The New Medium LIVE: CCTV Landscape from Lower Parel
Director: CAMP; Cinematographer: Ashok Sukumaran, Shaina Anand
Duration: 01:12:06; Aspect Ratio: 1.778:1; Hue: 256.427; Saturation: 0.080; Lightness: 0.268; Volume: 0.122; Cuts per Minute: 0.388; Words per Minute: 102.880
Summary: The word kamra and camera have the same root. A camera is just a room with a hole in it. Small people inside this room can see an image of the great outdoors, without themselves being seen. This experience, of watching without being watched, is at the very heart of cinema.
These days, it is more difficult to achieve, since there are reportedly more cameras than people in the world. Yet, we can stage such an experience, from inside a dark cinema hall in the heart of the city.
In around 1880, a series of hot-air balloon ascents took place in Parel. For the first time, Bombay could be seen from above, by a creature that was not a bird. Through the long 20th century, the chimneys of the Bombay mills tried to expel the fumes of wood and coal, labour and land-based struggles, into the faraway atmosphere. Today, we find ourselves floating above the chimneys in the overloaded vertical matrix that is Parel, surrounded by remnants and restaurants, swimming pools and waterlogged streets, memories and birds, songs and construction sites, dreams and fears.
The true destiny of CCTV is to make us secretly intimate with each other, and our surroundings.
SA: I am Shaina Anand and I'm the curator for The New Medium, this is season 2, it began last year and the overarching sort of idea behind The New Medium is a fairly simple one and it just takes you back a little bit, art historically speaking. Cinema is only about 125 years old, and for a minute if you zoom out and compare it to the other arts (like) painting, sculpture, dance, music, poetry and architecture which go back millennium, you realise then that if cinema is only 125 odd years old it is still an inherently new medium and its language and its vocabulary is far from exhausted. And that's somehow what the package is trying to do - its not looking at a very narrow canon called experimental cinema or auteur-driven avant-garde or the newer canons of says artist films, but its looking at the medium in language of cinema through its... like I said very short lifespan to bring to you moments that have been formally invented right. Where the form itself is being re-thought.
Phoenix Mills, Lower Parel
SA: Last year we did a sort of chronological
haazari through 12 films that exemplified what was new in form chronologically down to works by contemporary artists. This year we've crafted in a thematic into The New Medium and it is a genre I have somehow coined which is called 'footage films'. And this is important because otherwise we... when we look at films that are not necessarily lens-based, where the director didn't go and place the camera and take a shot, but has used existing material we say
Haan yeh toh found footage wala film hai - and that's somewhat of a misleading term, because its not like
main raste pe ja raha tha aur ek strip of film mila, and then
ya pardada ka trunk khula and jo pani se bhar gaya tha but uss mein kuch 8mm footage mila - that also happens. But the films you'll see in this package use existing images, archival images, existing footage from contemporary times in really inventive ways.
SA: And the important thing is the filmmaker didn't just find this footage, he or she went through considerable rigour, method, madness, commitment, to first go in search of that footage and then importantly what they did from it and how then crafted it anew. And that's the spine that run through 14 films. We're somewhere at the middle of it I encourage you to catch the... its been going on chronologically so we're somewhere in the 80's and 90's now - to catch the rest of the package. Along with the 14 films we brought to you 3 lives events, and CCTV landscape from lower Parel was actually the opening event and that happened at the Imax screen 7 next door, and we bring it you as a re-run today. Its live, its not a re-screening. So just remember that.
SA: Its somehow central to the idea of footage films, this event today - its not a film, its a cinematic performance, but is brought to you live via a single CCTV camera that's placed on the roof of the very cinema you're inside. Now, in a pre-cinematic moment you used to have something called the camera obscura. And camera means room. And what does
Kamara mean? Room. So the word camera,
kamara and various other extrapolations of it come from the Latin word that means room. And before this
chota dabba was invented the camera was a room-sized box, a space much like a cinema that you entered, but actually to see an image of the outside. And that's what camera obscuras were, there hole in that room and a lens was focussed bringing to you the image of the sea-side or the sunset or some lovers in the park somewhere that you could see from inside that room.
SA: 200 years later we're here and of course its not a camera obscura, its a cinema, and the camera up there is just a generic CCTV camera we bought on Lamington road. And there are more... the Mumbai police has 5000 such cameras, and a lot of private properties. When you go back and start looking for these dome cameras that keep turning around - they're called pan-till-zooms. So they can do a 360 pan, or tilt-up, tilt-down.
SA: And what I'm trying to say is - today there are more cameras than there are people. So, this really already complicates the idea of footage, right, and compels us as contemporary artists to somehow interrogate this landscape, understand these new mediums, they are often now quite intrusive surveillance mediums as well, but to kind of grapple with them find new critiques and aesthetics and try to produce something new.
SA: So here we are. CCTV Landscape at Lower Parel, brought to you live via single camera on top of this roof. Of course we're here in Lower Parel and it was - it is - we are in the centre of Bombay. And now we are going to take you on a spatial and temporal journey, but from one position across many years and many places. Enjoy.
SA: I'd like to introduce Simpreet Singh, Ashok Sukumaran who are my fellow colleagues at CAMP, who will take you on this journey along with me thank you.
AS: Thank you for coming.
camer obscura
Let's begin our tour inside a cinema hall in Bombay that was once a cotton mill.
讓我們從孟買一間前身為磨坊的電影院展開這段介紹
The word kamra and camera have the same root. A camera is just a room with a hole in it. Small people inside this room can see an image of the great outdoors, without themselves being seen. This experience, of watching without being watched, is at the very heart of cinema.
These days, it is more difficult to achieve, since there are reportedly more cameras than people in the world. Yet, we can stage such an experience, from inside a dark cinema hall in the heart of the city.
AS: Can you hear us?
妳聽得到嗎？
introduction
tilt down
Welcome to the dark room,
歡迎光臨這間暗室
where it is said, you must leave the outside behind.
在這裡，你必須將外在拋下。
There is a difference between what you see and what you know.
你看到的和你知道的是兩件完全不同的事。
But these 2 things,
what you see and what you know can also dance with each other,
但是這兩件事可以攜手並行，
encourage each other, replace each other, update each other
藉以刺激、取代、更新另外一面，
and invite into the room their hidden sisters, what you cannot see,
並且邀請他們的手足：那些你看不到的，你不知道的，
what you don't know, or what you have forgotten.
或是你已經遺忘的，進入這個房間。
Our story begins in the sky behind the ITC Grand Central.
我們的故事始於ITC格蘭德中心飯店後方的天空
AS: The site of an old tobacco factory of ITC, and the cluster of hospitals that strangely enough surround it in what is called Parel - KEM, Wadia, Tata Memorial, Maru, The Petit Animal Hospital, now Global Hospital. We could say that the spiritual centre of this early techno capitalist scientific cluster was the Haffkine Institute. Which you cannot see but lies behind this tall building over there... and its named after - its a laboratory named after Waldemar Haffkine who discovered the plague vaccine. And it is in his honour that the institute was named after the great Bombay plague of 1896.
AS: But before the plague this thing that you cannot see was a very important site, it was the British Governor's Bungalow and such the seat of the British power in Bombay and in the region. And before that it was a Jesuit church, and before that even they say a Baijnath temple.
AS: So, it was from the British seat of power that one day 1877, rose a strange object, a round silk balloon, filled with the same gas that lit up Bombay streets at the time - Coal gas. And as it slowly rose from the grounds of the Governor's Bungalow in Parel hundreds of people below it tried to imagine the view of the balloonier who for the first time - literally for the first time in history - could see Bombay from the sky.
AS: In 1885 the Governor's residence moved to Malabar hill, where it is now, and for a short 10 years between that and the plague, this site - the Governor's Bungalow - became a sort of playground, where aerial experiments including many many balloons rose into the skies above Parel. Thousands of people came to see these events on the tram, on the train, by foot, to see round balloons made of silk and cotton filled with coal gas go up and then the parachutes of pilots coming down. And the papers, the daily papers carried accounts of these ballooniers, often whites men, some women, who described Bombay from the air with a sort of pride and also a sence of ownership.
AS: In 1891 a balloon carrying a lieutenant Mansfield developed a leak at 1000 feet, and he fell with the balloon.
AS: Let's call this the descent into Lower Parel...
AS: Parachute didn't open, the fall continued.
AS: He remembered his gods.
AS: Land came closer.
AS: And still closer...
AS: ...and yes, the inevitable... happened. He died. But if he had fallen from the sky... 150 years before this or for that matter any time before 1784, he might have been saved because he might have fallen into water.
AS: And as you can see from this very beautiful map of Bombay we found on a rooftop... the heart of Bombay in which we sit now, in the centre of the image, was sea water.
AS: The concrete block is what used to be called Bombay island. The pink cap of the 50 rupee water that you can buy downstairs is Hali Ali.
AS: That plastic box with the X on it is Worli. And the inverted router is Parel Island.
AS: So, before 1784, this was a part of the sea - the blue was literally salt water. And everything in the 10 kilometers from north to south between Dharavi and Girgaon and east to west about 4 kilometers between Worli and Paidhonie... Paidhonie where you wash your feet - can wash your feet - was water.
AS: And this delicate steel curve is what you drive today when you go from Worli to Haji Ali by road - that curve.
AS: And in 1784 it was completed as the first time this large blue area was separated from the Arabian sea completely. It was called the Hornby Vellard dam, and it started in 1782. And in 1784 finally achieved the sealing off of land of an area that would be filled with soil and rocks which had been cut from the rest of Bombay's hills. And it took 50 years till 1840 to make this usable land.
AS: In the mean time this stretch was used to do what Bombay needed most which was to grow food. Because even though it was a very rich city and it was doing very well at trade, it was not doing very well in terms of hunger... of its local residents. And what was grown there was a form of rice that grows in salt water called batty.
AS: Beyond this vellard lay the great Arabian Sea, which a few days ago, on a more sunny day than today... looks like this.
SA: Our city on the western Indian Ocean had a thriving maritime trade between Africa and Persia. Ships sailed and people moved up to Malabar and Konkan through Bombay and Kutch, staying close to land as they cross Karachi, Gwadar, the Persian Gulf, Hadramaut, Salalah and Zanzibar. For its diasporic
musafirs the kindred sea was their country, one on whose borders lay the shrines of traveling Sufi saints. The sailors used to use these distinct shrines as they guide maps, an indication that they had arrived on a new shore. Amongst them and perhaps the only one tellingly not on land but rising out of the sea through time and tide was the Dargah of Hali Ali Shah Bukhari, who was originally a trader from Uzbekistan. He wanted to be buried in the sea because as the legend goes he had dug into the earth once to produce oil and he did not want to hurt the earth by digging further. So, he didn't want his grave to be dug into the earth.
SA: The Dargah was completed in 1431. The British eventually colonised these very sea routes which you could somewhat say was in Islamic Indian ocean. They captured the sea routes by labeling these traders pirates. When the vellard was built in 1784, it stared close to Hali Ali and ended on a lush hill. This one was a hill then, the British called it Lovegrove and fashioned it as a sort of honeymoon destination. The next 50 years saw the filling of the land between the western and easter water fronts. And wealthy merchants thought the hill would be a good place to move to as Mazgaon on the eastern sea front was getting over-crowed. Cotton and opium trade was booming. And capitalists were rising in power and numbers. The Bhagdadi Jews, the Parsis, the Gujarati merchants along with the East India company were reshaping Bombay.
SS: By the beginning of the 19th century two commodities gained prime significance in the trade circuit of England and Asia - raw cotton and opium. Opium in particular was being exported from Daman (India) earlier and later from Bombay to China, Canton. The opium trade was part of the triangular trade that happened between India, China and England, under which opium and raw cotton was exported from India to China, and from from there tea to England. From England came finished product to India including the machinery for the mills. In regard to the India-China trade, the values of opium were much higher then those of raw cotton.
SS: In March 1887 (22nd March) representatives of David Sassoon, Tatas and Wadias identifying themselves as opium traders wrote a petition to the Legislative Council of Hong Kong requesting them to withhold a law that was aimed at preventing import of opium into China, saying that this would have serious effects on the trade of opium. Although all these traders and the industrial houses, they claim in their legacy the cotton trade and the mill industries, but none of them own up to the opium trade.
SS: The surpluses from the opium trade were later on pumped into setting up the Mills and many of the major opium traders either owned the MIlls or were Directors in Mills. For example, Premchand Roychand owned Albert mill and Director of Phoenix mill. This tall building, Avigna One, was the first spinning mill in Parel set up in the year 1867 by the name Albert mill. In 1883 it was taken over by Premchand Roychand and named as Parel Mills, and later as New Islam Mills.
SS: Down from here... is the Sun Mill compound that, you see as the yellow walls.
SS: The Sun Mill compound is across the Tulsi Pipe road from here, and Jamsetjee Wadia who was one of the signatory of the letter that was sent to the legislative council of Hong Kong, he was one of the director of Sun Mills and he also owned the Bombay Dyeing and Century Mills.
SS: Also another director of Sun Mills was Fazalbhoy Karimbhoy, another opium merchant who owned Karimbhoy, Crescent, Pearl mills.
SS: And another director was the David Sassoons who owned the Sassoon mills, the United mills that is the present day Indu mills. And also what we can see... is the Apollo mills. As... as the glass building, the Lodha Excelus. He was also the director at the Phoenix mill, the Karimbhoy mill, Fazalbhoy mill, the Premier mill, the Pearl and the Crescent mills.
SS: Another signatory to that 1887 letter, was Jamsetjee Jijihoy. He was director of the Phoenix mill, the Century mill, the Karimbhoy, the Fazalbhoy, the Premier, the Pearl, the Crescent, the New City of Bombay mill and the New Great Eastern Mills. In a nutshell this is one of the story of the accumulation of capital in the city. The story of capital formation leads us to the story of land reclamation in the city.
SS: Mazgaon dock was built and owned by the Elphistone Land Company that reclaimed the land on which the Mazgaon dock stands today. The Elphistone Land Company was formed in the year 1858 for the reclamation of the foreshore at the eastern coast of the city. And later on the Company was bought by Premchand Roychand and others. In the year 1862 the company entered into an agreement with the Government to provide 100 acres of land for the terminus of Great Indian Peninsula Railway, and receiving in return the right to reclaim from the sea an area of 250 acres for the use of the port.
SS: By the year 1871 the port, the dock was established. And for this, the Company had imported gangs of Chinese labourers for the construction of the dock. And a regular service of train was established from the Mazgaon dock to the Kurla for the purpose of transporting the parts of the Kurla hill that was broken down and gave named to Kurla stone.
SS: Shortly after the breakout of the American Civil War, the local cotton industry ushered and led era of prosperity to the City in general as well as to the company. This was also the period of Share Mania when the Merchants who had benefited earlier from the opium trade and the cotton trade were now investing in land reclamation companies also.
SS: During American Civil War traders was involved in speculative share business with the hope that the cotton trade with England will be forever, which was not the case. As with the end of the Civil War the cotton trade was reduced, thus affecting the business of share market and land reclamation companies. Later on, the company was taken over by the government and turned into what is the present Bombay Port Trust.
SS: From here we come to the 3rd of the triad of land and labour and capital - ie, labour. Starting in 1856, the first mill employed around 500 workers and by 1960s the number of workers rose to around 2 lakhs. In beginning the workers came from Konkan region of Maharashtra and were joined in by other workers from Satara, Kolhapur and even Uttar Pradesh. Muslim workforce from Hyderabad and Konakan also constituted around 5% of the workforce. Which also included in large numbers women and children.
SS: The early mills had no fixed hours of work. Work hours varied from 13 to 14 per day in summer, and from 10 to 12 per day in winter. Regulation of hours started with the Factories Act of 1881 which limited the hours of children to 7 and the hours of women to 11 per day. But the working hours of adult males remained unregulated even then.
SS: Here, we have a statement of Bhivaji Bhawaji, a 40 year old maratha job worker in the Sun Mill, givem to the... the testimony was given to the India Factory Labour Commission in the year 1907.
SA: This is Sun Mill compound today. Bhivaji Bhawaji: "I have been working in the Bombay mills for 25 years, and am now a jobber. The hundred mill-hands assembled here have put me forward as their spokesman. At present the Sun Mill works only from 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. during the winter, but in 1905 it used to work from 5-30 A.M to 8 P. M. We got a little more pay then, that is true, and so we worked, but none of us now want to go back to night work, and all we want is for the Government to intervene to prevent the possibility of further long hours. Some of us wish a 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. 12-hour day fixed absolutely and all the year round, because if there is any variation from day to day the manager will take advantage of it and gradually increase our hours. Others of us wish for day light working only, this is about 11 hours in winter and 13 in summer, varying with the length of daylight. This was the practice before electric light was introduced, and some of us wish to revert to it so as to escape work by electric light altogether. We were quite contented before the long hours were introduced. The long hours exhausted us, and many fell Ill, and others complained that the electric light hurt their eyes. We could bear it only because we could take on an average three days "off" in a month. Very few of the Bombay mill operatives are permanently settled down in Bombay: almost all of us have our homes in the Ratnagiri district of Konkan, and we go there twice every year or two for a short visit. When a man is too old to work he does not return to Bombay, but passes his old age at home, being helped by remittances sent from Bombay by working members of his family.
SS: This is how the triad of land, labour and capital was formed by the begging of 20th century. Here we can see the Bawla masjid on the Currey road as the mill district also had considerable Muslims residents. The Bawla masjid or the masjid Saboo Siddique is the second largest mosque of the city. Parel had a sizable population of Muslims before the partition and they worked in mills as well as at docks. Many of the chawls had Muslims names like Haji Qasim chawl, Haji Habbib chawl and many like these. On the right side of the masjid we get a gimpse of the Bombay Development Department chawls that were founded in the year 1920 to undertake major housing construction projects known as a the Industrial Houses Scheme.
SS: The BDD department was to be funded from the proceeds of a development loan that was mounted under the catchword of 'by Bombay for Bombay' and from a 1 rupee town duty that was levied on each bail of cotton which entered the city. Although BDD aimed to build 50,000 1-room tenements, but they could construct only 16,000 tenements including some in Parel, at Worli, Seweri and Naigaon. The occupants of these chawls at that time ranged from mill workers, to general industrial workers and even police constables. The rent of the rooms ranged from Rs 5 to Rs 10. And these chawl neighborhoods have seen several socio-crtitical movements ranging from the working class movements to the Dalit-Panther movement. An earlier avatar of BDD was BIT which was formed after the outbreak of plague, and the urban planner Patrick Geddes talks about BIT that Bombay is not housing its workers but it is warehousing them.
SA: Now there were other aspects - regional aspects to do with feeding a hungry industrial city, and the growth of its capitalism. In February 1911, Dorab Tata's company inaugurated its first dam, in Lonavala. It ran a power line from Khopoli to Sewree, about 60 km in length. Most of the mills at that point were actually individual power driven stations, generating their own steam and later also their own electricity.
AS: The Tata dam was a hydroelectric power station generating 40,000 horsepower, which was supposed to power 25 of the then 90-odd mills active in the early 1900s in the city of Bombay. Now Tata's power project was supported by a guarantee from David Sassoon who was mentioned briefly earlier - big mill owner, self proclaimed opium trader, that the Bombay's mills would actually consume the electricity produced by the Tata power project. That Bombay's skyline still has chimneys is proof that at large, this idea of a centralised electric supply was not successful and in general mills preferred to make their own power.
AS: The Bombay Gas Company, which had filled the balloons of Parel with coal gas, was operational since much earlier - since 1866. It used coal to generate a burnable mix of hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane called "town gas", which was used for street lighting and in some cases factory illumination. Coal came from as far away as England and Australia.
AS: Tulsi Pipe road named after the Tulsi Pipe was a pipeline which was laid in 1879 from the Tulsi Vihar lakes to supply Bombay with drinking water, was another such regional infrastructure. That it is now named as Senapati Bapat Marg is quite ironic since Bapat was the first mobiliser of communities against the Tata dam in Lonavla. Which could be described as the first anti-dam movement in India.
AS: Since 2015, the 400 km network of the Bombay Gas company has been used extensively for installing optical fibre networks.
AS: And finally, since every city of production also has its effluents, we'll take you one more time... to Lovegrove.
SA: From east to west.
AS: Which is just under... here
AS: Lovegrove was a sewage management facility, a factory to burn shit, a factory where the sewage of the entire city was boiled before it was being release into the ocean. Commissioned in 1880, it still pump sewage and now it is said that its network is 1500 km long - the sewage network that it pumps. So, beneath the visible city there was electricity, there was gas, there was sewage - some of it came from the regional hinterland and some of it was expelled into the regional hinterland, at the moment in the late 18 century and early 1900s - in the late 19th century and the early 1900s - that we describe as the beginning of the mill - of the mill lands.
SS: The struggle of labour spans the history of capital in the city and it aimed of a better life and just not better work conditions. Starting with N.M. Lokhande, who formed the first labour organisation Bombay Mill Hands Association and the first labour journal Deenbandhu was member of the Satyashodak movement started by Jyotiba Phule. He was a critic of Bal Gangadhar Tilak who had galvanised the mill workers during his famous sedition trial of 1908 and had mobilised them around the festival of Ganesh Utsava. Because Lokhande believed that Tilak's approach of using religion reproduced caste hierarchies.
SS: What we can see as the World - the Lodha's World One tower was the Shrinivas and the Mumbai Mills which are now being used for the Lodha's Trump Towers and The Park. What we cannot see behind them is the Elphistone mills which was visited by Gandhi in the year 1921 during the Non-cooperation movement, and a huge bonfire of foreign clothes was lit.
SS: Down, where we stand now, is the compound of Phoenix Mill, the place where in the year 1937 on a rainy deep S.A. Dange was leading a strike of the women mills workers and invited Subhas Chandra Bose for addressing the mill workers. Since, it was raining very heavily all the workers had umbrellas on their heads, and Subhas Chandra Bose could not see any of their faces. On which Dange asked the workers to remove their umbrellas and stand in rainy water and listen to what Subhas Chandra Bose had to say. After the speech of Subhas Chandra Bose, on October 2nd the same year 90,000 workers from Mumbai declared a one-day strike against the unilateral declaration of war against the Axis powers, on by Britain and opposed India's participation in cold war second.
SS: Workers of mills like Mafatlal which presently is the Peninsula Land Tower, and mills like Shriram they were members of the first recognised labour union - the Bombay Textile Labour Union that was formed under the Trade Union Act 1926 by N.M Joshi. Later on, the struggle of mill workers also became part of the larger class struggle under the communists led by Ahaliya Rangnekar, GL and Tara Reddy, Kusum Randive and Narayan Surve. The textile mill workers’ earliest strikes in 1890's were focused on issues of payments and working conditions, but in the later year during the general strikes of 1919, 1920, 1924-25, and 1928 it had resonances of the freedom struggle. Many of the mill workers were also part of the Independent Labour Party formed by Ambedkar in 1936. He launched his social campaign for the untouchables at a meeting at Parel’s Damodar Hall which we can't see now in the year 1924 whereby he formed the Bahishkrit Hitkarini Sabha to promote education and represent the causes of scheduled castes.
SS: This is the Marathon complex. Earlier it was Piramal mills, in which one of our friends Pravin Lyunkar of Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti (GKSS) worked as a Badli kamgar, or a temporary worker. The mill was sold in the year 2000 by the Piramals to the Marathon Group who have constructed an IT park and a residential tower - the tower you can see as red and white building.
SS: The Mill was spread over 28,000 sq.mts of land out of which only 1424 sq.mts were left for housing 160 mill workers. This building is for housing 160 mill workers, and this is how the initial one-third one-third formula that was worked out which was introduced in 1991 and later on amended in the year 2001. The initial formula said that all the mill lands were to be divided in three equal proportions - one part for BMC, second part for the mill owners and third for MHADA for public housing. But a 2001 year amendment reduced it to one-third of only the vacant plot, which meant that, that the whole of the mill land was not to be divided into three equals parts, but the division was only of the vacant land. Pravin Lyunkar who was a worker there and also a member of the union has still not got a flat and he's awaiting lottery.
SA: It was 1993, I was 18, on my first job ever, at Trikaya Grey Adversting at Kalaghoda. It was here that we first heard the word Upper Worli. It began as an ad-world in-joke, a kind of brand marketing coined by Alyque Padamsee. Trikaya Grey and Lintas were moving to Lower Parel, and this stretch of tulsi pipe road, was being touted as Bombay's Madison Avenue.
SA: These guys are workers, they are not part of an ad or a hoarding.
SA: So, in the early 90's while the mill was still operational Trikaya and Lintas moved to Phoenix House, and a host of other ad agencies as envisaged, followed. My stint in advertising lasted only 6 months, I studied filmmaking, and grew up.
SA: A few years later, we heard that a 20-lane bowling alley occupying 30,000 sq.feet of a mill floor was opening up at Phoenix mills. The mills it seemed to people on the outside were fully shut, I remember my good friend and mentor Meena Menon of the Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti (GKSS) staring with rage at the cold chimney, that was now being painted and designed as a bowling pin, its mouth capped shut with a ball, as workers were being offered a pittance in VRS schemes on a day's notice.
SA: There is a chimney. The Ruias, the owner of the Phoenix as we know get their name from
rui (cotton), white gold as it was called at the turn of the century. Phoenix was one of the first mills whose land was incrementally re-used and privatised and capitalised for commercial use.
SA: Now, how did this happen? In 1977, there was a huge fire that gutted four floors of the blower department, its cause till now unknown. Phoenix mills stayed close for three years. And then of course was the great strike of 1982. The owners went and appealed to the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction - the BIFR, to modernise the sick mills by allowing a partial sale of land. That's when Phoenix Tower A and B - residential towers open up the on the site that was once the gutted blower department. The entire FSI of the blower department is used for this tower. Now, once the residential towers were up, the builder of the tower in a seemingly scripted plan and in collusion with the Phoneix mill owners complains that the re-purposed residential space is too close to the mills, and the mills' spinning department is very noisy and a buffer zone needs to be created. So The spinning department is demolished. You see the buffer zone there - still not been reclaimed as retail space - perhaps is waiting for yet another change of use so that it can be capitalised as commercial retail space.
SA: Over the years the Ruias kept approaching the BIFR asking for more piecemeal sale of land in order to modernise the sick mill, and more and more concessions are granted, but none of the promises are kept. Then in 1998, the BMC approves of a recreational facility for the workers and staff. And the owners mentioned in their appeal to the BMC that a protest of workers that happened in January of 1998 was because the workers were disgruntled and needed some recreational space. And that my friends was how the bowling company opened.
SA: From then on the sort of incremental transformation of the Phoenix mills is set into motion. Many of us will remember the dicotheque Fire and Ice, run by diamond merchant, film producer and land speculator Bharat Shah's son, while his father was in jail for underworld links, or Soul Kadi - the first restaurant where bombil fry and konkanast cuisine could be 'experienced'. And where the canteen for mill workers once stood, an automobile sales showroom SAI SALES AND SERVICE was leased out with help from Sharad Pawar and Suresh Kalmadi.
SA: A change in one vowel, and Phoenix mills became Phoenix malls.
SA: When the mill turned 100 in 2005, Phoenix Mall was rechristened High Street Phoenix - Alyque it seems had not been that far off. When it was rechristened High Street Phoenix it began to claim a series of firsts. A 60,000 sq ft lifestyle club house with a spa and fitness centre. Its roots of change in use still lied in the recreational plan for workers. A 45,000 sq ft auto mall, a seven-screen multiplex with 2000-plus seating area, you are here. A 4 lakh sq ft luxury mall, called Palladium, and a one million sq ft car park area equipped for 3000 workers (vehicles) and on top of that a five-star luxury hotel with a first-of-its-kind sky lobby in India.
SA: You are here today, in the 6th of the 7-screen Multiplex. And out there, what is there is there. Here is the hotel with its sky lobby and it was supposed to be the tallest in Bombay when it opened. In opened as Shangrila and of course now is the St Regis. As buildings are built, they also disappear we seeing that right as we are watching this. So, now we just make the regis disappear and see what could be on the outside.
SA: Can you recognise that? Its an Anthill on top of the Altamount hill.
SA: Some of you might here gone here for the MAMI opening party.
SA: And here is a crane, also through the view from St. Regis. More construction, more vacant land being re-used and re-appropriated.
SA: He's also operating a joystick and a throttle and turning the crane, much like what Ashok is doing here.
SA: That of course is the Mahalaxmi racecourse.
SA: When zamindari system was being abolished in the early 50s a group of workers whose quarters and hutments had been demolished in Mahim causeway actually occupied Samudra Mahal and they said '
Hum nahin hatengein, give us housing'. And when they were forcibly evicted from there they actually occupied the racecourse as well. Here you see people walking... horses, of course.
SA: That's the metro construction going on down there... and that's Tardeo... and Altamount road.... Carmichael Road as well, you see a bit of it.
SA: The NSCI, now called Sardar Vallabhai Stadium, I think.
SA: A building whose future use we still don't know.
SA: And our beloved Piya Haji Ali.
SA: Can you see on the left - there is a guy standing there... he's Sardar Vallabhai Patel. Can you see him? On the left... ya, there he is. He's watching the devotees of Haji Ali wondering if Shivaji's statue on the Arabian sea with will be taller than his own statue 182 meter statue that will rise out of the Sardar Sarovar dam. Its being called the Statue of Unity.
SA: There he is Vallabhai Patel.
SA: Mumbai is upgrading, say all the barricades that have blocked up E-Moses road for metro constructions. Some of you arrived here late because of this construction work. There is the metro construction.
SA: And there are the gas
walas delivering cylinders, still pushing their
hathgadi - no upgrade there.
SA: Mumbai is upgrading - can you read? Those are the barricades.
SA: Workers at the end of their work. And workers' housing where they eat, cook their food and feed their families as they construct your upgraded Urban Transport System.
SA: Somethings stand the test of time. The Haji Ali dargah is nearly 600 years old, and has withstood many a storm and cyclone, and has also kept up with the times - women can now enter the sanctum sanctorum - the actual dargah of Haji Ali Shah Bukhari.
SA: And there the fishermen going back to the Worli Fort and jetty. Somethings don't change.
SA: Hazy Bombay skies. And the Nehru Centre - somewhat supposed to be a symbol of our rational thought, critical and scientific inquiry. I wonder how long those values will stay with us. And as you come down from the Nehru Centre... you see the immersive dome theatre.
SA: May be that's what they're watching.
AS: Interval!! Not really. Don't go.
SS: This is Marriama Nagar. And this is the Lady Ratan Towers, constructed by Lokhandwala and named after his sister Lady Ratan.
SS: Below the Lady Ratan towers are the rehabilitation blocks of Bhudargarh Society, which are meant for the original people who stayed on the land on which the Lady Ratan towers have been built. This also includes the Gandhi Nagar Rehwasi Sangh, the Shiv Sandesh, the Shivneri and the Takshila Cooperative housing Societies. And these all are the parts of the Slum Rehabilitation Schemes. This is the Kamgar Sewa Mandal that has given way to this white Chandelier Tower.
SS: On the right side... is a 22 storeyed rehab block that will house 700 residents of Shiv Sainath and Shiv Ganesh Society. Work is halted as the developer is awaiting agreement of the slum dwellers to increasing the height from 22 to 32 storeys. Starting in 1990s the slums were opened up for redevelopment. Speculative scheme of slum rehabilitation was brought in, in the name of rehabilitating slum dwellers. These are the earlier slums and the new blocks that contain single room flats of 225 sq.ft. And the land that is freed after rehabilitating them in vertical blocks is taken over by the developers and the builders for free, for constructing of high rise buildings that are sold into the market. It is just not that the people are shifted - but also the development rights of the plots can also be shifted, as can be seen in the case of Palais Royale. Which is the right side, the high rise tower. The construction of this tower has been stopped because it is alleged that it has used the undue floor space index, the right to construct more (than) it should have. Rehabilitating slums in such a way creates a new landscape that epitomises inequality - social and spatial.
SS: You can see the Worli sea-link. Below this is the Gomanta society, which houses the slum dwellers of TATA Nagar from Prabhadevi. They have been shifted from Prabhadevi to here by the Omkar developers, in part of a Slum Rehabilitating Scheme. Below the Gomanta society is A to Z Industrial Estate which hoses the EPW office. And just below it is the Poonawala chawl, a private chawl which houses the workers of nearby areas. Below from... coming down to Poonawala chawl we come back to the Marathon complex. This is a garden of the Marathon towers.
AS: So there are many ways to follow and to pay attention to the formation of a different environment, new kinds of work, new kinds of leisure that we are surrounded by. It could be looked at also very intimately, like in this scene which involves nothing but us 3 days ago following a butterfly across the garden of Marathon.
AS: ...At 6:05 pm.
SA: That's Phoenix tower A.
AS: Or you could on a Saturday afternoon find yourself gently following the downward route from the World Trade Towers - the World Towerd - supposed to be more than a hundred storeys high... to find other things that below it.
SA: That's Marathon Nextgen Innova.
SA: And behind the car park of Marathon Nextgen... I guess is workers' housing.
SA: And
pani bharna ka samay.
SA: And on top of Raghuvanshi Mills, new kinds of work - BPO's doing all the graphics and the laborious animation work and CG work for Hollywood...
AS: ...or may be just watching a movie.
SA: Both.
SA: And also old kinds of work... ari work, zari work...
SA: ...little
kawwa goes home to roost into that hole there.
SA: So, yesterday while coming here last night to do a tech check we saw a hoarding on E Moses road that said 'Lodha Venezia 1 is all sold out, now you wait for Lodha Venzeia 2'. But this doesn't look like people living there, these sort of pastel lights - its still pretty much show flats, it doesn't look sold out.
AS: This is Gundecha towers about 6:37 on Friday... Jain only complex. The temple is at the bottom right.
AS: Everyone is vegetarian.
AS: But this is the scene at 3:15... two days before that, which is the scene on the great Butcher Island fire. Right behind Gundecha. Things change... as well. This is a... almost live view... right ahead of us, of construction in front of Ashok Towers. But then something strange happened about 10 minutes ago, which you can watch now.
SA: There's someone signaling to us, and waving out.
SA: That's Ashok Towers, and that was once the Morarjee Gokuldas mill. And the Morarjees of course, were also founders of the Scindia Shipping Company. There! There's a ship.
AS: Meanwhile at 7:18 pm a Table Tennis match is won by one set of people in Lodha Excelus over others.
AS: And so, we go into the night, we could go on forever.
AS: We'll just say hello... to... my parents. Its really them, I'm not joking.
AS: ...and we know these guys.
AS: ...and I won't do this to you, but I can do it to a chair... lucky number.
AS: In the night of Parel there are celebrations for unknown reasons that arise from the streets below what you can see. Another invisibility, that only at rare times becomes visible. They could be far away, like in this case. In front of the very window from which the girl was waving, 10 minutes ago... or they could be closer.
AS: Or we could observe that only one person wearing Power shoes walked across the entire courtyard of Palladium mall between 8:22 and 8:23 on a rainy night on Sunday. For a whole minute nobody else walked across the courtyard.
AS: Data is the new oil, kerosene.
AS: Or we could view scenes that nobody actually can see late in the middle of the night at 3 am... the air conditioning of St Regis lights up the sky, in the same way that the... probably the birds could tell us that the towers of the night shift factories would still do, a hundred years ago.
Many will no doubt assume that having dealt with the floods of the recent past they will also be able to ride out a storm. But the impact of a category four or five cyclone will be very different from anything that Mumbai has experienced in living memory. The winds of a cyclone will spare neither low nor high. If anything, the blast will be felt most keenly by those at higher elevations. Many of Mumbai's tall buildings have large glass large windows. Few if any are reinforced. In a cyclone, these exposed expanses of glass will have to withstand not just hurricane strength winds, but also flying debris. Many of the dwellings in Mumbai's informal settlements have roofs made of metal sheets and corrugated iron. Cyclone force winds will turn these and the thousands of billboards that encross the city into deadly projectiles, hurling them the with great force at the glass-wrapped towers that soar above the city. At this point waves would be pouring into Mumbai from both the sea facing shorelines. It is not inconceivable that the two fronts of the storm surge would meet and merge. In that case, the hills and promontories of south Mumbai would once again become islands, rising out of the wildly agitated expanse of water.
(Source: The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh)
AS: At 1:39 am... other forms of life can also exist.
AS: This on the 12th of October.
AS: ...and disappear.
AS: And finally let's take you into the future where in about 25 minutes from now a group of 3 peoples are seen leaving Palladium mall.
AS: Never to return.
AS: Thank you.
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