POLITICAL ECONOMY, SOCIETY, AND [PUBLIC] SPACE

Diagram showing total area of malls in each zone in the Mumbai Metropolitan Area.
information derived from Analytical Study of Organized Retail Outlets in Mumbai Metro Division

When it comes to public space and the political, there is no space more contested than the bazaar or the marketplace. It opens up a possibility of social life through negotiations and speech and carries imminent potentials of violence and consequently the synthesis of conflicts. Postmodernism brought with it a new model of a marketplace and public space and that is the shopping mall; a pristine civic infrastructure that caters for a certain class in India and is in stark contrast with the former markets charged with gender, political, and religious sensitivities. These power struggles that reflect society’s realities are diluted, superficially pacified, and placed under the control of the global economy of consumerism of luxury goods. A global colonization that has replaced the former Western colonies, making them seem bleakly trivial. In Making the Crowd Beautiful, Gerald Stanley Lee writes “making beautiful crowds and making beautiful buildings became bound up in the same process”. The crowd here seems to connote a modern force, a force that should be aesthetically homogenized into abstract patterns and controlled. He elaborates on this point stating “All the same time this human engineering organized the behavior of the crowd, preventing the apparent breakdown of social order; it also represented the crowd as expanded and animated by modern progress”.

Returning to India, in Habitations of Modernity, Dipesh Chakrabarty discusses the bazaars and marketplaces in India according to Western perceptions. He observes the words used to describe these public spaces “a place of heat and dust”, “crowds, dirt, and disease”, “blind to the unwholesome aspects of their public spaces”.  This was the language used by both the imperialist officials and the modernist nationalists, and the crowd here no longer connotes a modernist phenomenon but a threat to the public health and hygiene. Chakrabarty explains “while this way of seeing is no longer exclusively European, its main bearers in nineteenth century India were, no doubt, the Europeans themselves, whose modernist categories “private” and “public” were constantly challenged by the ways in which Indians used open space” (Chakrbarty p.66). Nationalists including Gandhi and Chaudhuri deplored “the absence of a citizen culture”. He then explains how “unlike the modern marketplace, the bazaar (the outside) is geared to the production of social life” where “the physical organization of shops in the bazaar encourages, as Anthony King has observed, “visual” and “verbal” inquiry and helps convert the former into the latter” (Chakrabarty p.73).

Today, the Dharavi slums in Mumbai can be seen as remnants of the bazaars described. In a New York Times article titled In One Slum, Misery, Politics, and Hope, Jim Yardley describes the daily happenings “inside, carpenters are assembling furniture on the ground floor. One floor up, men are busily cutting and stitching blue jeans. Upstairs from them, workers are crouched over sewing machines, making blouses. And at the top, still more workers are fashioning men’s suits and wedding apparel. One crumbling shanty. Four businesses.” This slum has been described as the parallel economy with” an annual economic output of $600 million to more than $1 billion” (Yardley). But Dharavi not only acts as a bazaar and a vibrant space of production but also a form of ‘school’ where people learn crafts, business, and develop survival skills. In the same article Yardley reports “Mohammad Mustaqueem, 57, arrived as a 13-year-old boy. He slept outside, in one of the narrow alleyways, and remembers being showered with garbage as people tossed it out in the morning. Today, Mr. Mustaqueem has 300 employees in 12 different garment workshops in Dharavi, with an annual turnover of about $2.5 million a year. He owns property in Dharavi worth $20 million.” Despite the thriving success of these informal markets, malls too are highly popular and frequented by locals.

According to a recent study titled Analytical Study of Organized Retail Outlets in Mumbai Metro Division, “[Mumbai] has a total organized retail stock of 8.72 million sq.ft. and will witness 11.26 million sq.ft. of new retail development over the next three years.” Furthermore, “The city is home to some of the most prominent and successful malls in the country and the retail rentals are amongst the most expensive in the world.” The study then looks at different parts of Mumbai, linking the location and area of the mall and its success to the social status of its immediate inhabitants; the Western suburbs having the highest area of organized retail.

However these malls, interrupt the emergence of the ‘Biopolitical City’ described by Hardt and Negri in the Commonwealth as the ‘space of the economic production and the space of the city [that] tends to overlap’(Hardt & Negri p.251). Appadurai so eloquently describes this phenomenon, in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, calling it ‘production fetishism’ where the ‘illusion [is] created by contemporary transnational production loci that masks trans-local capital […] faraway workers […] in the idiom and spectacle of local […] this generates alienation twice intensified for its social sense is now compounded by a complicated spatial dynamic that is increasingly global, thus, ‘the consumer [is] transformed through commodity flows into a sign or a chooser as opposed to an actor’(Appadurai, p.42)