Shekhar Krishnan

This book review appeared in slightly edited form as “Do Buildings Have Agency?” in Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai), Vol XLVI No.30, 23 July 2011

Neera Adarkar, ed., The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life (Gurgaon: imprintOne, 2011)

Can built forms have their own subjectivity? Architects, geographers and urban planners would surely answer this question in the affirmative. By contrast, most historians and social scientists have long viewed all non-human artefacts as “socially constructed”, and the structure and agency of the physical environment has remained weakly conceptualised, even in urban studies. Given the number of published works on the deindustrialisation of Mumbai and the decline of its textile industry – including an award-winning oral history of mill workersⁱ co-authored by the editor of this new anthology on chawls – it is significant that the most ubiquitous form of working-class housing in the Mumbai had not yet been studied in any depth until nowⁱⁱ. Galleries of Life is a salutary exploration of the history, architecture, culture and politics of chawls which creatively examines the tension between historical nostalgia and contemporary urban change in Mumbai.

Buildings can nurture, constrain, limit and transform those who inhabit or pass through them. Generic typologies mass produced on an industrial scale – apartments, tenements, chawls, skyscrapers and slums – are generative of their peculiar milieus and practices. Like other forms of housing, Mumbai’s iconic chawls are basically physical containers which give shelter and provide shape to social reproduction. But urban housing and the built environment can “act back” on communities and society. Housing as social space can signify a bundle of rights and claims, a locus of legal and property relations, a stage for politics and performance, and a set of resources for survival and mobility.

The essays in Galleries of Life study how chawls “have been agents of, and have acted as protagonists in, the city’s social reform [and] national movements, class struggles, and… social networks and institutions over the years” (17). For most of Mumbai’s modern history, the chawl or chaali was the flexible building typology around which most urban housing in the colonial and postcolonial city was constructed. Chawls were built by landlords and merchants in the colonial period to house members of their own caste and village communities; by textile mill owners to house their workers as Bombay’s industrialisation gathered pace; and by private builders and landlords, state improvement and housing boards to house the influx of migrant workers, salaried clerks, and government employees from the early to late twentieth century.

In 1911, the Census of India estimated that eighty percent of Bombay’s residents lived in chawls. The durability of the built form of the chawl contrasts remarkably with the mutability of the urban society which it sheltered and sustained for more than a century. The basic built form remained consistent – one or two-room tenements separated into living/sleeping and washing/bathing spaces, with a common corridor or gallery shared between floors, providing access to toilets and water taps shared by residents. Chawls were rarely if ever designed by professional architects. Chawls were built by contractors and engineers who improvised on this simple and flexible typology based on the limitations of physical site, the landlord’s budget, and construction materials.

While this basic form remained remarkably stable, the uses and meanings of the chawl space changed over time, as literal microcosms of the city’s social and industrial history. Early bachelor dormitories for rural migrants working on shifts in mills (gaala) and with shared eating spaces (khanaval) in the 19^th century gave way to rooms occupied under protected tenancies by entire families (kholi) in the 20^th century, which in turn gave way to a patchwork of residential, commercial and entrepreneurial uses in present-day chawls. The common toilets, taps and corridors of the early chawls were modified as the mori (or nahani) for washing and bathing was later interiorised for use by the entire family. In some chawls, further enclosures of corridors and balconies made for attached bathrooms (and in some cases, bedrooms), rendering chawl life almost as “self-contained” as upmarket “flats” in apartment buildings. More…

This book review appeared in slightly edited form as “Micro-History of Mumbai” in Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai), Vol XLV No.36 September 04, 2010.

Mariam Dossal, Theatre of Conflict, City of Hope: Mumbai, 1660 to Present Times (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2010)

Historian Mariam Dossal’s new book on Bombay/Mumbai is a major contribution to a flourishing genre of new urban histories in South Asia, and a scholarly cross-over into a large-format, illustrated urban heritage books. This is Dossal’s second major monograph on Bombay, following her Imperial Designs and Indian Realities (1991) on the infrastructure and planning of the colonial city from 1845-1875. Her new book focuses on “the ways in which the politics of land use have impacted on the lives and living conditions of Bombay’s inhabitants” (xxiii) with “contested space as its central concern”. The book seeks to explain historically how “expensive private property dominates almost every aspect of life” (xix) to the detriment of the environment, health and happiness of Mumbai’s citizens. Dossal’s work breaks new ground in its use of new sources to shine a light on a central thread of colonial and urban history in Bombay. Land is one of the enduring themes of South Asian agrarian and colonial historiography. But the survey, settlement, and mapping of lands in cities – and the formation of a market for private property in urban land – remains under-investigated by historians.

Marxist social history, premised on the opposition of industrial capitalists and wage labourers, relegated landlords and landed property to an ambigious “third space” in the historical geography of urban development. The best works of urban history, both in India and elsewhere, spatialize the classic opposition between capital and labour in the geography of the modern capitalist city. In Bombay, Raj Chandavarkar has shown how trade union politics and industrial protest were shaped as much in the workplace and factory as in the organization of working-class neighbourhoods. Jim Masselos has narrated how control over urban space was central to public politics and nationalist mobilization in colonial Bombay. In capitalist cities, space and the built environment are both the outcome of ongoing struggles, as well as an arena for new practices of politics and social life. The state, in turn, ensures the reproduction of the dominant spatial practices – private ownership, profitable land uses, and stable property values – through technologies such as cadastral mapping, revenue surveys, and urban planning.

It is within this “theatre of conflict” over land and property relations that Dossal’s spatial history of the colonial and postcolonial city unfolds. Divided into two sections – on agrarian Bombay until 1860 and industrial Bombay until the present, respectively – the book seeks to situate Bombay’s urban history in the historical transition from “feudalism to capitalism”. The large format, coffee-table book ambitiously claims to chronicle from “1660 to Present Times” in nine chapters. However the real heart of the study is from around 1790 to 1940, or about 150 years (Chapters 4 to which span the rise of Bombay from an archipelago of agricultural-fishing islands to one of Asia’s largest industrial metropolises. The first three chapters chronicle the British acquisition of Bombay from the Portugese, and early efforts by British governors to protect and fortify their settlement, and extend their legal sovereignty over the city and its inhabitants. In the new courts instituted by the British in the 18^th century, a modern form of legal hegemony over land transactions was sought through instituting a “rule of property” by which the colonial state would supersede earlier Indian and Portugese tenures, neutralize the power of landlords and tenants, and establish Government as the ultimate “lords of the land”.

More…

Slumdog Millionaire has been running since September at the cinema across the street from my apartment in Cambridge. I enjoyed the film when I finally saw it in December, despite the cliched invocation of Bollywood in the concluding song and Danny Boyle’s populism — the last scene of Trainspotting, where Renton “chooses life” by robbing his heroin addict mates from Glasgow, was more my style. But melodrama has its uses. Watching Jamal and Latika dance on the platforms of Victoria Terminus in the film’s finale reminded me of the protective grandeur of India’s greatest railway station, in which a few weeks before 56 people had been shot by gunmen in the 26/11 terrorist attacks on Mumbai.

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 Hindu has scanned the entire dossier of evidence related to the terrorist attacks on Mumbai on 26-28 November. Their servers seem to be overwhelmed with requests, so I have cached the PDFs for downloading here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 and all parts archived.

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.

Experts, journalists, and film-makers are seeing motherships everywhere.

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.