#Mumbai(Bombay)

[musiquesduciel]

A kind reminder that in Mumbai there's a restaurant where reserved tables don't hold up a sign that reads "reserved" but rather a sign that reads "promised" and I think that's beautiful.

[ink-black-wings]

the streets of bombay<3

[tiiramisu-cake]

[omgindiablog]

Nana chowk, Mumbai, India: Nana Chowk is a neighborhood in Mumbai. It is named after the philanthropist Jagannath Shankarshet also known as "Nana". The area lies in the Grant Road area. It is also home to the city's most versatile event and sports venue, Bombay Recreation Co. Wikipedia

[shamelessislamreligionhorse]

[agelessphotography]

Bombay, India, Alex Webb, 1981

[vintagepromotions]

Travel poster for Bombay (now Mumbai), India (c. 1930). Artwork by W.S. Bylitiplis.

[ametimpala]

Everyone (including me) wants to be Aditya from jab we met until they realize that it comes with having to come to terms with giving up on the love of your life for their own happiness and also standing by them, watching them go with someone else to live 'happily ever after'.

(yes in the movie he gets her eventually but that ending was not guaranteed, he did genuinely give her up)

[m4movies]

Bombay Sandwich & KARAK CHAI

[goodthings777]

ACCORDING TO THE RAMCHARITMANAS, MOKSHA (LIBERATION) IS ATTAINED BY THE DEVOTION TO SACHCHIDANANDGHAN BRAHM.

Who is this SACHCHIDANANDGHAN BRAHM?

[musiquesduciel]

Halsey in Mumbai wearing a traditional Indian Saree/Sari (Designer: Manish Malhotra)

[somerabbitholes]

the bus changed routes because of some road work, and now it goes right through what used to be the city’s dockyard — abandoned warehouses, buildings crumbling, tram tracks overgrown with moss, the whole deal and i’m currently living my best life with this change

[the-brown-man]

The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai

[soujjwalsays]

Ae dil hai mushkil jeena yaha, zara hatt ke, zara bach ke, yeh hai Bombay meri jaan.

Mumbai/Bombay

(The city of dreams)

Mumbai is like a giant piece of soul. Every time a new person comes to Mumbai and attaches oneself to this city regardless of wherever you go after that, it travels with you, enriching you.

- Mehak Batra

[postcard-from-the-past]

Esplanade Hotel in Bombay, modern-day Mumbai, India

British vintage postcard

[fatehbaz]

My [work] [...] traces the history of the emergence of the “slum” as a category of stigmatization in colonial Bombay, and locates it in broader histories of colonialism [...] in South Asia. [...] [E]verything counts, not just colonial archives. [...] These archival sources, like the rest of them, do not tell us the past, but mediate a reality for us. What does such an image tell us about how poverty relief changed over time in the subcontinent? In fact, by the late nineteenth century, a debate emerges among colonial officials as to whether the municipality should be doing poor relief at all, and wondering what to do about famine victims. If you took the British colonial archives and maps at face value, you would be missing a great deal. They should be read as documents meant to legitimize a regime. If one is not critical about archives, one falls into the tropes of those who wrote these archives. [...]

Aside from Maharashtra state archives and Bombay municipal records, I also used native language biographies of the city. I found this tiny little book, something akin to a Lonely Planet guide from the time, for people who wanted to visit Bombay.

By the early twentieth century, the city had become a character.

The city - this abstract idea - was becoming what you were coming to visit, rather than its people. [...]

---

In the 1860s, there is a Marathi biography of the city which actually deploys the tropes of an older colonial anthropology of Bombay from 1835. [...] I was [...] interested in the tension between on the one hand those colonial and native elites who wanted to turn the city into a place for revenue collection and commerce, and on the other the large majority of workers and migrants that shaped Bombay differently.

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The question of tropes around urban development is always fodder in my mind, as I ask myself why certain representations of space become both so powerful and so contested in colonial India. The concern with the city in India is a relatively new one, as Gyan Prakash argued in a 2002 article on the “urban turn” in South Asian social sciences.

The East India Company and the British Crown settled India primarily as an agrarian colony, with people stationed all across India to collect revenue. For long it was thought India was de-urbanized and peasantized, so the urban perspective was in the background.

Tropes surrounding the tensions between the urban and the rural are at the heart of modernism broadly, and at the heart of India’s nationalist project.

What we call “city space” is always associated with modernity, whereas all the rest is traditional.

If you showed a map of Bombay to an urban planner, they would tell you certain parts of Bombay are more urban than others, and such qualifications would map onto caste separation. Low-caste areas would be seen as “not-fully-urban”, not city-like. [...]

[T]he racialization of labor functions at the same time as the racialization of space. The internally-differentiated city comes to index a specific racialization of labor, in order to make it invisible.

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All text above, the words of Sheetal Chhabria. As told to Ayan Meer. A transcript published as “The Archive Box #3: Building Colonial Capitalism in Bombay.” Global Urban History. 11 December 2020. [Some paragraph breaks and contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]