Mumbai Fables Read online

  In the dream world of planners, Bombay appeared primarily as a configuration of industries, buildings, houses, and streets, a system of production, communication, and circulation. This was evident from the very beginning of urban planning in Bombay. Thus, when the panel on town planning issued a report in 1946, it bemoaned the magnitude of urban problems: disorganized growth; acute traffic congestion; narrow and crooked lanes and side lanes; insufficient, unsanitary, and overcrowded housing; congested and obsolescent areas; unsightly buildings; and inadequate public infrastructure for water and sewage.21 The existence of these problems reflected unplanned growth and required, according to the committee, a regional “master plan” that would impart coherence to Bombay’s future development. A regional master plan was expected to achieve the objective of ordered development by reorganizing the physical space. In the committee’s view, Bombay’s problems of congestion, overcrowding, unsightly buildings, and unsanitary and inadequate housing were fundamentally spatial. The committee used symbolically rich images of sewage and waste, densely packed slums, and traffic-snarled city streets to express a sense of India’s shortcomings as a nation. On the one hand, there was a deep belief in the nation’s existence; on the other hand, the emotively charged images of poverty, congestion, and filth questioned the fullness of identity and prepared the ground for the manipulation of urban space according to a set of functions and needs. “Every acre of land must be rightly used to balance the everyday requirements of the population in respect of work, industry, housing, recreation (both physical and mental), transport and communication and amenities.”22

  The French theorist Henri Lefebvre writes that planners, urbanists, and social engineers operate with what he calls representations of space.23 Such representations conceptualize space according to self-referential understandings and ideologies linked to production relations. Specific spatial forms of society and the lived experience of space appear through the lens of concepts and codes appropriate for the dominant social order. Under capitalism, planners represent particular social spaces—factories, offices, homes, schools, and so on—and the symbolic forms through which such spaces are lived as points on a grid of abstract space. Leached of practices and meanings, space appears abstract because capitalism erases qualitative distinctions and reduces them into homogeneous units of exchange value. Land comes into view as undifferentiated space, ready for the planners’ cartographic pencil, so that the city can be visualized as a well-coordinated and balanced organism of capitalist industrialization.

  Just such a concept of space lay behind the Bombay planners’ dissatisfaction with the city’s unplanned growth. Expansion without regional master planning meant that urbanization and industrialization could not occur efficiently. Efficiency and organization were the keywords of planners, who saw inefficiency and confusion everywhere in Bombay. They noted that industrial units were being established in the suburbs, which would be followed by the construction of housing, creating visible disorganization and inconvenience. The specter was urban sprawl. “What waste! What inconvenience!” Modak and Mayer exclaimed. They warned that the situation was worsening so speedily that unless a regional master plan was adopted, “Bombay will grow just as an industrial enterprise used to grow, adding a building here and a shed there and a godown somewhere else—the result—inefficient and obsolete development competitively at a handicap with modern industries.”24

  The metaphorical comparison of the city with industry was no accident; the planners were consciously planning the city as a space of industrial capitalism. Organizing such a space required the strict control of land use because land was “the basic commodity in which the town planner deals.”25 Control over land use permitted the planners to outline the projected city as orderly and efficient. There was attention to questions of zoning—the location of the heavy and light industries, the site for stables and tanneries—and provision for green spaces. The problem of housing received prominent attention. This was no surprise in a city where the housing shortage was dramatized by densely packed chawls. Both colonial officials and the Indian intelligentsia had long lamented the lack of adequate housing for the poor. Given the self-representation of nationalist planning as a project for the “people,” the plan could not and did not ignore this issue. Describing housing as the “dynamics of planning—the core of planning,”26 it projected the construction of a substantial number of low-income housing units, surrounded by parks and schools, to improve the “health and morals” of the poor. Bombay’s open spaces and suburban towns were expected to accommodate the growing population, with an efficient transportation system linking the suburbs to the city. Modak and Mayer imagined Bombay as a city in motion and recommended the expansion of east-west transportation links to foster an orderly westward settlement and the development of satellite towns.

  Although Modak and Mayer modestly stated that their plan was not a “final detailed blue-print” but an “envelope” to be filled with details,27 there is little doubt about its ambition. The idea was to reengineer an organic urban space to meet the needs of capitalist industrialization. Naturally, such a project of planning was a dream of the city as a grid of functions. Efficiency, need, function, and order were its watchwords. Plans for housing addressed a need, rather than the rich and symbolic sense of home. The provision for the expansion of rail and road networks was meant to answer the demand for the efficient movement of people and the orderly development of the industrializing city, rather than speaking to the cultural experience of mobility and speed. Zoning was aimed at the spatial organization of work and life, and not the practices and experiences of daily living. Unsuited to dealing with the practices and experiences of space and time, the language of the planners focused on systematic and orderly functions and the needs of industrial urbanization. Social problems appeared through the lens of space, and their resolution seemed to rest in the reorganization of the built environment. The ideal city, from the planners’ perspective, consisted of a closely coordinated mechanism of life, work, recreation, education, shopping, business, industry, and transportation—an efficiently functioning organism.

  The planners’ dreamscape of Bombay may appear rational and cold, but their emotional energy is palpable in the plan. Exclamation points punctuate their proposals, and the language pulsates with calls to transform the messy and muddled city into a metropolis that would function like a well-oiled machine to power India’s modern nationhood. “We must vastly improve and modernize, not de-Indianize,” wrote Modak and Mayer.28 Bombay was to be both a modern and an Indian metropolis. The claim was that modernist ideas were consistent with the nation, that applying Western urban planning methods to Bombay did not undermine its Indianness. So, Modak and Mayer presented their plan as a product of Indian knowledge and foreign experience. They said little about the content of Indian knowledge, except to state that the plan took into account India’s and Bombay’s conditions while proposing “the most modern solutions” that avoided the mistakes committed in Europe and the United States.

  The master plan shared and expressed the nationalist fantasy of modernization. India’s nationalist leaders visualized the fulfillment of the independent nation in the industrial modernization of society through planning.29 This fantasy was a response to their view that India’s poverty, economic underdevelopment, urban congestion, and transportation bottlenecks reflected the nation’s shortcomings—the lack of full-scale industrialization, the absence of scientific agriculture, the deficiency of modern infrastructure, and so on. Planning was the means to overcome these deficiencies; it was to be the instrument of the desire to overcome “backwardness” and to realize the pleasure of the modern nation. India was to be modern and different, at once embodying national traditions and industrial and technological modernity because the two were, in fact, compatible.

  One way in which the planners incorporated Indianness in their imagined metropolis was to treat it as a matter of architectural design and aesthetics. In JIIA and MARG, archit
ects frequently debated the merits of revivalist versus modern architecture. Most rejected a return to precolonial architectural styles, but almost everyone agreed that modern architecture must maintain a link to India’s past: Modern housing must express the character of the place in its style. Geography was yet another way for urban design to incorporate the character of the place. Thus, urban planners returned again and again to representing the dream metropolis as a city nestled between the hills and the sea. In 1948 Modak and Mayer urged a creative use of the sea and the hills to formulate a plan with emotional and aesthetic appeal: “People want to live in a great City, a City of dignity, grace, and inspiration; not only an efficient City.”30

  Seventeen years later, Charles Correa, Pravina Mehta, and Shirish Patel returned to the image of the city on the water and offered their plan for New Bombay as an alternative that would overcome the sense of lack expressed by images of congestion, crowding, and sprawl.31

  THE DREAM TEXT OF NEW BOMBAY

  In 1964 the BMC issued a development plan for Bombay.32 The municipal plan, meant to update the Modak and Mayer master plan, was preceded by the publication of a report by a study group appointed by the government to study the problems of the city. Headed by S. G. Barve, secretary of the Public Works Department, the group included N. V. Modak, the housing commissioner, the director of industries, the deputy secretary of the Public Works Department, and representatives of the BMC, Railways, Indian Merchants’ Chamber, and Port Trust. As the group’s composition suggests, the government’s guiding concern was to improve the city as an industrial space. Accordingly, the group was instructed to consider problems relating to traffic congestion, scarcity of housing and the lack of open spaces and playing fields, and the overconcentration of industry in the metropolitan and suburban areas.33 The group concluded that most of the city’s problems were created by “drift,” but that they were surmountable by “a planned approach and machinery for bringing about the necessary measure of coordination.”34 As the group noted, its proposals were not new; the novelty lay in their offer of an overall framework for understanding the problems and of suggesting a coordinated plan for implementing measures to realize a lower population density, decentralization of industry, an efficient communication system, and an increase in housing and open spaces.35

  The BMC plan of 1964 went over the same ground. Like the study group, it focused on industry, transportation, housing, and open spaces. Declaring that the city had grown much beyond what the 1948 master plan had visualized, the municipal authorities advanced their proposal as the means for realizing “Bombay the beautiful.”36 Once again, the culprit identified was haphazard and unplanned development. The BMC plan acknowledged and listed previous attempts to shape and order growth but stated that none had been comprehensive. Even the Modak and Mayer plan of 1948, it argued, “was not a complete Master Plan but a preliminary guide for further detailed study of the areas earmarked for different purposes.”37 As opposed to these earlier attempts, the BMC plan proposed a full-scale restructuring of the Greater Bombay region by zoning, developing suburbs to absorb population growth, decentralizing industry, and developing the urban infrastructure. Together, these proposals were presented as “elements of a single community design.”38

  The critics were not impressed. A newspaper article derisively declared that the municipal master plan was “no master plan at all” but “a pot-pourri of various regional and district survey maps grouped together incoherently with a palliative sprinkling of unimportant land-use recommendations such as for car parks, municipal schools, graveyards and dumpyards.”39 Correa, Mehta, and Patel were not impressed either; they wrote a letter to the municipal authorities—taking the invitation for public comment seriously—and laid out an alternative plan for building a twin city on the mainland.40 Their letter went unanswered.

  Possibly India’s best-known architect today, Charles Correa studied architecture at the University of Michigan and MIT and established a practice in Bombay in 1958. Shirish Patel, a civil engineer, was educated at Cambridge and established his engineering consultancy firm in Bombay in 1960. Pravina Mehta, an architect and planner trained in the United States, formed the third member of this team of young urbanists who deeply believed in their fresh, modernist planning ideals. Even before the BMC plan was published, Correa and Patel began discussing Bombay’s problems. They agreed that the issue was not population growth but the constraints imposed by the narrow strip of land on which the city was situated. “One look at the map, and you knew that the answer was to strike eastwards onto the mainland rather than perpetuate the existing North-South axis.”41 Correa and Patel started discussing the alternative and brought in Mehta, whom they knew as a thoughtful planner. After the BMC published its plan, the three experts agreed that it was flawed in persisting with the north-south tunnel vision of the city. They wrote to the municipal authorities suggesting a twin city on the mainland instead. The BMC ignored their letter, but an assistant editor at the Times of India who knew Mehta agreed to publish it. After its publication,42 Mulk Raj Anand offered to showcase an expanded version as an alternative in a MARG issue devoted to the consideration of the BMC plan.43

  Correa, Patel, and Mehta advanced their plan for the twin city of New Bombay as a comprehensive and radical alternative to the existing planning ideas on Bombay, all of which proposed extending the city northward. They rejected the 1948 proposal by Modak and Mayer to build satellite towns encircling the Island City as a practical and effective measure to develop Bombay as a metropolitan region. They believed that satellite towns would be impractical and, without expensive civic facilities, would become shantytowns. The 1964 BMC plan was no better, for it too was burdened with the idea of northward growth.

  The idea of striking out eastward to the mainland was not new. The first to suggest it was H. Foster King, a prominent Bombay architect and a partner in the firm of Gregson, Batley and King, who was elected several times as the president of the Indian Institute of Architects. In an address to the institute on June 14, 1945, he said: “Would it not be wiser to boldly strike out laterally in an eastward direction across the harbour to the inviting mainland beyond rather than unimaginatively persist in increasing our civic problems of traffic, population trends, zoning and health by not deviating from a vertical northerly advance which leads appreciably further and further away from the heart of the city?”44 It is not clear whether Correa and his associates were aware of King’s suggestion, but they certainly knew of the Barve study group’s recommendation in 1959 to build a bridge over the Thane Creek to connect the city and the mainland, and they seized on it to propose the twin city.

  Though the idea was not new, no one had previously proposed building an entirely new urban system. There was something breathtakingly bold about the plan to create another metropolitan center, one with equal prestige and importance to the Island City, which would bring about equilibrium. The authors outlined the idea of the new city with numerous charts, graphs, and maps and offered comprehensive proposals to link the island with the mainland by rail, roads, and bridges, projecting Bombay as an integrated metropolitan industrial region. A regional plan based on the idea of the twin city, their plan promised, would rescue millions from the asphalt jungle in which they currently lived and make Bombay once again the splendid “city on the sea” that it once was. People who spent most of their lives in the interior of the island would experience the harbor and the sea as part of their daily lives. With the Elephanta Caves standing at the center of the twin cities and exuding a sense of the past, one would enter the harbor to see the city on both sides—“on the one side extending over the island, and on the other rising above its shores into the hills beyond.”45

  The New Bombay plan was a richly embroidered dream text. A visual feast of beautifully produced maps, charts, and graphs, it presented the planned metropolis in the alluring image of the city by the water. A society imagined as a physical space integrated by ferries, bridges, rail, and road and organiz
ed into parks, new housing, business centers, and industrial regions was the stuff of dreams.

  Not surprisingly, the New Bombay plan received the full-throated endorsement of Anand. Ruefully noting that the city had neglected the “orchards of azure sea water around the island,” he enthusiastically endorsed the idea of a twin city connected by the ocean.46 He implored his readers to think of Bombay’s future with vision.

  Let us not build blind alleys. Let us open out to gardens, vistas, utilities, gathering places, schools, hospitals, on the hitherto neglected spaces, away from the congested “Fort” of the bygone era, until many “Xanadus” grow beyond the dream of Kubla Khan, nearer our own dreams for a city worthy of an emergent new world, beyond the concepts of London, Paris and New York, to our own inner aspirations towards the “city beautiful.” Let us have the courage to dream: For in dreams begins responsibility.47

  7.2. The Twin City plan.

  Over the next several years after the publication of the New Bombay Plan in MARG, support for the twin city idea grew.48 A number of government-appointed bodies incorporated its suggestions, but no concrete steps to implement it were taken until Patel and Correa had a chance conversation by the swimming pool with V. Srinivasan, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer.49 When Patel complained that the plan was tied up in committees, Srinivasan, who headed the State Industrial Corporation of Maharashtra (SICOM), came up with a solution. In 1970 he created the City Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) as a subsidiary of SICOM, charged with implementing the New Bombay plan. J. B. D’Souza, an upright IAS officer, was appointed as CIDCO’s managing director, with Shirish Patel as the chief planner.