Time Out Mumbai- 2 pieces on Cluster Development

This piece was (in a slightly edited form) published in Time Out Mumbai, Vol. 10, Issue 19, May 2014.


Cluster Bluster

Now that the votes (and the die) for the next government are cast, it does seem that Bombay’s fortunes are nowhere in anyone’s political priorities. In the run up to Election Day, though, there seemed to be one area of emerging consensus. All the candidates (who matter) from the South Mumbai constituency agreed that 'Cluster Development' in the city is the way forward. The only answer.

The biggest problem with our old city, according to them, is its rapidly deteriorating stock of buildings collectively called 'cessed'. These century old piles are filled to the brim with nonchalant tenants paying ‘controlled’ rents and hapless landlords with too few resources for maintenance. As a result these buildings are now decrepit, have common toilets, and are in imminent danger of collapse every monsoon. They are also densely packed together and there is no greenery anywhere.

The panacea for this sorry state is, of course, Cluster Development (aka DC rule 33/9). The argument in its favour is that developing a largish tract of land is less piecemeal, more systematic, and can be 'community driven'. A 40,000 square footprint today can contain several buildings in the inner city. Bringing them down to tabula rasa allows the redevelopment phoenix to soar, up to four times the plot area. These Elysian Fields would provide every stakeholder with a proper (300 sft) unit with toilets inside, lifts, and open spaces around buildings, with trees and lawns. Above all, the rented tag gets converted to ownership, the ultimate wish of every Mumbaikar grihasta. Could anything be better? Two projects at Bhendi Bazaar and Lower Parel are already under construction, so there is precedent too.

Let me be contrarian here. Leave aside the near cliché that such developments only benefit builders and speculators. In making my case against cluster development, I appeal to your urban and civic sensibilities.

Buildings in ‘clusters’ are equally piecemeal, only now the piece is larger. Here, entire neighbourhoods in the dense inner city will potentially be opened out to new vistas of rising skylines, infiltrated by built forms and open spaces that did not previously exist. This is the urban equivalent of pulling out teeth and replacing them with nails instead of dentures.

Our neighbourhoods- Chira and Bhendi Bazaar, Parel and Kalbadevi, Lalbaug and Dongri, all have a scale and uniformity that make up the urban whole. Congestion is the essential urbanity and civic make-up of the inner city. Shop lines open on footpaths, buildings touch buildings familiarly, balconies overlook streets and roofs match up in straight lines, making comprehensible perspectives. And there are people everywhere. Corners are special and built differently, giving identity and helping way-finding.

None of this is sustained in setting back buildings from the street, bounding them in the nutshell of compound walls, CCTV and uniformed security surveillance. Essentially, this large bite is no longer the city that was, only a regurgitated, unfamiliar, aspiration-fulfilling bolus.

Almost all of Bombay's residential neighbourhoods once spoke a ground plus three floors lingo. The city grew through iteration and accretion, just like Bambaiya-speak. Over the years street culture evolved to raising one floor. This happened everywhere, you may live in one such building. Now, imagine a building across your street looming forty floors above you, cutting off sunlight, subjecting you to a wall of heat radiating from air-conditioning units opposite. Such is the price of caprice the older residents of Mutton Street will face in year or two.

Should buildings in bad shape not be repaired? Well, of course they should, but by respecting building lines first. A contemporary, well appointed, state of the art redesign that retains the previous footprint and matches the height and floor-lines of its neighbours on either side is completely possible. Courtesy demands that buildings be re-imagined in their original context, one by one. With broad agreement, every new building may rise by one floor or two, and still retain the harmony of the street. Congestion will remain, but not further densification. Most of Mumbai’s housing requirement can be fulfilled if each residential building is raised one floor. You do the math.

My one disagreement with the cluster model should concern whoever wins the South Mumbai Lok Sabha seat. 33/9 will result in instant gentrification. Either overtly, or through subtle nudge-nudge wink-wink, the older residents will realise they no longer have a place in this new dispensation. Neighbours will be replaced by strangers, humsayas will be lost, local small shops will become untenable, business networks and societal ties, the result of decades of co-existence will dissolve. Ultimately diversity will decrease substantially making the new neighbourhood a confine of homogeneity served in no full measure by 'outsiders'.

This is counter-intuitive, but I do believe that the much derided Rent Control Act helped preserve a social equity amongst the residents of Bombay across half a century. A fixed low rent allowed the very poor to live in the same building with the very rich, and certainly occupy the public realm, the streets outside as equals. With tenancy morphing into ownership this will no longer be the same- as the city you once called Bambai Nagariya gets slowly transformed, the aam aadmi voter in your constituency could well be endangered by the next elections.

The following piece was (in a slightly edited form) commissioned by Time Out Mumbai for their special issue on Bhendi Bazaar, Vol. 9, Issue 12, February 2013.

Splendid Isolation
What Cluster Redevelopment will mean for the city

“Mohalla maa jayaaoon choo!”
Ever since I remember, this is commonly heard in many households. I am going to the Mohalla. The Mohalla is the Bhendi Bazaar. This throbbing heart of Bohra culture in Mumbai is the place to congregate, socialize, conduct small business, pass time, and gorge on pyalis of street side ‘chana-bateta’- a savory of chickpeas and potatoes that could also be ‘packed-up’ for the kids. The Mohalla is for ziyarat, for offering prayers at the Raudat Tahera, the mausoleum where the present Syedena’s father is laid to rest. And of course, if it is Jumma, it must be Chor Bazaar, the Friday-only market on the adjacent Mutton Street, where one can be equal parts flaneur and haggleur.

Urban culture in Mumbai is very real. It is also intangible, and thrives on two assumptions- first, that an urban place in the city can be taken for granted; and second, to paraphrase Robert Frost, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. It is anchored around a very few (and, on occasion, nondescript) physical markers: a left turn here, a shop sign there, a street vendor at the corner. Urban culture is thus, also very fragile. This is true for Bhendi Bazaar, and also for Chira Bazaar, Saat Rasta, Sewri, Parel, or any of the nine or so locations in the city where Cluster Redevelopment is scheduled to happen.

In a city that has replaced planning with speculation and public administration with outsourced anonymity, it is little wonder that the future heart of Mumbai can only be envisioned as a glorious Hausmann-like phoenix, rising out of a tabula rasa. Cluster Redevelopment, based on Clause 33.9 of the Development Control Rules, is the way the state government sees urban renewal in locations populated largely by cessed buildings or historically rented properties. Accepting the premise that the state itself cannot redevelop, the rule allows for private developers to rehabilitate existing users in the same location with some more areas and amenities and offers the developer a substantial pound of flesh for profiteering. While basic humanitarian gestures of temporary re-housing for those existing is built-in, the grand vision is the builder’s entirely, and very naturally based on the attractiveness of the project to potential buyers at full market price.

This vision disregards the intangible, but very real patterns of urban life. Mumbai is Mumbai because the rich and the poor have always lived as humsaya, with homes facing the same street; because the diversity of economic class and religious affiliation has meant nothing, especially in the densest neighbourhoods; because although there are ghettos, especially in the inner city, there are no walled exclusions; because the desire to come together to create an urban place is the result of social accretion over years, very real, even if you can’t put a finger on it. Mumbai is Mumbai not only because of urban homogeneity, but because of social diversity. To presume this the other way round, like cluster redevelopment projects seem to do, is to deny and choke the very spirit of the city.

Look at the New Bhendi Bazaar, this is what we see: a private future built on sixteen acres of south Bombay, imagined by the wealthiest of a Mumbai sub-community in its own image. We see pristine, ‘homes of rest and quiet’, secluded from the rest of the dirty city, your city, by walls or buildings that function as walls. Access into these redesigned acres will now be through gateways that never existed before. We see skyscrapers rising sixty stories abutting the same narrow street on which older four storey structures still exist. We see several buildings demolished to make way for a large park with unobstructed frontage around the Raudat Tahera.

Where did the Mohalla go? Can the same social fabric that held together for a century remain in this upmarket utopia? Can small businesses thrive without their former durable networks? Will Chor Bazaar retain any identity, when one edge of Mutton Street transforms into a barricade?

Cluster redevelopments as private real-estate speculations only take away from the city, both physically and spiritually disentangled from the larger reality of metropolitan Mumbai. While they load fresh urban burdens onto its infrastructure, they deign to exist in splendid isolation, in a rarefied haven of Eloi, while Morlocks outside toil in its grime.

Who speaks for Mumbai in these new projects? We accept the rights of the individual as supreme in our capitalist present. No one denies that better housing, amenities and facilities should be paramount for all. But should we, at the same time, not define responsibilities the same individual has towards the city at large? No quid pro quo?

Woh intezaar tha jiska yeh woh s(h)eher to nahin.

Time Out Mumbai- Travel Lite

This piece was published in an edited version in 

Time Out Mumbai, March 14-27 2014, Volume 10, Issue 15

Travel Lite

Those in academic circles probably know this already, but Mumbai has been the international flavor of for quite a few years now. This is especially true for students of architecture and urban design. Each time the monsoon bids Mumbai farewell and her sodden soul slowly dries, cohorts from universities, unknown and ivy-league, travel to her shores for field visits, just like flamingos at Sewri.

After parking themselves in one of the many establishments on or off Colaba Causeway, high-seating Volvo buses are procured and from such rarefied and elevated environments the city is absorbed. Driving down from the Gateway of India (referred to by some as India Gate) to the boondocks of Navi Mumbai, depending on the theme of the semester, the colonial SoBo, the dense inner-city areas of Kalbadevi, Bhuleshwar, the ‘panjra-pol’, the Dhobhi Ghat, the City Improvement Trust precincts of Dadar-Matunga, the former mill and current mall lands, the eastern docklands, the fast-disappearing mangroves and salt pans and ‘slums’ of every stripe are mandatorily observed. Local trains (in non-rush hours) are given custom, the monorail admired, and various skywalks crossed. Getting serious, development plans are procured, Google Maps pored over, terrabytes of jpegs clicked, local colleges of architecture visited and a few brains picked- all this in about three days or so. Oh, of course, Dharavi-darshan happens and 'Kumbharwada' becomes part of international vocabulary. It joins words like 'jugaad', which have already been learnt in advance.

There is quite an abyss between the literature available and the city's reality. In the spirit of academia, much previous reading is prescribed. Suketu Mehta, David Gregory Roberts, Katherine Boo, Dwivedi and Mehrotra, among others form the canon. ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ becomes the visual point of reference. This is pretty obvious when you encounter un-nuanced positions about slums or the role of real estate; cluster housing is fait accompli- a shining pointer to end all woes, after all it is community driven, no? Speculative theories coalesce into New Urbanism projects, learnings from weekend immersions and catch-as-catch-can ethnography informs the iterations of computer extrusions, where high rise developments (the only answer) are clothed with a garb of Bollywood culture.

What does our city offer that attracts so many to it? To be charitable, Mumbai does provide the foreign observer with several contradictions, to paraphrase Whitman, being large and containing multitudes. It is some surprise that trains run on time, but garbage remains uncollected. One family lives in a 2 billion dollar, 20 storied skyscraper residence, while more than half of the city lives in self-built postage stamp housing. The rule of law is indexical of our democracy, but common law applies everywhere. Everyone here walks and talks English, but as a phunny Indian language. However, despite these polarities, true to our common ethos, what you cannot see is vital to understanding and appreciation, but intangibles are often subsumed in the morass of visual documentation. This can lead to some ‘face-palm’ results. Some American students of architecture found the sights and smells of one corner of one street in the city so overwhelming that it became a metonymy for the city as a whole, and resulted in the design of skyscrapers made out of ‘kachra’. 

Nothing interests student practitioners of architecture and urban design and their mentor institutes more than change. The objective is always to make a city ‘more livable’. This is predicated on the understanding of a city as it is as ‘less livable’. Sociology rather than technology is currently the driving force behind change, and alternatives derived to conceptualize ‘better cities’ are the results of surveys and sampling, even if the sample set is a few persons doing muttergashti at street corners, or a paanwallah, say, or a local SIM shop. There is an urgent need to put it all down on paper and soon conceptual charts, three dimensional street views, stitched photo-collages and before/after layouts are all put together and displayed. 

By now, there is entire machinery in place here in the city to receive these visitors and cater to their needs, spaces for work and presentations, large panels for pinning up their work and seminar spaces for discussion, even for the conduct of international conferences. The usual suspects of invited city experts are rounded up from time to time to take on these fights of urban regeneration fantasies, and to give anecdotal and insightful comments and ‘crits’ about the nature of change in Mumbai, which are eagerly lapped up by these wide eyed, travel-lite acolytes. I should know, on occasion I have been one of them.

struggles with imagined gods

struggles with imagined gods
by 
Hemant Divate
translated from the Marathi by
Mustansir Dalvi

Published by Poetrywala
An imprint of Paperwall Media & Publishing Pvt. Ltd.
2014
ISBN 978-93-82749-07-3
Price: Rs.200
Available at Kitab Khana, Mumbai and on amazon.in

'struggles with imagined gods' in the press and media:
(click on titles)

Kanika Sharma discusses 'struggles' and Hemant Divate in Mid-day
A Different Kind of Poet

A short review in 
The Caravan: a journal of politics and culture
'What happened to the language' and other poems.

Sampurna Chattarji reviews'struggles' in Woodsmoke
Free Agent in a Land of Devastation

Eunice de Souza discusses 'struggles' in Mumbai Mirror
Some Literary Puzzles




Mustansir Dalvi
On translating Hemant Divate's Poetry
in Poetry at Sangam

‘Hemant Divate writes of his world, of his everyday embedded-ment in it. A prisoner of his own reality, he is aware of his incarceration,’ notes poet-translator Mustansir Dalvi in a specially commissioned translator’s note; we carry extracts from Divate’s recent book Struggles with Imagined Gods. Divate is publisher of the often audacious imprint Poetrywala; his struggle against sentimental poetics and the shallowness of the post-globalized world is keen. Languages wear duplicities, delicacies and skins of time that reflect their philosophical strengths, street tenor and chaotic co-opted multilingual urgencies. Hemant Divate takes this between his teeth, ‘Poets have stopped/ writing in their own language/ and have, instead, begun/ grinding it down into finer and finer grain.// … languages change completely/ every twelve years./ Which means, after thirty-six years/ no language can remain our own.’

Dalvi’s translations are almost combative to contain the patois employed by this gritty poet. We sense his intelligence scanning possibilities before homing in. He writes, ‘[Divate] writes as he speaks, as is the wont of the Marathi manoos of Mumbai. The translations then, to stay authentic have to remain within the realm of the English speaking citizen of Mumbai, equally multilingual – one part Marathi, one part Bambaiyya and two parts everything else… Strange choices have to be made to make Divate’s Marathi poems into English poems.’

This is tough, high voltage stuff."

-Priya Sarukkai Chabria

Poetry at Sangam

advance praise for 'struggles with imagined gods':

“Divate has an appetite for the contemporary, devouring both its poisons and its nourishments with gargantuan ease. A rich feast, but not for weak stomachs.”

-Adil Jussawalla

"Like the surrealists he admires, Hemant Divate favors the trick mirror and the unsettling image, his work reminds us that modernism came to Marathi literature before it came to Indian writing in English"

-Jeet Thayil

“Hemant Divate existentialist ‘struggles with imagined gods’ depicts today’s Indian consumerist society as a meaningless/absurd world, filled with disoriented individuals. With colourful contrasts and his ironic, hallucinated and hectic writing-style, he swamps the reader, forcing self-examination. For this Marathi Sisyphus, poem titles are lower case letters; flattened like society is flattened before the illness of religions. Nostalgia is a refuge, but not a cure. ‘Struggles with imagined gods’ is another of Divate’s necessary contributions to contemporary Indian poetry.”

-Zingonia Zingone

the fresh, juicy meat of a poem

A moment from life is stuck

between the teeth

of a poem.

It lingers in the interstices,

like scraps of meat

leftover, after chewing

on a chicken lollypop,

no different

from the space between two words

filled with the fresh, juicy meat of a poem.


what happened to language?

What happened to the language
of the boy sucking on a sugarcane stick?
What happened to his language, this vagabond,
rolling an old tyre all over his village?
What happened to the everyday tongue
of this little boy, playing thabu and marbles?

What happened to the language of the child
who loved surparambya, gilli–danda, lagori,
tops, mummy–daddy, doctor–doctor?

What happened to this free bird
who blew his whistle lustily during the jatra?
This brawling boy, who played appa–rappi
and cricket with a ball of rags? What happened?

The same boy, who spoke with his own friends later,
self-conscious of his obviously ghati tongue.
What happened to his language?
Kaay zhaala?


tell me when my number is called

So I was pushed
through some kind of machine.
A software was loaded into me, automatically.
How much space is left in my brain?
The reading says zero.

The technician said:
there’s no space in your brain for humanity,
all mind-space is completely full,
the brain has decayed through disuse,
whatever drive you open
is stuffed with brands.
Brand names, logos, and advertisements,
all nestle snugly into each other.
Naturally, you have lost
all awareness about life
In order to load some humanity back into you
shock treatment is necessary.

In this netherworld, I stand last in line
waiting for my number.
My number is the one after Yours.
Tell me when my number is called.

More poems from Struggles with imagined gods (published in Poetry at Sangam):
Mail Address 
Flowers have Turned Brutish 
Anything can Make your Blood Pressure Rise 
Dreams while Shopping 

Contents
    life begins
1. the fresh, juicy meat of a poem
2. Praha: I’ll be back
3. three poems for Pedru Uncle
4. mail address
5. a man may die, but...
6. who typed the password to restart?
7. life begins when you enter this room...
8. Rewind- 2

    what happened?
9. what happened to language?
10. flowers have turned brutish
11. funny mood
12. fuck me, if you can
13. brands surround them
14. New Age 1 2 3
15. dreams while shopping
16. here’s a long, winding, uneasy wall
17. anything can make your blood pressure rise
18. despite this, very timidly, he lives a good life
19. what is to be done about the axe embedded in the mind?
20. my struggle with an imagined god
21. tell me when my number is called
22. in Warsaw’s blue cemetery

The poems in this collection were first published in ‘Thambtach yet naahi’ (Abhidanantar, 2006) and ‘Hya room madhye aale ki life suru hote’ (Poetrywala, 2012).

HEMANT DIVATE
Hemant Divate is a poet, translator, editor and publisher of avant-garde poetry. His collections in Marathi, Chautishiparyantchya Kavita and Thambtach Yet Nahi are considered path-breaking. The renowned poet Dilip Chitre has translated Chautishiparyantchya Kavita into English, titled Virus Alert. His second translation -A Depressingly Monotonous Landscape -was also well received by the critics and readers. His poems are also translated into Spanish, French, German, Irish, Urdu, Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

Hemant is the winner of the Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad Award (Kolkata, India) and the Maharashtra Foundation Award (USA). He is the first Indian poet to be honoured by the Costa Rican government, and his work is translated into Spanish and published as Alarma de Virus. This collection is also published in Irish, titled Foláireamh Víris.

Hemant’s publishing house, Paperwall Media & Publishing Pvt. Ltd, has published more than 50 poetry collections of extraordinary quality in Marathi and English. As founder and editor of the Marathi little magazine Abhidhanantar, Hemant provided a rare platform for fresh talent and great poetry to enrich the post-nineties Marathi literary scene.

Hemant lives and works in Mumbai.

MUSTANSIR DALVI
Mustansir Dalvi was born in Bombay. He teaches architecture in Mumbai.

His poem 'Choosing Trains' was awarded First Prize in the Indian national daily Asian Age's Poetry Contest in 2001.

His poems are included in the anthologies These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry (Eunice de Souza and Melanie Silgardo, editors), Mind Mutations (Sirrus Poe, editor), The Bigbridge Online Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry (Menka Shivdasani, editor), The Dance of the Peacock: An Anthology of English Poetry from India (Vivekanand Jha, editor) and in the forth coming Anthology of Poetry for Young People (Jane Bhandari and Anju Makhija, editors) from the Sahitya Akademi, Delhi.

Mustansir Dalvi's 2012 English translation of Muhammad Iqbal’s influential Shikwa and Jawaab-e-Shikwa from the Urdu as ‘Taking Issue and Allah’s Answer’ (Penguin Classics) has been described as ‘insolent and heretical’, while making Iqbal’s verse accessible to the modern reader.

'Brouhahas of Cocks' is his first book of poems in English, published by Poetrywala in 2013.

Time Out Mumbai- Nanny State of Mind

This piece appeared in an edited version in my 'After Words' column in Time Out Mumbai, February 2014

Nanny State of Mind

One of the first actions the new CEO of the Central Board of Film Certification has taken is to rollback all permissions granted to movies in the last few months on the grounds that the previous board was too permissive of objectionable content. One of them, ‘Sholay-3D’, was pinpointed for lacking seriousness in its content. The movie was screened in the presence of the CEO, his Board, his parents, his wife, her parents, his daughters, and their neighbors from the same floor. The following cuts and modifications to ‘Sholay-3D’ were demanded:

Vigilantism in all forms is disapproved, as when a currently serving policeman is commissioned by a retired Inspector to source delinquents to carry out encounters. The scene showing Thakur giving supari to Jai and Veeru should be removed.

All three coin tossing scenes to be excised as a British Raj coin is used in independent India. Also said coin was forged (heads on both sides).

The Inspector, shown sitting in the same space as two convicts in a goods train should be replaced with a havaldar. Also, when in uniform, the inspector should be addressed correctly as ‘Inspector Saab’ and not ‘Thakur’ (proper hierarchy must be followed).

Scenes showing Veeru running on tops of railway compartments should be deleted. This wrongly encourages rooftop travelling by children in suburban trains and violates several clauses of the Indian Railway Act.

The song ‘Yeh Dosti’ is to be entirely deleted for promoting cultural prurience. Far too much love and physical displays of affection are visible between two full-grown males. Not only do they hold hands but one actually mounts the other’s shoulders while riding a motorcycle. Sec 377 to be referred to, also traffic laws regarding reckless endangerment while riding a two wheeler. The board also found objectionable the lyrics that openly refer to same-sex love (‘aisa apna pyaar’, etc.)

Scenes of the main actors openly extorting beedis from Soorma Bhopali without a ‘Smoking Kills’ disclaimer is a lapse needing rectification. A later scene of Imam’s son moving to work in a tobacco factory is discouraged on religious grounds. Alcoholism, consuming unbranded country products by respected senior film stars encourages illegal haath bhattis and leads to liquor tragedies.

Scenes of a widow turning off lights in the verandah outside her bedroom while another man ogles her while playing a mouth-organ were found to be too suggestive. The implied invitation to promiscuity cannot be overlooked. The scene of Radha handing over keys of father-in-law’s safe to criminals shows the Indian widow in poor character.

Russian roulette in Gabbar Singh’s introductory scene is of foreign origin. It is suggested that this be replaced with the Indian game of chausar. Firing bullets in the air is a waste of ordnance, an action not desirable in a developing country such as ours. Also, harvesting mangoes using guns is discouraged as it divests the unskilled unemployed of a proper day’s wages under NREGA.

All scenes of eve-teasing and physical proximity in song ‘Holi ke din’ should be removed. The producers are requested to see Barjatya’s wholesome films for positive influences.

The Board also frowns upon the excessive use of the Arabo-Turko-Persian vocabulary that permeates the entire movie, ignoring our homegrown Sanskritic heritage. To redress this, it is suggested that the following phrases be replaced-
‘yeh dosti’ by ‘yeh maitri’,
‘mehbooba’ by ‘premika’
and
‘kitne aadmi the?’ by ‘kitne purush the?’

Also, to avoid the issuance of an ‘A’ certificate, the following obscenities must mandatorily be replaced-
‘haramzaadae!’ by ‘dusht!’,
‘hijdon ki fauj’ by ‘ardha-nar sena’,
‘soovar ke bachchon’ by ‘murgi ke chooze’
and
‘chakki p*****g’ by ‘micturation’.

All lady members of the audience walked out during the ‘Mehbooba’ song, while covering the eyes of their young ones. Helen was not wearing skin-colored, full-body innerwear, as Sandhya and Vyjantimala have respectfully done in the past. Also physical thrustings of certain body parts in 3D to R D Burman’s rhythms were too much for older members of the board. On second thoughts, an ‘A’ certificate is unanimously advised.

Horses, poultry and insects were all harmed in this film. Such scenes should be replaced by CGI and a certificate to the effect should preface the main titles.

Depicting the surgical amputation of Thakur’s limbs is deemed unacceptable as the swords were not sterilized before the operation. Also Thakur was not put under general anesthesia by a qualified medical person. This encourages bad practices.

The use of spikes outside of a sport pitch can send wrong messages to school going children to wear them to classroom and home and should be replaced with sneakers (with the brand blurred). Also, stamping on someone’s palms with shoes on is against the Indian tradition of respect and humility. On the other hand, the Board commends the depiction of the ill-effects of dancing without shoes in public places.

The last scene of a man and a woman publicly embracing in a train compartment makes us hang our heads in shame. We condemn the previous Board for allowing such vulgarity to go though and recommend an enquiry (by appointing a retired judge) on their possibly mala-fide intentions of ruining the ethos of our great nation.

In Memory Yet Green, In Joy Still Felt: On turning fifty

In Memory Yet Green, In Joy Still Felt

When I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this, then, (said I,) what the author calls a man's life?
And so will some one, when I am dead and gone, write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life;
Why, even I myself, I often think, know little or nothing of my real life;
Only a few hints--a few diffused, faint clues and indirections,
I seek, for my own use, to trace out here.)

-Walt Whitman


This was never supposed to happen.

Turning fifty was never part of the larger scheme of things. I am completely ambivalent about this sudden state of affairs- for one moment you are what you are, and the next, half a century old.

Bugger!

Imagine this, five years ago, on this day, I started this blog. This post is, for better or worse, the hundredth. Have the thousands and thousands of words amounted to anything, I wonder? Well I have been paid for many of them, I must acknowledge this, and I have been commissioned to write a good number of pieces because of previous blog posts, so there is a happy syntagm between blogging and continuing to blog.

When I started this, the intention was largely to preserve memories. I did state that as a rough and ready credo in my first post. And subsequently a good many became an archive of my own past. This blog is an ever yielding tell, and I am an archaeologist of my own memories. It is both self serving and indulgent, but as I have mentioned before, a defense against short term memory loss. However, in the course of posting, I have ended up writing on a very large variety of subjects, as can be seen just by looking at the list of labels, which I am sure have crossed a thousand. So what is it that I am doing?

No idea, really. I am large, I contain multitudes.

My most successful post in terms of footfalls has to be the piece on Mario Miranda. It has already crossed 13,000 views. In December 2009 itself, the number of viewers of this post crossed 7000, and this bumped up further on Mario's untimely passing.

The closest in terms of this success was a long time coming. It is only half way through last year that another post crossed a thousand views and that was my translation of MirzaGhalib’s famous ghazal. I have been a magpie, and have written about what ever shiny object that has attracted my eye. Translations have become a passion that has been fueled by this blog and the early appreciation it got. This has led to two offshoots that have been steadily growing- two separate blogs of my translations of the poems of Muhammad Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. I have, looking back translated (in bits and pieces) the works of the entire Urdu pantheon- Ghalib, Iqbal, Manto, Sahir and Faiz, even Sharyar I have also translated a few poems from the Marathi- those of Arun Kolhatkar and Narayan Surve. All these were done for pleasure and this is a movable feast.

Bombay, or what’s left of it, has always provided fodder for thought, and I have chewed and ruminated on its urban affairs in a variety of ways. Pieces commissioned and written in Time OutMumbai, FirstPost.com, the Indian Quarterly, Times Crest and the EPW, among others have been archived here and are places I return to from time to time. The cultural history of the city as personal memory is always available as a common troth to dip into, and cinema, radio, television and reading form the signposts to growing up.

While the best part of being is the unending sense of awe, that quite counters any embedded cynicism, there is a joy that emanates from the company of friends, and friends as readers for whom I am forever grateful. You have ensured that these virtual pages are not mere contemplation of one’s belly button but a useful discourse that has fine tuned my own worldview.

This brings me to my current shop-worn state of five decades of having existed.
I would like to express my full-blown angst at this, and state that whatever I do henceforth I do under protest. I shall be dragged kicking and screaming into the future, and the scuff marks that my unwilling shoes shall leave in the dirt may well be the stuff of future posts.

So don't say that I did not warn you.

Shahryar- Two Ghazals from Gaman

These two (now classic) ghazals are from Muzaffar Ali's 1978 film 'Gaman' (the Departure), and are written by Akhlaq Mohammad Khan, more well known by his pen name 'Shahryar'.

Khan was the fourth Jnanpith Award winner in Urdu in 2008. His collection of poems 'Khwab ka dar band hai' in 1987 won the Sahitya Akademi award. He died in 2012.


Seene mein jalan aankhon mein toofaan sa kyon hai
by
Akhlaq Mohammad Khan Shahryar

Seene mein jalan aankhon mein toofaan sa kyon hai
Is shaher main har shakhs pareshaan sa kyon hai

Dil hai to dhadakne ka bahaanaa koi dhoonde
Patthar ki tarah behis-o-bejaan sa kyon hai

Tanhaai ki yeh kaunsi manzil hai rafiqon
Taa hadd-e-nazar ek bayaabaan sa kyon hai

Kya koi nayee baat nazar aati hai ham mein
Aainaa hamein dekh ke hairaan sa kyon hai


translated by 
Mustansir Dalvi

Why does my heart smoulder, why this tempestuous gaze?
Why is everyone in this city filled with such disquiet?

This heart, such as it is, needs but to keep on beating,
why then is it so unfeeling, so lifeless, like a stone.

Which station of loneliness is this, my friends?
There is only wilderness as far as the eye can see.

Can you see something new in me today?
Why then, is my mirror so bewildered to see me?


Here is the ghazal from 'Gaman', with music by Jaidev and sung by Suresh Wadkar.


Ajeeb saaneha mujh par guzar gayaa yaaron
by 
Akhlaq Mohammad Khan Shahryar

Ajeeb saaneha mujh par guzar gayaa yaaron
Main apne saaye se kal raat dar gaya yaaron

Hare ek naqsh-e-tamannaa ka ho gayaa dhundhlaa
Hare ek zakhm mere dil ka bhar gayaa yaaron

Bhatak rahi thi jo kashti woh garq-e-aab hui
Chadaa hua tha jo dariyaa utar gayaa yaaron

Woh kaun tha kahaan ka tha kya hua tha use
Sunaa hai aaj koi shakhs mar gayaa yaaron


translated by 
Mustansir Dalvi

How strange was this accident that befell me, friends,
for last night, I flinched with fear at my own shadow.

Every ideal that I ever aspired to has begun to fade,
every clot that rent my heart has begun to congeal.

Every boat, tossed about, lost, was eventually sunk,
the raging river that had swelled has now receded.

Who was that, where was he from, what befell him?
I have heard, friends that someone lost his life today.


Here is the ghazal from 'Gaman', with music by Jaidev and sung by Hariharan.





Translation and transliteration, copyright © Mustansir Dalvi, 2013, All rights reserved.

Ghalib ka hai andaaz-e-bayaan aur (translated by Mustansir Dalvi)

Hai bas ki har ek unke ishaare mein nishaan aur
a Ghazal by
Mirza Ghalib

Hai bas ki har ek unke ishaare mein nishaan aur
Karte hai muhabbat to guzartaa hai ghumaan aur

Ya rab! Woh na samjhe hain na samjhenge meri baat
De aur dil unko jo na de mujhko zubaan aur

Aabroo se hai kya us nigaah-e-naaz ko paiwand
Hai teer mukarrar magar hai uski kamaan aur

Tum shehar mein ho to hamein kya gham jab uthenge
Le aayenge bazaar se jaakar dil-o-jaan aur

Har chand subak-dast hue but-shikni mein
Hum hai to abhi raah mein hai sang-e-giraan aur

Hai khoon-e-jigar josh mein dil khol ke rota
Hote jo kaeen deedaa-e-khoon naab phishaan aur

Martaa hai us aawaaz pe har chand sar udd jaayein
Jallad ko lekin woh kahe jaaye ki ‘Haan aur!’

Logon ko hai khurshid-e-jahaantaab ka dhokaa
Har roz dikhaataa hoon main ek daag-e-nihaan aur

Letaa na agar dil tumhein detaa koi dum chain
Kartaa jo na martaa koi din aah-o-fughaan aur

Paate nahin jab raah to chad jaate hai naale
Rukti hai meri tab’h to hoti hai ravaan aur

Hai aur bhi duniyaa mein sukhanvar bahut achche
Kehte hain ke Ghaalib ka hai andaaz-e-bayaan aur



Ghalib’s felicity
a Ghazal translated by 
Mustansir Dalvi

Within every gesture
she secretes undertones.
Her love is eloquent, yet
once spoken, raises suspicion.

She has not and will not
even consent to hear me out;
give her more heart, O Lord,
even if you grant me no more voice.

Her reticence is enhanced
in every lowered glance.
The arrows are all in place
but her bow is elsewhere.

As long as you remain in town
I have not a care, for should
sorrows weigh heavily upon me
I will buy new life from the bazaar.

You may have deftness
in the art of breaking idols,
but look, I too remain resolute-
a stone that crosses your path.

My heart is rent and gushes blood
and I would weep aloud myself,
if only there lay scattered more
blood-rent eyes to witness my grief.

I would be ready to lose my head
at the mere sound of her voice;
yet as the executioner raises his blade
she screams Yes! Yes, she cries: ‘More!’

Rising daily, this world-warming sun
is a delusion everyone believes,
but I, for one, can break each day
afresh with a veil’d wound on display.

I could have spent some time in peace
had I not already given my heart to you;
I could have cried and lamented more
had I not already given up the ghost.

On not finding the easiest path
river waters rise to a deluge.
My own spirit, when obstructed
finds release somewhere else.

There may be more, even better
wordsmiths in this world, but
they say that Ghalib’s felicity
is quite unmatched, anywhere.



Translation and Transliteration © Mustansir Dalvi, 2013, All rights reserved.

Time Out Mumbai- Re:claim

This piece appeared in a slightly edited version in my 'After Words' column in Time Out Mumbai, December 2013

Re: claim

Dear Mumbai,
re: your claim that the only solution to your congested, imploding self is to reclaim more land from the sea, here are our considered opinions-

We see from our records that your past actions re: reclamations on your good-self are chequered with inconsistencies- whereas your laying the many causeways in the mid 19th century interconnecting the erstwhile islands that constituted your good-self had some intrinsic merit in making you whole, this resulted in a low-lying centre prone to flooding annually and mosquitoes, a space you further exacerbated by raising several textile mills, creating a situation you have not satisfactorily resolved even after a century and a half.

Your next request for plastic surgery admittedly met with some success in 1940 with your self-named appendage- the Queen's Necklace. But you botched this up laying a road along the water edge rather than perpendicular to it, isolating a thin sliver of land only useful for walking dogs and/or resisting expressions of young love. All your subsequent actions, we note with concern, catered to the whims and fancies of automobiles rather than your own citizens, a trait so deeply embedded that you seem to think is normal. It is not.

We can only shake our head at your half-hearted, ultimately abandoned attempts to create a business district out of the sea in the late 1960s, which you ironically named after the same person who opposed you in the first place. We call your attention to the toothless gum that is the Cuffe Parade fishing village. Your desire to iconicize the Mantralaya only resulted in scuppering the very objective of your new city across the harbour. This reluctance to shift your administrative heart to Belapur put back both settlement and progress of New Bombay by three decades, making it a dormitory suburb. We must therefore infer, Mumbai, that you are, in your own words, 'aarambh shoor'; you know how to start things but not finish them.

It is with some relief that we note your fancy late '90s ideas proposed by your starchitect to reclaim a width of one kilometre on your western edge for 'public amenities' stayed on the drafting board. God alone knows how you would have monetized all that land in the millennium. On bended knee, we offer thanks to our city deity daily that your other scheme of enclosing your natural eastern harbour (linking Colaba to Uran, like bringing together a thumb and forefinger) in order to create, a 'giant freshwater lake' remained just an idea. Having seen your track record with sewage,re: the Mithi, we only shudder at what you could have done to the water you sought to sweeten.

Now, in your latest application, you have sought to expand on the aborted Nariman Point reclamation by another hundred hectares. We observe that you have enclosed testimonials from foreign experts to back your claim. Needless to say, you seem unconcerned that in the last decade your business centres have all shifted to BKC and the mill lands. Enterprise and commerce have moved north. Has this not helped change the mono-directional circulation of commuters and laid the base for a polycentric city? Who do you think will benefit from raising land to create high-end residential properties on the southern tip? You already have, at the last count, around 1,40,000 unsold ‘crore-plus’ flats all over the city. We suggest you sell them first.

Also, your current policy allowing the densification of those parts of your good-self that are already some of the densest in the world displays an ambivalence about your own urban future. While you ignore debris-dumping on mangroves and salt-pans without permission, you keep a twenty kilometre stretch of eastern docklands undeveloped, hidden behind tall screens. This, after shifting the bulk of your maritime commerce to JNPT. We suggest, earnestly, you look up the word ‘oxymoron’.

Your new proposal also seeks to create another ‘freshwater lake’, this time at Mahim, which you intend to fill with water from the Mithi. You never learn, do you?

To conclude, your past history does not give us the confidence to endorse your proposal to resume reclaiming land. By allowing redevelopment on almost every plot of land (built or unbuilt), to provide ‘long denied’ benefits to the owners, your developers are reclaiming the entire city anyway, bit by bit. You should be satisfied. And satiated.

Nevertheless, given our long association, we specially commissioned our back office to develop a proposal to reclaim land from Bandra West to Sur-on-sea (Oman East). We are told this is feasible, as the crow flies. The only reason we resist giving it the go ahead is our concern about illegal migrants, and the possible dilution of your city’s culture.




The image at the top of this post is Neibhur's 1764 mapping of Bombay's islands.
This image was one of many made free for use online by the British Library.

Narayan Gangaram Surve- Two Poems

Write Your Own Name
by
Narayan Gangaram Surve
(Tumchach naav livha)

Master - write,
write your own name.

I’ll tell you the truth, Mariaai promise,
you just write.
Look at his curls, Master;
see how they spread like a naga’s hood…
they’re the gift of God, they are.

Master, the soil may be rich…
it may be fertile, but
if you don’t plough it
or seed it
will anything grow? Tell me, will it?
Then what use is my name instead of his father’s?
And without a father, what is to become of him?

Do not fill in the name of any god,
write only a man’s name…
what has God ever done, eh?
He filled this oti himself now, didn’t he?
Write down your own name.

Don’t ask about his caste;
C’mon, can women like us belong to any one person, Master?
We aren’t the householder type,
we aren’t that fortunate…

He was born right here.
Early one morning, 
I felt my womb slip below my navel,
and out he popped.
No midwife, nor anyone at hand,
this worried me at first… but then, I was delighted.

Come child,
touch his feet.
Touch Master’s feet, child.

But do this much for me; write your own name.


Oti, or oti bharne- A ritual among Hindu women in Maharashtra to make an offering to a Goddess by placing a coconut, a piece of cloth and grains in her lap. Done at specific times in a year, this ritual seems to be associated with female fertility.

(Thank you, Hemant  Divate, for some  essential interpretations.)




Money Order
by
Narayan Gangaram Surve

…and, look here,
write this down too:
Say, that I am happy.

This body aches, but still,
say, things are better here than in the village.
The men come like looming rain-clouds,
and burst in torrents all over us;
but Babdi, who always holds a grudge
asks all of them:
how many others did you visit,
before coming to me?
My dear, they’re men, I tell her,
if they ask you to sit next to them, you sit.
And why should their wives let go of their rightful claim,
I ask you?

…now, write this down as well:
The money orders may be delayed,
but they are sent.
Say, that the new things that were bought
have been sent with Vishnu,
along with fifty rupees, less ten.
From this amount,
buy schoolbooks for Gangi
and chuddies for Namya.
Give the brat ten paise everyday
so that he will run happily to school.
And kiss them both for me.

Now,
things are getting costlier here, too.
Even water in the glass evaporates.
Every new customer demands a fresh bed-sheet.
It’s not enough to provide a soft shoulder,
you need a ceiling fan too.
No, no, don’t write that down,
I only mention this because
you have been listening patiently to me.

All this makes me laugh. I am in two minds,
whether to tell you this, but
just the other day a customer came to me
and asked if a woman could be with him
while he was there.
Now, am I not sitting here, right next to you, I said?
He stared back at me, looked surprised and shuddered
and at that moment I felt like laughing
at the entire male race.

This skin we wear is a terrible thing,
men claw at it like hungry beasts
and feel free to say whatever they want.
I feel like laughing at all men,
and weeping for them at the same time.
Men
are drawn to our skin like cattle,
they just can’t help themselves.

You must be tired,
listening to me go on and on, like this.
What to do?
Everything is tiring these days, I know,
But, even so
visit me, from time to time,
come visit me,
whenever you have the time,
come up and visit me.


translated from the Marathi
by
Mustansir Dalvi



Translations © Mustansir Dalvi, 2020/ 2013, All rights reserved.

Time Out Mumbai- Forever Bombay

This piece appeared in a slightly edited version in my 'After Words' column in Time Out Mumbai, Volume 10 Issue 6, November 8-21 2013.

Forever Bombay

At a vantage point above the Kala Ghoda parking lot, I watch the world whiz past. My gaze sweeps the panorama from right to left- the Jehangir, the Rampart Row, Rhythm House, and the undulating modernism of the BSE tower. Then, I turn my back to it all. Arrayed before me are several fornicator’s chairs, some occupied. They all face away from the street, towards the pointed stone arcade and the murmur of fans and nodding heads beyond. I lower myself into a chair that creaks with age but offers comfort. I turn its specially designed extendable arm and hoist one lazy foot over. To my left, a lady in an orange cotton saree lies dead to the world; on my right a college kid has his nose stuck in a textbook on economics. Soon the buzz of traffic lulls me into somnolence and I am gone. The pleasures offered by the David Sassoon Library are manifold, but perhaps the least known is their indulgence of sleeping members on their terrace.

When I wake, I find bodies all around me, expressions of repose softening their features. I move inside, walk past floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, old teak tables covered with textbooks, handwritten notes and reams of stapled, photocopied study stuff. This other indulgence the library offers is, in fact, a mandate. The Library doubles as a Reading Room accommodating students from nearby colleges (the Elphinstone is right next door) to study in the relative quiet imposed here. Students form the bulk of its transitory memberships, and the upper hall is often full to capacity. We have this image of school kids studying under street-lamps, or on the steps of the Asiatic, but here is the real deal- for the library keeps its doors open from 9 to 9 every day of the year. Old desks and reading lamps are available as are numerous plug-points, de rigueur for today's laptop and mobile fuelled world. 

This small colonial building houses so much history. Built with the munificence of one of Bombay's city fathers David Sassoon (a library booklet from 1931 calls him a merchant prince), this building was erected in 1870 for the erstwhile Bombay Mechanics Institute, an association of young professionals from the Royal Mint and the Government Dockyard. While their activities wound down by the 1930s, the legacy of mechanical excellence in Bombay is enshrined on the library’s mid-landing in a marble bust of James Berkley, Chief Engineer GIP Railways whose courage and risk-taking led to the first train line to cross the Bhor Ghat. Descending the grand staircase, I circumambulate the larger than life statue of David Sassoon by the English sculptor T. Woolner. I am fixated on his hands raised in prayer; the slim detailed fingers in marble remind me of Albrecht Durer’s 1508 drawing of praying hands. The polygonal Malad stone, the Venetian arcades, the sharply neo-gothic rooflines, the interiors of timber and the commemorative art all stand mute to the building’s dwindling relevance to the city. This is only emphasised as I walk past a notice that says ‘Happy Senior Citizens Day!’ The David Sassoon Library is symptomatic of several of Bombay’s public buildings that stay forgotten for most of the year, and are only occasionally made the most of, like a Parsee Gara during a wedding. Here too, the library’s pocket park is de-mummified annually during the Kala Ghoda Festival and mothballed when it is over.

Standing at the entrance on a mosaic of Minton tiles, I am struck that this should not be the case. The library’s essential resource- its books in English, Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati date from the 1790s and form an archive to be treasured and accessed, especially its scientific books procured as a memorial to Berkley. Like the Asiatic and the Bhau Daji this library quintessentially represents the city, and deserves every first copy of every book published in Mumbai. Today, the library relies on its own dwindling resources and the efforts of its bibliophile managing committee. I cannot but ask everyone reading this- if you love books, buildings and Bombay, become a member now. Read, study, sleep, or take in the garden, but embrace this patch of land that is forever Bombay.

I step outside and cross the road. I turn away from the city once again and meet the eyes of Sassoon, now in the roundel above the entrance portal. He is, just as Kolatkar describes, “a prisoner... wearing a collar... forced to watch the slow disintegration of a city I cared about more than any other.” Like Mumbai, here is a place pining for its potential to be released and shared.


All the photos here are by Smita Dalvi. My thanks.

The Fifth Estate

Here is a long essay on the conundrum that is Mumbai's housing that was published in The Indian Quarterly; 

Volume I | Issue 4 | July-September 2013

The Fifth Estate

Mumbai’s developers are increasingly holding the city to ransom as its people desperately grapple with the dearth of affordable housing

I pass an hour in the local train listening to a man on his cell phone confess that he has no ready money for investment. What he does have is “property” that he will sell only when he gets the right price. On a second cell phone he is already making deals for the next property to buy. “Give and take” is his oft-invoked mantra. This is bijness. There was a time when one came to Mumbai to do business. Today, Mumbai nagariya is the bijness.

Mumbai has always attracted real estate deals. What is so different today? The change is in the mind-set. In a city where green-field land is virtually gone, all land is now perceived as available for (re)development, even if already built upon. Once you accept this premise, the whole city is a very large pot of gold, which like Kuber’s ghada can constantly be replenished.

The built city, the one we always held as a social contract to be permanent, a city we could take for granted, is now temporal, almost tentative, a commodity. The home is now the new unit of exchange. Once, it was accepted wisdom that occupation of space, whether through outright ownership, long-term rental or even common-law territoriality was the stable base upon which Mumbaikars built a life. Their home was the costliest thing they possessed, but this was the one thing they could never afford to sell. To sell was a downgrade, a displacement to the northern boondocks, away from the downtown soul of south Mumbai. Now there is another option: an upgrade, with the promise of more square footage and some rokda. Now the very house you live in can be monetized, even as you live in it. This has brought a venal sense of entitlement for a homeowner to lust for every last rupee that can be squeezed out of a deal.

Consider Vallabhbag, Ghatkopar, a suburban neighbourhood largely inhabited by Gujaratis. Built in the late 70s, this is not a gated community but built along lanes ending in cul-de-sacs. Very urbane, with pocket parks, very upper middle class. Each building is uniformly four storeys high, in reasonably good condition. Today, individual building societies are sourcing out developers to hand over their buildings to take them down and re-erect new apartments, with added areas granted through the municipal munificence of Floor Space Index (FSI) and Transfer of Development Rights (TDR). Homeowners negotiate for sops (space and cash) as quid pro quo for excess square footage that the developer can sell for profit. Aspirations are created where once none existed. Charles Correa in a recent interview said: “Sometimes aspirations of people can be quite ugly”. Aspirations here, having reached a tipping point become the norm. All change is justified. 

More housing in Mumbai sounds like a good idea, but in some localities like Altamont Road, Walkeshwar or Malabar Hill the price of real estate has risen exponentially. The most expensive real estate deal in the city, in June 2012, was for a 28th floor flat in Tahnee Heights on NapeanSea Road, which exchanged hands at the rate of Rs. 830/- per square inch! According to a recent survey by Liases Foras Real Estate Rating and Research, more than 60% of new housing units cost over a crore of rupees each. Housing affordable to the middle class now amounts to only 2% of the available stock. What this means is that at today’s rates even areas as far-flung as Jogeshwari West (13,987/sq ft), Powai (17,717/sq ft) or Palm Beach Road in Navi Mumbai (14341/sq ft) can provide, at most, a modest 500 square foot, super built-up apartment for a crore (figures from magicbricks.com, Jan-Mar 2013). No wonder then, no developer wants to construct anything in a size other than for the luxury segment. The rising cost of upper-end estate is unsustainable.  More than 35,000 housing units in the city are left unsold. Despite this, there is no fall in retail prices—proof if any that while the city can no longer provide homes to live in, it is still a haven for speculation.

The developer has become the fifth estate of the city. The grab bag of goodies is growing. This has been made possible by changes in the Development Control Rules of Greater Mumbai (Clauses 33(7) and 33(9), for the most part) that allow for reconstruction of buildings irrespective of their condition. Kamu Iyer, one of Mumbai’s most respected senior architects, always lived in Gold Finch near Five Gardens, designed by his teacher G.B. Mhatre in the late 1930s. Buildings like these in Parel, Matunga, and Wadala defined the domestic fabric of Art Deco Mumbai. Iyer’s own celebrated monograph on Mhatre helped generate awareness for these residential buildings worthy of heritage preservation. Gold Finch is one of the best examples of Mhatre’s mature work. Now, it is up for redevelopment, in amalgamation with an adjacent plot. The new building will loom 16 storeys above the four-storey harmony of the once salubrious R.P. Masani Road, calling attention to its nouveau riche occupants.

“Gated spaces are not new to Bombay,” says Iyer. “Kalbadevi, for example, had many community-based wadis, providing homes for all economic levels. Redevelopment today will lead to both gentrification and stratification of former mixed neighbourhoods, reducing considerably the public realm.” With single plots granted permission to rebuild, planning norms and urban sustainability are impatiently brushed aside for the “greater common good”. It is not unusual to see single buildings springing out of otherwise harmonious localities like mutant incisors. These extrusions affect the relation between building and street, and constrict light and ventilation, especially on the lower floors. New housing, exclusively for the affluent, directly affects available infrastructure like water supply and parking.

In Mumbai today, the builder lobby is all-influential. Since the mid-80s, they have negotiated operational space within the development rules, and these “understandings” have become more and more concretised. No wonder then, a former Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) chief was viewed with so much resentment for tightening the screws on new building projects and reducing concessional FSI on such mythic devices as flower beds. His recent departure was the reason that, according to newspaper reports, most of the afflicted members of the lobby allegedly took off to Dubai to celebrate his leaving.

A survey of Housing Typologies by the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) in 2007,2007 identified 21 distinct types, reflecting Mumbai’s diversity. These included chawls, slums, slum resettlements, site and service schemes, slum rehabilitation projects, housing at the urban edges, townships in the suburbs and redeveloped dilapidated structures. Many of these are self-help housing, consolidating older inner city areas and developing newer localities, mostly without state support. One such housing site laid out grid-wise on a garbage dump has become Shivaji Nagar, Deonar. Each grid has narrow alleys with five or six hundred units on a plot of around 120 square feet. Unlike organic slums, Shivaji Nagar was created by re-housing families uprooted from other parts of the city. Today it is a thriving locality, with several communities making their niche in Mumbai’s emerging middle class. Its alleys are paved, and repaved before every election. Electricity is legal, bought from Reliance; water comes to every house through overgroundover ground pipes that run for hundreds of feet. There is no squalor.

Every family in Shivaji Nagar is on the path to a pucca house. This is possible because land costs are not factored in and these are houses built outside the credit economy, in rokda, as it were, as and when the householder accumulates enough to upgrade. The prescient homeowner in Shivaji Nagar looks to the future: in (re)building, he creates an upper floor for giving out on rent. For every home rebuilt, at least two families get housed. Nowhere in the upper city does this 100% model of increasing housing stock exist. The poor renting from the poor seems like a win-win situation. Despite this, as Rakhi Mehra of micro Homes Solution has written, institutions like the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) have policies that block out those who need affordable housing the most by making a 15-year residency proof for families and a monthly household income above `5,000 as qualifying guidelines.

In Shivaji Nagar, every family partners with local contractors, who are as busy with work today as developers like the Lodhas or IndiaBulls in the other Mumbai. Pankaj Gupta is one such contractor who has learnt his craft through a decade of experience and apprenticeship. He has the process of house construction down to such a degree of efficiency that project management consultants could take notes from him. He can build a two-storey Reinforced Cement Concrete (RCC) house from demolition to handing over keys in five weeks flat. Gupta is well respected, for as he says, in Shivaji Nagar trust is the only currency. His work guarantees follow-up repairs and general maintenance even after the family has moved in. He has to; he lives in the neighbourhood too.

Gupta is only one of hundreds of contractors who build solid, lasting homes outside the pale of the mother city. This upgradation is happening in many other wards as well. Mumbai’s slums have a history at least half as long as the city itself. Few slums are new, and their inhabitants, through years of toil, have lifted themselves up in the world. The contractors’ creations are quite unique, for they work in deep collaboration with homeowners, constructing the most blatant displays of aspiration. New homes proudly show off shiny ceramic tile facades, idiosyncratic aesthetics, designed interiors, well-appointed kitchens and toilets. Some homes even have false ceilings with decorative mouldings and small chandeliers, just like in the movies. All this, on plots the size of postage stamps.

And yet, Shivaji Nagar and other similar localities like  Dharavi, Wadala and Bhandup live in the valley of the shadow of demolition. The BMC can be both benign and arbitrary. In Shivaji Nagar, no construction is permitted higher than fourteen feet. Any violation and sledgehammers may swing. Even though many houses routinely flout this restriction, demolition is not a norm. There is a policy to live and let live, which is why an inhabitant can pledge his life-savings for a pucca home. Contactors and officials understand each other. Pankaj Gupta had just completed building his own home and office in March 2012 when the BMC demolished its upper floor. “Bees saal mein pehli baar hua (It’s happened for the first time in 20 years),” he says stoically. It has hurt him, but the reason is politics, not personal.

Mumbai now is vertically cleaved into a binary of high-end luxury housing and hands-on, user-generated housing. Outside of the slums, there is no culture of building for oneself, discounting single-family anomalies such as Antilla. The model for cooperative middle-class housing—the mainstay of the 1970s that allowed families with modest incomes to build apartments—has almost gone. The state that once patronised cooperatives by providing subsidized land has now become a trader and auctioneer of land. The Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA), the state organisation responsible for generating housing stock, finds it easier to outsource to developers, at terms that benefit them. This sedentary mindset has permeated the rising middle classes: no one wants to do for oneself what they can get done for a price.

While the middle class is inexorably being squeezed out of the reckoning, slums remain the sites of true affordability and self-help. Badmouthed as eyesores and bastions of filth, civic bodies have mandated to make the city slum-free by 2015. The way to these Elysian fields is, naturally, to be forged by builders regulated by the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA), who are to re-house the so-called unauthorised but “eligible” slum dwellers in free units of 300 or so square feet each on 20-storey skyscrapers clumped together, while freeing a large portion of the occupied site for sale at market rates. Dharavi can now happily be renamed Bandra–Kurla South.

With policies allowing unilateral interventions by lobbies intent only on making capital, the collegial soul of Mumbai is being inexorably ripped out. Mumbaikars are now wilful accomplices to their agenda, bought over by ephemeral but colour-saturated carrots. When the pupils of your eyes can reflect only rupee symbols, you are reduced to a caricature of a citizen. Individual rights become everything, while urban responsibility is NIMBY—someone else’s concern. Mumbai seems headed down a one-way road to transformation for its own sake.

This city has had a history of reclamations—some that defined its urbanity, like those in the 1930s and 40s, and some contentious like those in the 1970s—but Mumbai has never been more a site for reclamation than it is today. Even as you read this, the land that is sought to be reclaimed is the ground beneath your feet.



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