Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria

Guardians of the Bourgeois City: Citizenship, Public Space, and Middle-Class Activism in Mumbai1

This article examines the new phenomenon of “citizens’ groups” in contemporary Mumbai, India, whose activities are directed at making the citys public spaces more orderly. Recent scholarship on Mumbais efforts to become a “global” city has pointed to the removal of poor populations as an instance of neoliberal governmentality as espoused by the Indian state following the “liberalization” of the economy in the early 1990s. However, in this case, it is these civil society organizations, not the state—whose functionaries in fact benefit from a certain element of unruliness on the streets—who are the agents of increased control over populations and of the rationalization of urban space. This article, based on fieldwork–based research, argues that the way in which citizens’ groups exclude poor populations from the city is more complex than a straightforward deployment of neoliberalism, and is imbricated with transnational political economic arrangements in uneven and often inconsistent ways. in particular, this article explores how civic activists in these organizations envision their role in the city, and how their activism attempts to reconfigure the nature of citizenship. for instance, civic activists consider themselves to be the stewards of the citys streets and sidewalks, and wage their battles against what they consider unruly hawkers, a corrupt state, and a complacent middle–class public. Moreover, civic activists render street hawkers’ political claims illegitimate by speaking on behalf of the abstract “citizen”of Mumbai, thus implying that hawkers’ unions speak only on behalf of the vested interests of a single population. in this way, they mobilize a normative notion of civil society in order to exclude the vast segment of city residents who either sell or buy goods on the street. in doing so, the civic activists transform the discourse and practice of politics in the city, so that, ironically, while on one hand using the rhetoric of citizen participation, they in fact undermine the radically heterogeneous forms of democratic political participation the city offers.

Urban Calamities: A View From Mumbai

One month prior to Hurricane Katrina, the city of Mumbai, India, experienced similar unprecedented and disastrous flooding. In contrast to New Orleans, however, the Mumbai floods were not marked by social disorder and violence but by widespread acts of generosity and altruism. The author argues that, paradoxically, it was the very “Third World-ness” of Mumbai that prevented the city from experiencing the chaos witnessed in New Orleans.

Text, genre, society: Hindi youth films and postcolonial desire

This paper proposes a renewed, interdisciplinary approach to the study of popular Hindi film, which uses the notion of genre to understand the relationship between individual films and social questions in contemporary India at large. We argue that ‘text’, ‘genre’, and ‘society’ are three crucial nodes that allow us to access the many levels at which individual films and groups of texts make meaning. The first half of the paper outlines three reading strategies, which we feel are crucial to understanding popular film as a genre. The second half proceeds to demonstrate the use of these strategies by enacting a dialectic and intertextual reading of three popular youth films of the early 2000s: Dil Chahta Hai, Kyon?, and Yuva, for what they reveal about change and postcolonial desire in contemporary urban India.

The Mall and the Street: Practices of Public Consumption in Mumbai

Practices of consumption are at the center of diverse debates surrounding the changing landscape of post-industrial Mumbai, India. For many, the city’s glittering new supermarkets and shopping malls and the consumption possibilities offered within them herald Mumbai’s membership into an elite group of ‘world class cities.’ Malls have also produced a euphoria among business and political elites, as well as some journalists, who see them as signaling a city-wide revolution in consumption practices in which localized retail formats — such as street markets and kinara stores (the ubiquitous small, family-run shops) — are gradually replaced by ‘global’ retail environments. With regularity, newspaper articles with titles such as ‘From mills to malls, the sky’s the limit’ and ‘Mall mania’ announce the arrival of a new kind of consumption that will irrevocably alter the city’s social and physical landscape by ‘supplant[ing] the riotous urban Indian street market’ (Johnson and Merchant, 2005). By contrast, others more critical of the mode of urban development of which the shopping malls are a part see malls as representing a capitulation to the forces of global capital, and as symbolic of the government’s skewed development priorities. Yet for these critics as well, the elite forms of consumption found within the mall fundamentally contradicts previous practices of consumption, and thus are seen as radically changing the experience of daily life in Mumbai.

The “Slumdog” Phenomenon: Slumdog Millionaire and Epistemologies of the City

What the hell can a slumdog possibly know? —Police Constable, Slumdog millionaire The swirl of excitement, commentary and controversy surrounding the film Slumdog millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle, 2008) in India and elsewhere calls for a careful analysis of the possibilities and pitfalls of transnational cultural production. alternatively seen as a celebration of urban Indias global coming-of-age, an affront to cultural sensibilities, a sign of neoliberal hegemony or superficial cinematic diversion, Slumdog has become one of the most controversial films to sweep the academy awards, winning eight out of its ten nominations. The film has spawned hundreds of news articles, reviews and blog entries, along with vigorous academic debate — of which this current volume is just one example. Out of this discourse, a majority of the voices have been somewhat cynical about the films success. Many critiques come from a well-founded mistrust of the politics of popular culture and an awareness of the largely racist and imperialist history of cross-cultural representations of India and the east in Western film, media and literature. These critiques rely on a generalized skepticism of the political potential of melodramatic film. however, what most critics have overlooked is how Boyles film offers a possibility for rethinking the relationship between popular cinema and the contemporary Indian urban experience precisely through its fantasy plot.