Paragons of Lifestyle Paragons of Lifestyle: gated communities and the politics of space in Bombay MARK-ANTHONY FALZON University of Malta In Bombay (Mumbai), the global phenomenon of gated residential enclaves is burgeoning. The city has a long history of residential segregation along religious and ethno-linguistic lines; the new developments are more inward-looking, however, in that they seek to create private, self-sufficient living and leisure spaces. This shift is located within the local dynamics of a perceived rise in crime, Bombay’s increasing communalism, and the politics of exclusion in the city. It is also a characteristic of urban formations worldwide. [Bombay, gated communi- ties, housing, urban segregation, middle class]. There on that ground that received so many European children and infants . the young of the well-to-do fami- lies from Queen’s Road and Marine Drive swing and jump and slide down the trunk of a giant model elephant; they are protected by a watchman, and by a paling of Disneyish animal cut-outs, from the street families that would other- wise infiltrate (108) Gillian Tindall, City of Gold: The biography of Bombay. ombay (Mumbai) is often described as a city of contrasts, a city where the upwardly-mobile middle class and the glamor- Bous elite rub shoulders with the masses of urban poor. The for- mer feel threatened by the latter while simultaneously using their labor at very cheap rates. Elites adopt certain strategies in order to protect the lifestyle they feel they deserve. In this article I examine 147 City & Society, Vol. 16, Issue 2, pp. 145–166, ISSN 0893-0465, online ISSN 1548-744X. © 2004 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. City & Society one such strategy: “fortification” (Blakely & Snyder 1997) and the parallel sanitization of urban space. Specifically I will discuss the rise of gated residential enclaves. Central to my inquiry will be the following questions: In what ways is space fortified and sanitized in Bombay? Why do Bombayites increasingly think of gated develop- ments as desirable places in which to live? Can the answers to these questions be generalised, or do they pertain to Bombay alone? Between 1999 and 2000 I spent several months conducting research among Sindhis in Bombay.1 I went back in autumn 2000 with the specific intention of collecting material on gated develop- ments.2 I visited several sites in Bombay and interviewed residents of gated communities. I examined newspapers (the Times of India Bombay edition, for instance, publishes a weekly Property supple- ment), real estate advertisements, and websites of construction companies. “Gated communities,” or “fortified enclaves,” are privatized, enclosed, and monitored spaces for residence, consumption, leisure, and work (Caldeira 1999). Their historical antecedents are few but significant—monasteries, for instance, and Oxbridge colleges. They are found in various locations around the world and have been dis- cussed, for example for the case of the US, where over three million households lived in such communities in 1997 (Blakely & Snyder 1997). Low notes that 16 million individuals lived in these com- munities in 1998 (2003). Others have discussed the cases of Britain (Gooblar 2002), South Africa (Robins 2002), São Paulo (Caldeira 1999), Buenos Aires (Pírez 2002), and Indonesia (Leisch 2002). Gated developments underline the fact that, as Harvey (1973: 278) stated, “what is remarkable is not that urbanism is so different but that it is so similar in all metropolitan centres of the world in spite of significant differences in social policy, cultural tradition, admin- istrative and political arrangements, institutions and laws, and so on” (1973:278). Attention to the phenomenon has increased in recent years within the scholarly community, as the publication dates of the books cited above indicate.3 Gated communities and their antecedents in Bombay ombay is an extraordinary city. It is India’s economic capital. In the British colonia era, it shared with Calcutta a “dual Bdominance” (in many ways outshining the Bengali city) with regard to the economy (Markovits 1996). Today it is the undis- 148 Paragons of Lifestyle puted financial capital and houses the headquarters of almost all the major banks, financial institutions, insurance companies, and mutual funds. It has India’s largest stock exchange and contributes 10% of the country’s factory employment, 33% of income tax, 60% of customs duties, 20% of central excise, and 40% of India’s for- eign trade. (The enormity of these figures becomes apparent when one considers that India is the world’s twelfth largest economy.) Bombay is the most important transport junction in India and an increasingly significant player in the global economy (Harris 1996, Charles 2001). Fuelled by daily influxes of migrants drawn, among other dynamics, by the “city of gold” image peddled in Indian cinema, Bombay’s population has grown rapidly since Independence. In 1951 the population of Bombay City was just under 3 million; in 2001 it was 12 million (16.4 million if one includes the satellite towns grouped under the “Greater Bombay Urban Agglomeration”).4 Bombay’s residents include millions of urban poor, many of whom have neither fixed residences nor access to basic resources. About a third of urban dwellers are estimated to live below the poverty line (Sharma 2000). The population of the city also includes a small but prominent upper class, which is dominated by a business elite often drawing on generations of wealth, and, very significantly for the purposes of this article, a growing middle class. The latter are partly the result of Bombay’s integration into a global economy and the associated burgeoning of the service sector. They are the beneficiaries of Bombay’s uniquely successful economy. Bombay’s population growth has been paralleled in recent decades by a residential shift northward, away from the old cen- tres and towards the new suburbs notably Andheri, Jogeshwari, Kandivli, Juhu, Versova, Powai, and Malad—all of which lie beyond Mahim, a marshy creek which in the minds of Bombayites separates south and central Bombay from the northern suburbs. Seventeen wards in the northern suburbs area experienced a popu- lation growth of over 50% from 1981 to 1991, while several wards in south and central Bombay experienced a loss of population.5 Many middle- and upper-class families who lived in central and south Bombay indeed moved to the northern suburbs. Krishin, a resident of a gated community in Thane, explained this move: “I moved a few years ago, when I retired. Real estate values are higher down in the centre, and I made some money by moving. I do not have to go to work anymore, so I can live comfortably here and make some money in the process.” This shift is significant, because 149 City & Society it is in the new suburbs that some of the more impressive and extensive gated communities are found. Before examining these new constructions it is important to understand the historical context of residential architecture in Bombay. The city has a tradition of several decades of self-con- tained apartment blocks. Given the scarcity and value of land (Bombay has tended to grow through the expensive process of land reclamation—the employ, as Rushdie put it in Midnight’s Children, of “tetrapods and sunken piles”), apartment blocks have been the main form of residence particularly in the post-Independence period. Living in an apartment block in Bombay is more than simply a place of residence. Individual blocks are generally referred to as “colonies”—which implies enclaves—and they are frequently segregated along the lines of religion, ethno-linguistic origin, or caste (see below). Bombayites have mental maps of where the prominent colonies are located. When asked for directions, indi- viduals typically explain places along the lines of, “turn left by Parsi Colony, then ask the driver to stop you at Scheherazade (this being a typical name of an apartment block).” Individual build- ings are the city’s landmarks. They are the places where distinct communities of people live, and they, rather than street names, are Bombayites’ main points of orientation. One should note that these residential units are often organized as co-operative societ- ies, an idea that has a long history in Bombay, where the first Co-operative Housing Association was formed in 1913 following the Co-operative Societies Act of the previous year (for a history of housing co-operatives in India, see Dabolkhar 1959, Naik 1971, Khurana 1997). The word “community” here needs to be elaborated upon, not least because academic discourse might unwittingly adopt the language of real estate developers and assume that “gated develop- ments” are also “gated communities.” In the popular Bombay per- ception, there are two types of colonies. “Cosmopolitan” colonies are heterogeneous, whereas “communal” ones are segregated along ethnic, linguistic, regional, caste, and/or religious lines. Both types are generally surrounded by walls, and these walls are perceived as the boundaries of particular interactive fields. Many Sindhi colonies, for example, included a tikana (Nanakpanth places of worship)6 where (mainly) women from the colony pray together in the morning. They also included a communal hall and other facili- ties for their residents. Women might walk or jog in small groups, or leave the colony to shop together. People know about their neighbors” lives, and events such as Holi (a Hindu spring festival 150 Paragons of Lifestyle that celebrates Krishna) are often played out in the common areas inside the colonies’ walls. As residents of a “Sindhi Society Co-op,” told me (my parenthesis): The advantages of living in a society are many.