This went hand in hand with the invention of other firmed up dialectical categories, including personal-impersonal, ethnic-modern, primary and secondary organizations, informal and formal practices, pure intellectual pursuits versus engaged and politicized practices, scientific versus religious truths so on and so forth – dialectical categories that plagued intellectual worlds for centuries but started to harden around this time.

Of course, in the real world, the informal and formal, the traditional and the modern played themselves out in complex ways. Thus modern day educational institutions could have large bureaucracies embedded in them along with age-old feudal practices and authoritarian teacher-patriarchs. Research practices could move between subjective and objective truths, between science and faith in various permutations and combination.

Eventually, these inner contradictions were contained by the idea of modern day institutions as respectable entities due to their validation as formal, organized and bureaucratic centers of learning and research. The more respectable they were the more they had to distance themselves from the other side of the wall; the informal, the personal, the engaged, religious, traditional…

What it did to the idea of institutions was particularly problematic. Any well organized bureaucracy, no matter what its ideology, beliefs, practices and track-record as a research center, could be passed off as an institution. Today, business enterprises running knowledge-for-cash programs are considered respectable institutions all over the world – going by the synonym of universities.

And small research centers, which connect knowledge to practices and are conscious of the power equations they are embedded in (they have no protection in the form of bureaucratic shields) have to prove themselves several times over before they can be understood as institutions.

The Dharavi School of Urbanology – see www.urbz.net for the latest update – is an institution in a more resilient sense of the term – when institutionalization meant a settling down of the ideas of practitioners who would like to learn more from the emerging generation.

It is located literally in the residual space of the grand journey of concepts that shaped the history of ideas and modern day institutional practices – the informal, hyperurban, dense space of a city – right at the other end of the spectrum.

What better place for a school of cities to be located in?

Its tiny. In the tradition of small centers of learning that could be found in narrow streets of old Edo, Alexandria, Baghdad, Benares centered around the beliefs and practices of people firmly committed to their dynamic beliefs.

It is a modern day myth that these were traditional spaces which preserved old forms of knowing. On the contrary, they preserved only by changing, evolving and adapting, unburdened by the categories of respectability and validation that modern day institutions are obsessed by.  They were centered on their practices and produced insights through them – with the same effectiveness as those hot on the pursuit of pure knowledge.

The Dharavi School of Urbanology challenges notions of institutions as it goes on to establish itself with literally nothing.

Do come and nourish it with your passion, experience and playfulness.

It is only when the rains debilitate Mumbai that we discover the possibility of navigating the crowded streets of our city on our feet. People have traveled huge distances wading through gutter water making them associate the act exclusively with civic breakdowns. However, several research findings indicate that a good many of Mumbai’s daily commuters actually walk to work everyday on a routine basis. That’s’ because most of them live in informal settlements and relatively close to work.

In fact Mumbai’s streets are a visual proof that people use their two feet all the time. Few roads or streets are free of walkers. The presence of roadside hawkers indicate the vibrancy of the streets in this regard only too well and most regular walkers adapt to their presence. One of the most successful infrastructure projects that civic authorities undertook in recent times are the walkways near Bandra and foot overbridges across roads and highways. The aim may have been to keep people out of the roads for the cars – but they have helped nevertheless.

Walking sometimes reveals how relative notions of distances can be. It was only after suffering through traffic jams that lasted two hours between Girgaum and Prabhadevi during evening rush hour that made me realize that the same distance could be traversed in precisely that much time by walking as well.  Of course that stretch included two great promenades – the Haji Ali  and Worli Sea Face roads.

Walks have been regularly incorporated in the city’s tourist – especially heritage trail – agendas. Rahul Mehrotra and Sharada Dwivedi’s Fort Walks is an excellent guide through the city’s colonial past. Enterprising guides have developed the ‘Slum tours” through Dharavi. PUKAR, Mumbai’s very own innovative urban research collective uses walks as a method of inquiry. Walks become part of the research process. Recently, members of the center held a special walk through the erstwhile Mill areas of Mumbai, providing participants a glimpse of the rapidly transforming neighbourhood. This was done as part of a global event in the memory of an American urbanist Jane Jacobs who used the idea of the walk as a way of reclaiming neighbourhoods for its residents.

It’s a sure fire way of making places safer without acts of surveillance if you simply learn to use the streets in a feet-on way. Of course, it may be impractical in terms of being a regular act in a Mumbaikar’s life. In many ways it sounds almost improbable.

But already the infamous traffic jams – especially in the suburbs have transformed several commuters from stations to their colonies into regular walkers. A bit more investment in the basic infrastructure for this activity will surely bring in several more and make it a pleasurable activity.

Walks have been overtly political acts as well, especially in the form of demonstrations and of course through Gandhi’s legendary marches. The political dimension of the walks merges with its cultural one – becoming often a ‘carnavalisque’ reclaiming of public spaces. And while most Mumbaikars would baulk at this idea, given how impatient they are with any act that slows them down, one time of the year they find themselves joining in is round the corner. When the elephant headed God makes his devotees (who love walking to him to Sidhivinayak temple anyway every Tuesday) dance along during the chaturthi celebrations.

For several years one has had mixed feelings about this great celebratory invasion of Mumbai’s streets. I have found myself walking through miles of static traffic in thunderous music and – after exorcising the bourgeois impatience of a regular commuter – even danced along – especially when a subversive techno parade joined in a procession in a true spirit of the carnival.

Maybe this Ganpathi festival – Mumbaikars can join in by politicizing the already politicized event a bit more – and make it a celebration of the act of walking as well –by everyone who has a political axe to grind – and reclaim the streets of the city in another way.

The idea that nobility can exist in the tribal mind is linked to the conviction that the authentic tribe exists.

The category tribal often got juxtaposed against that of the civilized mind in twentieth century thought and pushed anthropologist Levi Strauss to talk about the noble savage. In his brilliant commentary he ultimately pointed out that the urban civilized mindset has much more in common with its imagined counter-point – the thoughts and way of thinking of the savage.

He took great pains in pointing out that this observation is distinct from that of the idealized tribal that many modern intellectuals value: the rousseauseque idea of the savage world as being noble, something for the modern world to idealize.

What the Levi-Strauss argument did was to deconstruct the categories tribal and savage itself and yet allow them to be imbued with enchantment and magic. To be able to see aura and enchantment in the mundane is the most unique of all gifts.

However, it is a complex gaze. It simultaneously unravels categories such as the noble and the civilized as absolute ones. It opens up the way to look at the ordinary (ordinary in every sense) as being imbued with aura as – having the ability of being both noble and savage together, and having several other qualities that make up the complexity of human experience.

To elucidate:

To be excited by the fact that you are meeting a royal – can be mechanically balanced in a modernist mind – by being equally excited on meeting a tribal. This can be represented as being just and egalitarian.

However – since these communities never exist in their pure sense (all royalty is complexly constructed by convenient omissions and additions and all tribal communities have evolved and adapted and been connected to global spaces and histories as well) – to come to terms with the disappointment on meeting someone who is neither royal, aristocratic or civilized nor is savage, tribal and authentic is the biggest challenge of all.

Those who manage to do so are indeed liberated from the vast landmine of categories and labels that litter the contemporary world.

There are few who manage to do that and it is a moment to be cherished when you meet them!

Out of sight, out of mind’ has been a credo much loved by city officials. If you can’t solve a problem – just hide it. Cities like Delhi have taken this to a fine art. You can’t imagine that India’s capital has a huge population living in shanties and temporary tenements, simply because you don’t see them. They have been shunted out to the peripheries, behind the river and tucked away in the crevices of posh colonies.

Design and architectural projects often have a dual use in this hide-and-don’tseek game. They fulfil their stated functions – transporting people, providing homes in high-rise structures – and also provide new visual vistas for the city.

The very same metropolis appears vastly different from a great height or from across a bridge. Once the visual signature becomes part of the public imagination, it shapes the way we think.

That is why the IMAX-scale Bandra-Worli Sea Link experience needs to be handled with care. On one side of the bridge lies glamorous Bandra, while on the other lies a 400-year-old fishing village that has been directly affected by the construction of the bridge. Now that the lives of the fishing community have been substantially impacted, having reached the point of no return, they are worried about another danger – that of coming under the entire city’s spotlight.

Already, one hears of complaints against the supposedly unpleasant sight of what is being described as a slum. The fact that some members of the village do not have access to private or public toilets is being used as an argument about the entire settlement.

The fact is that the village of Worli Koliwada has a full-fledged functioning local political body with a highly educated and informed leadership. They deal with the issues of religious diversity (many of the Kolis are Christians) and migrants (several tenants living in the village from all over the country) with sophistication and maturity. They have a systematic and inclusive approach in decision-making through regular community meetings. In these meetings they have regular discussions and debates about what is the best way ahead for them. The leadership has access to good and skilled people who have been associated with the village’s development for decades.

The villagers know fully well that entering the visual map of the city through the Bandra-Worli Sea Link can move both ways. It can make it even more difficult for them to survive if the media projects them as a slum, which needs to be dealt with through real estate development projects. Or it can do something else altogether – convince Mumbai’s authorities that the best way ahead is to recognise the fact that the villages of Mumbai, while needing special inputs in sewage, drainage and toilet facilities, are actually well-equipped with skills to evolve and modernise on their own.

The Worli Koliwada leaders are way ahead of many others in this regard. The authorities simply need to respond to them supportively and recognise their habitat as such. This will help the residents of the village – the Kolis as well as the tenants – to improve and transform their habitat according to their own aspirations and choices.

If this indeed happens, what Mumbai will be rewarded with at the end of the road, is a beautiful, modern habitat that preserves the city’s unusual urban legacy – one that includes villages, full of chapels and shrines, where the original Marathi manoos wove the city’s cosmopolitan fabric we are so proud of today.

From the Mumbai Mirror Column

Waiting for the rains is one of the most painful moments in a Mumbaikar’s life. Covered in sweat, burnt by the dazzling sun and constantly looking skywards, the Mumbaikar goes about daily chores praying for that redeeming magical moment.

The wait has become increasingly torturous over the years. At one time, we just blamed the rain gods for any delay. Now, even the most devout believers have figured out the nuances of the global warming debate and are less inclined to spend time and resources on pujas and yagnas.

That is the pre-monsoon scenario. When the possibility of it raining seems dim. When the memory of floods and the weeks without sun seem distant and vague. As soon as the impossible happens, when the clouds actually burst open, the mood changes.

From the initial euphoria over the collective natural air-conditioning that the monsoons usually bring, the complaints start to trickle in and eventually become a flood of their own.

Loud howls of protest rent traffic jammed roads and highways. Complaints about the inefficiency of the city’s authorities are punctuated by dark philosophical pronouncements about global weather change.

Everybody starts cursing – after having savored the initial celebration.

Did the city always respond to the monsoons in this dual-faced way? Not really. It couldn’t have. Like many fishing villages everywhere, those who live at the edges of waterways – on the sea, in creeks and along water bodies – Mumbai’s residents too related to the monsoon in a manner that saw it as organically connected to the water systems in which it is embedded.

The seven islands converged, sometimes by force, but always incrementally over a period of time, without actually removing the city’s watery foundations. This allowed the rains, even if temporarily inconvenient, to be accommodated into the landscape. The city had wells providing water, way into the 20th Century.

Several of the lakes that were developed, in Thane, Kalyan and around the national park, were part of efforts that always saw the monsoons as a blessing that brought in water which needed to be stored and contained.

The Koliwadas of Mumbai, guardians of the city’s waterways, were dignified habitats that saw fishing as a modern-day urban occupation well until the 1960’s and ’70’s. They still exist, but shorn of civic dignity, and with a more embattled life as a fishing community.

What went wrong? Why did the city that once mostly celebrated the monsoons turn into a paranoid nervous wreck waiting for it with anticipation and dread?

Or more precisely, what did the city do to transform itself from a monsoon-friendly, flood-tolerant city, into a death-trap in which the sea becomes a monster snapping at its heals and when lakes and rivers rise ominously, threatening to engulf it?

Several of the answers to these questions will be revealed this month in a brilliantly conceived multi-media exhibition in which the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) at Kala Ghoda will transform itself into a temporary university specialising in the art, science and technology of the monsoons.

Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, the force and brains behind the exhibition, aptly titled ‘SOAK: Mumbai in an Estuary’ invite the residents of Mumbai to come and re-think the monsoons in a manner that is unique and quite simply an eye-opener.

They assert that Mumbai is an estuary – a geographical terrain that lets the sea in and integrates its rhythms into the vast urban system that constitutes it.

One that includes a colonial city, glitzy suburbs, fishing villages, towns, rivers, lakes, a forest and several habitats that defy definition. When the city forgets this, when it drives wedges in its own physical self, that’s when the problem starts.

Of course, that’s a very inadequate summary of what they are saying. The exhibition, that starts in a couple of weeks, will reveal a lot more.

The URBZ MASHUP workshop invites artists, designers, architects, urbanists and creative people who share an interest in cities and urban life to explore a city, debate, ideate, create fictions, photo-collages, music and videos.

The first URBZ MASHUP will take place in Tokyo, hosted by Temple University Japan, in the first week of July 2009. The second one will be held at Istanbul Technical University in the first week of August, followed by Mumbai in November. Other workshops are planned in Rio, New York and Amsterdam in 2010. Each workshop will remix and mashup the material produced in other cities.

The workshop lasts for 5 days. It is followed by a seminar and an exhibition. Each workshop comprises a mix of international and local participants. The participants form small teams of 3 to 5 people and explore the city for two and a half days. Each group chooses a street or neighborhood and documents it using various media including drawing, photo, audio, video and text.

On the third day, all participants get back to the workshop space and remix the material they have gathered in a free and creative way. On the fifth day, the material produced is uploaded in an online gallery on www.urbz.net. A selected number of pieces will be printed and exhibited at the workshop space itself. URBZ provides a virtual environment to exhibit what has been  produced.

The URBZ MASHUP workshop is a non-profit event aimed at stimulating imagination, facilitating creative explorations and generating cultural exchanges between cities and people.

For more info: www.urbz.net/mashup

Last fortnight’s column evoked several angry responses. Indignant Maharshtrian friends who have never supported MNS (the right-wing Maharashtra Nav Nirman Sena, a break-away group of the Shiv Sena) in their lives complained strongly. Friends from Koliwada in Dharavi were admonishing. Colleagues from Kolkatta, once Marxist and now simply fed-up with the ruling communist party, pointed out that that the question of aggressive politics transcends parties and ideologies. Moreover, quite a few of the MNS supporters who wrote in, confirmed their support for the party, along with expressing disagreement with its aggressive tactics. That is a vital point. The fact is that in a democratic system we have to negotiate differences – however deep – without resorting to physical force. And if Mumbai’s political culture can evolve into a space where force and coercion do not shape its agendas, that would work best for everyone.

Go to any neighbourhood in which the street is still an integral part of social life and you will see it resonating with dynamism, with people helping each other in times of crisis, and daily needs, using community resources in the best possible way. These contexts throw up grassroots workers and committed activists. At one time, these neighbourhood leaders were the foundations of a strong, socialist culture. When the political fortunes of left parties declined, those spaces were taken over by newer parties who continued to depend on the excellent organizational skills and grassroots skills of this cadre. When you meet this cadre face to face, you meet several committed men and women, politically astute and very open minded. They are a far cry from the top rung of leadership who provide the face to such parties and often take decisions that put everyone at risk.

In many ways a new political outfit which enters the scene inherits both, a committed set of grassroots activists who know their neighbourhoods well and a legacy of corruption and the habit of muscling their way through issues. The point is what do you do with this legacy? You either fight it or join it. It takes a different kind of strength to willfully change something as deeply entrenched as a corrupt political system by working positively with local neighbourhood leaders.

The fact is that MNS had a choice – it could have started on a fresh note. It may have taken it longer to establish itself but it would have had greater impact in a positive way. Instead, it took the idea of force to another level, by scapegoating and violating the rights of poor sections of migrant populations.

Where does ethnicity lie in this story? It is an integral part. One cannot wish ethnic identity away. Or insist that people must transcend their ethnicity with a simplistic flourish, or that parties must give up their ethnic agendas overnight.

The fact is that Mumbai, with its location in Maharashtra and its strong foundational culture rooted in the local population will always be connected to a rich Maharashtrian ethos. It is equally true that the city is part of India and home to millions of Indians from elsewhere and it has the ability of making them all feel at home in their struggle for earning a living and validating their choice to settle down there.

That’s the whole city. All it needs is a healthy political worldview that matches this wholeness. That surely cant be asking for too much.

Published in the Mumbai Mirror, Wed June 3, 2009

While it was a relief to find that the city did not vote for a chauvinist agenda as a whole, the ability of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena to cut into local votes is certainly disheartening. In many ways the MNS agenda is here to stay and will keep erupting from time to time unless the city responds forcefully.

The fact is that if they take over the Shiv Sena vote-space in the future, Mumbai is back to square one. One Thakeray will be replaced by another (much younger one) and the city will keep bending on its knees every now and then to a mafia-style political culture.

Right now the ball is in the Congress’s court. Unfortunately, the party can work very differently at the center, state and city levels. It is perfectly possible for some short sighted chief minister to keep one Sena at bay by encouraging another, until yet another political calamity is unleashed.

The question to ask is, why is it that large sections of Mumbai’s population still feel that identity politics is the only way ahead for them? What is it that they see Raj Thakeray doing for them? Is it a sense of empowerment that they experience through his ideology, even if it does not concretely change things for them? Do they feel safe and protected under his leadership in a city that does not fully account for the needs of everybody?

His largest patronage comes from the city’s, post-industrial working and middle-class Maharashtrians. Like his uncle, Raj too has moped up the residues of the city’s once rich, unionized, working class history and transformed it into a space of informal state control – mafia style. Since then, the Sainiks have taken over grassroots activities from the left, infused them with cultural agendas and added huge servings of scapegoat politics, and violence. Moreover, cultural activities, festivities and neighbourhood level involvement have been the hallmark of the Sena and Raj is firmly committed to that legacy.

His largest support comes from informal settlements in the city. From the Koliwadas to old villages to modern slums, these rich and textured landscapes have been his biggest support base. And as long as the authorities choose to ignore these spaces, Thackeray style politics will always be a specter haunting the city’s horizon.

Besides, the dominance of Congress in the city’s political horizon is one thing. Its ability of dealing with a numerically smaller but in many ways louder and more violent MNS is something else altogether. And if Mumbai follows the Delhi way – then that will only feed the agenda of such parties more.

In the capital, the Congress has been pretty aggressive against the jhuggis and slums, and in many ways has only postponed the problem. There will certainly come a time, when the exiled urban poor in that city will emerge as another force to reckon. And if one is not careful enough, will be equally aggressive.

The fact of the matter is that to eliminate the Sena style of politics, the city has to get to the root of the problem. And that consists of working at two levels. One is to make sure that the huge economic divisions that mark the city – most visible in its built environments and highly unequal consumption levels – is narrowed and the second is to proactively replace the cultural language of chauvinist politics with something more dynamic, celebratory and imaginative, in a manner that reaches out to every neighbourhood and corner. For a city that has such a strong culture industry and so much talent, it’s a shame that we have not been able to counter-act narrow cultural prejudices and counteract Raj’s language in a stronger way.

It’s not late though. The election results can become a strong foundation of a completely new political culture for Mumbai.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Wed May 20, 2009

URBZ collaborator, Jose “Cole” Abasolo is exhibiting some of his recent photoshoped images in Valparaiso, Chile. Don’t miss it!