Tadao Ando at Godrej Culture Lab

Yesterday, at an event organised by the Godrej Culture Lab at Vikhroli, I had the pleasure of listening to a talk by Tadao Ando, one of the world's greatest living architects. Not having been to Japan, my knowledge of his work comes mainly from books, but what I've seen in photographs and read about him has impressed me greatly.
When I got to the venue half an hour before the talk was to start, there was a long queue of people waiting to get their copy of a big tome about Ando signed by the man himself. Each person bought a copy for 2500 rupees, wrote his or her name on a slip of paper, and handed these over once face to face with the master builder. He'd write down the name, make a little sketch, and sign. Architecture students obviously have much more money than art students. I can't imagine such a long queue to get a book signed by, say, Gerhard Richter, if he came to town. I could be wrong.
The hall filled quickly, and some, like my friends Deepika and Shireen, found that keeping a placeholder such as a handbag on a seat did not guarantee that the seat would actually remain vacant. The auditorium had some 300 chairs, and by the time Ando began speaking about fifty people were standing at the back. He spoke in Japanese, and was translated by an Indian assisted by a White man who appeared part of the Ando entourage. He was by turns funny, moving and incisive. He also dropped a few names, highlighted his own charitable contributions and made what seemed a strong sales pitch to the assembled Godrej brass.
Ando's approach is inherently modernist, but he imbues concrete with feeling and light and incorporates natural features into the complexes he builds. He balances needs of the market with a desire to preserve and reinvigorate nature; and employs art, culture and built heritage to attract people to locations and to make those who live and work in those locations feel emotionally connected to their surroundings.
Should the Godrejes greenlight a Tadao Ando build, it will be the most exciting architectural project the city has seen since Independence.
A bit about the Godrej land in Vikhroli: it is the biggest tract of its kind in the city and probably the most valuable privately-owned piece of earth anywhere in India. Back in the socialist days, during the Emergency to be specific, the Congress government passed a law called the Urban Land Ceiling Act. The idea was to take land from those who possessed more of it than they needed, and build on it homes for the poor and government employees. Nothing of the sort happened. Politicians made millions by not expropriating privately held plots, and by ignoring a provision that forced builders to turn over for public use 5% of all flats built on exempted land.
In the 30 years that the Land Ceiling Act was in the books, the government acquired just 260 odd acres of vacant land, and received less than 2500 flats from builders from the nearly 2000 acres exempted. The law was repealed five years ago, but there's a lot of litigation related to it still being heard by courts.
The Godrejes owned 3500 acres, and little of that has been taken over or sold. Despite a speeding up in construction, there's plenty left for an architectural landmark to be built.
Back in the socialist days, two films were made about slum residents, the first independent documentaries about the subject to be widely viewed: Uma Segal's Shelter and Anand Patwardhan's Hamara Shahar: Bombay, Our City. Both films contrasted the massive unused land the Godrejes were sitting on with the paltry dwellings available to those who couldn't afford flats. Shelter, if I recall correctly, used title cards that said, in rapid succession, Godrej and Hoardrej.
Having successfully kept the ULCRA demon at bay, will the Godrej clan now do something interesting with all that land, or will they follow every other developer in cramming it with malls, glass-front office towers and luxury residences? It's clear that a Tadao Ando project will not be as lucrative as one by Hafeez Contractor and his ilk. But hey, Parsis are different from Marwaris, Gujaratis, Sindhis, Marathis, Punjabis and all the rest, right? Parsis combine entrepreneurship with civic sense and good taste. They don't look solely at the bottom line. If Godrej will do nothing but build another Hiranandani complex, Indiabulls Centre or High Street Phoenix, there's truly no hope for this city.

Tadao Ando took a helicopter ride over Vikhroli and its surroundings and was excited by the mangrove forest, seeing it as an anchor around which an entire complex could be designed. Another proposal currently doing the rounds, directed at the government rather than private sector, also involves the use of mangroves and the city's coastline. It is currently on view at NGMA, and has been designed by P K Das with the backing of Shabana Azmi, who worked with Das on the beautification of Carter Road. If something like the P K Das plan actually makes it past the drawing board, and the Godrej family bites the Ando bait, Bombay could be substantially improved five years from now. Here's hoping against hope.

Delhi hotels

The recent Delhi trip was my first visit to a city involving stays in two five star hotels in succession. When I speak of Delhi, I'm referring to the National Capital region, including Gurgaon, for it was at Gurgaon's Leela Kempinski that I first landed.


The hotel's embedded in Gurgaon's Ambience Mall, and came on board after architectural plans were drawn, so its exterior includes a standard shopping mall glass facade. The inside felt pleasant enough but unremarkable. I later learned Rajeev Sethi had put together a selection of artwork in the lobby and rooms. I'm afraid I didn't notice any of this art in my walks across the marble floor to the glass door in the mornings, or my walk across it to the lift in the evenings. What I did notice was the number of people saying namaste to me at every point: the chap who opened the car door; the two security men; two women just inside the door; two males flanking the lifts; and any other staffer who happened to be within ten yards of me at any time of day or night.
Delhi has completely gone over to the namaste greeting. In Bombay they still do 'welcome', 'good morning', 'good afternoon' without reflexively folding hands.
The room was very comfortable with a pleasant view over some scrub-like forest. All fixtures worked, and the wifi was fast, though the 550 rupee price tag for 24 hours was a bit hard. What I didn't understand was the wooden floorboards, which creaked below me every time I walked across the room, and creaked above me whenever the guy upstairs moved across his. There's really no excuse for using wooden floorboards in this day and age: tile or stone does perfectly well, and if you're worried about cold floors, a carpet's far better than wood.
Strangely the second hotel I stayed in used wooden floorboards as well: a peculiar fixation appears to have gripped the hotel designers of Delhi. This second hotel was The Park near Connaught Place. It claims to be a five-star hotel, but really is not. Like, I checked in at night, and I suppose the windows had been kept open by the previous occupant or by staff, and so the room was really cold. I turned the climate control to 25 degrees, but it didn't help. I called reception and was told the hotel had no heating, the thermostat was there only to adjust the level of cooling. They gave me a portable heater to keep the temperature comfortable, and I kept the AC switched on to ventilate the room, but really, a five-star hotel in Delhi ought to have central heating, no?
The lobby of The Park is done in retro-sixties style: bright, velvet-y biomorphic sofas, bead curtains, that sort of thing. Problem is, the place is showing its age, giving the lobby the feel of a fancy bordello.



The Park is a tourist's hotel, unlike the Leela which is full of suits; the senior citizens I saw looked quite happy. Maybe the decor reminds them comfortingly of what was cutting edge in their teenage years.


I was less than happy. The rooms are small; the water in my bathroom seeped under the glass partition separating shower from toilet; there's no wifi, only a slow ethernet connection at an extortionate 450 rupees plus taxes for an hour and 800 plus taxes for a day; the staff looked a bit too eager for tips; and the muffins at breakfast had a kerosene flavour.

The hotel that seriously impressed me on this trip was The Trident, Gurgaon, which I visited for a late night drink with a friend.

Designed by a Thai architect, the hotel makes use of traditional Indian structures such as the bangla roof, but within a spare overall plan, not minimalist by any means, but calm, reflective. Entry at night is spectacular: one walks through a gate to a black rectangle of water within which gleam four fires. To one side is the dramatically lit entrance to the reception area.
Going back to the Delhi versus Bombay theme, here's another reason Delhi scores: it has lots of interesting modern and postmodern architecture, while hardly anything good has been built in Bombay after the art deco era.

Heritage hero or villain?

This afternoon, BBC World broadcast an episode of Heritage Heroes applauding the work of Mohamed Turshi al Soghayer who was instrumental in conserving the traditional multi-storey houses of Rijal Alma in southern Saudi Arabia. The chairperson of the jury was Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, head of the Saudi Supreme Commission for Tourism and Antiquities, whose statement can be read on the Heritage Heroes site here.
Earlier, I'd read a New York Times article about real estate development in Mecca, including the building of a huge clocktower modelled on Big Ben and a series of highrises right next to the Kaaba. The clocktower is six times the height of its Westminster model, over 1900 feet as against Big Ben's 315 feet.


The apartment blocks and clocktower were built by bulldozing an old Ottoman fortress and levelling the hill on which it stood, to fulfill the demand among super-wealthy Muslims to have a room overlooking Islam's most holy site. Rapid construction around the Kaaba has displaced Meccans who've lived close to the site for generations, and created a divide between the rich who ring the complex and their less well-off brethren who have been forced further afield. According to many this runs contrary to the idea of Mecca as a place where class distinctions, so prominent elsewhere, fade, and are replaced by a sense of oneness and solidarity among all Muslims.
Prince Sultan, head of the Heritage Heroes jury was asked about the kitsch version of Big Ben rising where a hill and fortress used to be. He replied curtly, “When I am in Mecca and go around the kaaba, I don’t look up.” So much for commitment to heritage. It was surprising in any case coming from a member of the clan of Al Saud, probably responsible for more destruction of built heritage down the generations than any other currently powerful family in the entire world.
On a related note, today's Mumbai Mirror has the results of a poll listing the city's 'seven wonders'. It's a bit of hyperbole, but two predictable winners are VT / CST station and Haji Ali. Haji Ali was ruined years ago when a guesthouse was built right behind the dargah, warping the delicate outline of the structure seen against the sky. Now there's a proposal to dilute heritage norms for VT, and to use land on its eastern side to build, what else, shopping complexes and hotels. All of Bombay's municipal corporators ganged up not long ago to push through a scheme to redevelop Crawford market along similar lines. This morning's paper left me thinking: if the skyline around the Kaaba could be destroyed, what hope for a 19th century railway station and market?

Armies and Cities

My column on Yahoo! this time asks whether military establishments should move out of metropolises. Read it here.

The new Delhi airport

With the opening of a capacious new airport terminal, Delhi's taken another step towards becoming indisputably India's premier city. The old terminal contained a large mural by M F Husain, India's most important painter; the new one has ghastly artworks like the one pictured above. I have a feeling, though, that it will be superior in every other respect. A Metro link is being built as well, which means India will finally have an airport with a public transport link attached. Bombay, of course, can't even organise a bus service to its domestic and international terminals, leave alone a high speed rail connection.
The problem with Delhi remains, of course, its people. That'll take a few decades more to sort out.

Phantom Project

The world's tallest residential building is here! Or so billboards around the city claim. The tower is called World One, is 117 storeys high, and is owned by the Lodha Group. Look around Bombay's skyline, though, and you won't spot anything close to a 1500 foot high building. The Lodha Group's website doesn't so much as mention World One. What gives?
It seems the builder doesn't have necessary permissions to build the record breaking high rise, nor money enough to see it through. Those hoardings are meant to attract advance bookings and private equity interest to fund the project. The address of World One is said to be Upper Worli. But Upper Worli, as I recall, is the figment of the imagination of admen whose offices moved to Lower Parel a decade ago, and who claimed half-jokingly to have shifted to Upper Worli to shrug off Lower Parel's downmarket associations.
We have, then, a building that doesn't exist, in a neighbourhood that doesn't exist, funded by money that doesn't exist. If you possess a few extra crores, this phantom project might be where you want to sink them.

Swaminomics misunderstands Ellora and Dilwara

Within his domain of economics, Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar can be an incisive writer. His column about heritage conservation in today's Times of India is, unfortunately, a farrago of factual errors and misdiagnoses. He tells of his disappointment at finding the paintings of Ajanta and sculptures of Ellora largely eroded, compares these unfavourably with the finely detailed carvings in the Dilwara temples of Mount Abu, and claims that the reason the marble sculptures of Dilwara are pristine is that they are part of living monuments in which things broken are constantly replaced. From the comparison between Ellora and Dilwara, he draws the conclusion that living monuments in general are better preserved than those in the hands of the ASI. Finally, he suggests building new temples near Ellora to supplement the existing site and help keep local artisanal traditions alive.
Here's a paragraph from Anklesaria Aiyar's piece:
Why is Dilwara not eroded and discoloured like Ellora? Because the Dilwara temples are alive and functioning, attracting millions of worshippers. The temples are maintained by religious bodies, not the ASI. Donations from worshippers, plus the cultural force of ancient tradition, enable the religious trusts to hire the best artisans and maintain the highest quality in constantly repairing and replacing old, damaged sections. The replacements are as exquisite as the originals. This keeps alive ancient traditions and skills in art, which have been lost at dead monuments like Ajanta and Ellora.

1. The Dilwara temples have not been constantly renovated. The carvings are pretty much what they were when first completed. When looked at closely, the damage to them becomes visible, a nose missing here, a broken limb there.
2. There are a number of reasons why Dilwara is in a better state of preservation than Ellora. Work on Ellora began five centuries before the Dilwara temples were constructed. Secondly, the art in Ellora and Ajanta is affected by wind, rain and seeping water, wheras the carvings in Dilwara are inside protective structures. Thirdly, Dilwara uses marble, which is a very hard stone. Marble is also valuable, and therefore treated with more care than the rock of Ellora.
3. Many living monuments have gone through extensive restorations, and are not the better for it. The famous Mahavir temple at Osian, for example, has had its old pillars and lintels substituted with replicas produced in a workshop nearby. The new work has none of the exquisite grace of the 'damaged' columns it replaces.
4. Since Ellora consists of rock-cut temples, there is no method of redoing eroded sculptures while retaining the spirit of the place. You can't carve deeper into the side walls because you'll soon punch through into the next cave.
5. Ellora was damaged long before the Archaeological Survey of India was formed, so blaming the ASI for its state of repair is strange.
6. Anybody disappointed with Ellora has no understanding of sculpture. Despite the effects of time, those caves contain the finest examples of Indian sculpture's incredible treatment of mass and volume. There are, of course, sites offering greater delicacy of detail, notably Dilwara and Konark, but this does not detract from the achievement visible at Ellora.
6. Anklesaria Aiyar's argument is part of a trend of thought that believes, 'private enterprise good, government bad'. In the current context, it means living monuments funded by donations are good, protected monuments tended by the Archaeological Survey of India are bad. This is an entirely wrong-headed approach to the issue, and leads to foolish suggestions of the sort at the end of Anklesaria Aiyar's column (build new temples near Ellora!).

Mathur and da Cunha's SOAK revisited

Earlier this afternoon I looked around SOAK again. Dilip da Cunha had written to me suggesting a discussion after reading my previous post, and he sought me out while I was at NGMA. I was gratified to be able to share perspectives.
While our exchange of views did not change my interpretation of the show, I did regret restricting myself to what I felt were its negatives. There is much to commend about the energy and dedication the authors have put into their research. Their ideas about rejigging the way Bombay deals with the monsoon deserve serious consideration by municipal authorities. Though I disagree with da Cunha and Mathur's reading of the city's history, I'm sure that, should their proposals be put in practice, they would be preferrable to the slipshod actions of BMC planners.

During our back and forth, both authors suggested I had misread their writing. After looking at their texts carefully once more, I am satisfied I have not done that, aside from employing straightforward assertions instead of sentences that use phrases allowing for wiggle room like 'not necessarily' and 'cannot be assumed'.

I've transcribed a few panels from the show to provide a taste of the da Cunha / Mathur style and mode of thought. Each bit of text is in italics, and is followed by my own analysis.

"Mumbai's history, in most accounts, pivots on its European occupation -- the Portuguese from 1534 to 1665, but more significantly the British from 1665 to 1947. Little is said in these accounts about an attitude to and vocabulary of terrain that was constructed through this occupation, a vocabulary that rests on a fundamental belief not necessarily shared by previous occupants of Mumbai, namely that land and sea should be divided.
This division was instituted by European seafarers, but more concertedly by English marine and land surveyors in the late 1700s with the drawing of a line on a map. This line traverses rocks, swamps and beaches of an aqueous terrain, asserting entities that are taken for granted today in descriptions, planning and everyday administration of Mumbai. Three of these entities are significant: the island of Mumbai, the coast of the Indian subcontinent, and a major concern following the 2005 flood, the Mithi river. The reality of these entities cannot be questioned. But they are essentially things singled out from the dynamic, at times chaotic terrain of an estuary by an eye driven to simplify, perhaps at a cost that is being paid for by floods in Mumbai today."

Mathur and da Cunha provide no evidence to show that the belief in dividing land from sea was "not necessarily shared by previous occupants of Mumbai". I don't understand how fishermen could ply their trade or sailors could navigate their boats without having a clear idea of what constituted land and what sea.

"Until 1843, there was general agreement that Bombay Island was once more than one island, but no agreement on how many. In 1843 R.X.Murphy put speculation to rest by providing an empirical basis for arguing that the island once comprised seven islands. Based on a study of place names, which suggested a water edge, his conjecture matched a place called Heptanesia that the Greek geographer, Ptolemy, in the second century located off the coast of land that he referred to as India inter Gangem. It is today popular fact. Indeed the islandness of Mumbai has even gone indigenous, with stories of native settlers -- the 'Kolis' -- inhabiting an island; and their goddess Mumbadevi being the 'goddess of an island'. Yet the islandness of Mumbai in the fluid terrain of an estuary cannot be assumed. Mumbai was willed to be off shore."

When Mathur and da Cunha state that "the islandness of Mumbai has gone indigenous", they mean that locals have come to believe the fiction constructed by Brits. In their view, the idea of Mumbadevi as the goddess of an island did not come about because kolis independently understood that the temple was built on an island, but because they swallowed incorrect colonial ideas. Again, there is no evidence provided for this rather strong assertion. My own feeling is that fishermen would know very well what was an island and what was not. Why presume they do not have this knowledge?
The final sentence of this section is unambiguous: "Mumbai was willed to be offshore". In other words, the city was never an island or collection of islands; the idea of Bombay as an island is a social construct, a colonial construct. I disagree. As far as I know, it was never possible under any tidal conditions to walk from Colaba to Vashi or Alibaug back in the 17th century. Bombay was, indeed, a collection of islands, and the locals knew this because humans can walk on land but not on water.
The temptation at this stage is to think, "surely they can't actually be suggesting Bombay was not an island". But that is precisely what they are suggesting, which is why I wrote in my earlier post of contemporary academic theory being fundamentally foolish (I have removed that word because it was too personal. I want to emphasise it is the theory itself I consider foolish, not any individuals).
A kindred example of this kind of argument is Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove's contention that what we call slums are, in fact, not slums at all. You can read my posts about the Srivastava / Echanove theory here and here. Rahul is an associate of PUKAR, one of the organisations that has backed SOAK, and he wrote a glowing preview of the show in his column in Mumbai Mirror.
I mention this to indicate that the da Cunha / Mathur line of thought is part of a tradition of looking at urban development. I wrote sympathetically about it in a post about demolitions in Ahmedabad. Unfortunately, among some academics, the tradition has degenerated into an anti-rational conspiracy theory.

"The articulation of a line between land and sea has largely gone unnoticed. It was a taken-for-granted visualization in the milieu of colonial power and landed property. Today, it is deeply embedded in everyday language and an intrinsic part of imaging Mumbai and imagining its future. Questions have been raised regarding the form of this line from the time Mumbai was occupied by the English. More recently, the purpose and enterprise of its drawing have been discussed. But little is said about its presence, about the battlefront that it sets up between land and sea, and between land and water in general which, in Mumbai, includes the monsoon".

Notice the rhetorical sleight of hand by which a (questionable) argument about the relationship of land and sea is widened to include the rain. It is unclear to me why the drawing of a line sets up a 'battlefront' between land and sea. Maps were necessary for navigation, and they did their job very well. A good map is an accurate and useful representation of reality, not an instrument of imperialist power. Mathur and da Cunha themselves make use of maps of Bombay for their proposals, and those maps, too, divide land from water.

"The monsoon in Mumbai is a moment of fresh water saturation that people once made every attempt to extend through the year. They built bunds to hold monsoon waters where they fell and they made wells to increase the porosity of the surface and allow (and access) saturation at lower levels. But by far the most ingenious way of extending the monsoon was the talao.
Far from being passive collectors as they are often considered to be, the talaos of Mumbai are active landscapes that operate to extend the monsoon at the level of the sea. They deploy surface runoff, earthen embankments, and importantly, the pressure harnessed by tapping into fresh water aquifers sandwiched between strata of blue clay, limestone, littoral concrete, basalt and saline aquifers to keep salt water on the surface at bay. Accessing fresh water aquifers without disturbing saline strata is an art fraught with chance. It was to become a lost art as the search for an assured and abundant water supply led to the idea and project of big dams, reservoirs and pipes, and to making a surface that was not about saturation, but runoff to the sea via rivers and drains."

A fake contrast is set up here. What is this 'extending of the monsoon' that Mathur and da Cunha speak of? All it means is that water that falls in the rains is available for use at a later time. Any sort of storage, then, is a form of 'extending the monsoon'. In which case, the huge reservoirs built by the British and by administrators of independent India are also methods of extending the monsoon. It's true that talaos operate "to extend the monsoon at the level of the sea", while the big reservoirs are on higher ground, but why should one be preferrable to the other in and off itself?

"Contrary to its common use to mean drain, a nullah is a surface of overflows. Its identity hinges on the operation of devices that hold monsoon waters. When seen individually these devices are simple structures like bunds built to allow a spill-over at a certain height. Seen collectively and in operation, however, they activate a surface that gathers and dissipates with a complexity and temporality that beguile the eye. Their workings do not form lines like rivers that run through settlement but rather the field of settlement itself."

I don't understand what is so complex and temporal about the working of nullahs. I confess I have never found them beguiling and never will, but if the squalor of slums can be romanticised, why not the working of drains? The last sentence is this passage is puzzling. "Their workings do not form lines..." what are these workings? "... do not form lines like rivers that run through settlement...". I thought rivers existed prior to settlement. They 'run through settlement' because settlements are formed on their banks. "...but rather the field of settlement itself". You got me. I have no idea what this last phrase is meant to mean.

Sloppy City: Mathur and da Cunha's SOAK

On days like this, I am especially glad I didn't complete my doctorate. Had I done so, I would have been tempted to settle down in a teaching job at some university in England or the United States. In which case, I'd constantly have had to read books like Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha's SOAK, books by very smart people written in language so dense, only people familiar with the jargon might comprehend the flimsiness of the arguments. Since most of those trained in the jargon have bought into the academic system, they are about as likely to harm their careers in the name of intellectual honesty as Shia clerics in Iran are to say, "Hold on, this whole Islamic republic idea is bollocks, isn't it?"
SOAK is a book presenting Bombay from a novel perspective, and is also an exhibition currently on view at the National Gallery of Modern Art. The bulk of the show consists of text, maps and diagrams, but two boring installations have been created to forestall criticism that the show has nothing to do with art and should, therefore, find no place in NGMA.
Mathur and da Cunha's argument, paraphrased, is this: The British created modern Bombay based on a belief that sea had to be divided from land. Early European maps which vary in their representation of the city's boundaries do so because, in reality, these boundaries were fluid rather than fixed. Locals did not necessarily view land and sea in the same cut and dry, adversarial fashion as Europeans. Their traditional ways of harvesting and draining rain water, namely talaos (ponds) and nullahs (drains), are preferable to the underground sewers and the dam-created reservoirs favoured by colonial administrators and expanded after India gained independence. If we had retained our earlier notion of the land-sea relationship, we'd have been saved catastrophes like the flood of 2005. To reinvigorate the city, it is helpful to use the idea of an estuary, which is neither fresh nor salt water, neither sea nor river, but something in-between. Bombay is an estuary rather than an island.

I take issue with Mathur and da Cunha for the following reasons:

1) The authors have not quoted one single local source to back up their belief that non-Europeans had a different take on the Bombay mix of land, sea and fresh water. It's all very well to complain about the city's history being dominated by colonial accounts, but the complaint falls flat when the people doing the complaining show no evidence of having read any non-colonial writings on the city.
2) There is plenty of evidence that traditional Indian thought divided land and sea very firmly. Islands make an appearance early in the Indian literary canon, the Sanskrit word for them is 'dvipa'. In the colonial era, there are Maratha maps which depict Bombay as an island or a series of islands, proving that it wasn't only the Brits and Portuguese who thought in this fashion.
The foundational dogma of modern critical theory is that everything is a social construct. However, normal humans outside the academic echo chamber know that the difference between earth and water is not something constructed by nasty imperialists.
3) It is incorrect to say colonialists made an absolute distinction between land and sea. They knew about tracts which sometimes appear to be land and at other times are covered with water. The current word for them is, simply, wetlands, and they include marshes, swamps, bogs, sloughs and mires. Wetlands are great for biodiversity, but rarely congenial to human habitation. That's probably why, when we talk of being mired or bogged down or swamped, we aren't speaking of happy experiences.
What is now central Bombay was once marshland. Not only could nobody live in the marsh itself, it made everything in the vicinity inhospitable for humans. The rate of deaths from malaria in the 15th century has not been recorded, but we can guess it was catastrophically high. Which is one reason why, while the mainland immediately to the north and east flourished for millennia, Bombay remained sparsely populated and impoverished.
4) Which leads to the next bone of contention: reclamation. Mathur and da Cunha condemn reclamation as a kind of crime against nature, an emblem of the imperialist desire to fight nature and conquer it. The fact is, however, that Bombay could became a proper city only because of reclamation, particularly the transformation of its wetlands into dry land. One might object to further reclamation today, but to make a general case against it would be to argue that Bombay ought never have become an urban centre.
5) There are towns in India which do not have massive water reservoirs or underground sewers. They retain their faith in talaos and nullahs. The ones I have visited are, without exception, filthy and water deficient. I see no empirical reasoning behind the notion that talaos and nullahs are superior to large reservoirs and underground sewers. In fact I find it hard to imagine the demands for water of a city of 15 million being adequately served by traditional talaos or variants thereof.
6) The flood of 2005 was not exacerbated by planning in and of itself, but by bad planning, or the failure to plan. Illegal construction, and construction legalised where it should not have been, were the primary reasons why water remained standing for days in some areas. It is perfectly possible for a city to reclaim land and build on it on a grand scale while protecting itself from natural disasters; a case in point is Hong Kong, which faces storms regularly without seeing the sort of damage that the July 2005 flood visited upon Bombay. The point is to plan and execute efficiently.

I will write more on this issue in a day or two, connecting it with past posts of mine, and providing a taste of the Mathur / da Cunha style by quoting directly from their book. It costs 2000 rupees, and I am not prepared to shell out that amount, so the quotes will have to wait till I can borrow a copy or return to NGMA to transcribe a few passages. For the moment, MTNL has provided me a window of opportunity to upload, who knows when I'll get it again?

Dharavi Ain't No Slum

A little less than a month ago, I critiqued Rahul Srivastava and Mattias Echanove's reclassification of Dharavi from a slum to a collection of villages. The pair has written an Op-Ed in today's New York Times presenting their thesis to an American audience. Titled, 'Taking the Slum Out of Slumdog', the article argues that Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire "represents what most middle-class residents of Mumbai (and now all over the world) imagine Dharavi to be. The urban legend of its squalor has taken root because few Mumbaikars have ever been there". In other words, according to the writers, there's nothing squalid about Dharavi, it's all a myth created by well-to-do folks who've never been there. Where, then, one wonders, did those images of squalor so tellingly shot by Danny Boyle come from? Did the camera miraculously transform a clean and verdant landscape into a fetid crowd of shanties? Should Slumdog be in the running for a Best Visual Effects Oscar along with all the other nominations it has received? The truth, as anybody who has ever been to Bombay will know, is that there are slums everywhere, even in some of the most affluent parts of the city. Citizens don't have to travel to Dharavi to learn what a slum is: they only need eyes and noses. Slums are the first thing noticed by tourists coming to Bombay: there's a vast sprawl abutting the airport, and hutments line miles of tracks on the route to the main rail terminus.
Echanove and Srivastava (henceforth, E&S) go on to claim, "Dharavi's messy appearance is nothing but an expression of intense social and economic processes at work." The homes double as work spaces, and represent, "a decentralized production network rivaling the most ruthless of Chinese sweatshops in efficiency". In this, too, they are mistaken. The production in Indian slums is horribly inefficient. That's why Dharavi's workers earn far less than their Chinese counterparts. In attempting to change perceptions of Bombay's slums, E&S swallow the stereotype of a Chinese workplace. I haven't been to China, but I've visited Hanoi and its environs, which have factories modelled on Chinese ones a little to the north. The workshops I saw, hundreds of them ringing the Vietnamese capital, were huge warehouses, well-lit, roomy, full of workers bending over fabric while sitting at work tables. A tedious and taxing job, no doubt, but far from slave labour: created in an environment that allows the standardisation required for mass production, and far safer for employees than are Dharavi's toxic recycling factories.
E&S stress the tropes of post-modern planning that I wrote about in my post on Ahmedabad: decentralisation, community, village, local involvement in development etc. They mention repeatedly that the government has been less than helpful in providing amenities to Dharavi's citizens. But nowhere do they state why this might be. They omit to inform readers of the New York Times that the homes of Dharavi are built illegally on government land. Using their favourite analogy of Bombay and Tokyo, the two write, "Look at large parts of Tokyo. Its low-rise, high-density mixed-use cityscape and intricate street network have emerged through a similar Dharaviesque logic. The only difference is that people’s involvement in local development in Tokyo was seen as legitimate." The only difference? Surely they jest. Their argument is, in any case, disingenuous, because the Tokyo developments they speak of were entirely legal. Citizens had rights to the land on which they built their homes. That is why they were 'seen as legitimate'.
I should stress that S&E aren't mavericks. Crazy as it may seem to some of us, the idea of Dharavi as village rather than slum, a community to be celebrated and cherished, is catching on. Prince Charles, who has become an emblem of anti-rational, anti-modernist architectural thinking in Britain over the past two decades, recently praised Dharavi's "underlying intuitive grammar of design", and held the place up as a model to be emulated. There are no signs, however, that the Prince intends forsaking London's Clarence House, his private estates in Gloucestershire and Scotland, and his new 192 acre Welsh property, to make a home in Bombay's finest village.

User-Generated Urban Regeneration

Rahul Srivastava, a friend of mine who majored in anthropology and was the first director of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research), has helped set up a new consultancy called Urbz, which works on the principle of 'user generated cities'. He has written a number of articles on this theme, frequently in collaboration with fellow-Urbz member Matias Echanove.
PUKAR is doing some important work in urban regeneration, and I'm sure Urbz will also make a substantial contribution to the field. Nothing I write in this piece should be taken as belittling their achievements or intentions. I do, however, have fundamental differences with Rahul's view of city development. Take the issue of slums in general and Dharavi in particular. The subject is on many minds because of the stark visuals seen in Slumdog Millionaire. Rahul and his partners at Urbz have an unusual take on it: "Often dubbed “Asia’s largest slum,” Dharavi is in fact a heart-shaped agglomeration of primarily informal settlements that bustle with economic activities. It is located literally in the heart of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital." Let me first voice a pet peeve about the use of the word 'literally'. Why do people always use it when they can't mean it literally? As in, 'I literally died', or 'literally in the heart of Mumbai".
That trivial matter behind us, let's analyse the purport of the sentence. Dharavi is called Asia's largest slum, while IN FACT it is not a slum at all but something else. An agglomeration of primarily informal settlements. In another essay, published in Art India magazine, Rahul and Echanove go further, speaking of "millions around the world who actually live in villages that are misrepresented as slums."
The enemy of informal settlements is, of course, the planned township. In good postmodern fashion (see my previous post for more on that), Rahul and Echanove (R & E) favour bottom-up, incremental development in consultation with communities, rather than any master planning by state agencies. They take as a model the development of Tokyo after WWII, where local activists and residents designed precincts because the government had other priorities. The gulf between Tokyo and Dharavi, though, is immense. Tokyo was devastated by bombing during the war, and so citizens had a clean slate of sorts to work with. They stayed within the law, maintained high construction and hygiene standards, and were provided requisite utilities. Dharavi, on the other hand, is an overcrowded mess of shanties built illegally on state land by residents who, for the most part, have to contend with pathetic sanitation facilities. In fairness, I should clarify that all my knowledge of Tokyo is second-hand, I've never visited Japan. If anybody has been there and feels the comparison with Dharavi is apt, please let me know. I doubt, however, that any Tokyo neighbourhood looked like this after it was rebuilt:



This photograph was taken by Matias Echanove, who knows both Tokyo and Dharavi well.
In their Art India piece, R & E hold up the bazaar as the ideal metaphor for the city, writing, "No wonder the bazaar is making a comeback in post-industrial cities: farmers' markets, music festivals and the like appealing to an increasingly cosmopolitan and bohemian generation...". They then provide the example of the Bombay Bazaar in Tokyo, a restaurant that "is part of a new group of venues that have adopted slummy-looking vernacular architecture as a fashion statement." Slumminess tends to become a fashion statement when there aren't any actual slums around.
I love comeback bazaars like London's Borough market myself. But the fact is they cater not to the clientele that farmers' markets originally did, but to prosperous citizens who can afford handmade oatcakes, organic heather-fed lamb and seaweed-eating hogget. The rustic feel of Borough market is cherished by those who have grown up shopping at Sainsbury's. It seems an odd model for places which have till very recently not experienced the convenience of modern retailing. R & E decry the clinical design of planned neighbourhoods, but they fall into the trap of glorifying its opposite. A bit like India's communist parties which support dubious regimes like Iran's theocracy just because they are anti-American.
In critiquing the antiseptic, R & E end up glorifying the septic.

Ahmedabad recollections

Since so many people are speaking of Narendra Modi as the best Prime Minister India could have, the latest being Preity Zinta, here's my account of what I experienced of the man's development policies. I travelled to Ahmedabad in March 2007, my first and thus far only visit to the city. The town has over a dozen world class historical monuments, some great modern architecture and a fine museum, but has never made it to India's tourist map because it is noisy, dirty and lacks atmosphere. Gujarat's ban on liquor doesn't help.
Most auto rickshaw men are clueless about major architectural landmarks. Luckily, I ran into a driver named Mohammad who specialises in ferrying around the few heritage-seekers who come to Ahmedabad. He saved me a lot of time, aside from taking me to one or two interesting places that guidebooks don't mention and, at the end of the day, only charged what his meter showed.
Most of Ahmedabad's oldest surviving monuments are delicately-embellished mosques. Many have been in continuous use for half a millennium; they predate the Mughal emperor Akbar's takeover of Gujarat. I expected the people in these mosques to treat me with suspicion. I have encountered such suspicion in places like Bhopal and Banaras, and assumed the onslaught that Muslims in Gujarat faced in 2002 must have made them wary of strangers. To my surprise, I was received warmly everywhere I went, with caretakers going out of their way to point out decorative details I might have missed. One young Maulana, on learning I was a journalist, took me round the mosque under his charge, showing me places where it leaked, other areas where the structure had weakened and needed to be propped up by bamboo sticks. He'd been asking for assistance from the state government since the earthquake of 2001 without any response. He pleaded with me to send letters to the Archaeological Survey (ASI) or any other conservation authority I knew to bring the neglect of the monument to their notice. I promised him I would, but am ashamed to confess I did nothing after returning to Bombay.
On my final evening in Ahmedabad, I rode through an area of the old city called Astodia, to find many of the structures bordering the street were being bulldozed. One old man stood in what had been his living room on the third floor of a building whose entire front had been gouged out. He had probably stayed in that home his whole life. Many of the structures being demolished were clearly over a hundred years old. It was unfathomable why anybody would want to destroy one of the few places in the city with real character. My immediate reaction was that, since most of the residents of Astodia were Muslim, the administration probably didn't care what happened to them. It was one more strike on behalf of Modi's revolution.
Back home, I tried to make sense of what I'd seen by googling the Ahmedabad news. I learned that the city's municipal authorities had decided to widen the main Astodia road in the 1950s. The case went to court and, in 1964, residents got a stay on demolitions. When I visited, the locals had just lost their final appeal, the stay had being vacated, and the municipality had gone to work immediately.
Along that road lie two of the 500 year-old mosques I have spoken of, including the Rani Sipri mosque, a small but exquisite construction in excellent condition. The Ahmedabad municipality planned to take down the compound walls of these places as part of their road-widening plan. Since both were ASI-protected structures, conservationists prevented the vandalism by getting a court order in the nick of time. But they could do nothing about more recent buildings of architectural merit, because the list of Ahmedabad's heritage structures had not been published.
In the months since I witnessed those bulldozers at work, I have spoken to some Modi supporters from Ahmedabad about the destruction. Their defence has been that, a) the widening of the congested arterial road is necessary for Modi's 'Megacity Ahmedabad' plans; b) The residents have been given good alternate accommodation and are happy with the deal; and c) Many Hindu roadside shrines were removed as part of the civic improvement drive, so there is no special targetting of Muslims involved. I have not verified these claims.
The road widening, though is yet to be completed, and just today there's a news item about a Brazilian student of kathak performing in public as a protest against the destruction of Astodia's heritage. So, what is it the Brazilian could see that Modi's acolytes in the municipal corporation could not? The answer lies partly in the time-warp involved in the demolition. It was mooted an astonishing fifty years before it was executed. I've written about the revolution in museum architecture that took place in the twenty years between the design of the new NGMA wing and its construction. It's hardly surprising that ideas of urban planning have also substantially changed between the 1950s and 2009.
The urban planning revolution began even as the Astodia road was first being scrutinised. If one were to mention a single event that kick-started the movement, it would be the publication in 1961 of Jane Jacobs' book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which took on the policies of Robert Moses, the man who transformed New York City. Town planners like Moses believed in making cities more liveable by executing big-ticket public works projects: expressways and bridges, parks and promenades, dams and waterworks, and massive public housing schemes. Whatever came in the way of these efforts was bulldozed without much consideration of value. The new way pioneered by Jacobs rejected this rationlist, top-down approach in favour of decentralisation, preserving and empowering communities, consulting locals rather than depending solely on appointed experts, and working on a small rather than gargantuan scale.
This movement is now seen as a shift from modernist to post-modernist thinking. A modernist would view Astodia as a traffic bottleneck ghetto of mostly impoverished citizens, living in uncomfortably tiny habitations without good public utilities. A post-modernist would see it as a close-knit community dwelling in old structures, some of them finely crafted, practising a lifestyle that had developed organically down generations.
In India now, we are faced with an interesting conflict. NGOs have overwhelmingly adopted the post-modern approach, but administrators preserve the modernist mindset, with one important variation, namely that they rarely accomplish what they set out to do in the proper time frame, thus negating the essential advantage of modernist planning, which is its emphasis on rationality and efficiency. The fact that the Astodia road widening is yet to be completed nearly two years after the demolition drive is a good example of Indian modernist planning.
The modernist and post-modernist viewpoints are so distinct that one side cannot comprehend the other's perspective. As I took that ride through Astodia, for instance, I found it mind-boggling anybody would even consider demolishing that row of antique buildings. I am sure that, conversely, some officers of the municipal corporation were amazed to discover activists fighting to preserve that enclave intact.
Although I thought the razing of buildings in Astodia foolish, I have not bought entirely into the post-modern line of thought. My friend Rahul Srivastava has recently co-written an article about Dharavi which exemplifies what I believe to be the shortcomings of the postmodern-NGO approach to urban planning. More on that in a day or two.

High-rise cycle

Today's Times of India carries a story about plans to build a 101 storey high-rise in Wadala. The piece begins by hinting the time isn't right to conceive such a grandiose project. However, considering the usual length of business cycles and the years taken for large buildings to be completed, the middle of a downturn might be the perfect time for these sorts of proposals.
High-rise buildings are the ultimate architectural sign of business confidence, even hubris. They tend to be conceived at the peak of business cycles, and completed at the trough. The Empire State building, the first habitable modern structure to be the tallest edifice in the world (setting aside the few months that the Chrysler Building held that honour) was completed in 1931, as the Great Depression really began to bite. It remained largely unoccupied for years.
The Sears Tower was first envisioned during a retail boom in the 1960s. By 1974, when the tower was ready to be occupied, the owners discovered their revenue projections had been very optimistic. Sears Roebuck eventually had to mortgage the property.
Margaret Thatcher took over in hard times, but by her second term in office the British economy was growing at a healthy rate. That's when bankers dreamt up an ambitious regeneration scheme for the docklands, with a showpiece tower that would be Europe's highest building. Canary Wharf hung out the To Let signs in 1991, running smack into a massive recession, meaning that, like the Empire State and the Sears Tower had done, it lay half-empty, causing bankruptcies and changes in ownership.
After the World Trade Centres were attacked, many people suggested the era of tall buildings was over. The exact opposite happened, as a housing bubble led to a slew of dizzyingly high structures being proposed and passed. So now we wait for Burj Dubai to open the doors of its 5 billion dollar, 800 meter plus tower in mid-2009. Something tells me the promoters of the project aren't thrilled about their timing.
On the plus side, as economies eventually turn around and demand for office rentals creeps up, the tallest buildings begin to seem like icons of a city rather than white elephants. Who can imagine Manhattan without the Empire State Building?

NGMA issues

The National Gallery of Modern Art, located in Delhi's Jaipur House, is inaugurating its new wing today. A few years ago, the museum's director Rajeev Lochan showed me the plans for the extension . I mentioned the design looked dated, and he explained why. The project kicked off in the mid 1970s. A design was selected in the early 1980s. Virtually the same plan has been executed in the 21st century. In the intervening decades, museum architecture's undergone a revolution with the creation of structures like Bilbao's Guggenheim, Denver's Frederic Hamilton building, and the British Museum's Great Court.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry

The Denver Art Museum's extension, conceived by Daniel Liebeskind

The glass roof of the British Museum's Great Court, designed by Norman Foster

Indians, even those who haven't travelled abroad, might find some of these edifices familiar. Hrithik Roshan danced inside the Great Court for Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham. And Rajinikanth did a jig in a blond wig before the Bilbao Guggenheim in Sivaji. Will the NGMA extension similarly inspire film choreographers? I doubt it.

Admittedly, a museum's potential as a backdrop for a song-and-dance is not a fantastic criterion by which to judge it. But I do have one yardstick by which to measure the success of the NGMA extension, namely, does it give M. F. Husain's iconic canvas, Zameen, the room it deserves? The painting, first exhibited in 1955 and immediately recognised as a masterpiece, is a little over 18 feet long, not massive by contemporary standards. Yet it has been hidden away in storage for years. It ought to be hung in a space of sufficient depth so its full impact can be felt. If anybody reads this after having visited the new NGMA, please let me know if the architect and curator have done the painting justice.
Whatever the status of the Delhi museum, it seems that Bombay's NGMA, housed in the Cowasjee Jehangir Hall, will continue to languish. Two years ago, I distributed a pamphlet at the opening of the show Edge of Desire at CJ Hall. The note, which criticised Rajeev Lochan's handling of the Bombay gallery, was to be published in an E-zine due for launch at the time. That website never got off the ground, but I'm reproducing the entire text of the pamphlet in my next blog entry, because I feel it's as relevant as it was twenty-four months ago Or perhaps even more pertinent since we can't expect private galleries to mount substantial group shows during the current downturn.
All the points I made in that appeal have been revalidated in the past two years. An excellent example was the refusal by Lochan to display the Benodebehari Mukherjee retrospective in Bombay. Gulammohammed Sheikh, one of India's finest painters, gave up more than a year of his creative life to put together the show in conjunction with his co-curator, the scholar R. Sivakumar. Since the government offered only paltry funding, Sheikh persuaded galleries like Espace, Vadehra and The Guild to sponsor catalogues. The works lay in Jaipur House for months after the Delhi show was taken down, but were never transferred to the empty Bombay space despite repeated entreaties by the show's curators and a number of artists and art lovers.