When We Demand Our Share of This World”: Struggles for Space, New Possibilities of Planning, and Municipalist Politics in Mumbai
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2018 "When We Demand Our Share of This World”: Struggles for Space, New Possibilities of Planning, and Municipalist Politics in Mumbai Malav J. Kanuga The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2858 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] “WHEN WE DEMAND OUR SHARE OF THIS WORLD”: STRUGGLES FOR SPACE, NEW POSSIBILITIES OF PLANNING, AND MUNICIPALIST POLITICS IN MUMBAI by MALAV JAYESH KANUGA A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2018 © 2018 MALAV JAYESH KANUGA All Rights Reserved ii “When We Demand Our Share of This World”: Struggles for Space, New Possibilities of Planning, and Municipalist Politics in Mumbai by Malav Jayesh Kanuga This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _______________ Date Chair of Examining Committee _______________ Date Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Michael Blim David Harvey Ida Susser Don Mitchell THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT “When We Demand Our Share of This World”: Struggles for Space, New Possibilities of Planning, and Municipalist Politics in Mumbai by Malav Jayesh Kanuga Advisor: Michael Blim This dissertation presents an urban history of Bombay/Mumbai from the perspective of a politics of plurality, arguing that while the city has emerged from governmental control and planning, its development has also been shaped by myriad popular productive forces of urban society. The dissertation traces the uneven development of the city through significant planning policies, popular movements, and lived experiences of various struggles against regimes of developmentalism—the governing ideologies of development, techniques, policies, and rules of law through which the city has been planned and governed. These ideologies and practices have shifted over time, but since the earliest days of Bombay’s urban development, they have marked the space of the city. Colonial and imperial projects were based on planned abandonment and the governance of differentiated vulnerability that was inherently anti-democratic and depoliticizing (even as it used the rhetoric and machinery of democracy). Myriad popular cultures of the city have nonetheless marked the space of city with a variety of political responses to developmentalist projects. This selected history, indeed the often-antagonistic interplay between two histories of the city, allows us to understand that planning has long been a terrain of struggle over not only the city’s development but also the city’s functional democracy. It shows that planning and development are the domains of both state and popular practice, however uneven and divergent those practices are. iv Through in-depth ethnography, this dissertation connects the historical investigation of Mumbai’s development to the contemporary politics animating a range of urban movements in recent years that have mobilized working-class and populist visions of the city, its past, and present and possible futures. This dissertation chronicles a five-year popular cycle of struggle to establish a more hopeful vision of the future for the city by responding to, and seeking to reshape, the municipal government’s official twenty-year Development Plan 2014–2034. In the process, a spirited municipalist politics has emerged in Mumbai undergirded by a rupture of those experiences and knowledges that define the dominant regime of urbanization. These politics demonstrate that the prospect for dismantling the anti-democratic forms of developmentalism that plan and govern the city emerges from attempts to forge collectivist and popular urban consciousness. By tracing this history, the dissertation argues that Mumbai’s contested cultures of planning offer important insights into the heterogeneity and plurality of the city’s futures. In so doing, the dissertation places Mumbai as a significant site for the investigation of the diverse trajectories in which the developmental futures of capital emerge. Finally, the dissertation calls for renewed theorization of the Indian city from the perspective of urban movements—the places of social mobilization, spatial politics, and articulations of social subjectivity and heterogeneity. v For NEIL SMITH (1954–2012) and FERNANDO CORONIL (1944–2011) vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is one of many outcomes of a collective process of research and action. I first and foremost want to thank the members of Hamara Shehar Mumbai and related groups, with whom I shared so many days and nights of learning and struggling. My comradely gratitude goes to those who comprised my first intellectual and political community in Mumbai: Simpreet Singh, Hussain Indorewala, Shweta Wagh, Paankhi Agrawal, and Faiza Khan. My conversations with Chandana Das and the Right to the City Campaign in Delhi were also crucial in the development of this project. Thanks also to Sitaram Shelar, Aravind Unni, Marina Joseph, Sabah Khan, Purva Dewoolkar and the other members of the HSM Abhiyan Core Group; to Amita Bhide, Swapna Banerjee-Guha for their scholarship and their guidance in early visits to India; and to Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran, Zinnia Ambapardiwala, Sanjay Bhangar at CAMP for friendship, space to think and work, and for our creative collaborations. Special thanks to Preeti Sampat for the support and important introductions in the field. I thank Neil Smith for being the first to welcome me and, in fact, recruit me, to the department and introduce me to the gravitational pull of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. May Neil live on in the collective works to come and in the struggles of our time. Likewise, thanks to Mary Taylor, Padmini Biswas, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and many comrades I had the chance to work with and learn from at the Center. My friendships with Manissa McCleave Maharawal, Priya Chandrasekaran, Rachel Daniell, and Duygu Parmaksizoglu shaped my most treasured memories at the Graduate Center. I am indebted to Morgan Linden Cullen Buck for sharing an integral part of this journey with me and for many cherished memories along the way. Laura Gottesdiener, who grasped the urgency and necessity of the worlds I was vii traversing in order to complete this work and who summoned her time, love, and intelligence in support at every step of the way—thank you for everything. I thank Ellen DeRiso and the faculty of the department of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, who offered support and a place to learn and dare to think. My deep gratitude goes to Michael Blim for guiding me through various stages of the project’s development, and to David Harvey, Ida Susser, and Don Mitchell for coming together in critical support of this dissertation research and making critical demands of me in the process. Thanks also to Vinay Gidwani for feedback on the earliest stages of this work, and to Deb Cowen, Ananya Roy, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore for encouragement while in the field. This dissertation research would not have been possible without grants from the Graduate Center, the Social Science Research Center, support from Antipode’s Institute for the Geographies of Justice, and the support of the Gittell Dissertation Fellowship at the Graduate Center. There were many sacrifices made in the making of this dissertation, not only my own. For their patient support, sustained enthusiasm, and unending faith in me, I thank my beloved family, Jayesh and Dharmishta and Mansi Kanuga, as well as family and friends in India who rooted for me with interest and curiosity. viii “When We Demand Our Share of This World”: Struggles for Space, New Possibilities of Planning, and Municipalist Politics in Mumbai Table of Contents Introduction Page 1 Chapter 1 Page 27 The Colonial Disorder of Things: Early Urban Development in Bombay Chapter 2 Page 62 Struggles for Space: The Fabric of Worker’s Urban Culture and Power Chapter 3 Page 101 A City for a Nation Yet to Come: Class Identity and Difference in Post-Independence Bombay Chapter 4 Page 123 The Savage Production of Urban Informality: Industrial Decline and Urban Fragmentation Chapter 5 Page 158 “When We Demand Our Share of this World”: Juggernaut Developmentalism and New Municipalist Politics Chapter 6 Page 200 Countermunicipal Cartographies: Alternative Ecological, Indigenous, and Commons Visions of the Collective City Chapter 7 Page 239 Rethinking Subaltern Urban Theory: Spatial Justice and Political Possibility Conclusion Page 268 The New Urban Question in India Bibliography Page 279 ix List of Figures Figure 1 Page. 4. Jagannath Puri Rath Yatra, the procession of Jagannath. Image credit: The Festival of the Chariots by Jagajivana Dasa, Jun 1, 1978. Jagajivana Dasa, Volume-13 Number 06 (accessible at http://www.backtogodhead.in/the-festival-of-the-chariots-by-jagajivana-dasa/) Figure 2 Page 29. Demonstração da Fortaleza de Mombaim (Demonstration of the Fortress of Mumbai), 1635, a Portuguese map of Bombay indicates the early urban infrastructure (warehouses, fort, ship building year, houses and mansions). [Harvard University holdings]. Source: “Bombay: History of a City” in Trading Places, British Library Archives, http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/trading/bombay/history.html Figure 3 Page 41. A View of Bombay from Malabar Point during the Fire of 1803 (Engraver: Barth, J.S.; Medium: Aquatint, coloured, Date: 1804). British Library. Figure 4 Page 41. Map of Bombay, 17 February 1803. Image taken from ‘Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency (pp 391). Edited by Sir James M. Campbell. General index, by R. E. Enthoven. Figure 5 Page 43. Map of the Native Town of Bombay, 1855.