First Post Mumbai: Say Goodbye to the Mumbai You Know

My new column in FirstPost.
for the full article, click here:

Say Goodbye to the Mumbai You Know

excerpt:


"Here then, is an incomplete and flawed view of the Mumbai of the present. In the future, this ELU is what the authorities in the Municipal Corporation and the ward offices will base their decisions and permissions on. If transformations are to be effected using readings that do not square up with ground realities, urban planning, however well intentioned will not amount to much.

Pankaj Joshi told his audience of how difficult it was to get hold of the ELU. Not in the public domain, he had to extricate the documents from the authorities by invoking the Right to Information (RTI) Act.

This is symptomatic of the ways of the state these days. Either by their own resources or by outsourcing these studies to various consultants and planners, the information gathered and the documents generated from them are increasingly held back. The citizens at large shall only experience the consequences slowly, over time, as the new Development Plan gets implemented. Consider this: the previous Development Plan was published in 1981, but sanctioned for implementation only in 1993, twelve years after."

FirstPost Mumbai: Why preserving Mumbai’s heritage is preserving Marathi Asmita

The Dadar-Matunga Estate, Mumbai; laid out in the 1920s on either side of the Kingsway.
Image: Google Earth


My new column at FirstPost.com
First Published On : Sep 10, 2012 15:03 IST

Why preserving Mumbai’s heritage is preserving Marathi Asmita

Twenty years ago, a report on Mumbai’s urban heritage was prepared under an enlightened Municipal  Commissioner, Jamshed Kanga. The Kanga Report articulated the need to identify, document and preserve through legislation those parts of Mumbai that made it Mumbai. This was adopted by the State Government and the municipality and became policy.

Using international benchmarks while appreciating local conditions, heritage guidelines were drafted to stave off the wanton destruction of buildings and precincts. Its recommendations did get implemented, slowly, with the patient participation and efforts of many sensitive citizens: architects, academics, planners, sociologists and educated laypersons from every walk of life. At one point, we all patted ourselves on the back, celebrating the success of the heritage moment.

Now, Mumbai’s Heritage Movement is dead. Weep not for the buildings, public spaces and water bodies that will soon be lost in the miasma of ‘redevelopment’; shed a tear instead for ignorant, ideologically moribund and capricious thinking, that considers the preservation of the urban fabric of our city a speed breaker on our expressway to Shanghai.

A new, completely manufactured discourse has just been raised, decrying the civic heritage committee’s move to expand the ambit of areas to be preserved. Evoking the Marathi Manoos to bulwark against heritage has resulted in an ominous class and culture-based discourse of difference. This accusation that heritage listing is the enemy of redevelopment is being articulated from all shades of the political spectrum. It damns everything that the city has achieved in preserving its physical urbanity by calling its success one-sided and bourgeois.

Heritage is elitist: Oh so SoBo!

Shivaji Park and its surroundings are the battleground for this new power-play, based on a perceived articulation of victim-hood. The argument goes like this: areas predominantly inhabited by Marathi speaking Mumbaikars (like Dadar, Matunga, Prabhadevi, Lalbaug and Mahim) will be stifled from the benefits of change if they come under the Heritage Preservation List. What is the heritage worth preserving in these decrepit, about to collapse, poorly serviced buildings, that the Marathi Manoos be deprived from the benefits of redevelopment?

What is left unsaid is that ‘redevelopment’ today means is unbridled, grounded in profit, aspiration. The promise of ‘free’ FSI is only possible by the infiltration into an egalitarian space by speculators whose purpose can only be served by the wholesale gentrification of a city that was, up to this point, everybody’s city.

The Marathi Manoos argument misses out on two essentials: The first is that open spaces in Mumbai like Shivaji Park or Five Gardens were designed as green lungs in well laid out neighbourhoods. They were meant to be public spaces for the use of everyone who lived in its vicinity. They are not and have never been gated spaces. These spaces were part of the City Improvement Trust developments starting from the 1920s to create middle class housing for an essentially migrant, rising population.

The best of these new neighbourhoods were the Dadar-Matunga Estate, the Parsi and Hindu Colonies on either side of King’s Circle. Their success rested on the scale of their buildings and the harmonious urban fabric that resulted, with ground and three upper stories and matching building lines. We recognise this harmony today as a symbol of Mumbai’s urbanity and cosmopolitanism. This fabric is the heritage that needs preserving, not individual buildings as such. Open spaces are determined by the height of the buildings that flank them. New twenty storey buildings around Shivaji Park would not only destroy its fabric but also loom overbearingly over the maidan making the vast public space puny.

The second argument is historic. In Mumbai, while the architecture of the Raj, the public buildings that defined Urbs Prima Indis, have been largely identified as heritage and preserved, there has been little recognition of the buildings outside of these hoary piles, especially in public perception. These ‘other’ buildings are largely non-monumental, even domestic in scale. They define the architecture of the city that came up in the penultimate decades before independence.

The Improvement Trust laid out residential precincts in Sion, Parel, Dadar, Matunga, Mohammed Ali Road, Byculla, Nagpada, Princess Street, Sandhurst Road, Elphinstone Road and Colaba. These planned neighborhoods provided homes at reasonable rents and open spaces for all. That should be enough reason to preserve these areas as essential urban image givers to the city, its familiar and friendly face.

But if ever a reason is needed for a heritage listing of these very areas, it is this: The buildings of the 1930s and 1940s represent the first examples of Mumbai’s home-grown architectural practice. After graduating from the Sir JJ School, having studied and worked with stalwarts like Claude Batley, C. M. Master, Foster King and G. B. Mhatre, these young architects would design hundreds of buildings in these emerging localities and collectively establish an urban image that was both unique and local, an expression of RCC adapted to Mumbai’s tropical climate and the social exigencies of middle income housing.

Here are some of the architects and architecture firms who designed most of the buildings in the Shivaji Park locality at this time: G. B. Mhatre, S. H. Parelkar, V. M. Suvarnapatki, R. K. Joshi, D. P. Borkar, S. J. Narvekar, G. D. Sambhare, G. W. Marathe, D. G. Vaidya, S. M. Kini; Patki, Jadhav & Dadarkar, Jaykar & Gupchup, Parelkar, Ovalekar, Gore & Parpia and the Dhurandhar brothers. The buildings around Shivaji Park, Five Gardens and the Dadar-Matunga estate were predominantly designed by pioneering Marathi Manoos. Seeking to destroy them today in the name of redevelopment is to erase an essential, eighty year old built heritage that contributed to the Marathi Asmita (pride) of the city, just as much as the poets and litterateurs of the language did.

Happily, redevelopment does not mean the wholesale demolition of buildings so that towers can be built in their place. Heritage conservation is sufficiently well developed in Mumbai, with some excellent practitioners who can refurbish these buildings and adapt them for contemporary use, easily increasing their age for many decades to come. The buildings and the concurrent fabric can remain as it was, even as users and uses change. The present open precincts do not need to become walled enclosures for the affluent. The Marathi socio-cultural sphere has always been nourished by the buildings of middle Mumbai, as much as it has by the chawls of Girangaon. Both formed the fertile ground for a lot of its expression over the last half century or so, but have never been acknowledged as the agency that encouraged this.

In our world of rising affluence today, we are happy to wallow in the ignorance of our own past. Happy to flush it away as irrelevant, we choose to selectively raise a banner of victimhood instead. Preserving the immovable feast that is architecture and encouraging its appreciation is an ongoing cultural sustenance. Recognising our heritage is  recognising ourselves.

First Post Mumbai: How adaptive technology can bridge Mumbai's housing Divide

Here is an excerpt from my new column on FirstPost.Com:

How Mumbai’s pucca house dream got a quick fix

for full article , click on link above.

excerpt:
"In Mumbai, more people build for themselves than approach builders for ready-made units. With more than 60 percent of its citizens living in self-built housing, this is self evident. They are beyond the pale of Mumbailopolis at large because of their location in designated slums — areas that, to other 40 percent, are the blight seen from the airplane. Spaces and communities to be eliminated as part of official policy in a decade or so.


It is these very areas that are experiencing a construction boom like never before. Those who live here are now part of the city’s middle-classdom, having made enough capital through enterprise and labour. They can construct a pucca home — an expression of their aspirations and optimism."

First Post Mumbai: The Body on the Street

My new column on FirstPost.Com:
Published Date: Mar 07, 2012 11:09 am | Updated Date: Mar 07, 2012 03:51 pm

Kuber Sarup case: We’re just bodies on Mumbai’s moral streets
for full article , click on link above.

What is the worth of an individual body on the streets of Mumbai?

Not much. 
In our public places, our bodies are governed by two standards: the rule of law, which disallows 'indecent behaviour' and the rule of Khap, which disallows everything. The nuances between the two are frequently ambiguous, as is seen in the case of Kuber Sarup who was booked by a policeman for perceived indecency while saying his goodbyes to a female colleague.

His ordeal tells you that your body, in public, is not your own. If at all it needs to be outdoors, it must be positioned appropriately. Ideally, so our city implies — stay at home. If you must come out, do so for a reason, and get off the streets as soon as possible. Watch Fritz Lang's Metropolis to learn the proper slumped posture for a public presence.

Any expression beyond the terminally inert is likely to be plotted along a scale of conformity to standards of propriety or morality. A body may not touch another body on Mumbai's streets. No matter that you travel daily in what the railways call 'Hyper Dense Crush Load'; clinched in the most intimate of same-sex body-positions. The moment you are ejaculated at the station: haath laavoo nakaa.

Why is any public display of affection in Mumbai an offence to Indian Culture? Reuters
Let us recreate Sarup's act, shorn of value judgment: in a public place, a male puts his arms around a female and presses his lips to her cheek for what may be a second or two. Both separate to depart. The female catches a vehicle. The male is picked up and subjected to quasi-judicial hell. He is booked, fined and given a dressing down on his 'bad behaviour'.

Section 110 of the Bombay Police Act 1951 says: "No person shall willfully and indecently expose his person ill (sic) any street or public place or within sight of, and in such manner as to be seen from any street or public place, whether from within any house or building or not, or use indecent language or behave indecently or riotously, or in a disorderly manner in a street or place of public resort or in any office station or station house." There are no specifics. This paragraph is neatly sandwiched between sections disallowing ferocious dogs and horses to be let loose, public bathing, and flying kites. The only phrase from Section 110 that could remotely apply here is ‘behave indecently’.

How many options did the policeman discard to conclude that Sarup's behaviour was indeed indecent? On the face of it, he had no way of knowing who the individuals were: brother or sister, husband or wife, spiritual leader or acolyte or even two strangers. The act was consensual, neither complained of a forced advance. Would the same policeman have booked an adult female kissing an infant male in public for possible paedophilia? Or all those males embracing heartily as they emerged from mosques after the Idd prayer?

Any student of semiotics knows that an act is separate from its perception. The two are loosely linked at best and understood by common-law agreement. Meaning is never inherent; we ascribe meaning to something. How we do is based on our own background and world view. Body language therefore is hardly subject to normative judgments. To do so would be like asserting that only Marathi should be spoken in public in Mumbai. If such linguo-fascism is sniggered at, why should the acts of bodies be subject to similar homogeneity?

In our public realm, we are no models of perfection when it comes to inadvertent action: remember Clan Bachchan proudly and collectively emerging after voting, holding up erect middle fingers? Everyone did a double take, then laughed it off, good naturedly. No one threw the book of Indian Culture at them.

I would be happy if a policeman prevented me from breaking the law. I would even appreciate it if I were booked if I did, indeed break the law. But I will not abide any policeman giving me a lecture on Indian Culture and Traditions, like the hapless Sarup was subject to. I do not believe that policemen in Mumbai have the education and awareness to do so. I do not think that imbibing Amar Chitra Katha at a young age or the ritual observance of religious channels first thing in the morning makes anyone an authority on the subject. Not until the beat cop has a certification of credit hours spent learning under qualified teachers on the diversity of Indian Culture (from 'A' for Arunachal to 'J' for Jarawa, and every letter in between and beyond) will I accept this kind of edification.

Why is any public display of affection in Mumbai an offence to Indian Culture? Are our minds (and upbringing) so fickle that any conjoining of body parts, however innocuous, can only be an allusion to the act of coitus? It is indeed a matter of concern that every public action we make has to run the gauntlet between the upholders of the Police Act 1951 and the lumpen upholders of the Khap. Both these are, at the best of times, uncanny reflections of each other. You and me, on the other hand, with the benefit of hindsight and of higher education, amount to nothing on Mumbai’s moral streets.


Published Date: Mar 07, 2012 11:09 am | Updated Date: Mar 07, 2012 03:51 pm