Mumbai Fables Page 34
EVERYDAY TACTICS OF SURVIVAL
The clichéd description of Dharavi as “Asia’s largest slum” depicts the 175-hectare tract, housing eight hundred thousand people, as a place of misery and oppression. In the corporate and middle-class visions of Dharavi, it is an obstacle in Mumbai’s path to achieving a “world-class” status. It is for this reason that many critics in India accuse the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire of portraying Mumbai in a bad light. For them, the film is one more example of the West’s obsession with poverty and wretchedness when it comes to representing India. In fact, the critics share with the film the vision of Dharavi as an abject slum, rather than a place where the poor live and work with imagination and enterprise.
Prior to the late nineteenth century, Dharavi was a swamp inhabited by the Koli fishing community. Fishing died out as the swamp was filled. Poor migrants moved in from different parts of India, making the land habitable. Their resourcefulness transformed Dharavi into a flourishing economy. The eighteen-year-old Shamsuddin, for example, traveled all the way from Tamil Nadu to Dharavi in 1948, looking for work.11 He worked initially in his uncle’s rice-smuggling business, transporting the grain from the outskirts to the city to sell it at nearly ten times the original price. The rice business ended after a few years when his uncle moved back to the village and the cousins migrated to Pakistan. Shamsuddin survived by working first for a coal company and then at a printing press. He got married, and the couple moved into a ten-by-ten room in a “settled chawl” in 1961. A little later, Hamid, a man from his native village, arrived in Dharavi and made him a proposition. “Give me space and I’ll make chiki [sesame brittle].” Shamsuddin procured him a shack and went from shop to shop selling chiki and other snacks. When Hamid moved away to Calcutta, Shamsuddin and his wife took over the business. They learned how to make chiki, which he sold in cinemas every day, returning home late at night. They packaged it and named their product “A-1 ckiki.” It grew into a successful business employing twenty workers, who lived in the two-room chiki factory’s loft.
Shamsuddin’s story is not exceptional. Dharavi is full of such tales of migrants making a go of their lives. Their ingenuity and spirit have transformed Dharavi into a thriving economy amid poverty and squalor. Seen through the jaundiced eyes of the middle-class reformer, the city is full of only claustrophobic density, fetid drains, garbage, and ugliness. But if you open yourself to observing the drive, the enterprise, and the spirit of survival amid the incredibly wretched physical conditions, you cannot help but be uplifted. Rarely do you see idleness and despair associated with this “slum.” From the establishments manufacturing leather goods for export and selling knockoffs of designer brands on the main street to artisanal establishments in the tight inner lanes, the picture is one of pulsating energy. Recycling is a way of life and livelihood.
Dharavi is an economic success story. It has developed without any public state subsidy or assistance. Illegality thrives and is visible. Until police pressure chased him out to Tamilnadu in the mid-1980s, the notorious underworld don Vardarajan Mudaliar used to distill and distribute illicit liquor from his operating base in Dharavi. Today, although all kinds of illegal activities are openly carried out in the area, it is not infested with crime and violence, as the popular middle-class stereotype insinuates. Rather, Dharavi is a zone of booming free enterprise and a tribute to the ingenuity and hard work of the migrants, who come from everywhere in India (see plate 15). Tanners from Tamil Nadu, leatherworkers and artisans from Uttar Pradesh, potters from Gujarat, and migrants from Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Bihar, and elsewhere work in Dharavi’s amazing variety of trades, legal and illegal. Every religion is represented. Hindus, Muslims, and Christians coexist despite bouts of communal violence. Every linguistic group is present, but the language on the street is the mongrel tongue Bambaiya. A mix of all the regions from which people come, Dharavi is “allah ka gaon [God’s village],” says Khatija, the old Muslim woman who migrated from Kerala decades ago.12 It is a cosmopolitan mix brought together by dhandha—business deals, clean and shady. Dharavi is pure Mumbai.
“No master plan, urban design, zoning ordinance, construction law or expert knowledge can claim any stake in the prosperity of Dharavi.”13 Though far from perfect, it represents a form of urbanism characteristic of what architect Rahul Mehrotra calls the “kinetic city.” He distinguishes the kinetic city from the static city, which is composed of architecture and monuments built with permanent materials. The kinetic city represents the city of motion—“the kutcha city, built of temporary material”; it is temporal, a city in “constant flux.”14 In the apparent chaos of narrow streets crowded with people disgorged by suburban trains, in the constant making and remaking out of recycled materials in Dharavi, in the vital pulsating energy of the informal economy, in the exuberance and spectacle of wedding processions on the street, and in the multiple uses of space, he finds a dynamic urbanism. The vibrant urbanism of the kutcha city shares urban space with the static urbanism of the “pucca” (permanent, stable) city, colliding with it, provoking its wrath. The slum rehabilitation projects represent attempts to displace the kinetic city, to expunge its existence, and to order Mumbai to the dull discipline of the static city—to the delight of real estate magnates and the middle-class heritage activists. Fortunately, the kinetic city survives in Dharavi; Mumbai’s legendary everyday tactic of survival with wit and enterprise stubbornly persists under the looming shadow of the bulldozers of “development.”
THE LAYERED CITY
Mehrotra’s “kinetic city” is a city of layers, with multiple and successive historical slices of Mumbai coexisting in the same time and space. Henri Lefebvre wrote that urban space has a structure more like that of “flaky pastry” than like the homogeneous and isotropic space of classical mathematics.15 This is true as much of the so-called bounded places of the cities of an earlier time as it is of the new urban constellations of shopping malls and the displaced poor.
You can get a vivid sense of this layered history in Chor Bazaar (Thieves’ Market), the city’s flea market. The place has intrigued me from the very first time I set eyes on it a few years ago. Since then, I have returned several times to the dense maze of shops that are located between Sardar Patel Road and Grant Road. As you traverse the narrow lanes packed tight with vendors and stores selling a bewildering array of goods—genuine antiques and knockoffs, old coins, furniture, hardware, automotive parts, records, Hollywood and Bollywood film posters and lobby cards, shoes, clothes, and just plain junk—it becomes clear that this is no ordinary flea market. An extraordinary history is on display here. The objects on sale and the people who sell them embody the heritage of Mumbai’s urban life. Yes, it is a market, but the trade in the debris of commodities of modern life here tells stories about the city. To make sense of these narratives, I had to begin with the name.
“Let me tell you how Chor Bazaar got its name,” said Zafar Bhai, the owner of Jubilee Decorators, a shop selling antique furniture and decorative objects in Mumbai’s legendary market. The owner of another furniture shop introduced me to Zafar Bhai as an old-timer, as someone who knows and has lived through Chor Bazaar’s history. One look at this man in his seventies with his courtly manners, and you knew that there was something terribly odd and inappropriate about the bazaar’s name. The soft cadence of his elegant North Indian Hindustani language spoke of a sophisticated urbanity, not devilish thievery. But he good-humouredly accepted Chor Bazaar as the name for the market where he earns an honest living.
“You see, the name goes back to the time when the Gateway of India was built, when Queen Victoria visited Bombay.” He continued with a tale about a theft. “When her ship docked, she discovered that her violin was missing.” It was the queen who ordered that the market be rechristened Chor Bazaar after the stolen violin was found on sale on Mutton Street. “This is how the place got its name.”
Of course, Queen Victoria never set foot in Bombay. The Gateway was built to comme
morate the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1911 and was completed only in 1924. I did not point out these inaccuracies. To be sure, the story is apocryphal, and yet it contains a representation of the past, one that is very different from that which appears in the archives. Like the bazaar, which exists on the margins of the mainstream markets, this historical representation lurks outside the shadows of disciplinary history. There are no documentary records or commemorative plaques to substantiate this expression of the past; instead, it survives precariously in recycled stories as a faint impression, imperfect and obscure.
Enter the world of this past, and unexpected knowledge greets you. To begin with, let us take the colonial genealogy of the name suggested by the story. Flea markets are not unusual; all across the world one finds places for trade in the debris of modernity. But to my knowledge, nowhere are these places called Chor Bazaar. It is telling that this term was used in colonial cities to name sites for the trade in used goods. Delhi also had one with this name. Such bazaars probably followed the establishment of orderly markets where colonial subjects were expected to act as modern bourgeois consumers. But when commodities sold in the organized and official precincts are used up, they lose the legitimacy conferred by the shine of newness. Faded and worn out, when these artifacts returned from the dead to assume a second life as recycled goods, they probably appeared as illegitimate. To the British, Chor Bazaar must have seemed an appropriate name for a place where Indians (who, in any case, frequently appeared as untrustworthy and dishonest in colonial stereotypes) bought goods to live stolen lives. It is no wonder, then, that Zafar Bhai’s story pins responsibility on the British for the naming of the market.
Chor Bazaar probably followed the establishment of Crawford Market and the founding of shopping arcades on D. N. (Hornby) Road during the late nineteenth century, when the city expanded beyond the Fort precincts. The Gazetteer, published in 1909, does not mention it, suggesting that the bazaar emerged only in the early decades of the twentieth century. By this time, the cotton mills had expanded, and the city was flush with poor migrants who were employed as mill workers. Its location in an area thoroughly revamped by the City Improvement Trust during the 1910s also suggests that the market made its appearance when Bombay became a thriving industrial city. Zafar Bhai’s references to Queen Victoria (or the Prince of Wales) and the construction of the Gateway of India also suggest the same.
The apocryphal story, then, captures something of Mumbai’s colonial heritage as a modern industrial city. But it refers to a heritage that is very different from that monumentalized in the parade of Gothic Revival buildings; rather than commemorating the self-representations of British power, it registers the colonial framing of the life cycle of commodities as they changed from their state of glittering newness in shopping arcades and established markets to their condition as old, used debris in Chor Bazaar.
Modernity and debris go hand in hand. As commodity production quickens the pace of life, it also hastens the speed of obsolescence. Not only does it label existing artifacts as traditional and thus outmoded, it quickly renders its own products out of date. Commodity production, aided by advertising, constantly strives to disseminate new styles and fashions, casting away yesterday’s goods as old-fashioned, as junk. You can find these outmoded commodities in Chor Bazaar—old mariner’s compasses, cuckoo clocks, Art Deco furniture and decorative objects, film memorabilia, and a baffling assortment of other goods. Each object tells you a story of Mumbai’s urban life. Take, for example, old jazz records, which you find for sale in specialty stores. Besides telling us about the change in the recording technology and medium, the presence of these records in Chor Bazaar suggests a decline in the appreciation of jazz in Mumbai. Restaurants where jazz was regular fare until the early seventies either no longer exist or have moved on to other musical offerings. With the change in the social world that patronized jazz, the records too have moved on, ending up on the dusty shelves in Chor Bazaar. Look closely at the fusion music of Hindi films and Latin beats, and you will find the lost world of Goan musicians who were in the forefront of Western music in the city until the early seventies. Synthesizers and changes in musical taste in Hindi cinema have rendered this earlier form of musical cosmopolitanism obsolete. Visit the store selling old film magazines, posters, lobby cards, and songbooks, and you become aware of an earlier technology of advertisement, now overtaken by television and computer graphics. The bazaar is a rich archive of such discarded histories (see plate 16).
At first glance, the odd collection of old artifacts in the bazaar appears as just that—odd. But if you examine it carefully, you find that the arbitrariness repositions commodities; it tears them away from their original historical context and places them in a new environment. The unexpected juxtaposition of records and postcards, clocks and curios, posters and furniture, in the bazaar functions like a montage, breaking up the smooth and evolutionary surface of historical representation. You see the city’s urban heritage not in a linear fashion but in the heretical arrangement of fragmentary and spatial combinations. History appears jagged and disjointed as your eyes move from old hardware parts to beautiful objects sculpted in glass, from jazz records of the sixties to knockoffs of Art Deco furniture fabricated today. The aura of heritage is broken by the arbitrary collection of commodities.
If the ephemera on sale in Chor Bazaar offer us a heretical archive of Mumbai’s commodity life, they also provide glimpses into changes in the fortunes of families. Goods end up here not only when they become obsolete but also when death and disputes break up families. Chor Bazaar is the repository of changed and broken families. Interviews with shop owners suggest that this was particularly the case during the 1940s and the 1950s, when the Partition saw both a flight and an influx of people. Muslim families who moved to Pakistan sold their belongings before seeking a new home in the new country. The fact that most of the Chor Bazaar merchants are Muslim may have eased these transactions. This was also the time when the outward trickle of Europeans began. If there was an outflow of people, there was also an inflow of immigrants, particularly the Sindhis, who made Mumbai their new home. Chor Bazaar became one of the places where these refugees bought furniture sold by departing Muslims. The next two decades witnessed the departure of Parsi families to the UK, Canada, and Australia. Furniture dealers speak of these decades as Chor Bazaar’s golden age, when the market was flush with quality goods. Parsis, in particular, were valued as sellers and buyers because of their strong preference for heavy, Victorian furniture. Well preserved, the exquisitely made Burma teak and rosewood furniture, designed in Victorian and modern styles, along with delicate, decorative objects, were bought from Parsis in estate auctions and household sales during the sixties and seventies. Apparently, this was when the market for used goods morphed into a bazaar for antiques.
Antiques emerge only with modernity, when mechanical reproduction deprives objects of their originality and authenticity. Devoid of any original essence and uniqueness, industrially produced goods acquire an aura only when they lose their novelty and are discarded. Then, what the city throws away as junk is recommmodified and assumes its second life as a residue of the past. As representations of a disappeared era, as condensed remainders of an elusive past, antiques do not have use value; they are valued precisely because they are useless. No one actually uses these spittoons, clocks, picture postcards, and film posters. Even the delicate decorative furnishings you can buy at Zafar Bhai’s store are valued as reminders of a bygone era and are used in film sets to evoke the past.
The aura of antiques springs from their value as remembrances, as evocations of style. For this reason, too, one finds copies of antiques in plentiful supply at the bazaar. Both owners and consumers will tell you that there are very few genuine antiques in Chor Bazaar; for those you have to go to expensive dealers elsewhere in the city who can authenticate their collections. In the bazaar, you mostly get knockoffs, which lack the aura of uniqueness and genuine essence. Yet, the ba
zaar is always crowded with people. While some hunt for that rare thing that they cannot find anywhere else, others eagerly acquire copies of antique furniture and replicas of old gramophones. They are in the market for style. The city is an emporium of styles. While modernity homogenizes urban life, standardizing individuals and their environment, it also creates a strong desire for differentiation. Style provides one way to assert individuality. The city is where you find the dandy, who draws attention to his person through fashion, flamboyance, and wit. “In the old days,” said Zafar Bhai, “a hundred rupees bought you a good suit, shoes, and a tie; and with a little more money, you could throw in a bowler hat as well, and there you were—a proper city man!” Today, one does not see dandies with bowler hats in the city, but one finds Mumbaikars furnishing their lives with both genuine antiques and copies secured from Chor Bazaar. Surround yourself with an old gramophone, Victorian and Art Deco furnishings, film memorabilia, and jazz records, and you can rescue yourself from the modern jungle of urban anonymity and assert your uniqueness.
Not for nothing, then, does Chor Bazaar stand as the heretical heritage of the city. Existing in the shadows of the mainstream markets and carrying an air of illegitimacy both in its name and in the goods it transacts, the bazaar represents the city’s history in junk, memorabilia, antiques, copies, and kitsch. There are no stories of a rise and fall, of glory and decline, but only the debris of Mumbai’s modern life. You do not find history memorialized and frozen in a museum here. The remaindered past is alive, active in the present and exerting pressure on it by breathing life into what has been discarded as junk by history.