(In Bombay last month, I found myself, one evening, unaccountably sitting on the balcony of Phoenix Mills for hour after hour, feeling angry and desperate and perversely fascinated. I sat there for four hours, looking, not doing anything else. That is where this came from.)
1. Freeze this segment of the city at any moment in time, and you encounter a very particular Bombay, a Bombay mythologized many times over, but also a real Bombay. Social distances are crossed with apparent ease here. Blue collar and white collar bump collars on crowded streets; tea and paan shops, tiny cheap restaurants and permit rooms jostle with large shopping centres and expensive eateries; working-class neighbourhoods weave through the shadows of looming residential skyscrapers and towering office blocks; narrow alleys stuffed with pedestrian life seep into broad boulevards stuffed with slow-moving car traffic; flyovers where cars whiz by overlook messy junction points of humming, throbbing pedestrian roads. The sound of drilled metal and hammered concrete, the wet slap of cement and tarmac, fugue into the chatter of families shopping for the week or the day, the honk of impatient taxis and Contessas, the music blaring from bars. The smells of stale piss and the smells of brewed Barista coffee hover together in the air. The neighbourhoods thrum with the friction of crossing social worlds, visible to one another and part of one another. This is not Delhi, with its zoned off territories, its industrial units banished to the city’s edges, its gated communities and malls designed exclusively for the super-rich. Lower Parel is a messy junction of interchanges, an exhibition of classes, communities and histories passing each other on the street, unsmilingly but also, on the whole, unthreateningly.
2. But having frozen space in time, allow time to begin moving again in this space. And now these crossing worlds, these corruptions and porosities of social distance, seem less plastic than they appeared at first, and more tragic. This used to be part of Girangaon: working-class Bombay, textile mills belching smoke from their tall chimneys, factory sirens screaming at lunch hour and the end of shifts. Spinners and weavers and doffers and reelers and moneylenders and rentiers and khanavals fabricated, through their intimate exchanges and conflicts, a distinct world. Shahirs recited their poetry, lavnis and tamashas entertained working-class families and communities, religious occasions and festivals created, alternately, flashpoints of unity and discord, powerful unions organized workers into militant political activity. This was a locality, like others in Girangaon, created and sustained by the mills and the labour market that swelled around them, fuelled by the relationships, rivalries, lives and deaths of labourers. This place belonged to them.
3. The mills died. The strike of 1982 ended in unqualified defeat. Productive technology shifted from mills to powerlooms. The market shifted from cotton to polyester and other synthetic fibres. For several years the mill lands lay vacant and unused; the communities built around them began to float apart. Meanwhile, the city continued to grow. It grew richer but also poorer. It grew more congested. Slums occupied more and more space; commercially available land, on the other hand, became more and more profitable. Bombay became one of the prime real estate destinations of the world. Real estate, as was inevitable, turned its eye upon the mill lands. This happened at a time of an acute housing shortage in the city. Environmental activists argued, with reason on their side, that the lands left vacant by the mills provided a wonderful opportunity for the city to breathe again: the unused acres could be converted into parks and green public spaces. NGOs campaigning for workers’ rights argued, again with reason on their side, that the land that had belonged to workers should be developed for their use, their sustenance. In a time when slums dotted the landscapes of the labouring and ex-labouring poor, the vacant lands offered an ideal space for the construction of low-cost housing. Real estate agents and builders, with the state and money on their side, argued that this was the chance the city had, finally, to become ‘world-class’, to become Shanghai, to become Manhattan. Cleansed, purified, beautified. It was a long battle, dragged through the media, the deliberations of contending cliques of policymakers, experts and advisers, and the courts. But eventually the side with the guns and the money won: acres and acres of mill land were turned over, largely illegally, to builders and investors for ‘new development’. Lower Parel, and areas like it, came to acquire the landscape they inhabit now: a schizophrenic juxtaposition of supremely rich corporate offices leaning into the sky, surreal skylines punctuated by the grit and dirt of plebeian neighbourhoods, caked with dust and bursting sewers and crowded bastis and chawls. The process of corporate gentrification continues. The working and unemployed poor, in a city of vast and visible economic disparities, are being squeezed into tiny corners of land that had historically been theirs. ‘New development’ in Bombay distributes entitlements and opportunities in a manner that, even by the standards of contemporary global capitalism, is blindly avaricious and unjust. It identifies stakeholders on the basis of profitability, plunges real estate investment and speculation into the city as though the poor didn’t exist.
4. In this apparent criss-crossing of classes and spaces, a significantly new form of social distance is actually being produced: the inexorable work of capital upon plebeian livelihoods and localities, plebeian communities that structured these streets and alleys, and consequently the creation of a new patriciate, ennobled by access to the benefits of real estate investment and speculation. And Phoenix Mills, where I am sitting as I write this, stands at the centre of this new strategy of urban creation, a grotesque and fascinating monument to the torn and entangled histories of Bombay, a testament to the fantasies on whose purse-strings the engines of growth now run.
5. Phoenix Mills is a scam: the land the mill stood on was leased on condition that it be used for ‘workers’ recreation’. This obscene deployment of a worker-friendly clause in urban development law for the purposes of actually disinheriting what remained of the working class testifies to the transformation of the law itself, a transformation with deep historical roots fructifying fully at this moment in time. At one point, over a hundred years ago, the law that governed the space of factories was a weak but real instrument for the protection of workers, now it became an instrument for their disenfranchisement, their erasure from the spaces they had built and sustained, the spaces they had spun and woven into their masters’ profits. The millworkers of Bombay, and the complex local economy framed around their activities, had no space in the new, world-class city that was being imagined. They were an unnecessary impediment. They were, quite simply, superfluous.
6. I’m sitting on the steps of Level 1, High Street Phoenix. Behind me is a white room with large windows – the Bowling Company. A Sports Bar belonging to the same company. A seafood restaurant named Gopaljee. Below and behind me, there are outlets of Copper Chimney, McDonald’s, Bombay Blue, Noodle Bar, Spaghetti Kitchen, Gelato Italiano, Kareem’s, Domino’s. On my far right, Big Bazaar: socialism for the rich, or at any rate for the economically empowered. Below and beside that, several open-air food stalls. Below me and facing me, a large brick-tiled courtyard, where shopping families, children, groups of young people, and couples, wander and talk. Directly below me is a tiny patch of enclosed green, and a couple of large potted plants, behind which are groups of people sitting on marbled benches with small attached water fountains. They face Barista, Quorum, Planet M, and The Dollar Store. These are mostly built within structures inherited from the old factory: this room might have been the carding room, cotton may have been reeled in its neighbouring compound, and spun into yarn in the big oddly shaped structure behind that. No matter – it’s all gone now, and our focus is on the new and the living, not the dead. Still, the intersection of dead and living is eerie in Phoenix Mills. The building that now houses Spaghetti Kitchen and McDonald’s would once have housed mill engines: it is attached to a large stone chimney, rather tastefully decorated in white, with the words ‘HIGH STREET PHOENIX’ emblazoned across its body. It is an arresting and spectral sight, a perpetual, though unwitting, reminder of the lives and deaths that passed through these factory walls once.
7. Life is happening all around. People are shopping in Big Bazaar and Pantaloons, darting in and out of the enormous building named High Street Phoenix, eating and drinking in the restaurants and bars, simply wandering around. And I am struck by the fact that despite the obscenity and injustice involved in producing this space, it remains a pleasant space to be in. This is a week-day, and so it is relatively relaxed, free of the weekend rush. It’s buzzing but not noisy. It is a middle-class space with its own generosity, embracing the gamut of occupations and experiences that constitutes the Indian middle class, not just –as in Delhi malls – the sickening conspicuous consumption of the nouveau riche. The crowd is not entirely devoid of plebeian faces: careworn office faces, careworn working mothers’ faces, housewives’ faces that have finally been granted some relaxation, the faces of young men with shiny belts and slicked back hair and nowhere to go, the faces of the children of the respectable lower middle class, the faces of women who feel secure here and wander about freely, on their own or with their friends and families and lovers. A walk along a courtyard licking an ice cream, a hungrily munched chicken roll here, a long involved conversation there, the clasped hands of a couple deep into each other across the courtyard. The meanness and generosity of Bombay, as ever, can never quite cancel one another out. It is a public space.
8. It is a public space, but the public has its limits. The public experience it offers is contained, it is privatized within boundaries of class that are porous at their outer edges, but nonetheless there. I see this on Friday nights and weekends, when the mall becomes a zoo: a desperate mass of working middle-class people, a crocodile queue jostling to enter the mall. It is a desperate crush of people, many of whom, worn out after a week’s work, have this chance in this space and no other to do their shopping for the following week. The streets outside are the same as they ever were: local groceries, tobacconists, engineering and car repairing workshops, fruit and vegetable sellers, assorted mechanical blue-collar skills, surrounding this weirdly unsure, wavering, swaying circus of the local patriciate and gentry, small and large, modest and rich. This circus is contained within the space of the mall: step outside and you enter an utterly different world. The surrounding streets still belong, temporarily, to the proletarians and plebeians. But they in turn are surrounded. The corporate patriciate and white-collar gentry inhabit the oases of calm, the high-rise buildings, that survey this landscape and the rest of the city. Their meeting point is here, in Phoenix Mills, where they stock up for the week, and demonstrate the essential unity of the community they belong to, separated from them, the others, the mass of people who spit on the roads, the dirty faces of children who stare hungrily into shopfront windows from the outside, the men and women living around the mall who have no idea how long their occupancy of these roads and alleys will last, how long before they are cleansed, and we have, finally, our Shanghai or our Manhattan. This is the slow, contested, but inexorable dynamic of segregation in the city.
9. Below me, the courtyard is humming with all the delicate variations of human relationships and interchanges. But beyond this, interchanges of a different kind are at work. Beyond a fence of aluminium plastered with billboards – Pantaloons, HSBC, Samsung, HT – the landscape shifts dramatically and surreally. A giant car park is being erected. Gangs of men, small figures with hard hats, stand on a half-built roof that is also a work-floor, yelling and grunting as they haul up a half-finished door, borne on the shoulders of a man climbing a rickety scaffolding. A gigantic crane looms over their bodies, swinging this way and that. Workers move around, fix walls, stop, look around, smoke, and return to work, on the seven floors of the car park that is being built, with speed and efficiency and sweat and, in all probability, terrible pay with no benefits. Stacks of bamboo line the back of a man moving, very slowly, between the towering skeleton of the car park and the work-floor where it is being assembled. Tall rods rise from the surface, providing the weight and balance for makeshift pillars that will later be finessed into the foundations of the different storeys. Loud hammering. Drilling. Four men picking an unsteady path across a walkway precariously balanced on a grid of wooden rods, cobbled into a platform to hold the weight of working men and their materials. On the sixth floor, a man very near the edge, crawling along the walkway inspecting his work. He’d better not have vertigo. Men balancing on one another, shouting loud instructions, hauling concrete and wood and metal, cleaning surfaces, hammering in loose bolts. Construction is factory work, but with a difference: here the workers are building the factory even as they work in it. Workers’ recreation.
10. The compound that surveys this back-breaking labour, the compound where I am sitting, is not, plainly enough, built for workers’ recreation. But in another sense, it clearly is built for that very purpose. Recreation in the literal sense of the word: to re-create, to create afresh. A new economy and new forms of work. This may be a space of consumption, but it remains a factory nonetheless. Tangible goods and intangible services are produced each moment. Men and women smile plastic smiles at you from behind food counters as they wrap your sandwiches and rolls. McDonald’s gives you the assembly line in miniaturized and perfect form: the young workers who hand you burgers and fries never stop for a moment, never sit, their hands and bodies move in pre-synchronized manner. Ford and Taylor are recreated in the juxtapositions and rhythms of their work. Security guards, many of whom may have worked in the old mill, or others around it, move around sleeplessly, watching you for signs of transgression, stifling yawns but unable to hide the tiredness in their eyes, behind their dull blue suits. Waiters and shop assistants scurry to your service, always ready to be of use, fortunate if you speak to them with courtesy. A complex, dynamic economy of labour persists within the walls of the old factory. An economy with new codes, new and intimate hierarchies, but an economy of labour nonetheless. All this happens in the shadow of the old mill chimney, and if you listen very hard you can hear ghosts clanking their chains, marching in through the gates when the whistle blows, marching out again when the day’s over, and you can hear, in your mind, the hissing steam of the engines in the mill, and smell the smoke as it billows blackly out of the now cleansed, white chimney. Dead and living labour mingle. History is lived. All that was solid has melted into air, but air has crystallized as real estate, has taken shape, again, in this new economy of exchanges, services, and construction.
11. I look across this bustling, chaotic jostling of economies again, and the landscape I’m part of produces itself, with a new clarity, before my eyes. Here, Phoenix Mills, with its complex interpenetrations of work, investment, and consumption. Before me, the looming husk of a car park, the scaffolding that supports it, and the men who slowly conjure it into shape and form. Across the road, the sounds and smells of car mechanics’ workshops, cheap eateries, and small groceries that constitutes Gandhi Nagar Road, the chawls and bastis that sit in the middle of the new Shanghai that is taking shape before our eyes. A short way in the distance, three giant tower blocks, heralding the future of lower Parel. The future of new Bombay.
1. Freeze this segment of the city at any moment in time, and you encounter a very particular Bombay, a Bombay mythologized many times over, but also a real Bombay. Social distances are crossed with apparent ease here. Blue collar and white collar bump collars on crowded streets; tea and paan shops, tiny cheap restaurants and permit rooms jostle with large shopping centres and expensive eateries; working-class neighbourhoods weave through the shadows of looming residential skyscrapers and towering office blocks; narrow alleys stuffed with pedestrian life seep into broad boulevards stuffed with slow-moving car traffic; flyovers where cars whiz by overlook messy junction points of humming, throbbing pedestrian roads. The sound of drilled metal and hammered concrete, the wet slap of cement and tarmac, fugue into the chatter of families shopping for the week or the day, the honk of impatient taxis and Contessas, the music blaring from bars. The smells of stale piss and the smells of brewed Barista coffee hover together in the air. The neighbourhoods thrum with the friction of crossing social worlds, visible to one another and part of one another. This is not Delhi, with its zoned off territories, its industrial units banished to the city’s edges, its gated communities and malls designed exclusively for the super-rich. Lower Parel is a messy junction of interchanges, an exhibition of classes, communities and histories passing each other on the street, unsmilingly but also, on the whole, unthreateningly.
2. But having frozen space in time, allow time to begin moving again in this space. And now these crossing worlds, these corruptions and porosities of social distance, seem less plastic than they appeared at first, and more tragic. This used to be part of Girangaon: working-class Bombay, textile mills belching smoke from their tall chimneys, factory sirens screaming at lunch hour and the end of shifts. Spinners and weavers and doffers and reelers and moneylenders and rentiers and khanavals fabricated, through their intimate exchanges and conflicts, a distinct world. Shahirs recited their poetry, lavnis and tamashas entertained working-class families and communities, religious occasions and festivals created, alternately, flashpoints of unity and discord, powerful unions organized workers into militant political activity. This was a locality, like others in Girangaon, created and sustained by the mills and the labour market that swelled around them, fuelled by the relationships, rivalries, lives and deaths of labourers. This place belonged to them.
3. The mills died. The strike of 1982 ended in unqualified defeat. Productive technology shifted from mills to powerlooms. The market shifted from cotton to polyester and other synthetic fibres. For several years the mill lands lay vacant and unused; the communities built around them began to float apart. Meanwhile, the city continued to grow. It grew richer but also poorer. It grew more congested. Slums occupied more and more space; commercially available land, on the other hand, became more and more profitable. Bombay became one of the prime real estate destinations of the world. Real estate, as was inevitable, turned its eye upon the mill lands. This happened at a time of an acute housing shortage in the city. Environmental activists argued, with reason on their side, that the lands left vacant by the mills provided a wonderful opportunity for the city to breathe again: the unused acres could be converted into parks and green public spaces. NGOs campaigning for workers’ rights argued, again with reason on their side, that the land that had belonged to workers should be developed for their use, their sustenance. In a time when slums dotted the landscapes of the labouring and ex-labouring poor, the vacant lands offered an ideal space for the construction of low-cost housing. Real estate agents and builders, with the state and money on their side, argued that this was the chance the city had, finally, to become ‘world-class’, to become Shanghai, to become Manhattan. Cleansed, purified, beautified. It was a long battle, dragged through the media, the deliberations of contending cliques of policymakers, experts and advisers, and the courts. But eventually the side with the guns and the money won: acres and acres of mill land were turned over, largely illegally, to builders and investors for ‘new development’. Lower Parel, and areas like it, came to acquire the landscape they inhabit now: a schizophrenic juxtaposition of supremely rich corporate offices leaning into the sky, surreal skylines punctuated by the grit and dirt of plebeian neighbourhoods, caked with dust and bursting sewers and crowded bastis and chawls. The process of corporate gentrification continues. The working and unemployed poor, in a city of vast and visible economic disparities, are being squeezed into tiny corners of land that had historically been theirs. ‘New development’ in Bombay distributes entitlements and opportunities in a manner that, even by the standards of contemporary global capitalism, is blindly avaricious and unjust. It identifies stakeholders on the basis of profitability, plunges real estate investment and speculation into the city as though the poor didn’t exist.
4. In this apparent criss-crossing of classes and spaces, a significantly new form of social distance is actually being produced: the inexorable work of capital upon plebeian livelihoods and localities, plebeian communities that structured these streets and alleys, and consequently the creation of a new patriciate, ennobled by access to the benefits of real estate investment and speculation. And Phoenix Mills, where I am sitting as I write this, stands at the centre of this new strategy of urban creation, a grotesque and fascinating monument to the torn and entangled histories of Bombay, a testament to the fantasies on whose purse-strings the engines of growth now run.
5. Phoenix Mills is a scam: the land the mill stood on was leased on condition that it be used for ‘workers’ recreation’. This obscene deployment of a worker-friendly clause in urban development law for the purposes of actually disinheriting what remained of the working class testifies to the transformation of the law itself, a transformation with deep historical roots fructifying fully at this moment in time. At one point, over a hundred years ago, the law that governed the space of factories was a weak but real instrument for the protection of workers, now it became an instrument for their disenfranchisement, their erasure from the spaces they had built and sustained, the spaces they had spun and woven into their masters’ profits. The millworkers of Bombay, and the complex local economy framed around their activities, had no space in the new, world-class city that was being imagined. They were an unnecessary impediment. They were, quite simply, superfluous.
6. I’m sitting on the steps of Level 1, High Street Phoenix. Behind me is a white room with large windows – the Bowling Company. A Sports Bar belonging to the same company. A seafood restaurant named Gopaljee. Below and behind me, there are outlets of Copper Chimney, McDonald’s, Bombay Blue, Noodle Bar, Spaghetti Kitchen, Gelato Italiano, Kareem’s, Domino’s. On my far right, Big Bazaar: socialism for the rich, or at any rate for the economically empowered. Below and beside that, several open-air food stalls. Below me and facing me, a large brick-tiled courtyard, where shopping families, children, groups of young people, and couples, wander and talk. Directly below me is a tiny patch of enclosed green, and a couple of large potted plants, behind which are groups of people sitting on marbled benches with small attached water fountains. They face Barista, Quorum, Planet M, and The Dollar Store. These are mostly built within structures inherited from the old factory: this room might have been the carding room, cotton may have been reeled in its neighbouring compound, and spun into yarn in the big oddly shaped structure behind that. No matter – it’s all gone now, and our focus is on the new and the living, not the dead. Still, the intersection of dead and living is eerie in Phoenix Mills. The building that now houses Spaghetti Kitchen and McDonald’s would once have housed mill engines: it is attached to a large stone chimney, rather tastefully decorated in white, with the words ‘HIGH STREET PHOENIX’ emblazoned across its body. It is an arresting and spectral sight, a perpetual, though unwitting, reminder of the lives and deaths that passed through these factory walls once.
7. Life is happening all around. People are shopping in Big Bazaar and Pantaloons, darting in and out of the enormous building named High Street Phoenix, eating and drinking in the restaurants and bars, simply wandering around. And I am struck by the fact that despite the obscenity and injustice involved in producing this space, it remains a pleasant space to be in. This is a week-day, and so it is relatively relaxed, free of the weekend rush. It’s buzzing but not noisy. It is a middle-class space with its own generosity, embracing the gamut of occupations and experiences that constitutes the Indian middle class, not just –as in Delhi malls – the sickening conspicuous consumption of the nouveau riche. The crowd is not entirely devoid of plebeian faces: careworn office faces, careworn working mothers’ faces, housewives’ faces that have finally been granted some relaxation, the faces of young men with shiny belts and slicked back hair and nowhere to go, the faces of the children of the respectable lower middle class, the faces of women who feel secure here and wander about freely, on their own or with their friends and families and lovers. A walk along a courtyard licking an ice cream, a hungrily munched chicken roll here, a long involved conversation there, the clasped hands of a couple deep into each other across the courtyard. The meanness and generosity of Bombay, as ever, can never quite cancel one another out. It is a public space.
8. It is a public space, but the public has its limits. The public experience it offers is contained, it is privatized within boundaries of class that are porous at their outer edges, but nonetheless there. I see this on Friday nights and weekends, when the mall becomes a zoo: a desperate mass of working middle-class people, a crocodile queue jostling to enter the mall. It is a desperate crush of people, many of whom, worn out after a week’s work, have this chance in this space and no other to do their shopping for the following week. The streets outside are the same as they ever were: local groceries, tobacconists, engineering and car repairing workshops, fruit and vegetable sellers, assorted mechanical blue-collar skills, surrounding this weirdly unsure, wavering, swaying circus of the local patriciate and gentry, small and large, modest and rich. This circus is contained within the space of the mall: step outside and you enter an utterly different world. The surrounding streets still belong, temporarily, to the proletarians and plebeians. But they in turn are surrounded. The corporate patriciate and white-collar gentry inhabit the oases of calm, the high-rise buildings, that survey this landscape and the rest of the city. Their meeting point is here, in Phoenix Mills, where they stock up for the week, and demonstrate the essential unity of the community they belong to, separated from them, the others, the mass of people who spit on the roads, the dirty faces of children who stare hungrily into shopfront windows from the outside, the men and women living around the mall who have no idea how long their occupancy of these roads and alleys will last, how long before they are cleansed, and we have, finally, our Shanghai or our Manhattan. This is the slow, contested, but inexorable dynamic of segregation in the city.
9. Below me, the courtyard is humming with all the delicate variations of human relationships and interchanges. But beyond this, interchanges of a different kind are at work. Beyond a fence of aluminium plastered with billboards – Pantaloons, HSBC, Samsung, HT – the landscape shifts dramatically and surreally. A giant car park is being erected. Gangs of men, small figures with hard hats, stand on a half-built roof that is also a work-floor, yelling and grunting as they haul up a half-finished door, borne on the shoulders of a man climbing a rickety scaffolding. A gigantic crane looms over their bodies, swinging this way and that. Workers move around, fix walls, stop, look around, smoke, and return to work, on the seven floors of the car park that is being built, with speed and efficiency and sweat and, in all probability, terrible pay with no benefits. Stacks of bamboo line the back of a man moving, very slowly, between the towering skeleton of the car park and the work-floor where it is being assembled. Tall rods rise from the surface, providing the weight and balance for makeshift pillars that will later be finessed into the foundations of the different storeys. Loud hammering. Drilling. Four men picking an unsteady path across a walkway precariously balanced on a grid of wooden rods, cobbled into a platform to hold the weight of working men and their materials. On the sixth floor, a man very near the edge, crawling along the walkway inspecting his work. He’d better not have vertigo. Men balancing on one another, shouting loud instructions, hauling concrete and wood and metal, cleaning surfaces, hammering in loose bolts. Construction is factory work, but with a difference: here the workers are building the factory even as they work in it. Workers’ recreation.
10. The compound that surveys this back-breaking labour, the compound where I am sitting, is not, plainly enough, built for workers’ recreation. But in another sense, it clearly is built for that very purpose. Recreation in the literal sense of the word: to re-create, to create afresh. A new economy and new forms of work. This may be a space of consumption, but it remains a factory nonetheless. Tangible goods and intangible services are produced each moment. Men and women smile plastic smiles at you from behind food counters as they wrap your sandwiches and rolls. McDonald’s gives you the assembly line in miniaturized and perfect form: the young workers who hand you burgers and fries never stop for a moment, never sit, their hands and bodies move in pre-synchronized manner. Ford and Taylor are recreated in the juxtapositions and rhythms of their work. Security guards, many of whom may have worked in the old mill, or others around it, move around sleeplessly, watching you for signs of transgression, stifling yawns but unable to hide the tiredness in their eyes, behind their dull blue suits. Waiters and shop assistants scurry to your service, always ready to be of use, fortunate if you speak to them with courtesy. A complex, dynamic economy of labour persists within the walls of the old factory. An economy with new codes, new and intimate hierarchies, but an economy of labour nonetheless. All this happens in the shadow of the old mill chimney, and if you listen very hard you can hear ghosts clanking their chains, marching in through the gates when the whistle blows, marching out again when the day’s over, and you can hear, in your mind, the hissing steam of the engines in the mill, and smell the smoke as it billows blackly out of the now cleansed, white chimney. Dead and living labour mingle. History is lived. All that was solid has melted into air, but air has crystallized as real estate, has taken shape, again, in this new economy of exchanges, services, and construction.
11. I look across this bustling, chaotic jostling of economies again, and the landscape I’m part of produces itself, with a new clarity, before my eyes. Here, Phoenix Mills, with its complex interpenetrations of work, investment, and consumption. Before me, the looming husk of a car park, the scaffolding that supports it, and the men who slowly conjure it into shape and form. Across the road, the sounds and smells of car mechanics’ workshops, cheap eateries, and small groceries that constitutes Gandhi Nagar Road, the chawls and bastis that sit in the middle of the new Shanghai that is taking shape before our eyes. A short way in the distance, three giant tower blocks, heralding the future of lower Parel. The future of new Bombay.
6 comments:
Bochka, you are right. All of us were naive, naive in thinking that somehow this Left Government was better, must be better, had to be better. Every time Buddha reiterated that he is still a communist, that he believes this is not the system, I wanted to naively believe him. We are like his constituency, we soon will forget and move on to other protests.
The tragedy of it is that there was once so much more - so much more honour, dignity, and commitment in the Left movement in West Bengal. And the paradox is that every slogan, every mode of protest in Nandigram cries out its decades-long Left heritage, the heritage of Tebhaga and Operation Barga. Nothing worth preserving in the political culture of West Bengal is imaginable without the historical contribution of the Left. And sadly, no hope in West Bengal is possible today as long as this Left thrives and grows. Yes, this Communism - in Bengal, in India - was always slavishly Stalinist, always rigidly dogmatic, always slow to recognize reality. But there were so many times - so MANY times - when it was also brave, committed, willing to lay itself on the line for its principles - and genuinely a force for empowering the disempowered. That's gone now. And I'm sorriest of all for the hundreds of dead Communists turning in their grave as Buddha turns his kingdom into a banana republic, with police and bullets and torture.
life goes on..
This is really the story of Bombay. Working and middle-class neighbourhoods being encroached on by spaces for the rich. In Girangaon, of course, the juxtaposition is more sharply focused as the chawls of Lalbaug defiantly co-exist alongside glass towers. It's upsetting that folks who have an almost umbilical connection with the area are made to feel like neglected step children. On top of that, the place is an infrastructural nightmare. Perhaps the only positive outcome of the economic downturn is that no one has the money to buy the remaining mills in the area and turn them into ugly confections of glass and chrome.
p.s. It's Gajalee, not Gopaljee!
gajalee, of course....can't believe i wrote gopaljee! thanks pron...
I would like to thank you for sharing your thoughts and time into the stuff you post!! Thumbs up Body Shop Phoenix
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