Bumming in Bombay

Despite what architect Hafeez Contractor and other wannabe patricians might say, it is the socially exclusive, generic multiplex or mall that is squalid, not the insanely-crowded-with-all-comers streets outside the Andheri station

Vikram Bedi Mumbai

That ‘Bombay’ (the old name of new Mumbai) circulates not on roads and highways but on streets and public transport is something that I, a dilliwala, deeply appreciate (as do the terrorists). Bombay exemplifies the city-as-theatre, the city-as-dance, which is why, notwithstanding blasts and urban social emergency, the city remains iconic, the topic of so much cinema, literature and journalism. Easily disparaged, the city is too compelling to ignore, and I’d argue, to not learn from. Bombay is not yet all negative. Despite everything, it must be judged complexly — its iconic status, apparently threatened nowadays, is ultimately rooted in our mixed feelings about it.

When it is dark and the yellow street lights are on, the streets of Bombay become the urban equivalent of a stage, in which the spectator is also an actor. The intimidations of the city’s verticalness are almost gone; the street’s sensory overloading of the walker is lessened by the darkness. The frictions of the crowd are, resultantly, less painful. There seems, miraculously, enough room for individuals. There is a virtuous cycle between well-lit and therefore safe night streets and people trusting enough to be outdoors till late (not that they all do so out of free choice.)

Bombay’s streets, then, are gratifying and enabling despite stressful time pressures, overcrowding and infernal traffic. They forcibly expose the self to its social others. They are civic schools, insisting on the more or less safe mixing of social types. A shared space of being-and-moving-together in a chaotic and everchanging ‘dance’, of trusting strangers; they are about appearing before each other as equals. The street, then, underpins the wider public realm of citizenship — more than print, television, associations and political parties, the humble, packed, ugly city street is critical to any tolerant and inclusive ‘civic sense’. Always potentially uncanny and frictional, it challenges citizens’ tendency to overvalue privacy and predictability, but does so without violence (unless the LeT, or the Shiv Sena decides to exhibit its love of urban Indian crowds!).

The health of the street, then, is a major civic issue given the fast and vast increases in ‘gentrification’ and social sanitation that big Indian cities are currently undergoing. Their elites, egged on by developers, retailers and advertisers, are keen on spatial-segregation. Their new suburbs, often entirely developed by large private companies, are based on the logic of the enclave or, worse, the fortress. They are anti-urban in that they refuse the pleasures of the crowded, mixed-use city street, of heterogeneous urban crowds in general. Secession from the city is considered a sign of grandeur. Prominent examples of civic death-at-birth: Gurgaon, Kolkata’s Salt Lake City, the Hiranandani Complex in Bombay.

The new elites value point-to-point private automobility that dispenses with the need to walk the street. Colonised by consumerism, our old cultures of ghoomna-phirna as urban pleasure are dying. One circulates in the city only because there is a seductive magic-space (a mall, a restaurant…) at the end of the trip. The city, the result of the dense and confused throwing-together of many social differences, is no longer theatrical enough on its own without set-piece spectacle places.

Meanwhile, come prime time, television empties the street and markets these new spatial ideals, mimicries of America. The defeat of the Indian elites’ love of the bazaar has begun—within a generation, ‘organised retail’ will transform their affection, necessarily tied to notions of Indianness, into contempt — too crowded, disorganised, dirty…. Elite citizenship will reduce to ostentatious consumption in public.

Contexts for more or less equal encounters with those strange to the elite self are getting fewer. Private schools, withdrawn housing societies with private infrastructure, private automobility —  all definitions of civic alienation. Admittedly, the forces responsible are very strong, and may even be good in themselves, to a degree. But Bombay makes us aware of how important and possible it is for the form and structure of the city to weaken these suspect tendencies.

City-ideals are being hotly debated in middle-class India, what with demolitions, floods, jammed traffic. But, too often, we over-focus on physical infrastructure: we neglect the ‘software’ aspects of good urban living, as with public spaces full of social ‘mixity’, which is the software. Why, for example, do we not clamour for more commerce-free zones (commerce being a good thing on the street but, because of the class divisions expressed in spaces of consumption, bad, if it rules everywhere)? Why do ‘open spaces’ always mean landscaped parks, as in South Delhi, as against spaces full of public art, performance and sport (Bombay’s legendary Shivaji Park et al)? 

Despite its horrific hardware deficiencies, and thanks in large part to its street life, Bombay has a civic friendliness, tenuous and minimal to be sure, about it. This is almost miraculous, given its many social emergencies. Elite New Delhi is, by contrast, a sprawl of ornamented spaces geared more to living ‘amongst ourselves’ than ‘with each other.’ It is often planned that way.

Bombay teaches us how the excessive love of private pleasure results in public squalor. In these terms, it is the socially exclusive, generic multiplex or mall that is squalid, not the insanely-crowded-with-all-comers streets outside the Andheri station. This aspect of Bombay reminds us that cities have to balance order/predictability and chaos/uncertainty. True, our big cities have too much of the latter; yet, we must avoid lapsing into some desire to become regimented Singapore (or Shanghai!). Should the city not force and seduce us into the uncertain pleasures of the truly public, socially mixed, complex? Doesn’t Bombay show that the advocacy of civic spiritedness in India is not a romantic pursuit (witness the not entirely rhetorical, not entirely selfish, genuinely civic care expressed in the recent outpouring of criticism and despair by Mumbaikars of all classes)?

The love-of-the-city that is so widespread in Bombay is as yet too weak in quality to motivate and discipline the government into effective action. But at least this, as a basis for collective mobilisation, exists. Which is far more than can be said of New Delhi. The much-vilified spatial form of Bombay has, more than the state, political parties, or

associations, yielded this vital

civic resource, leaving room for hope, and a channel for anger. Despite what Hafeez Contractor and other wannabe patricians might say, the Bombay street, crowded and diverse, is an example worth emulating.