Mumbai Fables Page 33
Neel’s life in Mumbai speaks to the essence of the city’s fabled history. It evokes both its alluring promise and the mythic struggles of immigrants to survive and forge the modern city as society. Excess characterizes Mumbai—excesses of power and ambition, of profiteering and exploitation, of aspirations for justice and equality in the face of terrible injustice and inequality. It is, as Suketu Mehta says, a “maximum city.” How could it not be? Consider its forging as a thriving metropolis out of seven islets. Power, ambition, fantasy, and violence—all had to be enlisted on an extraordinary scale. Its stories contain a surfeit of dreams and nightmares, lofty aspirations of cosmopolitan openness and violent nativist and communal passions. These are what pulsate Mumbai with energy and dynamism.
Mumbai grows unabated, a megacity devouring mangroves, swallowing the graceful line of bungalows, covering the landscape with apartment towers and shantytowns, and enveloping it all in its polluted air. The infrastructure creaks under the growing population pressure. The city appears out of control, its urbanism splintered by nativism and communalism. Where the aging Bal Thackeray and the Shiv Sena have lost some of their roar, Thackeray’s nephew, Raj Thackeray, has picked up the slack. His Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) has grown from strength to strength, eating into the support of the Shiv Sena from which he broke away. A cartoonist like his uncle, Raj Thackeray rides the tiger of populist politics by targeting North Indian immigrants. These contemporary excesses produce despair and pronouncements of the city’s death. But as Gillian Tindall reminds us, Mumbai’s problems are due not to its weakness and decline but to its strength and dynamism.3 The city’s troubles mount because Mumbai continues to draw people by its promise.
VISION MUMBAI
If mounting problems produce despair, they also generate grand visions. A new vision for Mumbai appeared in 2003. It was based on a study conducted by McKinsey and Company for Bombay First, a nongovernmental organization of business leaders. Carried out in cooperation with the relevant government bodies, the study published a report entitled Vision Mumbai: Transforming Mumbai into a World-Class City. The consultants developed a database and framework for “benchmarking Mumbai” and for the “calibration” of its performance under different parameters along a spectrum—from “poor” to “average” to “above average” to “finally world class.” In McKinsey’s judgment, the city’s slipping economic growth and quality of life placed it at the lower end of the range on a number of categories. Its recommendation? A change in Mumbai’s “mind-set.” Instead of the timid attempts at “incremental improvement and debottlenecking,” it advocated bold “step jumps.”4
The Maharashtra government promptly succumbed to the seductive vision of Mumbai’s rise to “world-class” status. The chief minister appointed a task force composed of senior government officials and Bombay First’s representative, which endorsed the “world-class” aspiration. Enumerating the city’s woes, it painted a picture of Mumbai hovering “perpetually on the brink of collapse, with its swelling population, deteriorating environment, income disparities and lack of funds.” The city risked “entering the graveyard of failed cities” unless it took command of its future. Fortunately, there was hope. It recommended seizing the potential presented by globalization for increased trade and “the transfer across geographies of investment, technology and talent” and proposed a ten-year strategic plan to improve governance, accelerate economic growth, construct affordable housing, and develop infrastructure. If financed by a $40 billion investment and fast-tracked by a series of “quick wins” to secure public support, the plan would turn Mumbai into a world-class city by 2013. “The world is watching. Mumbai is waiting.”5
Here it is once again, an enticing planned vision of the future city. However, unlike the modernist twin-city project, this initiative comes not from architects and urban planners but from business leaders and a global consultancy firm. Echoing the ascendancy of the market-based ideology, the proposal advocates a “public-private” partnership, rather than a public undertaking. The market orientation is particularly visible in its proposals for private capital-based slum rehabilitation. Unfairly holding slums responsible for bottling up Mumbai’s growth, the document recommends offering builders incentives to construct towers to house the slum dwellers. Particular attention is showered on Dharavi—“Asia’s largest slum”—three sectors of which are to be cleared and developed as office and commercial space. With its proximity to the corporate Bandra-Kurla complex, Dharavi is a real estate El Dorado, prompting attempts to drive away slum dwellers. The city beautiful can be built only by chasing away the poor with the help of the market, supplemented by evictions and demolitions that miraculously followed the unveiling of “Vision Mumbai.” Several critics charge that the “world-class city” is a dream sold to facilitate the corporate takeover of the city’s future.6
The “Vision Mumbai” focus on housing is no accident. Over sixty percent of Mumbai’s population lives in slums. The density of the city’s population is 29,000 per square kilometer, the highest in the world—compared with 13,000 in Shanghai, 10,000 in New York City, and 5,000 in London. Break it down further, and the figure for the densest Mumbai ward climbs to over 100,000. The colonial state had resorted to the ruse of a housing shortage to launch the Backbay reclamation, a ploy that was used by the postcolonial government in the 1960s to push for further seizure of land from the sea. The aspiration to become a world-class city returned to this tried-and-tested tactic in proposing slum rehabilitation. Builders enthusiastically endorsed the move. Why would they not? The Dharavi Rehabilitation Project is a gold mine for them. As a newspaper comment points out: “Builders get 535 acres of prime land, in return for providing free housing to 52,000 families—plus hospitals, schools, international craft villages, peace parks, art galleries, an experimental theatre and a cricket museum!” But since each “apartment” measures only 21 square meters, and the minimum distance between two buildings is only 5 meters, there will be 1.8 million square meters that the builders may sell in the commercial market. Furthermore, the government has granted an unprecedented floor space index of 4.1—as opposed to the standard 1.3—to attract developers. “No wonder the sharks can’t wait to bite. And with Rs 2,700 crore [$574 million] expected to land in the official kitty, neither can the state government.”7
COUNTERDREAMS
Since the start of the building boom of the early 1990s, the real estate industry has aggressively sold the dream of owning a home. Glossy brochures and colorful advertisements promise richly appointed apartments equipped with the latest appliances and housed in exotically named residential complexes boasting lush green lawns and recreation facilities. Meanwhile, the developers and the government entice displaced slum dwellers with offers of marginally larger living spaces in modern towers equipped with plumbing and electricity.
Urban activists have criticized the serious shortcomings of the private capital-led makeover dreams of the city. A compelling critique also emerges in the works of Meera Devidayal, a Mumbai artist. What is different about her commentary is that it engages with the dream of a home at the level of its image. Devidayal began by collecting images circulated by newspapers and brochures from property developers. People were “being bombarded with the marketing of dreams by the media, by banks offering easy home loans, by developers offering everything from free vastu consultation [supposedly from the ancient science of construction] to British governesses.”8 Her 2003 “Dream Home” exhibition responds to the fantasies spun by real estate entrepreneurs. In canvas after canvas, Devidayal brings into view the repressed desires of the dream home. Gold Valley presents a lifeless, gray tenement building superimposed on a lush green landscape that is watered by a stream. The fantasy of luxuriant nature, the “Way to Gold Valley,” as the sign reads at the bottom of the painting, crashes against the incongruous bleak reality of the square, cagelike tenement rooms. Through the windows, we see nature mapped as numbered property lots.
Her Luxurious 1,2&3
BHK Flats is dominated by the image of a blueprint of an apartment building elevation drawing (see plate 11). The bright red tulips at the bottom suggest the dream home stored in the image. Running through the smooth surface and neat lines of the elevation is a brick crack, the trace of a demolished structure. Together with the antique lamp shade on the upper left, the crack envisions or visualizes what is hidden by the blueprint, what the new will reduce to rubble.
With an ingenious superimposition of architectural drawing over the painted surface of the canvas, Devidayal suggests the complicity of architecture in the destruction of life’s rich texture. Unmindful of the concrete experience of home, the real estate industry forges ahead by reducing it to the abstract space represented by geometric lines.
But are the experience and meaning of home in an immigrant city like Mumbai reducible to owning a dwelling? Feeling at home in the impersonal metropolis is always a challenge. This is even more so for immigrants in Mumbai. Because of their precarious livelihood in the city, they have traditionally maintained ties with their native places. Mumbai is just a mahanagari, a metropolis that poor immigrants endure to earn a living. They may live two or three generations in slums, but home is still the village or the small town they came from. Belonging is a complex emotion for those who struggle to survive amid daily injustices.
Muzaffar Ali’s 1978 Hindi film Gaman (Departure) offers a haunting perspective on the meaning of home for immigrant taxi drivers in Mumbai. We see the city from the point of view of Ghulam, a Muslim who leaves his North Indian village after the family is cheated out of its land by the landlord. Leaving behind his ailing mother and wife, he lands at the door of Lallu, a taxi driver, who is his friend from the village. Lallu warmly welcomes Ghulam, offers him some space in his shack, and then takes him on a ride to the city’s tourist attractions. Much like Neel and Bhola, they go to the Gateway, the Taj, and other sights. When Ghulam expresses his awe at Bombay’s grandeur, his friend remarks that it is grand outside but rotten inside. We are warned that things are not what they seem in the city. Sure enough, when the suburban train suddenly stops because someone has died under the tracks, a passenger remarks: “Why did he die under the train? The delay is costing me money! Just drag the carcass out. Why waste time?” When Ghulam expresses shock at this indifference, his friend says: “Give it time, you will also become indifferent.”
Ghulam does not become indifferent, but we see an impersonal city emerge through his eyes. Taxi drivers eke out a miserable living and suffer humiliations inflicted by haughty passengers and heavy-handed policemen. Lallu’s girlfriend’s old father, who drove a taxi for thirty years, is now addicted to gasoline fumes. Shots of Marine Drive and Cuffe Parade seen through the taxi window are contrasted with the squalid shantytown in which the cab drivers live. But unlike the superficial and uncaring milieu of the rich, depicted through the conversations of passengers, there is humanity and solidarity in the world of taxi drivers. Lallu not only shares his shack with his friend but also gets him jobs, first as a taxi cleaner and then as a driver. He is Hindu, and Ghulam is Muslim. But religion does not stand between their friendship. Their world is cosmopolitan. Underlying it is not some developed philosophy of cosmopolitanism but a bond formed by village links and the experience of struggling to survive in the stone-hearted city. Gaman shares this conception of Mumbai’s vernacular cosmopolitanism with Chetan Anand’s Taxi Driver (1954). But its style is realist, and the tone is melancholy. Unlike Taxi Driver’s detached observer’s perspective, Ali’s film evokes the city through the protagonist’s experience and emotions. As Ghulam drives his taxi, lost in the anxiety of gathering enough money to send home for his mother’s medical treatment, a song plays in the background:
Seene mein jalan
Aankhon mein toofaan kyon hai?
Is Shahar mein har shakhs pareshaan sa kyon hai?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Kya koi nai baat nazar aati hai hum mein?
Aainaa humein dekh ke hairan kyun hai?
[Why] this heartburn
Why these storm-filled eyes?
Why is everyone so troubled in the city?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Is there something new about me?
Why is the mirror aghast at the sight of me?
The merciless metropolis, the relentless routine of work, and the loneliness of separation from his wife have changed Ghulam. The cruel city even snatches his friend away when Lallu is killed by the hired goons of his girlfriend’s family. They are opposed to their friendship because it threatens their designs on her as a passport to wealth. There is no limit to Bombay’s inhumanity. How can Ghulam belong here? In the film’s last scene, he goes to the train station to return home. But as the engine blows its whistle, we see Ghulam watching the train leave, his face framed by a row of steel bars. Bombay is not home, but that is where he lives.
What is home, then, for the immigrant taxi drivers? In her series Tum Kab Aaoge (When Will You Come), Devidayal delves into the immigrant taxi driver’s imagined home in the city. The city’s fleet of yellow and black taxis is manned predominantly by immigrants from North India. Most live and sleep in their taxis; it is their home on wheels. In 2004 stickers entitled “Tum Kab Aaoge” started appearing on these taxis. The images varied, but all of them pictured a pining woman against the background of a lush, green countryside and mountains, with a train engine, truck, or taxi in the foreground (see plate 12). The images, with the captions reading “When Will You Come” or “When Will You Come Home,” express the immigrant’s nostalgia for home. Uncannily, the question these images pose is also the one that Ghulam hears his wife ask in Gaman as he gazes at the green countryside through the door of the train racing toward Bombay. It is a question that his wife will keep asking in her letters throughout his stay in the city.
When she noticed the same question being asked by the image on taxi stickers, Devidayal set off to explore the fantasy homes the immigrants created in their taxis by decorating them with floral and velvet seat covers, miniature shrines, stickers, and other objects. Her paintings are not a journalistic report, nor an anthropological study of the materials she encountered in taxis. Rather, they are a “pictorial take based on a play of signs which morph reality into fantasy, fluidly erasing the boundaries between the two.”9
Objects in the Mirror Are Closer than They Appear (see plate 13) blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy while insisting on their difference. The swans gliding through pristine waters, seen through the windshield, spill inside the taxi, appearing as a reflection on the dashboard, invading the inside world of the vehicle. The caption declares that the dream is closer to the dreamer than we might think, but set against the colorful yet tranquil image of swans is the darkened silhouette of the taxi driver, who watches them as images on a screen. The taxi driver’s figure is dislocated from the ground. You cannot place him in the dreamy image on the windshield. He views the swan scene as a movie, sitting in a darkened theater, retaining his separation from the dreamscape on the screen. This point is stressed by the picture of the woman to the left, who stands in the doorway against a black background, her face half covered by shadows. Serving as a reminder of what the taxi driver has left behind, her image suggests that the taxi is not his home; he is out of place. In other paintings in the series, the dreamworld seeps into the taxi driver’s body, obliterating the distinction between the dreamscape and the dreamer.
But Devidayal does not allow illusion to overwhelm reality. There is always something that breaks the reverie—the cityscape, the conspicuous yellow and black image of the taxi, the steering wheel—and underlines the distinction between fantasy and reality. Her use of mixed media on canvas—paint, photograph, and print—underscores boundaries and distinctions. She unsettles the world the painting depicts by underlining the out-of-place nature of things, by drawing attention to the fantasy, and by h
er clever use of different materials. Through these methods, her work suggests that the immigrant lives his reality in the city by assembling an imaginary home with objects around him, by putting together a world with irreconcilable things. Viewed against the illusions of home sold by the wily real estate promoters, Devidayal’s paintings pay tribute to the inventive survival tactics of Mumbai’s lonely taxi drivers.
The portrayal of a resourceful and distinctive style of everyday, popular urbanism can be discerned in Devidayal’s paintings. The world she presents in her Where I Live series is far removed from that of the architect and the urban planner. Once again, the theme is a dream home, and her subjects are poor immigrants. She does not romanticize them; nor does she share the reformer’s response of recoil and outrage at the sight of their abysmally cramped and desperate living conditions. Devidayal’s art represents not “slums” but homes.
Devidayal’s compassionate engagement with the imagination of poor migrants, with people living on the edges of survival, is evident in the very medium of her art in Where I Live. Consisting of digitally printed photographs on recycled sheets of galvanized steel, her art incorporates the material of their lived lives, of huts fabricated with used, cast-off objects. The medium captures the “everyday alchemies of Bombay’s informal sector” that “turn dross into gold, giving a second life to the broken and redundant objects of daily use.”10 She counteracts the coldness of steel by splashing its surface with color. The result is a work that not only pays tribute to the survival strategies of the poor by using recycled steel but also attributes them with richness and dynamism. Thus, in Altamount Road the bright photograph of a film star, affixed on a steel almirah, in striking contrast to the gray corrugated sheet, offers a cheerful portrayal of the poor’s patched-together home (see plate 14). The reflected images of the television, the utensils stacked on top and beside the almirah, add a colorful dimension. Devidayal does not romanticize the life of the poor. Her use of different surfaces and the spotlight on dissimilar objects draw attention to the jagged world assembled by the poor while also recognizing their creativity and desires. The portrait that emerges is of an urbanism that turns necessity into opportunity, an imagination that squeezes color and pleasure from the gray and dreary conditions of the poor in Mumbai.