Risk and the City: Bombay, Mumbai, and Other Theoretical Departures
2006; Routledge; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14736480600824565
ISSN1557-3036
Autores Tópico(s)South Asian Studies and Conflicts
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Throughout this essay I use this hyphenated form "Bombay-Mumbai" to signal the contradictory nature of the contemporary city that was formerly known as Bombay. In fact, the renaming of the city from Bombay to Mumbai forms an important part of the story told by this review. Where appropriate, the name Bombay is used, especially when referring to practices, representations, and imaginaries associated specifically with the name "Bombay," including Bombay cinema. 2. As for the experience of the foreign, Anderson writes in his blog: "What's foreign? How about this: 2 am, driving back from a state of the art call center in the middle of Bombay, my driver is slaloming through rubble in a scene that would look like Falluja but for the Brahman [sic] cows grazing in the fast lane. On the shoulder, a half-naked five year-old girl is squatting to pee on a huge slab of broken concrete, lit by a fire of burning garbage. The billboard behind her advertises the latest Blackberry. India!" This blog is linked to Suketu Mehta's personal website which first brought it to my attention. See http://longtail.typepad.com. 3. On his first visit to Bombay last year, the well-known architect Daniel Liebeskind remarked, "Mumbai is clearly a city that eludes architects who see the city as a material object. It's a city where human beings are far more important than brick and mortar, concrete, glass and steel." (Quoted in Times of India, Mumbai Edition, October 2004.) In the logic of such remarks, Mumbai is a city in which architecture itself disappears as a material fact and is substituted by sheer demographic density that constitutes a visible overlay, taking the more traditional place of "infrastructure." 4. Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Post-Colonial Bombay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 5. This notion of the filmic or cinematic city, as distinct from other, normative visions of the city—the city of urban planning, the "lived" city and so on is an important object in the urban studies literature. The material effects of the representations of the film city are particularly strong in the case of cities like Bombay, which form the "real" sites for the imaginary cities of cinema. For an exploration of this concept, see Stephen Barber, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion Books, 2002). 6. For one interesting example, see "Varnam: A Blog on India Past and Present." Blogs are fast becoming an important site of audience formation and reception research and are therefore interesting from an ethnographic point of view. 7. See, for example, the chapter "Distilleries of Pleasure," which begins with a scene in Madanpura, a Muslim neighborhood in South Bombay, well known in Bombay crime lore for being the place where a number of notorious gangsters grew up. I thank Thomas Hansen for bringing this to my attention. 8. Ravi Vasudevan, "Disreputable and Illegal Publics: Cinematic Allegories in Times of Crisis," Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media (New Delhi: Sarai, 2004), pp. 72–3. As Vasudevan explains, crime films or noir films in general first took film out of the studio and onto the streets of Bombay, simultaneously dramatizing the plot through the use and the image of the city as well as sealing the reputation of the city as a space of criminality and moral perversion. In more recent films, of course, the city is also portrayed as a site of pleasure though it is significant that the visual apprehension of the city as empirical site is initially associated with narratives of moral disorder, risk, and danger particularly because of the sort of national public that was being cultivated by early post-independence cinema. For a broader summary of the argument concerning the city as a problematic site in the nationalist imaginary and the historicist aspects of Indian nationalism, see Gyan Prakash, "The Urban Turn," Sarai Reader 01: Cities of Everyday Life (Delhi: Sarai, 2001). 9. Vasudevan, "Disreputable and Illegal Publics," p. 72. 10. The films discussed by Vasudevan include Deewar, Muqaddar ka Sikandar, Ankush, Arjun, Nayakan, Parinda, Baazigar, Ghulam, and Satya. By situating these films in the context of national crises contemporaneous with the films, Vasudevan shows how the space of the city as a space of risk and "the hierarchies and prejudices of urban social order" indexed critically by criminality in the city in fact served as a comment on the crises of the nation. An inadvertent consequence is the representation of the city as a political site providing an alternative to the nation. 11. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai develops a distinction between the modern and the contemporary that is a very useful one. In his terms, the modern is "not a fact, an epoch or a stage but a vision, a conception or a project" whereas the "contemporary is a condition." "Therefore," he states, "modernity is now a project with a particular set of characteristics, given globalization as a contemporary condition." In "Illusion of Permanence: Interview with Arjun Appadurai by Perspecta 34," Perspecta34, The Yale Architectural Journal (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, June 2003). 12. Sujata Patel, "Bombay/Mumbai: Globalization, Inequalities, and Politics," in Joseph Gugler, ed., World Cities Beyond the West: Globalization, Development and Inequalities (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 328. 13. Mike Davis, "Planet of Slums," New Left Review No. 26 (March–April 2004), pp. 5–34. Cited in Michael Watts, "Baudelaire over Berea, Simmel over Sandton?" Public Culture Vol. 17, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 181–92. 14. This question is powerfully raised by several essays in a recent special issue of the journal Public Culture on Johannesburg. The volume, titled Johannesburg: An Elusive Metropolis has a critical-theoretical introduction by the editors Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, which lays out an argument distinguishing the "development" approach to "third world" cities from an approach that centralizes what they call the "citiness" of these cities. About "citiness" they write: "'Citiness' we understood as made up of excess, simultaneity, speed, appearance, rapid alternations, relentless change, and indeed ceaseless mutability and discontinuous eventfulness: transience." Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, "Writing the World from an African Metropolis," Public Culture Vol. 16, No. 3 (Spring 2004), p. 199. 15. Patel, "Bombay/Mumbai: Globalization, Inequalities, and Politics," p. 328. 16. For example, Mike Davis and Michael Watts point to the political work of new religious groups like Islamists and Pentacostalists in the slums of the cities they study, while several works on Bombay have looked at the rise of Hindu majoritarian chauvinist groups like the Shiv Sena—a xenophobic regional political part which sought to change Bombay's "character and image from that of cosmopolitanism to a city of the Marathi-speaking underclass," as Sujata Patel puts it. See Patel, "Bombay/Mumbai: Globalization, Inequalities, and Politics," p. 330. 17. Arjun Appadurai, "Illusion of Permanence: Interview with Arjun Appadurai by Perspecta 34", p. 50. 18. Appadurai, "Illusion of Permanence," p. 46.
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