Spectral housing and urban cleansing: notes on Millennial Mumbai

Arjun Appadurai

A brief history of decosmopolitanization Cities like Bombay (now Mumbai) are instances of the elusiveness of global flows at the beginning of the new millennium; they are large and are currently shifting from economies of manufacture and industry to economies of trade, tourism and finance. They often contain shadow economies.

Bombay:
A city where crime is an integral part and where fear of the poor is steadily increasing; Prior to the 1970s it retained the ethos of a well-managed, Fordist city After the 1970s, the environment changes: jobs become harder to get, more rural arrivals found themselves economic refugees, slums and shacks began to proliferate etc.; the most markedly xenophobic regional party in India- the Shiva Sena (founded in 1966 as a pronative, Marathi-centered, movement for ethnic control of Bombay) gained control until today of the city and the state. In this essay the author tries to note two specificities about Bombay: 1. The peculiar ambiguities that divide and connect cash and capital from one another; 2. To show that disjuncture is part of what might let us understand the peculiar ways in which cosmopolitanism in Bombay has been violently compromised in its recent history City of cash: Bombay after WWII was a cosmopolis of commerce; today money is either locked, hoarded, stored, and secreted in every possible way: in jewelry, in bank accounts, in land and housing etc.; hidden money made visible through cars and mansions, sharp suits etc, or we have -visible money: cash (stacks of rupees are openly and joyously transacted); cash+chance+wealth=linked - yet there is a lot of interest in bank accounts, shares, and insurance policies (instruments used to protect money); even poor wage-earners strive to have small savings accounts

-Bombays film industry runs on black money (film financing is a notoriously gray area of speculation, risk and violence in which the key players are men who have maid killings in other markets who seek to keep the money out of the governments hands; corruption everywhere - Liquidity is the dominant criterion of prosperity for both corporations and individuals; this is also money that is seeking immediate expenditure - Since the 1970s cash and capital have come to relate in a new and contradictory manner in Bombay: while cash still does its circulatory work, guaranteeing a complex web of social and economic relations, capital in Bombay has become more anxious: 1. The flight of industrial capital away from the city; 2. Financial capital in Bombay operates in several disjunct registers: as the basis for multinational corporations tempted by new market seduction in India; as speculative capital operating in illegal or black markets, and as entrepreneurial energy operating in a city where it is increasingly difficult to coordinate the factors of capitalist production Housing (this disjunct relationship can be followed and here we see an outcome of it: ethnic violence) To speak of spectrality in Bombays housing scene moves us beyond the empirics of inequality into the experience of shortage, crowding, and public improvisation. It marks the space of speculation and specularities, empty scenes of dissolved industry, fantasies of urban planning, rumors of real estate transfers, consumption patterns that violate their spatial preconditions, and bodies that are their own housing. The absent, the ghostly, the speculative, the fantastic all have their part to play in the simultaneous excesses and lacks of Bombays housing scene. It is these experienced absurdities that warrant my use of the term spectral in a setting where housing and its lack are grossly real. (pg. 63) Homes as unstable products: a vast range of insecure housing; the poor are everywhere and they are only partly concentrated in slums. Almost every one of these kinds of housing for the poor is subjected to socially negotiated arrangements. The poor set house everywhere and when they are servants to the rich, they usually have a small room in the penthouses and bring friends or dependents; small commercial enterprise sprout on every possible spot; Public sleeping is the bottom of the hierarchy of spectral housing. The sleeping body in its public, vulnerable, and inactive form is the most contained form of the spectral house. Bombay has a shrinking but still large body of tenants, governed by an obsolete rent control act that has been the subject of enormous contention since the beginning of
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economic liberalization in the early 1990s and landlords are at war with their old tenants, who pay tiny rents for real estate worth fortunes Dreams and fantasies: tenants dream of a day when they will be allowed by state fiat- to buy their houses for less, and landlords dream of a free market where they can kick out their poor tenants and bring in wealthy multinationals. Meanwhile, as tenants die or move but hold onto their places by locking the door, the building look like ghostly spaces (spaces of houses without occupants, and bodies without houses on the streets). The market in rental houses is illegal The pyramid: the upmarket end is occupied by the multinationals who pay huge down payments, below there is the universe of the middle - class owners and renters who entertain dreams of the big kill, further down: the varieties of rights in tenements, slums, pavements etc.; knitting together this complex edifice of housing related hysteria is the huge disorganized army of brokers and dealers. Today, national and transnational manufacturing is steadily leaving Bombay, and another major spectral narrative has started to emerge: thousands of acres of factory space are rumored to be lying idle behind the high walls that conceal dying factories, and thus it might yield housing for those without a secure house. What killed Bombay and how did Mumbai emerge? = the repositioning of Bombays streets, shops and homes as sacred national space, as an urban rendition of a Hindu national geography Urban cleansing In 1996 the Shiva Sena proclaimed that Bombay would henceforth be only known as Mumbai: a Mumbai of the future ethically pure but globally competitive. 1992-1993: a big effort to Hinduize India based on Anti-Muslim sentiments On 6 December 1992 a Mosque was destroyed = a symbolic epicenter of this more general campaign to cleanse Hindu space and nationalize the polity through a politics of archaeology, historical revisionism, and vandalism syndicated Hinduism= also included the liberation of Hindu temples from what they argued to be their illegitimate Muslim superstructures. The Shiva Sena went from being a regional party to a national political force; focusing on the border wars with Pakistan, it has used a powerful media campaign of hate against the figure of the Muslim as the archetype of the invader, the stranger, and the traitor.
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- about 50% of Munbais 12 million citizens live in slums or other degraded forms of housing, but slum dwellers occupy only 8% of the citys land; the rest is either industrial land, middle- and high-income housing or vacant land in control of the state - in the riots of 1992-1993 the worst zones of violence were among the very poorest The maha arati= a kind of guerilla form of public worship organized by Hindu groups to push Muslims out of streets and public spaces: they were hunted down with listes of names, Muslim businesses and properties were relentlessly put to torch. There is also a battle for space In 1992 -1993 spectral housing met ethnic fear, and the Muslim body was the site of this terrifying negotiation Appadurai concludes that in a city where daily sociality involves the negotiations of immense special stress, the many spectralities that surround housing (from indigent bodies to fantasy housing schemes and empty flats) can create the conditions for a violent reinscription of public space as Hindu space a bizarre utopia of urban renewal.