Mumbai’s quiet histories: Critical intersections of the urban poor, historical struggles, and heritage spaces

Abstract

Informal and improvised practices of occupation and settlement have been known in the Mumbai region since before the birth of the city. These practices have since evolved into a tactic of the poor as they assert a “right to the city” among various structures of inequality and domination produced by the state and civil society. Heritage preservation, as it is practiced in Mumbai, participates in such state work and its failures render it as an object and instrument of class struggle. Within this context, heritage regimes agitate certain wounds of misrecognition borne by urban marginals and have produced assemblages, such as the Jogeshwari Caves, that assert a demand for their redress. Long pursued practices of “quiet encroachment” have become a generative urban force in Mumbai, but their histories remain understudied and unarticulated. This paper seeks to bring historical attention to these struggles and suggests that archeology can further attend to this project of redress.

Abandon the Slum? Toward an Alternative Recognition of Urban Informal Dwelling

“…Encroachment and informality, therefore, formed a "constitutive genealogy" of the city and improvisational living has been intrinsic to the lifelong struggles of the poor and vulnerable to not just survive but acquire the "urban worldliness" that enables them to get by. 20 In recent years, more specifically over a span of the past three decades, a parallel shift in the perception of urban marginal living has been palpable in urban poverty scholarship. While the pejorative framing around slums has changed, they came to be represented as icons of urban poverty.…”

Making‐Home From Below: Domesticating Footpath and Resisting “Homelessness” in Mumbai

“…However, in the Indian and South Asian contexts, the mono‐functional use of the sidewalk as a pedestrian‐first space has been historically contested in the way it functioned to serve economic, domestic, social, and political needs (Anjaria 2012; Bandyopadhyay 2017; Kidambi 2016). These ideals of the home and the outside have historically been at odds with practices of urban inhabitation where for example street living and squatting in various urban interstices was commonplace (Anjaria 2012,2016; Bandyopadhyay 2022; Nakamura 2014). In other words, squatting and improvisational living have been historical features of Indian cities and the personalisation of the street and urban spaces has been a constitutive genealogy of urban India.…”

“…For her the distinction (and the conflation) between home and house becomes quite clear, as she stated that “ humein makan toh mila thaa, lekin ghar nahi ” (“we got a house but not a home”). Asifa’s active refusal to adhere to the bourgeois order of the city (Chakrabarty 2002:77) not only challenges dominant ideas of home and ownership but also fails to recognise that informality and appropriation have been intrinsic survival mechanisms (Nakamura 2014). These appropriations and forms of dwelling significantly shape the nature of public spaces in India, as do emerging forms of gated communities, private estates, and “modern” living (Bandyopadhyay 2022).…”

New monuments for the new India: heritage-making in a ‘timeless city’

“…The narrative of liberators versus encroachers and the patronising stance of the PM towards the residents will sound familiar to scholars of urban heritage and are nothing new in India, where the term 'encroachment' has a long judicial history associated with illegal housing and occupation of public land (Ghertner 2015). The term, however, also appears more recently in contexts of heritage preservation in India and elsewhere and seems increasingly to be utilised in opposition to heritage and its advocates (Shepherd 2012;Nakamura 2014;Bloch 2016). The displacement of local communities is a recognised part of neoliberal heritage-led regeneration (Herzfeld 2003(Herzfeld , 2010Dines 2012;Collins 2015;De Cesari and Dimova 2019;Meskell 2019), and is often justified through the reactivation of the colonial trope of the 'uncaring native' (De Cesari and Herzfeld 2015, 176), with local residents seen as 'unsuitable stewards' (Panetta 2019, 6) of their own heritage or ultimately 'inimical to culture' (Nakamura 2014, 273).…”