H S Verma: Bombay to Mumbai to Mumbai Metropolitan City Region: Changing Character and Logic of Transformational Process (Ninth Installment) Localization: Mumbai Safe no more Gang rape of a photojournalist in 2013 was not an isolated incident, and sociologists and psychiatrists had indicated much earlier that Mumbai had developed a growing class divide and pockets of uneven growth. Mumbai is the financial capital of India, home to some of its richest but where 20 percent of the youth are unemployed. The attitudes have changed for everybody in the city. Post-1990 and globalization, the city has become a harder place for everyone. But not all is well. The structure of the family has changed in Indian cities over the years, with multi-generational joint families giving way to nuclear families where the parents go out to work and the children are left unsupervised. Rising unemployment is making matters worse for the youth. The tide of globalization has created pockets in Mumbai where unemployed young men feel like they have been disenfranchised and that society owes them their legitimate dues. The hold of the family has loosened, the fabric is fraying and even though families still live together, they don’t have as much of a hold on their wards. Mumbai now records the most rapes after New Delhi, about a third of the number of cases reported in India’s capital. These produced socially sanctioned oppression including crimes against women. While there may not be any link between immigration to crime, as so often alleged by the SS and the MNS but the city no longer embraces or integrates newcomers in the social system. The crime scene was a deserted mill, a symbol of Mumbai’s changing social fabric, one that used to employ thousands of immigrants but was abandoned after a strike forced the owners to shut it.Those who gang raped the photo-journalist had a sense of rootlessness that the youth feel. They lacked an anchor in the city and nursed a grudge against the society in general but the rich and well provided for in particular. They had become increasingly intolerant. Excepting one, they all belonged to very poor Muslim families. The community is now finding it difficult to rent an apartment in the city. The slums, where they are forced to live, are being indiscriminately demolished and there is a growing lack of empathy with anyone facing these problems. Localization: Loss of Public Space for Women 2005 has been the defining year for the loss of space for movement of the women after 9 pm in the night in the Mumbai city. It was then that there was a crackdown on the dance bars. During the earlier period, it was rare to see deserted ladies’ compartment in a Mumbai local train even after mid-night. After this, the hawkers disappeared from the streets, and the shops downed their shutters much earlier. At 11 pm, the bustling suburb of Santacruz now looks like 2 am.Restrictions on mobility and business threaten the city’s traditional character of being open 24 hours and relatively safe, even for the females. The nature of everyone’s work in the city is quite peculiar. After the city has been rocked by horrifying incidents like the Shakti mills gang rape, moral policing has been willy-nilly thrust on unwilling Mumbai women. But by ordaining that women should avoid working late or going out alone at night, moral police is trying to fit the women into boxes and that is very dangerous for the city’s identity. Sometimes there are no lamps on a deserted road and a dark stretch is being termed unsafe. But providing street lights and ensuring safety is the job of the local/state/Union governments. The right answer is not to tell the women to avoid venturing out during the nights and on deserted stretches in metro cities. While Mumbai women may not have stopped moving about at odd hours of the night, they have certainly become far more careful and circumspect in taking some precautionary measures. These include not doing anything to draw attention, not entering into empty compartments of the locals, and ensuring that they travel along highways and busy roads so that they can avoid desolate areas when travelling in auto-rickshaws. However, following these dictums is not a choice available to women living in far flung suburbs and working late hours is a routine for quite a large number of women in Mumbai’s economy. This entails facing the risks of travelling in half/totally empty compartments of local trains, getting down at a remote station, and then taking an auto to travel or walk home on foot via deserted/desolate roads. Mumbai proper itself no longer retains the previous tradition of safety, and its extended suburbs were known to be in the grip of anti-social elements even in earlier times. Things have gone from bad to worse since the control of the municipal corporation went in the hands of the SS, and the Home Department of the Government of Maharashtra to a totally incompetent NCP politician like R R Patil. Mumbai 2014: Evolved Character The Planned and the Unplanned Shall Persist Mumbai’s slums have demonstrated their capacity to proliferate despite economic and political efforts to obliterate them. In point of fact, there are more slums in Mumbai in 2014 than their number in say 1971.The planned and the unplanned parts of the city have co-existed as the city has grown. As Gautam Bhatia (2013) very aptly puts it, there is a symbiotic relationship between the slum and the planned city and it cannot be threatened as long as one feeds off the other. The slum budges with activity—domestic, mercantile and the socio-cultural--.in a city like Mumbai. Like the other cities in any part of the world, both the rich parts of the city as well as the slums keep on constantly changing. The life in the slums keeps improving and the one in rich parts keeps deteriorating. Mumbai’s Dharvi is a self-renewing organism that is constantly changing its own structures of accommodation, work and social norms. Sadly enough, it has an unfortunate relationship with the Mumbai city that is obsessed with real estate and builder lobbies. Even the basic ideology behind the award of projects by the SRA earlier on and the new cluster development policy enunciated in 2013 by the CM, Prithviraj Chavan is entirely driven by appropriation and privatization of the slum space. The division of the Mumbai city into part planned and part undocumented slum persists as a cultural, economic, and class entity. The unequal city has forsaken its responsibility of equitability and proliferated on the foundations of private ownership. City land remains with the rich, private and out of bounds.Gautam Bhatia argues that any hope of bridging the growing divide hinges on reversing this commercialization of land to create pockets of rental and short-lease housing within two centres. The present socio-economic-cultural character of Mumbai, seen in 2014, is not exactly what it has been earlier on. Rather, it is what it has evolved over the past few hundred years. It is true that this evolution has been different both in terms of content as well as speed during different epochs. Writing periodic profiles would be best left for the better qualified social and economic historians. What is recorded here is an urban ethnographic viewpoint assembled on the basis of insider ethnography helped by participant viewpoints of various stakeholders of what is known as Mumbaikars. Mind you, the Mumbaikar is not one individual but a typified collectivity that frequents, lives, experiences, and celebrates Mumbai as it has always existed and as it exists today. In his view, Mumbai is gigantic in every conceivable way, its population, city servicing systems like its road and suburban rail transport systems, its water supply and sewage disposal system, per day in and outflows of people, goods, and finances to and fro from the city. Without doubt, it is a heavily crowded, diverse and pulsating urban environment. Individuals living in Mumbai generally mind their business, and remain aloof from the individual trials and tribulations of the others. And yet, at times of collective disaster, Mumbai has always displayed the collective will and determination to face and fight it with all their might. The Mumbaikars may be curt, if necessary but are generally genial. They may be unforgiving to the un-initiated, and expect a newcomer to follow Mumbai’s rites and practices. It may break those who do not follow its dominant streak. Mumbai is a crowded city, crowded not only in terms of resident and transient population but also in other manifold ways. That is why a distinctive individuality immediately gets noticed in Mumbai’s crowded anonymity. It is orderly in a very disorderly way like large fleet of the BEST buses and the suburban local trains, teeming with overflowing commuters jostling for space and quick ride to their work places or residences or other destinations being sure that they would reach their desired place on time. On these voluminous journeys, the commuters are part well-behaved and in part they display their frenzy and unruly behaviour.In general, outsiders’ are unanimous in pronouncing the city as quite civil, and reasonably safe despite its insane speed and throbbing and livewire life. Mumbai is a quite an open system to everyone who himself does not sport a closed mind, and is ever ready to absorb you in one of its myriad activities. Surprisingly enough, the city’s range of available activities keeps getting enlarged by each passing day, and the city has the professional capability to quickly master a new one to be counted. This is due to the fact that the city has kept reinventing and restructuring itself on a concurrent basis in an attempt to be in tune with the changing requirements of the time. Despite very crude attempts of the SS and the MNS to bundle it under the closed sub-culture of the Marathi Manoos, Mumbai has refused to do so and remains accommodative to different ethno-religious-linguistic sub-cultures that comprise the city’s societal fabric. Mumbai has always been dominated by the economic impulses---trade, commerce, finance, and industry--- coming from different sources/places, and cultures. Mumbai is not only gateway of India but also a window to outside world. Among Indian cities, Mumbai would be the first to pick global trends. It is distinctive as an entity but quite open to adoption and adaptation of ideas, technologies, and practices. In doing so, it blazes a trail nationally and internationally. Some of its native trail blazers like the unique lunch box delivery (Dabba delivery), Bollywood, press and music stand out. It used to boast of a local governing system that was envy of many other developing countries but with the takeover of the BMC by the SS in the 1990s, it has taken a heavy beating. It boasts of a city economy that is robust, and domineering, and an institutional culture that is sleek but is not entirely free of its vices. Mumbai is a curious mix of the good, the not so bad and the ugly, chaotic and still satisfactorily manageable. Remarkably, the city is hospitable not only for the richest of the rich but also the poorest of the poor at the same time. 62 per cent of its population lives in the chawls and slums in the year 2013.
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 03:46:51 +0000
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