Mumbai Fables Page 25
In an attempt to make up for Desai’s loss, the CPI nominated his widow, Sarojini Desai, as a candidate for the special election held in October 1970. A thirteen-party combination, including the ruling Congress Party, supported her candidature. The Sena put up Wamanrao Mahadik, a sitting member of the Bombay Municipal Corporation, who was once a clerk in the municipal body. Right-wing parties came out in support of Mahadik. The election was symbolically important, and it was bitterly fought.
Mary Katzenstein, an American scholar who visited the Sena and CPI offices two days before the election, provides telling portraits of the two offices.
The Sena offices were jubilant, crowded, and noisy. The CPI ofice was half-empty, the workers muted. The contrast could not have been more stark. At the Sena office, the first object to meet the eye—as in most Sena offices—was a garlanded print of Shivaji. . . . The walls were plastered with photos of Mahadik and Thackeray. . . . Only a couple of those present appeared older than forty. The rest were young boys in their teens and early twenties. Constant chatter—all in Marathi—jokes, and an occasional excited command filled the office. A few workers exclaimed in a manner reminiscent of the ebullience of an athletic competition: “We’ll show them—the red flag will never fly again in Bombay.”
The visit to the CPI headquarters revealed an entirely different scene. A half-dozen workers sat around a table. . . . A handful of children and young teenagers came in—and were introduced as the children of several of the party workers. The workers were almost all in their forties and fifties. On the walls were several posters, including one, slightly yellowed at the edges, of Lenin as a young man. . . . The party workers sitting in the office included several women—a marked contrast to the all-male group in the Sena office. The atmosphere was somber and studied. Two men debated a point about the campaign procedure—in English, although both were Maharashtrians. The visitors were quickly asked to sit down and tea was immediately brought. . . . Those gathered around were uninterested in making predictions or even in engaging in the usual campaign denunciations of the other party; instead, a tense discussion was struck up about the historical role of the party in the Bombay trade union movement. Two workers vehemently and openly disagreed—an occurrence almost never witnessed in public view in a Shiv Sena office.103
There it was, the stark contrast between the youthful, populist politics of the Sena and the politics of reason in the Communist Party office. When the election results were announced on October 18, 1970, Mahadik had narrowly edged out Desai’s widow by 1,679 votes out of the nearly 62,000 votes cast.104 The Sena had gained its first legislator, at the expense of the Communists.
Desai’s murder was a turning point. The Communists were never again to claim Girangaon as a red city. The political landscape of the city was transformed. The Left and liberal intelligentsia bemoaned the death of the city of reasoned discussion and debate. A new mode of politics, whose adherents spouted populist reason, had made a decisive entry. The Sena’s critics denied that Thackeray’s outfit was a political party, deriding it as a gang of the lumpen proletariat. Ironically, Thackeray too claimed that the Shiv Sena was not a political party, stating that it was antipolitics and antipoliticians. According to him, the Shiv Sena was an upsurge of the people. This upsurge did not achieve a dominant presence until the late 1980s, when it made common cause with the anti-Muslim Hindu nationalist politics. But by 1970, it had served notice that its style of antidemocratic and populist politics of the Marathi manoos was here to stay. It was a mode of political mobilization that absorbed individuals in the collective “popular will” and unleashed it against the “outsiders” and elites to realize the fantasy of a Marathi Bombay.
The chief architect of this fundamental change in Bombay’s political landscape was Thackeray. Supremely contemptuous of the prevalent political order, he was the original “angry young man.” Long before the superstar Amitabh Bachchan made the screen image of the young underclass urban vigilante famous in the 1970s, Thackeray had made a forceful entry into the city as an angry, irreverent, and defiant voice of the people.
7
PLANNING AND DREAMING
In 1965 MARG, a Bombay journal of art and architecture, published an issue entitled “Bombay: Planning and Dreaming.” Showcasing plans prepared by three young professionals, Charles Correa, Pravina Mehta, and Shirish Patel, the issue proposed the development of a twin city for Bombay. The editorial by Mulk Raj Anand, an acclaimed writer and the journal’s editor, implored the city to pick up the courage to dream up a worthy metropolis. He wrote that dreaming was no idle activity, for “in dreams begins responsibility.”1 The responsibility to plan Bombay’s future, therefore, had to begin as dreams, and planning was dreaming.
Anand issued this incitement to dream an ideal city at a time when independent India was less than two decades old. The national mythology, which still enjoyed authority at that time, held that the village, and not the city, defined India. According to the nationalist myth, this was not simply because most Indians lived in the countryside but because the village epitomized India’s cultural essence. Although nationalism took shape in cities and the leaders lived in urban areas, the cultural imagination of India identified the soul of nationhood in the village. Gandhi, as is well known, regarded the city as the expression of a modern civilization alien to India. For him, the nation’s true spirit resided in the simple human relations of the village community.2 Even Nehru was not exempt from this thought, writing of the mythic “Bharat Mata” (Mother India) in the countryside, among the peasantry.3 Though no longer a self-contained community, “the village still holds together by some invisible link and old memories revive.”4
Yet, if villages were where India existed in all its vividness, where “fine types” of men and beautiful women reminded him of the ancient frescoes that had endured, they were also places of backwardness and superstition. In a letter to Gandhi in 1945, Nehru wrote: “I do not understand why a village should embody truth and nonviolence. A village, normally speaking, is a backward environment.”5 The village may have represented India’s soul, but its existence as a modern nation required industrialization and urbanization.6 Interestingly, Nehru sings no paeans to the city, for it was not in the existing city but in a planned urbanization spearheaded by a modernizing state that he saw India’s future. Urbanization meant something larger and more abstract than what could be found in the existing city. Though Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and other cities had served as cradles of modern thought and life, Nehru saw them as expressions of colonial history; they were not incipient, even if imperfect, blueprints for the future. The shining example of the future was Chandigarh, the modernist city commissioned by the nation-state and designed by Le Corbusier. As the expression of an abstractly conceived model of urbanization, it represented a higher rationality than did any existing Indian city. The source and instrument of this true and universal reason was the nation-state, which stood poised to steer India toward modern nationhood through industrialization and urbanization.
With the nation-state defined as the realization of the modern nation, planning emerged as the key instrument for achieving this condition. Chandigarh demonstrated this faith in planning. Even if there was only one Chandigarh, or only one Brasilia, underlying it was the authority of the modernist ideal of a rationally planned urban organism. Planning enjoyed the imprimatur of science; it was viewed as a technical exercise, fashioned by experts and governed by scientific principles that could be applied just as easily to economic and social structures as it was to nature. The cultural prestige of science extended to urban planning as well, and urban planners and architects claimed authority as experts engaged in reengineering space by applying their scientific knowledge. The Athens Charter of the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), published by Le Corbusier in 1942, was an expression of this modernist claim. Aimed at engineering the city as an industrial product, as a machine with social functions, the Athens Charter projected planning as a
scientific enterprise designed to reengineer urban life rationally and efficiently.7 This vision of manufacturing urban life took shape and struck a chord in the immediate postwar era, which was characterized by unprecedented urbanization throughout the world.8 Chandigarh and Brasilia were its most spectacular expressions because they were built from scratch, but urban planning’s authority and influence extended well beyond these two experiments.
The exuberant spirit of planning also gripped Bombay’s urbanists. Leading intellectuals, architects, and planners breathlessly promoted the idea of the twin city as a rational solution to Bombay’s problems of haphazard growth and urban congestion. They challenged the state to dream big. Only bold planning, they argued, could build an orderly and efficient urban society. Utilizing their status and influence as experts, the urban planners enlisted the modernizing state in its dream of New Bombay. But their dream repressed the reality of politics and society. And most crucially, they forgot the powerful force of greed.
TOWARD URBAN PLANNING
As in other countries, India also experienced rapid urbanization after Independence and Partition in 1947. With men and women flocking to cities and towns in search of economic opportunities, Bombay’s population grew from 1.49 million in 1941 to 2.3 million in 1951.9 A share of this increase was also due to the influx of refugees who were fleeing from the Partition violence. The surging urban population and expanding city sharpened the sense of an urban crisis, already reverberating in the early 1940s. J. F. Bulsara, a commentator on urban affairs, bemoaned “two hundred and eighty seven years of unplanned building.”10 His text catalogs Bombay’s problems—its haphazard growth, the “cheerless chawls and bleak block-houses,” the amorphous architectural map, and a “preponderant illiterate population” that lacks the art of living together in the city and whose “primitive mental condition” aggravates the problems of filth. He paints a picture of ethnic groups living in ethnically segmented neighborhoods—Gujaratis, Banias, Bhatias, and Jains in Kalbadevi, Bhuleshwar, Ghatkopar, and Borivili; the Maharashtrian middle classes at Girgaum, Thakurwar, and Shivaji Park; the South Indians at Matunga; the Muslims at Mohammad Ali Road, Bhendi Bazaar, and Abdul Rahman and Sheikh Memon Streets; the Parsis at Colaba, Tardeo, and Dadar; the Jews at Israel and Samuel Streets; and the Europeans in Colaba and Malabar and Cumbala Hills. These communities found spiritual enjoyment in their places of worship and culture, but not in the fractured civic life. The unplanned and shapeless city offered only the “spurious attractions” of glittering lights, the silver screen and celluloid entertainment, the excitement of the racecourse and gambling, “the universal craze for getting rich,” and the “soul-destroying chase of overnight fortunes.”11
Bulsara continues his litany, moving from detailing the problems of housing, to spatial disorganization, to community divisions, to “spurious” attractions in the city. It is a picture of whole-scale urban crisis. This was not peculiar to him; the newspapers of the period regularly highlighted the mounting disorder in the city. Bombay, which went through a building boom in the thirties and the forties, had a sizable number of engineers and architects who also expressed concern about the city’s future. Their concern was reflected in the JIIA (Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects) and MARG. Both journals published a number of articles that kept up a steady drumbeat of warnings about the impending urban disaster caused by unplanned growth. The solution to Bombay’s problems, Bulsara argued, lay in systematic planning, based on a scientific survey of the city’s problems taken as a whole.
A particularly passionate advocate of modernist planning was MARG, under Mulk Raj Anand’s editorship. A writer and novelist in the tradition of social realism, Anand had published an impressive social realist novel, Untouchable, in 1935, followed by Coolie in 1947, both of which evoked the national and class ferment in Bombay. Anand was not only a novelist but also a cosmopolitan intellectual. He had studied in England in the 1920s, earning an undergraduate degree from University College, London, and a doctorate in philosophy from Cambridge University. After completing his education, he remained in London, pursuing a literary career. He worked for T. S. Eliot’s journal Criterion and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, fraternized with the Bloomsbury writers, turned to Marxism, and drafted the manifesto of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association.12
On his return to India in 1945, Anand became an important part of Bombay’s intellectual circuit. His circle included the painters Francis Newton Souza, S. H. Raza, M. F. Hussain, and K. H. Ara and the sculptor S. K. Bakre of the Progressive Artists’ Group. Supported by exiled Central European Jewish intellectuals and Indian benefactors in Bombay, these artists, all of whom were migrants to the city, were beating down the doors of the city’s art establishments with their modernist work. In place of the spiritualism and revivalism of the nationalist artists of the Bengal School and the academicism of the colonial school, they saw their artwork, following the German Expressionists, as conceptual “expressions” of their inner emotions and concepts. Rather than articulating the nation’s cultural essence, they viewed themselves as artists participating in the universal discourse of art. Their modernism avoided the Indian/Western trap by balancing nationalism with universalism, by inhabiting a form of cosmopolitanism that assumed India’s national sovereignty and equality in a world of nations.13 It was national without being anticosmopolitan, and it was cosmopolitan without being antinational.
Anand founded MARG in 1946 with precisely this idea of nation-based cosmopolitanism. Its mission was to promote modern, progressive thinking on art, architecture, and modern life in the future free Indian nation. Accordingly, it was a platform for the art produced by the Progressive Artists Group in Bombay. The same impulse drove its advocacy of modernist urban planning. The word marg means “pathway” in Hindi, but it was also an acronym for the Modern Architectural Research Group, a name that was modeled after the Modern Architectural Research Society of architects and planners in London.14 To highlight the promise of modern architecture and urban planning, MARG published the Athens Charter of CIAM as well as contributions from Le Corbusier and other prominent international architects and planners.15 Apparently, it was Anand who planted the idea of building Chandigarh and recommended Le Corbusier’s name as the architect for the project.16
While being partly responsible for the first of the two largest urban projects undertaken in postcolonial India, Anand was also laying the foundation for the second—New Bombay (now Navi Mumbai)—by heavily promoting the cause of modern architecture and planning. In an editorial published in 1947, Anand extolled the virtues of American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright for revolutionizing urban planning by incorporating science and industry in their designs.17 He argued that what India needed was planning from this new perspective. The Bombay architects, engineers, and intelligentsia associated with MARG and JIIA breathed the heady air of a big city in the throes of change. If the city’s problems were immense in their eyes, so was the power of urban planning, whose cause they zealously championed.
7.1. Mulk Raj Anand with Le Corbusier in the architect’s studio in 1953. Courtesy: Shirin Vajifdar.
As the modernist intelligentsia began to press for urban planning, the government moved in the same direction. In 1945 the government appointed the Bombay City and Suburbs Post-war Development Committee to deal with the issue of “Greater Bombay” and town planning of the suburbs. Composed largely of government officials, the committee appointed three subcommittees on town planning, housing, and traffic and railways, asking each to prepare a report. Even before the panel on town planning published its report, criticism came forth fast and furious. The JIIA berated the committee for not seeking the expertise of architects and town planners. How could the Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC) develop an organic plan to tackle the problems of slums, filth, overcrowding, and traffic congestion without the expert advice of planners? “Instead of eradicating the disease at the center, the fungus [was] being allowed to spread outward.” The t
arget of their ire was the BMC, which was accused of being blissfully ignorant of the benefits of planning.18 When the town planning panel eventually published its report, MARG roundly criticized it for “disjointed planning” and for overlooking the needs of “the city as an organic unit.”19 Sarcastically applauding the recommendation for the preparation of a master plan, the journal noted that it was something that “the enlightened architects in the city had been urging the authorities [to do] for a long time.”
MARG and JIIA got what they wanted when N. V. Modak, a BMC engineer, and Albert Mayer, an American town planner and architect, prepared an outline for a master plan in 1948. This was a significant development. The clamor for experts had been heard and heeded. The BMC had long claimed its authority over planning as a representative body of the citizenry. However limited this assertion may have been under colonial rule, there is no denying the fact that the BMC had exercised its authority over Bombay’s development as a public body. Faced with the torrent of criticism that greeted its initial efforts, however, it ceded the domain of urban knowledge to the technocratic elite. Experts, not the urban citizenry, were to decide Bombay’s future.
PLANNERS AS DREAMERS
The elevation of the planners’ authority, ironically, came close on the heels of independence in 1947. The nationalists assumed power claiming that the nation, not alien rulers, must exercise authority over India. But once India was independent, the power to decide Bombay’s future was ceded to the technocrats, bypassing the citizens. MARG had been pushing the case for architects even before independence. In the editorial of the inaugural 1946 issue, entitled “Planning and Dreaming,” Anand wrote in soaring rhetoric about dreaming a future: “Planning is like dreaming—dreaming of a new world.” Architects and urban planners were to dream of ways to usher in the good life, to produce “the blue prints of a new social order.” The future lay with architects because they could plan India’s cities on a scientific basis. “It is because an architect seems to us a symbol of the resurgent India, that the Modern Architectural Research Group has come forward to sponsor this magazine of architecture and art.”20