Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai
A Brief History of Decosmopolitanization
Cities like Bombay—now Mumbai—have no clear place in the stories told so far that link late capitalism, globalization, post-Fordism, and the growing dematerialization of capital. Their history is uneven—in the sense made commonsensical by a certain critical tradition in Marxism. It is also characterized by disjunct, yet adjacent, histories and temporalities. In such cities, Fordist manufacture, craft and artisanal production, service economies involving law, leisure, finance, and banking, and virtual economies involving global finance capital and local stock markets live in an uneasy mix. Certainly, these cities are the loci of the practices of predatory global capital—here Mumbai belongs with Bangkok, Hong Kong, Saõ Paulo, Los Angeles, Mexico City, London, and Singapore. But these cities also produce the social black holes of the effort to embrace and seduce global capital in their own particular ways, which are tied to varied histories (colonial and otherwise), varied political cultures of citizenship and rule, and varied ecologies of production and finance. Such particularities appear as images of globalization that are cracked and refracted. They are also instances of the elusiveness of global flows at the beginning of the new millennium.
Typically, these cities are large (10–15 million people) and are currently shifting from economies of manufacture and industry to economies of trade, tourism, and finance. They usually attract more poor people than they can handle and more capital than they can absorb. They offer the magic of wealth, celebrity, glamour, and power through their mass media. But they often contain shadow economies that are difficult to measure in traditional terms.
Such cities, too, are the site of various uncertainties about citizenship. People come to them in large numbers from impoverished rural areas. Work is often difficult to obtain and retain. The rich in these cities seek to gate as much of their lives as possible, travelling from guarded homes to darkened cars to airconditioned offices, moving always in an envelope of privilege through the heat of public poverty and the dust of dispossession. Frequently, these are cities where crime is an integral part of municipal order and where fear of the poor is steadily increasing. And these are cities where the circulation of wealth in the form of cash is ostentatious and immense, but the sources of cash are always restricted, mysterious, or unpredictable. Put another way, even for those who have secure salaries or wages, the search for cash in order to make ends meet is endless. Thus everyday life is shot through with socially mediated chains of debt—between friends, neighbors, and coworkers—stretched across the continuum between multinational banks and other organized lenders, on the one hand, and loan sharks and thugs, on the other.
Bombay is one such city. It has an interesting history as a set of fishing villages, many named after local goddesses, linked by bridges and causeways and turned into a seat of colonial government in western India. Later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, it blossomed as a site of commercially oriented bourgeois nationalism, and, until the 1950s, it retained the ethos of a wellmanaged, Fordist city, dominated by commerce, trade, and manufacture, especially in the realm of textiles. Well into the 1970s, in spite of phenomenal growth in its population and increasing strain on its infrastructure, Bombay remained a civic model for India. Most people with jobs had housing; most basic services (such as gas, electricity, water, and milk) reliably reached the salaried middle classes. The laboring classes had reasonably secure occupational niches. The truly destitute were always there, but even they fit into a complex subeconomy of pavement dwelling, rag picking, petty crime, and charity.
Until about 1960, the trains bringing in white- and blue-collar workers from the outer suburbs to the commercial and political core of the city (the Fort area in South Bombay) seemed to be able to move people around with some dignity and reliability and at relatively low cost. The same was true of the city’s buses, bicycles, and trams. A three-mile bus ride in 1965 Bombay cost about 15 paise (roughly the equivalent of two U.S. cents at then-current rates). People actually observed the etiquette of queuing in most public contexts, and buses always stopped at bus stops rather than fifty feet before or after them (as in most of India today).
Sometime in the 1970s all this began to change and a malignant city began to emerge from beneath the surface of the cosmopolitan ethos of the prior period. The change was not sudden, and it was not equally visible in all spheres. But it was unmistakable. Jobs became harder to get. More rural arrivals in the city found themselves economic refugees. Slums and shacks began to proliferate. The wealthy began to get nervous. The middle classes had to wrestle with overcrowded streets and buses, skyrocketing prices, and maddening traffic. The places of leisure and pleasure—the great promenades along the shore of the Arabian Sea, the wonderful parks and maidans (open grass fields designed for sport and pastime in the colonial era), the cinema halls and tea stalls—began to show the wear and tear of hypermodernization.
As this process began to take its toll on all but the wealthiest of the city’s population, the groundwork was laid for the birth of the most markedly xenophobic regional party in India—the Shiva Sena—which formed in 1966 as a pro-native, Marathi-centered, movement for ethnic control of Bombay. Today the Shiva Sena controls the city and the state and has a significant national profile as one of the many parties that form the Sangh Parivar (or coalition of Hindu chauvinist parties). Its platform combines language chauvinism (Marathi), regional primordialism (a cult of the regional state of Maharashtra), and a commitment to a Hinduized India (Hindutva, the land of Hinduness). The Shiva Sena’s appeal goes back at least to 1956, shortly before Bombay was made the capital of the new linguistic state of Maharashtra and after intense rioting in Bombay over the competing claims of Gujaratis for Bombay to be in their own new linguistic state. In retrospect, 1956 marks a moment when Bombay became Mumbai, the name now insisted on by the official machineries of the city, all of which have been influenced by the Shiva Sena. Since this period, mostly through the active and coercive tactics of the Shiva Sena and its cadres, Bombay’s Marathi speakers have been urged to see the city as theirs, and every few years a new enemy is found among the city’s minorities: Tamil clerks, Hindi-speaking cabdrivers, Sikh businessmen, Malayali coconut vendors—each has provided the “allogenic” flavor of the month (or year).
A high point of this ethnicization of the city was reached in late 1992 and early 1993, when riots broke out throughout India after the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya (in the state of Uttar Pradesh in north India) by Hindu vandals on 6 December 1992. Bombay’s Hindu right managed in this period to join the national frenzy of anti-Muslim violence, but this violence, too, had a Bombay flavor. In keeping with more than two decades of the Shiva Sena’s peculiar mix of regional chauvinism and nationalist hysterics, Bombay’s Hindus managed to violently rewrite urban space as sacred, national, and Hindu space. The decades of this gradual ethnicizing of India’s most cosmopolitan city (roughly the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s) were also the decades when Bombay became a site of crucial changes in trade, finance, and industrial manufacture. This essay is in part an effort to capture this more than circumstantial link. I turn now to a series of ethnographic interventions whose purpose is to think through the complex causalities that mediate between the steady dematerialization of Bombay’s economy and the relentless hypermaterialization of its citizens through ethnic mobilization and public violence.
I have suggested so far that Bombay belongs to a group of cities in which global wealth and local poverty articulate a growing contradiction. But this essay is not an effort to illuminate a general class of city or a global urban dilemma. It is an effort to recognize two specificities about Bombay that mark and produce its singularity. The first is to note the peculiar ambiguities that divide and connect cash and capital (two quite distinct forms of wealth) from one another. The second is to show that this disjuncture is part of what might let us understand the peculiar ways in which cosmopolitanism in Bombay has been violently compromised in its recent history. I do this by sketching a set of circumstances to make an argument about wealth, housing, and ethnic violence, that is, at this stage, circumstantial. Future work on Mumbai may allow me to be more precise about causalities and more definite about comparisons.
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Notes
This essay is dedicated to my friends in the Housing Alliance (SPARC, NSDF, and Mahila Milan) in Mumbai who are producing their own radical projects for housing in Bombay, based on situated secularism, grassroots energy, gender equity, and deep democracy. I must also thank my hosts and audiences for helpful comments and reactions at the conference on “Cosmopolitanism,” University of Chicago (May 1999), and the conference on “Urban Antagonisms” organized by the World Academy for Local Government and Democracy (WALD) and held in Istanbul (also in May 1999). At the University of Chicago, I owe special thanks to numerous friends and colleagues whose comments have helped me strengthen this essay, though not as much as they might have wished: Homi Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Claudio Lomnitz, Sheldon Pollock, Elizabeth Povinelli, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Katie Trumpener, and Candace Vogler all provided valuable readings in the editorial context of this issue of Public Culture.
There is a large scholarly literature that constitutes the foundation for this ethnographic essay. In lieu of detailed citations, I offer some indications of a few major debts and scholarly engagements. This essay would have been unthinkable without the major two-volume collection of essays on Bombay edited by Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner—Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture and Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1995). See also Bombay: The Cities Within by Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra (Bombay: India Book House, 1995) and Damning Verdict: Report of the Srikrishna Commission (Mumbai: Sabrang Communications and Publishing, n.d.). My sense of the predicament of megacities in Asia and elsewhere has been deeply informed by the work of my friend and colleague Saskia Sassen. My understanding of Bombay’s special housing dilemmas has been enriched by a series of case studies and reports produced by A. Jockin, Sundar Burra, Celine D’Cruz, and Sheela Patel. My debts in regard to the analysis of Hindu nationalism in Bombay are too many to list, but special mention must be made of the ongoing work of Thomas Blom Hansen—see, for instance, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999)—Ranjit Hoskote, and Kalpana Sharma. See also Romila Thapar, “Syndicated Hinduism” in Hinduism Reconsidered, edited by Günther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1989), and Sandeep Pendse, “Toil, Sweat, and the City” in Patel and Thorner’s Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India. My recourse to the trope of the spectral is on an ongoing engagement with the work of Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, and James Siegel, though they may well not recognize themselves in this text.