Infinite topographies: forays into plurality, play and resistance in the chawls of Bombay

Abstract

Patwardhan’s films, Occupation: Mill Worker (1996), and Bombay Our City (1985) capture a reorganisation of space. Mills close down, slums are razed to the ground, thousands are evicted, and century-old workers’ housing estates become high-rise apartment buildings for the wealthy. A new spatialisation of the city is set underway that (re)distributes parts and places, expunging the working poor to the fringes of the city from where a congruent order of circulation, on crowded trains and buses, is instituted. A practice of rationalisation: the optimisation of life, its organisation in ways that master the movement of bodies, of illnesses and epidemics, of crime and disorder, and of goods and trade (Aslam 2020, 166; Foucault 2004; Dean 1999). An architectural biopolitics seeking to foster movement (that needs movement), but only in linear and segmented flows.

Yet, this practice is constantly resisted in the “petty malices” (Foucault 1977) of those who transgress and act in disorderly and unruly ways. What energises such political enactment? Working through visual, literary, and archival materials, this paper suggests the space energising these resistances, is the chawl. As a site, or assemblage of spaces, the chawl is constitutively messy. Houses overflow, extending and infiltrating into each other. Corridors become sites of an intertwining that is constitutive of this blur. A space of juxtaposition where several other spaces collapse onto each other (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986, 25-26). It is the storage room, breezy bedroom on a midsummer night, communal meeting room, laundry, party venue, and everything else – all at once. Home/outdoors, family/neighbour, get blurred in this space that is here and still somewhere else, some third space (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986, 27; Dumm 1996, 44; Moten 2017, 152-167).

It shapes those that live in/walk along it, and becomes the “holding environment” for a pluralising reimagination of subjectivity (Honig 2017, 5). The messy spatiality of the corridor engenders a messy/intertwined corporeality where boundaries of subject/object are disordered by way of that very heterotopia. Becoming, in this way, both the enactment and the spring-board for practices that problematise the Orderly body-schema of the city, opening out onto an infinite topography that is the chawl corridor.

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ORCID for Tanay Gandhi: orcid.org/0000-0002-1159-054X

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