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Is there a culture of the Indian street?

J O N AT H A N S H A P I R O A N J A R I A

IN spring of 2006, I stood on a bustling street adjacent to a central

Mumbai train station while a group of architects presented a public
space mapping project to an official from the Brihanmumbai Municipal
Corporation (BMC). The architects pointed out the tens of thousands of
pedestrians effortlessly weaving their way through a small space, the
dozens of hawkers who strategically sit between concrete planters, the
clusters of mobile vendors who work in the middle of the road but out
of pedestrians’ pathways, the shopkeepers whose extensions blur the
boundaries between the formal and informal, the flower vendors
stationed on the path to a nearby temple, and the men on bicycles
parked under an overpass offering cold drinks to thirsty passers-by. All
these people constitute the anonymous cast of characters in what Jane
Jacobs (1961 and 1992: 50) famously called the ‘intricate sidewalk
ballet’ of congested, but healthy and vibrant, public spaces.

The architects tried to disabuse the official of the commonsense view

that street commerce and foot traffic are at odds. Hawking and walking
are interlinked, they argued. They are part of a single transportation
modality that consists of a variety of uses and populations, something
that produces visual confusion, but a functioning urban environment.
As a result, automotive traffic is far more disruptive than hawker and
shopkeepers’ encroachments. The density of the crowd and the
commerce on the street’s edge discouraged all but the occasional taxi or
truck, so these disruptions, fortunately, were infrequent. The street-
sidewalk boundary had been blurred by people walking on the roadway
– so the streetscape had become, in a way, a ‘shared space’ or, as it is
called in Holland, woonerf.

However, what counts as urban design innovation in northern Europe

is considered infrastructural failure when located in Mumbai. These
streets are too congested, explained the BMC official, they are too
narrow, used by too many people and for far too many different
purposes. He confidently offered a solution: a massive elevated
pedestrian walkway. With a sweeping gesture of his arm, he visualized
the walkway’s arc, soaring above the swirl of street activity from the
exit of the station to the nearby arterial road. As we watched him in
stunned silence, we saw that no amount of spatial analyses would
disabuse the idea that Mumbai’s streets are too crowded, too dense and
too messy.

This encounter took place two years before the first of thirty-two (and
counting) pedestrian skywalks were constructed in Mumbai.1 At that
time the idea of a pedestrian bridge sounded preposterous, thoroughly
out of touch with how the city’s streets function. Why was the solution
to congestion sought in the sky, when there was one so clearly on the
ground, we wondered? Was the skywalk meant to benefit pedestrians,
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or discipline them? It wasn’t quite clear. But these questions missed the
point. Literally and figuratively soaring above the city, projects like this
operate on a logic of urban fantasy and globally-scaled aspiration; the
dream to rise above the ‘mess’ of the street, as an official is quoted
saying (Siddhaye 2011), needs no technical justification.

It was 2006, no skywalk had been built, and yet, skywalks were
shaping the reality of the city. Their imminent arrival shaped how
people interpreted streets, their use, and the potential design
interventions that can transform them. This encounter can teach us
much about how the city works – about, for instance, the way local
authorities shape the built environment, the nature of bureaucratic rule
and transportation-related decision making processes – but more
importantly, it demonstrates how urban fantasies continue to animate
the reality of the street. It shows the presence of unactualized structures
in the tactile environment of the city. This presence is a constitutive
element of what might be called the ‘culture’ of the Indian street; the
experience, function and aesthetic form of the street are inseparable
from the spectre of dreams for what a modern, global or ‘world-class’
urban landscape should look like.

Writings on the street in India can be grouped into two categories. The
first sees the street as a space of difference. These are writings by non-
Indians and Indians alike that – whether as emblematic of the ‘exotic
Orient’ (Kidambi 2007: 35), ‘premature’ (Bose 1965), or
underdeveloped – see streets ‘seething with miscellaneous humanity’
(Low 1907: 23), as deviations from modern ideals. The second group
sees streets and urban space as manifestations of power, arenas on
which forces of global capital and ideologies of neo-liberalism unfold
(Rajagopal 2001, Whitehead and More 2007 and Arabindoo 2010).
And finally the third perspective, what might be called a ‘culturalist’
approach, frames Indian streetscapes in terms of their unique rhythms
and logic of practice (Appadurai 1987, Ahuja 1997, Edensor 1998 and
Mehta 2009).

This essay focuses on the third perspective because, despite the

problems, it continues to be compelling. It also is the approach that
resonates with contemporary debates on global urbanism and the need
for new vocabularies of urban analysis derived from historical
experiences outside the West (cf. Robinson 2002). The culturalist
perspective is important because it highlights the specificity of urban
experience; however, at times, its effect is to rigidify difference. Is this
inherent to the project of locating urban particularity? It might be, but
only when we focus on different street practices, as opposed to
difference as a mode of experience that shapes the street. I argue that
the specificity of the Indian street lies in the problematic of difference –
the perceived disjuncture between lived experience and universalizing
norms of urban modernity – that animates ordinary life and
governmental efforts to transform the city alike.

Representations of the street: The Indian street has not fared well over
the past two centuries. From Naipaul’s street scenes consisting of
‘depressed-looking, dark people …eating, indifferent to everything but

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their food’ (Naipaul, quoted in Chakrabarty 2002: 65-6) to Gandhi’s

observation that Bombay ‘looks as if it were the scum of London…
[with] all the shortcomings of London but… none of its amenities’
(quoted in Hazareesingh 2007: 124), descriptions of Indian streetscapes
have been framed in dystopic terms. Travellers’ and journalists’
accounts describe streets that are dense, dirty and chaotic. They
describe terrifying experiences of navigating crumbling surfaces,
dodging garbage, shit and hawkers on long-ago vanished sidewalks, all
the while avoiding the dangerous anarchy of India’s infamous exhaust-
spewing traffic.

In much travel writing on India, the street offers a glimpse into another
world. ‘When we reached the native town how changed was the
scene… Europe was left behind and the East was realized – the narrow,
winding streets, the open shops, small but highly characteristic, where
the owner, Hindoo, Mahomedan, or Jew squatted among his wares’
(quoted in Kidambi 2007: 35). This chronicler of late 19th century
Bombay observed not just a broken world – a world of poverty, dirt and
despair – but an inverted one: a world, as an observer put it at the turn
of the century, in which people ‘do all sorts of things in public which to
our thinking should be transacted in privacy’ (Low 1907: 23-24).

Here, difference is indexed by sensory experience– ‘On entering its

huge bazaars for the first time, one is immediately deafened by the din
that prevails, and half suffocated by the smells that impregnate the
atmosphere’ (Rousselet, quoted in Dwivedi and Mehrotra 1994: 50) –
as well as by the organization of everyday life. ‘The shops are simply
boxes, set on end, with the lids off… [where one can] stand and watch
the baker rolling his flat loaves, the tailor stitching and cutting, [and]
the coppersmith hammering at his bowls and dishes’ (Low 1907: 24)
while all around people can be seen ‘dressing, shaving, washing, and
sleeping, and, in spite of the caste rules and religious restrictions, even
a good deal of eating’ (Low 1907: 23).

Indeed, on most streets in urban India people are walking, but they are
also working, cooking, talking, eating, sleeping, reading or simply
hanging out. People brush their teeth, wash their face, chop vegetables
and clean dishes. On the quiet residential street in front of the
apartment where I stay in northwest Mumbai, the day begins with a
woman selling tea next to her husband, an occasional banana vendor.
Their grandchild plays on a scooter while his father washes his
autorickshaw. By the late afternoon, a cigarette and paan vendor
appears across the road. Around the corner, a vendor toasts sandwiches
opposite a man selling nimbus and leafy green vegetables from a small
pushcart. A raddiwala cycles by, collecting old newspapers. An
itinerant barber, his equipment stored in a small briefcase, sits in the
shade of a shoe repairman’s roadside stall. A block away, a cluster of
women sell vegetables perched against a fence, a man fries pakodas
from a small metal stand, others prepare chaat and vada pao. Beneath
an old tree, magazines are displayed next to two young men repairing
tires, stacks of which are used to support a table for their neighbours’
food preparation.

How are we to interpret these street scenes? Is this mix of activities a

sign of infrastructural and governance failure– a view shared by the
local residents’ associations and much of the Mumbai media? Or, do
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they index a sensibility, a ‘refusal to become citizens of an ideal,

bourgeois order’ (Chakrabarty 2002: 77). Or, as Arjun Appadurai
(1987: 13) writes, are the streets and associated practices ‘cultural
resources’ which ‘lie at the heart of public life in contemporary India’?

Indian streetscapes: Considering the way monumental architecture

continues to stand in for ‘heritage’ in urban India, Appadurai’s call for
an appreciation of street life is remarkably prescient. For Appadurai,
streetscapes exhibit a ‘public culture’, a place where notions of place
and affiliation are forged. ‘With the possible exception of the railroad,
streets capture more about India than any other setting. On its streets,
India eats, works, sleeps, moves, celebrates and worships’ (Appadurai
1987: 14). Streets are also ideal sites from which to explore
connections among popular media, politics and society in a context of
intensifying transnational image circulation, the subject of his more
well-known later work (cf. Appadurai 1996).

However, imbuing ordinary landscapes with cultural value is different

from interpreting streetscapes as sites of distinct cultural sensibilities, a
view that informs other writings on the street. We see this view, for
instance, in Soraya Ahuja’s Where the Streets Lead (1997), an account
of the aesthetics and experience of the street in half a dozen Indian
cities. This text interweaves fictional narrative with architectural
analyses to reflect on the configurations of ordinary life and built
environments: ‘I looked down at the patterns formed by the cars, the
people, the signs, the crossings, buildings and lights. Here lay the
boundless conurbation of streets operating in perfectly controlled
chaos. This was the Indian street for me’ (Ahuja 1997: 47).

To Ahuja, Indian streets are defined by a profusion of personal

encounters: ‘The food carts and people around them and the simple act
of eating made the place appear intimate’ (Ahuja 1997: 50). The
transformation of public spaces into private spaces occur everywhere,
from the quiet residential streets to the imposing, monumental
architecture of South Mumbai: ‘a continuous arcade that connected all
the buildings… was crowded with hawkers of all sorts, and indicated a
characteristic inherent in the culture of the Orient, to personalize a
public domain, so that the demarcation between the private and the
public was loose and nebulous, unlike in the West’ (Ahuja 1997: 50).

A mix of the intimate and the anonymous is central to other writings on

the Indian street. Consider, for instance, Kaiwan Mehta’s Alice in
Bhuleshwar, a memoir of the author’s wanderings through the old
Mumbai neighbourhood of Bhuleshwar that mixes postmodern pastiche
with ethnographic musings: ‘The crowd of people and cycles, cars and
handcarts does not allow one to look around for long. The negotiations
that one employs to navigate these streets dominates one’s experience
of the area’ (Mehta 2009: 2). This is a deliberately fragmented
approach that, in the spirit of de Certeau (1984), is an effort to dwell in
the mental maps of the city. ‘Every gali belongs to a sweeper, and he
proudly owns the burden, as much as he curses the stench in his life’
(Mehta 2009: 13). Emerging from the crush of the commuter trains,
Mehta writes, ‘We step into new neighbourhoods, making them new

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again. We move through main lanes and streets every day, sometimes
negotiating the traffic, at other times, garbage, and often even the
marriage procession of a man we do not know but recognize’ (Mehta
2009: 4).

This imaginative potential of the public spectacle, sensory experience

and social mix also animates Tim Edensor’s essay, ‘The Culture of the
Indian Street’ (1998). To Edensor, mixed use streetscapes pose a
conceptual challenge to urban analysis that normalizes the highly
monitored, strictly demarcated streetscape of the West. In contrast to
‘western’ streets, which are ‘constructed out of an aesthetics and
rationale which fears mixing of function and the disintegration of
boundaries’ (Edensor 1998: 213), streets in India are characterized by
an overwhelming sensory experience, public spectacle, a jostle of
bodies, objects and practices, in which ‘passage is marked by
disruption and distraction… offered by these heterogeneous activities
and sights’ (Edensor 1998: 210). Indian streetscapes contain a ‘haptic
geography wherein there is continuous touching of others and weaving
between and against bodies’ (Edensor 1998: 212).

This is a geography that challenges the pedestrian, drawing him into the
urban realm. ‘The body passing through the Indian street is continually
imposed upon and challenged by diverse activities, sensations and
sights which render a state at variance to the restrained and distanced
distraction of the western street’ (Edensor 1998: 213). Eschewing
earlier interpretations of dense streetscapes as signs of civilizational
inferiority (e.g. Low 1907) or infrastructural failure, Edensor sees them
as models for what has been lost in the West. To him, mixed use, the
blurring of boundaries between public and private, and the rich sensory
experience are signs of streets that are ‘less circumscribed and framed
by the power of capital and bureaucracy’ (Edensor 1998: 219).
reinterprets messy streetscapes as redemptive spaces. Jarring
streetscapes invigorate, they heighten the senses and invigorate social
engagement. Indeed, this is a street spectacle that challenges ‘the
passive’ ideal that, since the late 18th century, has dominated the
European urban experience (Sennett 1994: 16-21; cf. Edensor 1998:
214).

It goes without saying that the exuberance of India’s streets has

potential to heighten engagement of the external world in a way that
suburban U.S. streetscapes – obsessed, as Richard Sennett (1994: 18)
argues, with effortless navigation and a kind of ‘freedom from
resistance’ – do not. There is democratic potential too – India contains
streetscapes that allow a wide diversity of urban practices, as well as
the potential to generate greater awareness of the harsh realities and
inequalities of urban life (what do ‘clean’ sidewalks hide better than
poverty?). But, as with all culturalist analyses, there is a danger of
imputing stasis, harmony and boundedness on what is, in fact, a much
more contested and fluid realm. Edensor’s analyses of street life
suggestes a unified and circumscribed cultural world; the streetlife he
describes are presumed to be ontologically distinct from streetlife
elsewhere when, in fact, they are produced out of centuries of exchange

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and interaction, including with those in the ‘West’ (cf. Mcfarlane

2008).

Edensor provides a much needed fine-grained account of Indian

streetscapes, and in doing so, he achieves what all good urban
ethnography should do. But in its invocation of difference, the essay
raises a larger question about the possibilities of transnational urban
analyses: is it possible to describe particularities of urban experience –
to decentre urban environments in Europe and North America –
without reifying culture? Or, is reifying culture inherent to the project
of identifying specificity? I suggest that, as long as we reconceptualize
the notion of street ‘culture’, this does not have to be the case. Rather
than a distinct realm of practice and sensibility, we might instead refer
to a realm of experience and interpretation in which ‘difference’ is not a
stable, external sociological category, but a frame of reference that
produces the street and its associated worlds in the first place.

In India, difference lies in the haunting spectre of what is perceived as

the incomplete project of modernity in the city. Questions such as the
one framing Partha Chatterjee’s (‘Are Indian Cities Becoming
Bourgeois at Last?’ 2004) essay on middle class urban politics (and
from whom I draw the title of this essay) speak to this predicament.
Indian cities are modern in an obvious sense, and yet the constant
public discussion about lack of civic sense, misuse of public space and
the appearance of streets is partly a reflection of anxiety over whether
they are full participants in world modernity; for many of its users, the
streetscapes that Edensor celebrates represent a problem because they
deviate from a supposedly universal urban aesthetic ideal. Thus, while
writings on the culture of the Indian street are concerned with
‘understanding… difference and "otherness" ’ (Edensor 1998: 220), the
politics of contemporary urban India suggests that what is needed is to
understand how otherness operates on the street. What is needed,
therefore, is not just ethnography of different street practices, but how
street practices in India are produced through awareness of difference
from the ‘West’ by those using, working, loitering, managing, writing,
and governing it.

Without denying the intimacy, mix of activities, proximity of bodies

and blurred boundaries in urban India described by Edensor and others,
we cannot celebrate the vibrancy of streets in India without losing sight
of the fact that they are animated by a continual contest over how a
modern streetscape should function. As with the BMC skywalk, dreams
of urban landscapes elsewhere and notions of what a modern city
should look like continue to animate ordinary life. These are not
‘cultural’ attributes in the anthropological sense, but are spawned from
an imagination of cultural difference.

Indeed, even what these writers identify as ‘culture’ is in fact a set of

contested street practices in which, for instance, daily needs conflict
with modern ideals; thus the ‘total confusion of the private and the
public’ (Chakrabarty 2002: 66) is not a static empirical reality, a sign of
cultural specificity but, to many in urban India, including civic groups,
NGOs, pedestrian rights activists, residents associations, municipal

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officials, police, journalists and celebrities, something that needs fixing.

Likewise, the constant stream of letters to the editor complaining of
Mumbaikars’ lack of civic sense, the ‘citizen’-led campaigns against
littering, spitting and patronizing street vendors, do not represent a
static cultural tradition, but are highly charged politics in which are
wrapped up larger questions of democracy, citizenship rights, and
conflicts over the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1996).

Streets and modernity: In outlining the conceptual stakes in a study of

the Indian street, it is necessary to explain that by ‘street’, I refer to an
element of the built environment that simultaneously operates as an
abstract entity and a lived experience. This is the concept of the street,
to follow de Certeau (1984), that sees the street consisting of an
assemblage of technical expertise, law and things, as well as the
experiences, practices and imaginaries of its inhabitants. These are, of
course, merely analytic categories that highlight how urban landscapes
are produced. At any particular moment, the meaning of a street is
informed by the official practices that make it an abstract entity, just as
‘the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into
a space by walkers’ (de Certeau 1984: 117).

The street is an object of spatio-legal regimes and a technocratic gaze –

of policy makers’, planners’ and engineers’ visions – but it also
operates as a powerful metaphor. ‘The street’ connotes the mundane,
the gritty, and the real. It is a space of everyday interaction (e.g. Whyte
1943), urban savvy, morality (‘street justice’) and popular political
sentiment (as in the journalistic cliché ‘the Arab street’). Curbs, parks
and sidewalks seem to lack this poetic potential, although the public
square comes close.

The street is also where the political categories of liberal democracy

manifest themselves. As Marshall Berman (1986) writes in ‘Take it to
the Streets’, political and spatial categories co-produce each other. The
ideals of modern subjectivity – individuated personhood unencumbered
by history, social ties, or obligation, for instance – are spatialized. We
see this, for instance, in the removal of embodied practices (eating,
washing and cooking) from the street (Valentine 1998), in the 19th
century European ‘city… [which] has drastically and irreparably
devalued it [the street] as a place of social experience’ (Moretti 1983:
127), and in the valorization of strolling, aimless wandering and
flânerie in art and literature. In the modernist imagination, walking gets
transformed from a mundane act to a normative spatial practice, while
the pedestrian becomes the normative urban inhabitant; individuated
and unencumbered, stripped of the past, someone who embraces
contradiction and the challenges of the new.

In this way, the street occupies a privileged place in accounts of urban

modernity. To Walter Benjamin (2006), the experience of the street
stands in for the contradictions of capitalist modernity – the
simultaneous experience of the attractive and the repulsive, the sacred
and the mundane, the transformative and degrading (Kaviraj 2004). In
Baudelaire’s poetry, for instance, ‘[t]he archetypal modern man... is a
pedestrian thrown into the maelstrom of modern city traffic, a man

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alone contending against an agglomeration of mass and energy that is

heavy, fast and lethal’ (Berman 1983: 159). The street is where one
encounters the technology, sociality and politics of the modern world.

This is where the street in India poses a challenge. Analyses of urban

modernity rest on a literary tradition which normalizes the ‘modern city
as a crowd of strangers’ (Williams 1992: 85) and a gaze of ‘the
alienated man’ (Benjamin 1986: 40) that does not quite characterize
streets in India (or, perhaps, any street other than those geographically
and chronologically located in 19th century Paris). If the experience of
the modern city is defined by alienation, then how do we interpret
streets in places like Bombay, which are represented as ‘part village
community, part cosmopolitan city street’? (Mazumdar 2007: xx).
Similarly, what do we make of streets that do not produce a ‘veil
through which the familiar city beckons… as phantasmagoria’
(Benjamin 1986: 40) but, as we see in Hindi film, ones that ‘evoke… a
whole range of experiences related to loss, nostalgia, pain, community,
and anger’? (Mazumdar 2007: 4-5).2

‘The great novelty of urban life… does not consist in having thrown the
people into the street, but in having raked them up and shut them into
offices and houses’ (Moretti 1983: 127); and yet, it is precisely the vast
mix of people and activities in public that writers identify as a
characteristic feature of the Indian street. Is the answer to these
questions simply to say that the category of the modern is irrelevant?
Or, that the Eurocentricism of mainstream urban theory can only be
overcome by expanding the category to include radically different
urban forms and practices? Alternatively, I suggest that we might see
difference from the category of the modern (however much of a myth
that category is) as constituting a predicament that is an extricable part
of the experience of the urban Indian streetscape.

Any discussion of the culture of the Indian street has to take into
account the fact that today’s Indian streetscapes are an accumulation of
a century and a half of municipal, police and elite residents’ efforts to
transform them. This does not mean the street has been subsumed into a
logic of architectural modernism; but equally, nor does the street
represent a complete inversion of it. From the introduction of motorized
transport at the turn of the century, which authorities hoped would have
the effect of ‘teaching the native to look ahead and to perceive that the
middle of the road is not the place for an aimless saunter’ (quoted in
Hazareesingh 2007: 66); mid-century bureaucrats’ discussions of the
necessary sidewalk maintenance ‘if the pedestrian is to be kept off the
road’ (The Greater Bombay Scheme 1945: 25); and to more recent
efforts to discipline street users such as the erection of fences meant to
keep pedestrians separate from automotive traffic, efforts to reshape the
street practices in India have largely failed (cf. Chakrabarty 2002).

On the street in northwest Mumbai discussed above, the new fence

meant to discipline street users – to produce rightful pedestrians – was
immediately appropriated by washermen and hawkers, so that it now
serves as the physical infrastructure for the street’s informal economy
(e.g. Koolhaas et al. 2000). In part, this can be read as a sign of

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modernity’s ‘obsession to impose a thoroughly rationalized order on to

the world’ (Clarke 1997: 3); the fence ultimately had an opposite effect,
as more people chose to walk amidst traffic than be hemmed in by this
unforgiving architecture (cf. Ranade et al 2005).

If there is a culture of the Indian street, it is in its relationship to the

project of modernity. This is not so much a shared sensibility, but a
contested terrain that consists of conflicts over how streets can be used
(can the side of the road be used for hawking, or is it solely for
walking?), efforts to discipline the public (e.g., ‘Don’t Spit! Don’t
Litter!’ Rao 2012) and infrastructural interventions (such as skywalks
and pedestrian fences) that ebb and flow, that remake streets as much as
streets remake them. These are not conflicts over whether or not the
streets are modern or ‘Indian’, but over the ‘configuration of the
modern’ (Kaviraj 1997: 92) in the first place.

Streets in India are shaped through this constantly shifting negotiation

over the form and content of the city; they neither mimic modernist
urbanism nor do they invert it. In this way, urbanist modernism as an
architectural form, and urban modernity as a consciousness, represent
both problems and possibilities. Practices such as flânerie are premised
on a landscape of urban alienation; of being in the crowd but never
being part of it.

Streets in urban India offer a spectacle that captures wanderers’

imaginations (cf. Edensor 1998), but this spectacle is premised on
pulling the spectator into other worlds. To some, for example, Naipaul
(Ezekial 1974), the impossibility of distanced observation, autonomy
and anonymity signals an unsettling lack of modern consciousness; but
more compellingly, it can challenge the universalizing concepts of
urban space and analysis. Thus concepts such as flânerie as urban
methodology (cf. Featherstone 1998), problematic outside the idealized
modernist landscape of 19th century Paris, can be helpful in other ways
– in, for instance, allowing us to see how streets are inhabited by the
‘phantasmagoria’ (Benjamin 1986: 40) of urban lifeworlds elsewhere.

What sets the street in Mumbai or New Delhi apart from streets in
North America and Europe is thus not a different ‘culture’ or street
practice (we can see bits of the Jane Jacobs’ ‘street ballet’, as well as
the drudgery of architectural modernism in New York City as much as
in Mumbai), but in the way fantasies of other cities haunt everyday life.
Read the New York Times and the countless urbanist blogs on New York
City, and you get the sense that the future of that city emanates from
within itself. By contrast, the model for the future Indian street is in
Singapore, Dubai and Shanghai; its potential to become a modern city
is presumed to be in its ability to emulate urban landscapes elsewhere.

Footnotes:

1. Mumbai’s skywalks were built by the MMRDA, a statewide agency responsible for
infrastructural development that is independent from the BMC. Nevertheless it is clear
from this encounter that BMC officials were aware of the MMRDA’s future plans.

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2. That is not to say that representations of the street in India as spaces of social
isolation and alienation are impossible. See, for instance, Karin Zitzewitz’s (2009)
readings of Sudhir Patwardhan’s Bombay paintings.

References:

Sarayu Ahuja, Where the Streets Lead. Penguin, New Delhi, 1997.

Arjun Appadurai, ‘Street Culture’, The India Magazine 8(1), December 1987, pp. 12-
22.

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.

University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996.

Pushpa Arabindoo, ‘City of Sand’: Stately Re-Imagination of Marina Beach in

Chennai’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(2), 2010, pp. 379-
401.

Walter Benjamin, Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Harvard

University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1986.

Marshall Berman, ‘Take it to the Streets: Conflict and Community in Public Space’,
Dissent, Fall 1986, pp. 476-85.

Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Simon
and Schuster, New York, 1982.

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