Book review: Sujata Patel,D. Parthasarathy and George Jose (Eds.),Mumbai/Bombay: Majoritarian Neoliberalism,Informality,Resistance,and Wellbeing

Mumbai has always been iconic in its urbanity. It is the ‘Maximum’ city: a city that does not sleep; a city of gangsters and of ‘slumdog millionaires’ alike. For those of us who study Indian cities, we know Mumbai through the most definitive studies of urban history and politics in India—Rajnarayan Chandavarkar on the labour movements in the cotton mills; Thomas Blom Hansen on the rise of nativist politics; and Jim Masselos on minority politics. While research works on other cities have picked up, Bombay/Mumbai continues to be one of the most researched cities in India. It is, therefore, quite a daunting task to bring out a fresh and nuanced volume of essays on the city.

For this volume, the editors have brought together an interesting set of contributors—academics, researchers associated with a range of non-profit organisations and journalists—that speak to the contemporary moment of neoliberal governance and how that has shaped Mumbai in myriad ways. The volume is divided into three parts which speak to related but different logics of urban transformation: ‘Work and Labour’, ‘Infrastructure and Politics’ and ‘Wellbeing and Reproduction of Life’. Though the volume touches on familiar terrains of land politics, governance and urban planning, it also touches on some very unconventional issues. For example, there is a chapter by Shireen Mirza on the Qureshis of Mumbai who are involved in meat business, a community and a profession we know so little about.

The final section on ‘Wellbeing and Reproduction of Life’ is probably the most refreshingly different. It has a chapter by Harris Solomon on ambulances and how trauma incidents are handled in the city. The other two chapters—one on the art ecosystem by Olga Sooudi, and the other on minority institutions by Sameera Khan—are about how they find a space in Mumbai. Placed one after the other, the two articles show an interesting contrast. On one hand you have ‘secular’ art that is part of an urban ecology that is now hugely commercialised, and on the other, a minority Islamic school that is trying to fight its own ghettoization by balancing both faith and modern education.

There are indeed all kinds of connections which are implicit in the volume. Neeraj Hatekar’s piece on Shiv Sena shows how the political party evolved in the changing political–economic context of Mumbai. From a party that used street-based violence and depended on this ‘native’ brand of politics, it has now made a corporate turn, harbouring businessmen and seeking social capital. Tobias Kuttler delves into the long-standing taxi business, and how that is being transformed by the entry of new platform companies like Ola and Uber. Similarly, George Jose takes us to the neighbourhood of Vasai-Virar and shows how it transitioned from a peripheral village belonging to Adivasis to a ‘dormitory’ which is now home to working class migrants in the city. These three chapters are vignettes of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’—each of them telling us a story of transformation also of the city, and that these transformations are not happening in a vacuum but are entwined with land values, real estate and people’s aspirations in the city.

The other theme implied in the volume is that of fragmentation as the hallmark of neoliberal governance. Some articles in the volume speak of the fragmentation of the experience of work (Raghav Mehrotra, Mansi Parpiani); fragmented modes of urban planning, infrastructure development and even service delivery (George Jose, Shripad Motiram, Harris Solomon). In all, these chapters make it apparent that the neoliberal state’s presence in Mumbai is interrupted and fragmented. In the age of public–private partnerships, contracting out important public functions to private enterprises, the state’s presence in people’s lives is only intermittent. As these chapters show, this absence–presence of the state only renders people more vulnerable and precarious.

But while these chapters discuss the debilitating economic forces, they also throw light on the changing nature of solidarities and resistance in the face of this fragmentation. Of course, all is not hunky-dory in the world of resistance. D. Parthasarathy’s chapter delves into the changed nature of solidarity and civility in micropolitics in the context of older labour politics. Parthasarathy notes that consequently, social movements post neo-liberalisation have also been forced to be more localised and focused on immediate concerns, rather than on big structural problems. But on the other hand, Raghav Mehrotra and Mansi Parpiani also write intently about the precarity of working classes in Mumbai, but continue to speak passionately about pehchaan—a term that means ‘identity’ but also stands in for ‘credibility’, ‘reputation’ and ‘network’. One of the best in the volume, this chapter brings out how pehchaan becomes the resisting force in the face of precarity in Muslim working class neighbourhoods.

Though the volume promises to throw some light on the nature of majoritarian neoliberalism, those insights are not made explicit. One sees hints of the same sprinkled around, but it remains largely unaddressed, apart from Mirza’s piece. The questions of majoritarianism and neoliberalism are taken up in separate chapters, which blunts the possibility of a relational understanding of both these concerns to emerge together. For example, it would have been quite telling to see how the infrastructure of a city (analysed in part II of the volume) is also affected by majoritarianism, or vice versa. In some articles, though they are deeply researched and produce a formidable set of data, Mumbai is treated as a placeholder. (By a ‘placeholder’, I mean that the city is merely an insipid container in which there are different tensions and struggles). The city itself does not quite emerge as an actor. Urban studies are primarily based on the opposite impulse. For urbanists, the city is an agent: it shapes localities, infrastructures, behaviour and struggles. Given that this is a volume on the city, probably this impulse should have been at the heart of every piece.

I began this review with the problem of the challenge of writing about a city like Mumbai that has been so over-researched. The problem is even more heightened when it is an edited volume which puts together vignettes to render a city more decipherable from a range of perspectives. The task of edited volumes one could say was relatively easier and more valued 15 years ago. Patel’s own three volumes, edited with Alice Thorner and Jim Masselos—Bombay: Metaphor of Modern India; Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture; Bombay and Mumbai: A City in Transition—continue to be important contributions to the field.

But at a time when there are a large number of monographs, journal articles and long form essays on Mumbai and on many other cities, an edited volume that brings together some interesting perspectives and insights but generally misses internal coherence falls short. (The fundamental issue is that the edited volume is now a poorer cousin in the research family). The older model of edited volumes as reliable primers and useful teaching resources may no longer work. But having said that, there is enough creative space for us to reinvent it.