Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

Part A: An Extended Prologue
7. For more information,
watch the YouTube video
entitled, “Why Mumbai
Has Slums” by “Scroll.
in”(https://youtu.be/
jPZp_ICmfhE). We are
explained how politics
and slum rehabilitation
have interplayed to
perpetuate the housing
crisis of Bombay.
According to the Economic Survey of India 2017-18, Bombay’s
housing market tolerated about 0.48 million vacant houses 7 (“Economic
survey says not many people are taking up houses in Mumbai”,
2018). “The phenomenon of high vacancy rates is not fully
understood, but unclear property rights, weak contract enforcement
and low rental yields may be important factors. The spatial
distribution of the new real estate may also be an issue, as the vacancy
rates generally increase with distance away from the denser
urban core,” the Survey pointed out.
Clearly the issue of housing in Bombay, as with any other globalised
city of such scale in developing countries, is one that requires
a rigorously multi-disciplinary approach to solution. The issue is
not merely one to do with influencing the governing bodies in the
right manners. Rather it is to do with recognising urban vulnerabilities
(Parthasarathy, 2009, p. 116) and thereby studying the
spatial consequences of the capitalist pyramid that defines cities
like Bombay. Although many have pointed toward global trends
that have influenced Bombay’s asymmetric growth, the true culprits
are the open market policies that changed Indian in the late
80s and early 90s (Nijman, 2000, p.582). Liberalism in the new
urbanised Indian city fermented a hierarchy that the poor were
perhaps used to but only beginning to accept. On the other hand,
the working upper-middle-class in search of a complacent city life
largely ignored these struggles while the academics and intellectuals
wrote books and made films about them. Perhaps most accurately
described in the scientific study on the “Matthew Effect”
and allocation of resources (Merton, 1968, p.62), as the rich get
bigger houses, the poor have to fight to keep the shanty structures
they currently own. Ethnographic studies of Bombay’s poor and
homeless have helped us understand to a limited extent the nature
of the city’s chaotic street life but have not given us insight
comparable to that received from the fictions produced in Bombay.
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