Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor 9780295748504, 9780295748498, 9780295748511

Citation preview

Padma Kaimal K. Sivaramakrishnan Anand A. Yang "#$%#& '(%)*$&

Outcaste BOmBay City Making and the Politics of the Poor +,-#( "./%0.

1-%2#$&%)3 *4 5/&.%-6)*- 7$#&& Seattle

!"#$%&#' ()*+%, 8/& 9/(# :*& &% ;%/)%*- 4*$ =&%/- "),(%#& ?%$&) @**0 ",;2#-)%*- 7$*6$/9. Copyright © ABAC by the University of Washington Press Composed in Minion Pro, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach AD AE AF AA AC D E F A C Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. ,-%2#$&%)3 *4 8/&.%-6)*- :$#&& uwapress.uw.edu *-6$#&& >/)/- ABABBEEFCC (print) | >- ABABBEEFCA (ebook) | H"@I JKLBAJDKELEJL (hardcover) | H"@I JKLBAJDKELDBE (paperback) | H"@I JKLBAJDKELDCC (ebook) Subjects: &.: Dalits—India—Mumbai. | Mumbai (India) ClassiGcation: MNN DSELD.BOE SDF ABAC (print) | LCC DSELD.BOE (ebook) | PPN FBD.D/OLLBJDEKJA—dcAF MN record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ABABBEEFCC MN ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ABABBEEFCA Qe paper used in this publication is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, /-&% RFJ.EL–CJLE.∞

For Madhavi and Sahar In memory of Dadhi Abba and Rizwan

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ! 1

"e Housing Question and Caste, #$%&–#%'( . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . #%

2

Marxism, Language, and Social Hierarchy, #%)(–#%'( . . . . . . . . . . . . . . *&

3

Urban Planning and Cultural Politics, #%*'–#%+#. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $'

4

Revolutionary Lineages of Dalit Literature, #%'(–#%+) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ##'

5

Slums, Sex, and the Field of Power, #%&(–#%$*. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .#!& Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .#+* Notes

!"#

Bibliography $%& Index

$!#

ACknowl­e dgments

!is book’s journey began at the turn of the twenty-"rst century. !e end of the last millennium, and the beginning of the new one, heralded many transformations in my professional and personal life. It involved multiple journeys: from Pune—the best city in the world, many Punekars believe, and I do too—to Mumbai, and from there to Chicago, Seattle, New Haven, Cincinnati, and Santa Cruz. !e passage of time and the journey itself have indebted me to many people. When I landed in Mumbai to work as a journalist and report news on the city, including labor and crime, I understood the need to think historically. !is realization of my lack of historical understanding of the city triggered an expedition that took me beyond to make sense of this history. !e reader will decide if that journey has borne fruit. What I can say with certainty is that the excursion made me a nonresident Indian and a professional historian. In Chicago, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Muza#ar Alam created the space for me to savor University of Chicago’s intellectual community. Insights from that intellectual formation helped me in Seattle, where the University of Washington remains a generative intellectual community for me. I am eternally grateful to Anand Yang and K. Sivaramakrishnan (who was there all too brie$y before he le% for Yale) for helping me make Seattle and the UW community home. Priti Ramamurthy, Jordanna Bailkin, Purnima Dhawan, Laurie Sears, Chandan Reddy, Sareeta Amrute, Frank Conlon, Christian Novetzke, Sunila Kale, Craig Je#rey, Vicente Rafael, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Moon-Ho Jung taught me, through their examples and guidance, how to be scholarly. Frank Conlon bequeathed a tranche of books on Bombay, many of them are cited here. Seattle enabled many friendships: Jameel Ahmad, Sahar Romani, Sandra Gresl, Woonkyung Yeo, Chong Eun Ahn, Shruti Patel, Amir Sheikh, Keith Snodgrass, Jennifer Dubrow, Amy Bhatt, Tapoja Chaudhuri, Sharmistha Ghosh, Leah Koskimaki, Catherine Warner, Hsiao-wen Cheng, Jon Olivera, Scott Brown, Amanda Swain, Rebecca Hughes, and Shiwani Shrivastava provided camaraderie, ix

x

&' ( )*+ , - . / 0 - ) 1 2

laughter, food, engaged critique, and intellectual stimulus. Given the importance of Seattle and the University of Washington to my formation, I feel honored that the book is being published by the University of Washington Press. Lorri Hagman and Elizabeth Berg’s sage and expert editorial advice has shaped and enhanced the book. Food, chai, and a shared interest in South Asia marked a memorable year in New Haven and fostered a community: Kasturi Gupta, Rochisha Narayan, Rene Saran, Arupjyoti Saikia, Sumati Sundaram, Aniket Aga, Chitrangada Choudhury, Sahana Ghosh, Kamran Ahsan, Sana Haroon, Tariq !achil, and Piyali Bhattacharya. !e "rst dra% of chapter  4 was written and presented at the Yale South Asia Colloquium in February 4564; I am thankful to all the participants for their suggestions. At Xavier University in Cincinnati, where I spent a lovely year, Rachel Chrastil, Amy Whipple, Kareem Tiro, Randy Browne, and Christine Anderson were very supportive. !e form and content of the book was shaped by University of California at Santa Cruz. !e Asia Plus writing group in the History Department, with Gail Hershatter, Emily Honig, Alan Christy, Noriko Aso, Minghui Hu, and Jennifer Derr, was a nourishing space not just to try out and develop new ideas but also to think about writing itself. !e junior faculty writing group, with Muriam Davis, !omas Serres, Alma Heckman, and Ben Breen, was another impor tant venue for feedback. Chapters 7 and 8 were presented at the History Department Works in Progress series as a mammoth single chapter. Questions, suggestions, and encouragement from Greg O’Malley, Maya Peterson, Elaine Sullivan, Dana Frank, David Anthony, Terry Burke, and many others sharpened the chapters. Kate Jones, Marc Matera, Matt O’Hara, and Nathaniel Deutsch read various portions of the manuscript and provided engaged feedback. !e book has bene"ted from a variety of intellectual formations on the UCSC campus: I presented dra%s of chapters at the Cultural Studies, Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Sociology colloquiums. I am thankful to Vanita Seth, Megan Moodie, and Miriam Greenberg for inviting me to present and to scholars including Anjali Arondekar, Mayanthi Fernando, Bali Sahota, Lisa Rofel, Megan !omas, Nidhi Mahajan, and many others for their comments and suggestions. !e Bombay workshop convened by Abigail McGowan at the University of Vermont in March 4568, which included Douglas Haynes, Nikhil Rao, Sheetal Chhabria, and Liza Weinstein was not only intellectually stimulating but also supportive and welcoming. Similarly, the book is richer due to

&' ( )*+ , - . / 0 - ) 1 2

the feedback provided by scholars at the South Asia colloquiums at University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and Stanford University. I would like to thank Ramya Sreenivasan, Lisa Mitchell, Ania Loomba, Akhil Gupta, Purnima Mankekar, Sharika !iranagama, and !omas Hansen for their invitation and hospitality. T. B. Hansen read dra%s of two chapters and provided incisive critique and suggestions. I have also bene"ted from conversations with Rupa Viswanath, Arun Kumar, Sumit Guha, Uday Chandra, Usha Iyer, Ajantha Subramanian, Shailaja Paik, Anu Rao, Ram Rawat, Lisa Mitchell, Gyan Prakash, V. Geetha (who read a dra% of chapter 4), Carmel Christy, P. G. Jogdand, Namdeo Dhasal, Arjun Dangle, J. V. Pawar, and many others. I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers recruited by the University of Washington Press for their insightful and supportive comments. All these people have helped me think through, revise, and reinvent various aspects of the project. !ey have made it richer; the de"ciencies and blind spots are mine alone. Without the generosity of librarians and archivists in India, England, and the United States, this project would have faltered before taking o#. I would like to thank the sta# at the Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai Marathi Granth Sangrahalay, Communist Party of India o9ce at the Bhupesh Gupta Bhavan, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune, Nehru Memorial Library and Museum, as well as sta# at Ajoy Bhavan in Delhi, the British Library, University of Washington, and the UCSC library for their help. In Mumbai, Subodh More and Ramesh Shinde provided important materials from their personal collections. To get to these places, I received grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies junior research fellowship, Chester Fritz fellowship at the University of Washington, a writing fellowship from the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, a Hellman Foundation grant, and a Committee on Research grant at UCSC. Without the muni"cence and love of family and friends in India, this book would not have been possible. My sister Shaziya and her husband Rizwan’s warmth and wit made their home in Mumbai a home away from home. !ey made landing and living in Mumbai so much easier. Rizwan, unfortunately, passed away before the book appeared in print, but his humor and generosity will forever remain in my memory. My brother Moiz, Prakash uncle and Swati auntie, Darakhshan Khan, Huma and Zameer Sayyed, and Haaris Shaikh and Deepa Kadam shared their homes and their love of Mumbai. I also cherish the friendships of P. K. Chackochen, Murtuza Ghadially, Priya Nair, Monica Bathija, Prashant Shah,

xi

xii

&' ( )*+ , - . / 0 - ) 1 2

Revathi Venkatesh, Amit Dhorde, Andy Schi#rin, Krishna Pant, and Kavita Char. In Pune, my father Moinuddin and mother Khairunisa have been always supportive and encouraging of a journey they do not fathom much. My mother may be barely literate, but possibly because of that, she always encouraged me/us to study and read. My brother Aatif completes her brood of four. Aatif and Ashiya, along with Moiz and Naila, make Pune a special place. !e next generation of Shaikhs in India, Haaris, Farhan, Rida, and Yaseen, may be growing up in turbulent times, but their good cheer and optimism always provide a corrective to the nonresident Indian’s far-removed sense of bleakness. In Hyderabad, the Murtys—Mohan, Gayatri, and grandmother Sarojini—have been steadfastly supportive of my endeavors. In Delhi, my brother-in-law Anand Murty not only opened his home but also enthralled us with his music, cooking, and jokes. Without Madhavi Murty, my partner, I would have probably remained a journalist. We began our adventure as journalists together, pursued graduate degrees together, and are now colleagues at UCSC. She read my news copy many years ago, and she has read every word of the manuscript, including these acknowledgments. Her insightful suggestions are scattered throughout the book, and her love and comradeship have made this a ful"lling journey. We became parents on my "rst day at UCSC. Our daughter, Sahar, su#used our lives with joy, made sure that I thought of parenting and the book together, and cheered the completion of every editorial stage. I dedicate this book to Madhavi and Sahar, to my late grandfather, Dadhi Abba, whom I remember almost every day, and to Rizwan.

Outcaste BOmBay

IntroduCtIon

"#$ %&'()& &*+$ ,)- .$ )& /&/+/)0 +1)21(&3 4*(&1 5*2 ) history of Bombay city. 6e nose, along with the head, marked social hierarchy in colonial India. In its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the width and length of an Indian nose (and the measurements of the head) provided proof of the group a7nity of its bearer and the precedence he or she commanded in a social hierarchy. In the estimation of the British colonial administrator and commissioner of the Indian census of 89:8, H. H. Risley, these groups were tribes that had transformed into castes over a period of time.< 6us the measurements of noses and heads held the key to a social scienti=c estimation of castes in India. 6e di>erences among castes, determined by nasal and cephalic indices, were further cemented by distinctions and similarities in the rituals and customs of these groups. In this way, caste became a timeless essence and a building block of Indian society.? Indian noses, however, were unruly signi=ers of caste. 6e structure of social hierarchy based on nasal indices collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. As the noted sociologist G.  S. Ghurye observed, there was no correspondence between social hierarchy and nasal indices of people in Bombay province.@ 6e noses of upper-caste Deshastha Brahmins, lower-caste =shermen, middlecaste Kunbi peasants, and untouchable Mahars had similar measurements. 6e body thus was an inadequate material referent for caste, and in Bombay city the nose had to be replaced by another marker. 6e built environment and housing enunciated caste di>erence; they supplemented the body as material referents for caste in the city. 6e built environment and housing are quintessential markers of class, but they are also important sites for living and experiencing caste. 6e built environment in Bombay in this period included factories, docks, railway lines and train stations, roads, schools, parks, places of worship, the sewage system, water supply, and housing, all of which were planned and regulated either by city administrators or institutions of the !

B

% & 1 2*'/A 1 (*&

regional and central governments and owned by individuals and companies as private property, or by the city and state as a public good. Housing, a component of the built environment, accommodated residents who lived and worked in the city. As the historian Sheetal Chhabria pithily puts it, housing was an administrative category deployed by the state to demarcate the city, accumulate capital, distinguish and manage populations, and discipline labor.C Workers labored in factories and at docks, construction sites, and other places in the city and lived in tenements and slums owned by landlords or state institutions to which they paid rent. Houses, even those in slums, shaped everyday lives, inhabitants’ experience of the city, and non–slum dwellers’ perception of them. 6ose who could not a>ord to pay rent squatted on public lands and sidewalks. Because of the importance of workers’ housing and wages for sustaining the working class and the economy built on their labor, state institutions collected data on wages and housing. 6is data informed studies of the working class in Bombay. Workers in the twentieth century raised the issues of wages—or more particularly, the inadequacy of the money paid to them—and housing (especially aDer the 89E:s). 6is book builds on these studies and adds another layer of analysis by arguing that caste not only inFuenced the built form of the city, including provisions for workers’ housing, but also underlay its industrial economy. 6e resulting entanglement of caste and class is evident in the everyday life, experiences, and cultural politics of the urban poor, mostly Dalits (formerly known as the untouchable castes) in the city. 6e entanglement of class and caste had the e>ect of shrouding caste in the cloak of class and, by extension, modernity. It sustained the perception of castelessness in the city.G Class is a modern social and political relationship that conveys the dominance of one group over another; it is also a linguistic phenomenon, because experiences of being a class (or any other group) become comprehensible through language. Class is in sync with modern times because in the long march of modernity, the telos, in this schema, is the melting away of older forms of group a7nities, such as caste. In Bombay city, with its modern, industrial economy, the gradual withering away of caste was assumed by the votaries of modernity, including the elite trying to forge a nation in late colonial and postcolonial India, Marxists imagining a uni=ed working class, and the leaders of the Dalit social movement, including B. R. Ambedkar. Perhaps Ambedkar’s conception of the city, in the 89E:s and 89B:s, as a space that would enable Dalits to escape casteism in the villages and foster forgetfulness about caste, became retroactive proof of the nonvitality of caste in the city in the late

% & 1 2*'/A 1 (*&

nineteenth and twentieth centuries.I His hopefulness about the future of caste in the city was in sharp contrast to his appraisal of the Indian village as “a sink of localism [and a] den of ignorance.”J Ambedkar’s views on the village were similar to Marx and Engels’s considerations on the “idiocy of rural life” and their vision of the city as an escape from this idiocy.K Maybe this was why the eminent sociologist M. N. Srinivas opined that there was not enough material to study caste in urban India.L 6e assumption was that people shed caste on the way to the city or upon arrival there. Outcaste Bombay contends that capitalism and caste shared a symbiotic relationship: they leeched o> each other. Industrial capitalism attached itself to caste and made it a part of its metabolic system