Two Tales and A City

In 2015 I was the recipient of the Winston Oh Travel Research Award during my MFA. The award was created to encourage recipients to travel to a city / country / place and create an artwork in response to that place.

My natural choice was Mumbai the city I called home, before moving to Singapore. I wanted to investigate how certain key events from a period of near history had shaped the current state of a city. I was interested in the parallel rise of the underworld and the Hindutva movement, and the growing sectarian divide between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai during 1970’a and 1980’s.

Mumbai is described in documents from 300 BCE, as a group of seven islands which formed a part of the kingdom of Ashoka, the famed Buddhist emperor of India. The ownership of these islands was constantly changing, and they were colonized by a number of different rulers. Bombay, as it came to be known, became an important entrepot during British rule in India because of its sheltered port. The opening up of the Suez Canal in 1869, connected it to the rest of the world and Bombay became one of the major maritime and financial centers of the world. Over time, it also emerged as an art and cultural hub because of its ethnically diverse population, urban loosening of social strictures and off course the emergence of the Indian film industry.

The 1970’s, however, brought a new dimension to this thriving commercial centre. Mass economic and environmental migration from villages birthed large numbers of disenfranchised groups living in slums and surviving on daily wages. Pushed to breaking point, it was natural perhaps that some of the youth was lured into the world of crime. A group of daily wage earners, working at the Mumbai dockyard created an organised network to smuggle contraband electronic goods, gold and silver. It was one of the first instances of organised crime in the city and gave birth to the terrifying persona and term ‘Underworld Don’. The entire city was divided into territories, each controlled by different underworld dons of varying power and means. With the tacit support of politicians Mumbai became a centre of gang wars, extortions and killings.

It not only transformed the landscape of the city into a hotbed of crime it also eroded its social and communal fabric. Dongri, which was a primary locus was a Muslim dominated area and hence Muslims appeared to control Mumbai’s underworld. These tensions created magnified a communal divide in an otherwise harmonious city. Mumbai split into Hindu dominated and Muslim dominated areas; each territory being fiercely protected. Subsequently, it witnessed one the worst communal riots in the country in the 1990’s. In the 1990’s and 2000’s, the smuggling of drugs and arms replaced that of the more benign electronic goods and gold. Money from drugs and arms made the underworld extremely powerful and it transformed itself into an international mafia and terrorist organisation, forging ties with religion-based terrorist organisations in other countries.

The climax of these phenomena resulted in twin incidents that occurred 22 years ago and changed the socio-political landscape of Mumbai forever. Unprecedented communal rioting in December 1992 and January 1993 was followed by a series of bomb blasts in March 1993, killing thousands of people in streets and local trains. Their echoes can still be heard in the city and the hanging of Yakub Memon in June 2015, who was the key accused in 1993 bomb blasts, almost polarized the nation. While he was a martyr for one community, he was a mass murderer for the other.

Noted Indian filmmaker Anurag Kashayp’s film ‘Black Friday’ in 2004, which attempted to trace the intertwined incidents of communal riots and the serial bomb blasts was banned by the Government of India for its alleged sympathy towards the Muslim community and supposed justification for bombs.

This installation consists of the screening of the film ‘Black Friday’ on a tarpaulin sheet (ubiquitous in slums of Mumbai), accompanied by wall texts of names of people who died during blasts, research materials from newspaper archives as well as a reproduction of the letter from the president of India, declining a mercy plea for Yakub Menon. This work is an attempt to trace the history of these incidences through archives and popular culture by exploring drawing, images, writing, material and a movie screening.

Urban centres are complex and dynamic systems and reflect the many phenomena and processes that drive and influence their physical, social, economic, environmental and cultural transition. However, a few of these singularities shape the transition more than others. My key research question for the award was to explore how certain phenomena and historical events shape the historicity and current state of a city more than others and I chose the city of Mumbai for my research.

Year2015