Bhabha, H.- Mumbai on My Mind, Some Thoughts on Sustainability (Article-2010)

7/21/2019 Bhabha, H.- Mumbai on My Mind, Some Thoughts on Sustainability (Article-2010)

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/bhabha-h-mumbai-on-my-mind-some-thoughts-on-sustainability-article-2010 1/6

Mumbai

o y

Mind:

Some Thoughts on Sustainability

Hom\ K Bhabha

t is always too early, or too

late,

to talk of the cities of the

future. The Just City

or the

Generic City floats

before our

tired eyes

in the

half-light

of

dusk and returns to our expect

ant

gazes

in the dawn of a new day. The futurity of the city,

as

the

Office for Metropolitan

Architecture

once

proposed, is

the post-city being

prepared

on

the

site of the ex-city. t is

in

those

anomic hours in-between dusk and dawn-when

we

experience

the

wakeful present

of

our

predicament-that

we

build the city of the future, the

new city,

precariously

and

proleptically-prophetically.

Any

claim

to

newness, any pro

posal

that

we are at

the

turning

point of

history,

urbanity,

or ecology,

is at

once a historical commitment and a tenden

tious and

transitional

proposition. Tendentious

not

because

of

a

lack of intelligence or

imagination

in

our

thinking, nor

a failure of integrity or technology

in

our planning,

but

be

cause

of the transitional temporality that

mediates

both the

conception

and

the

construction

of the projects of the

future.

Transitional,

in

the

sense

in

which

Antonio

Gramsci

conceives

of the

turning point

in history as

a

constellated reality-an

archive of the contemporary balanced on the knife-edge of the

emergent

and the

residual. The

historically

new

is always

a

moment

of incubation,

Gramsci

writes:

What exists at any

given time [in the

name

of the new]

is

a variable combination

of

old and

new,

...

a momentary

equilibrium of cultural

rela

tions

... 1

t is, indeed, the momentary equilibrium of cultural rela

tions

that

I

want to

address,

anxiously aware

as

I

am

of

my

deep ignorance

in

matters of ecological

urbanism. My

igno

rance-or let's

call

it my innocence-leads me

however, to

suggest

that sustainability

as a

mode of relational thinking

is

profoundly implicated

in

the momentary

equilibrium

of

cultural,

social,

and geopolitical relations.

Certain environ

mental and

ecological discourses seem to

suggest that sus

tainability

is

an ethical or architectural practice for the

longu

duree an

intervention

into the

given

ground

of

an

immanent

Environment

in order

to

protect

its

integrity

and

propagate its

productivity

for the ages. Such perspectives

yield considerable

benefits in historicizing

a

political

mo

ment

and mobilizing a movement. I would

like

to suggest,

78

NTICIPATE



however,

that circulating

within the

wngue

duree are incuba

tiona

l presences

of petits

recits

that

support the environmen

talist project, but conceive somewhat differently of

the

nar

rative plot of ecology. I take courage

from texts that

seem

to

stress the

crucial importance

of

momentaryequilibrium" in

ecological thinking. n Felix Guattari's The Three Ecologies

eco-logic

is

de.fined

as

a process,

which

I

here

oppose

to

sys

tem

or

to

structure, [and which) strives to capture existence ·

in

the

very act of its

constitution,

definition and deterritori

ali

sation.

This

process

of 'fixing-into-

being' relates

only to

expressive subsets that have that have broken out

of

their to

talisingframe and have begun to work on their own account ....

Ecological praxes strive to

scout

out the potential vectors

of

subjectification and singularisation

at

each partial existential

locus.

2

Just as

I was

trying

to

morph my

mind around this

verba

l

tsun

ami

- deeply

attracted, nonetheless,

by

eco-logic

as a capturing of existence in the very act of its consitution...

a fixing-into-being"- was comforted by Mohsen Mostafavi's

ringing

endorsement

of

Guattari's

concept

of

effective social

agency th e "singularisation of existence a s a transforma- '

tive force

in th

e discourse

of

ecological urbanism. Such a

practice requires a

new

mindset, Mostafavi writes, "what

Guattari called

a process of

the re-singularisation

of

tence... [which) depends on the collective production

of un

predictable and untamed 'dissident subjectivities' .... An eco

logical urbanism

needs

to

incorporate an ethics

of size, of

social mix,

of

density

and of

public space.

What

is more sig-·

nificant, I believe, than

an essential

but discrete itemization

of ecological

public

goods"-size, mix, density,

etc.-is the

·

relational value that eco-logical thinking establishes as

the

conditions for an

ethics

of sustainability.

The most prosaic, dictionary definition

of

sustainabi

lity

suggests

th

ati t is a citydesigned

or

landscap

ed

in such a way

as

to ensure

the

continued

conservation

of

natural

resources

and

the surrounding

built environment while providing the

cultural, social, and economic base

needed

to support its in

habitants. t

seems natural that

the nonnative

measures of

the

discoursesofecology

or

sustainablity

are

spatial. However,

in that innocent-sounding phrase to

ensure the

continued

conservation, we move

from

territoriality or

"ground"-land

scape, city, forest,

industrial park

- to an ecological temporal

ity

t he continued conservation- th t supports or houses ·

the

agency

and

ethical

activity of

the

ecologist. (Let us

not

fo

rget

that the root of eco ecology comes from

the

ancient.

Greek oikos:

house

or dwelling.) Sustainability is

the

moral · ·

injunction to

put your

house

in

order

so

as to

enhan

ce

and

empower

the

~ e l l i n g of both selves and others. What does

·

·

79



it

mean to ensure continued

conservation?

What is the time

frame

of

such

intervention? Is

sustainability

an evolutionary

process,

a teleological task,

or

a

strategic,

interstitial

interven

tion into fragile and fractal reality that we call the urban en

vironment? If

like

me, you want

to say "all

ofthe

above," then

you cannot

rest

easy

in some form of

pragmatism because

those three layers or tiers of sustainabilityform

an

intriguing

palimpsest

of overlapping intentions, differential time-scales

and partial, contradictory aims

that

oveiwrite each other and

create multiple

ecological

potentialities.

The

crucial task of

the

ecological agent

then is

to

maintain

a

momentary equilib

rium

between these various practices of

sustainability

and

their

diverse

definitions ofwhat constitutes the "future." And

this

brings us back

to

the

capacity

of the

agent

or the capabil

ity

of the activist-and agency

might

be individual. collective,

or institutional-to intervene in the urban existence in the

present

tense:

in

the

very

actof

its

constitution, its being

fixed

into-being.

ls

this

merely

a theoretical problem with no practi

cal application? Is all this just

a fireside chat

between Guattari,

Mostafavi,

and,

belatedly,

Bhabha, generating much

smoke

of a distinctly narcotic variety? Is this agency for the

angels,

if not

the birds?

t became both

conspicuous and clear

to

me as I read

through the illuminating proceedings of the

Urban

Age India

Conference

3

that one

of the major

issues

for urban planners is

indeed how

to

calculate the

"time"

of

environmental interven

tion. Now "time" is

not as abstract

a

quantity,

as discussions

of temporality

sometimes suggest.

When time becomes the

medium of agency or the vehicle of urban ecological

interven

tion, then,

as

Rahul Mehrotra

suggests, temporality becomes

intimately

connected to

governmental

policy

and

bureaucrat

ic decree-code, site, and

practice.Time

is politics and policy;

time is geopolitical locality

and its situation

in the

archive

of

memory,

record, and

regulation.

Mehrotra's

complaint

against

the

"mistiming"

of

the

ecological

intervention

in

Mumbai/

Bombay makes

my

point about

the need

to

act at the

point

of

a "fixing-into-being"

rather

well. There is of course no "ideal"

time of intervention, but there are good times and

worse ones.

Mehrotra writes:

Over the last

three

decades in Mumbai, planning

has

been largely

concerned with

rearguard

actions versus the avant-garde approach

es

that traditionally led planning. Thus today

most

infrastructure

follows

city

growth rather than

facilitating

and opening up new

growth centres within and outside the city's

core.

In contemporary

Mumbai, planning happens

systematically

posterior,

as

a

recu

perative and

securing

action.

Thus, the profession

is

chiefly

engaged in recuperative

action,

inter

vening

post-facto toclean up the mess t is therefore no coinicidcncc

NTICIP TE 80



that n Mumbai there is an increased celebration of projects

in

volving cleaning up

whether that is the restoration

of

historic

buildings, precincts or dist

ric

t

s, waterfro

n

ts

and p avements, or the

relocation of

slums

to

make

wayfor infra struc

tu

re.4

Sustainability represe

nts

an ecological and ethical commit

ment to what Ludwig

Wittgenstein

, in

his

scattered notes

on

archite

cture ,

des

c

ribes

as not cons

tructing

a building,

as much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations

of possible buildin

gs.

5

More than a master plan, I

think

Wittgenstein is suggesti

ng

th

at we

think deeply about

what

I will call the

unbuilt.

f I might

put

it another way,

in

keep

ing

with my

interest in ecol

ogic

al time-space as a

momen

tary equilibrium of

cultur

al relations , then I would say that

ecological

urbanism

should reflect deeply on the unbuilt. Let

me

end with a few proposals about

the

place

of the unbuilt

in the time of ecological reflect ion. Aperspicuous view of pos

sible buildings is

a counterfactual in terest in what

could

have

been built

i f

economic, c

ultura l.

and ecological

conditions

were

otherwise; it is an aspirational commitment to

what

might

have been

bett

er

built

or

not built at

al l

; and, finally,

the

unbuilt is a

spectral, vir

tual

per

spec

ti

ve

on the

ghost

of

open ground

that

haunts

th

e

hi

story a

nd

the conscience

of

ev

e

ry

construction.The

unbuilt

is a ges

ture of

ethical and archi

tectural

vigilance

th

at

makes it possib l

e

for

ecological agency

to capture human existence in the very act

of

its

constitution

of

an

emergent

world withi

n

th

e representational and

histori

cal realms of

both

being

and

meaning.

Nothing

conveys

this

process

of

huilding and unbuilding,

of

capturing the urban experience of Mumbai in the very act of

its

constitution,

its fixing into meaning, than

Salman

Rush

die's

Midnight s Children. In post

colonia l Mumbai,

the past

hope

of the Indian nation for a free a

nd

e

qual

cosmopolitan

city

will

not

surrender itself to a shuttered sectarian future

of communal strife

and

ethno-religious violence. Civilization

and barbarism-the

enli

g

ht

ened ide

als of

Indian

indepen

dence on

the one

hand,and

th

e

vario

us a

tt

e

mpts to di

v

ide

and _

destroy its kinetic sen

se

of partial a nd diverse communities

on the other-are the ambi

va

lent tensions

th

at

create

the nar

ra

tive energy of

Rushdi

e's Midn ig

ht

s Childr

en

,

Mumbai

's

Buddenbro

oks .Midnig

ht

s Children is

buil

t on a

scale

of ener

getic movement

across the

land

sca

pe of the city, a

nd

the y-

sage moralise of the country'

s political history. Never

forget

that

the

last

paragraph of

th

e novel

has

Saleem Sinai,

the

author's

double,

being trampl

ed unde

rf

oot.

But

before that

happens there is

so

much trav

eling

to

do:

Mumbai on My Mind: Some

Thoughts

on Sustainability

8



Drive On Chowpatty sands Past the great

houses

on

Malabar

Hill, round Kemp's Corner, giddily along the sea

to Scandal

Point

And yes, why not, on

and

on and on,

down

my very

own Warden

Road,

right

along the segregated swimming pools

at

Breadh Candy,

right up

to

the huge Mahalaxmi temple and the old Willingdon

Club

....

Throughout my

childhood,

whenever bad times came

to

Bombay, some insomniac night walker

would

report that he

had

seen

Shivaji's

statue

moving; disasters in the

city

of my youth,

danced

to

the occult music of a horse's gray,

stone

hooves.

6

Saleem

has

a

nose for the

energy

of

Mumbai,

just

as it

is

Mum

bai's energeia

that

brings the narrative to life. Midnight s

hildren

survives

because

it lives on,

and

off, this

remarkable

"energy"

to

move

across

the city, and the country, like an in-

somniac street-walker-profligate and promiscuous, vulner-

able

and venereal-hungrily in search of language in which

to picture

the movement

of

the city. The narrative moves in

a single page from the coconuts of Juhu Beach to the ritual

of rice eating

in

the

city

and then

to

the

Ganesh

Chaturti

fes-

tival ofthe Elephant god at Chowpatty Beach, where

both

rice

and

coconuts are

cast

into

the sea as ritual offerings. The

narrative

"energy'' builds up list by list, word by word, name

by name, place by place, in that palimpsestical style

of

the

layered

descriptions of

places, peoples,

and things.

Saleem's

olfactory explorations of the

city

also

reveal

an underlying

anxiety, an ongoing awareness

that

Independence comes at

the

cost

of

Partition, and

the dream

of pluralism may be

threatened by

the

nightmare

of provincialism, regionalism,

and communalism. The

nightwalker

is

kept

awake by the

sound of the hobnail boots on the

cobbles.

The fetish

ofprofuse

and desperate linguistic description of

urban landscapes represents

a

desire to

preserve in minute

and persisten t detail the

elements

of

a

larger pluralism asso

ciated

with Mumbai,

which

feels itself

under

threat. The

larg

-

er

idea of India was,

regrettably, achieved only by disavowing

and destroying the

"constitutive" difference

of the way of

life

of the subcontinent's majority populations, Hindus

and

Mus

lims,

by cracking

the

country

at

Partition and

dividing

its

peoples. Division is not the "independence" of difference; it is

the

disappearance of

difference.

Attacks

of

terror-the

first in

1993,

the most recent

in No-

vember

2008-as

well as incidents of communal rioting have

tragically

left their mark on

a city that seems,

on

the surface,

to work busily against and across such ethnic and

religious

boundaries. Rushdie most often takes the coastal road Marine

Drive

as he makes

his

way from

south

to

north.

The

north is

the world

ofBo11ywood

with its

left-leaning

Muslim

Commu-

nist,

Qasim the Red, who hangs out at the Pioneer Cafe with

Amina Sinai. But

if

you tum away just before Chowpatty Beach

NTICIP TE

82



1 Gramsci

,

"The Philosop

hy of

"'-lisand lntelleciual and

M

oral Re

fo

rma

. . . ._-1r0m A

Gramscl

Reader

:

Se

leeled

1916-1

93

5, edited

by

David

flllglcs

(London: Lawrence and Wishart,

- 1..353.

2 F m

Guanari, The Three Ecologies

. . . . Brunswick. NJ : Athlone Press . 2000).

3

~ r

Ind

ia :

Understanding

Maximum

Ciry.

Acce

ssed fr

om

l l lmp:/.-W.

urban

-

age

.

net/03

_confer

ences/

car l

_mumbai.ht

ml. The

con

fe

rence was

lllelc:I in

M

umba

i, November

200

7

and

mganized by the

C

it ies

Programme at t

he

London School of E

conomics

and Political

Science and

the

Alfred Herrhausen

Society, th

e

In t

ernational F

orum

of

the

Deutsche Bank.

4 Rahul Men

ro tra, "Rema

king

Mumb

ai,"

in

Urban India: Unders tanding the

Maximum City. 46.

S

Ludwig

Wi

ttgenstein,

Cu

lt

ure

snd

Va/u.,,

ecited by

G. H. vonWright with Heikki

Hyman

, ranslated

by

Peter

Win

ch

(Oiicago: Un

iversity of

Chicago

Press,

1980). 7e.

6

Salman Ru

shdie

,

M

id

night'sChildrBn

Lo ndo n, Picador, 1982).

7

Pr

akash Jadhav, "Under

Dad

ar

Bridge

,"

in Poisoned

Bre

ad: Translations from

Modern

Marathi

Dalit Literature ed

ited

by Arjun

Dangle

(London

: San

gam

, 1992 ,

56-57.

into

the

city's old interior, you enter a

different

world. You

drive past Azad

Maidan, jus t

the

ot

her

side

of

Cathedral

School, past the

Goan-Roman

Catholic communities around

Girgaum,

then

around the Parsee

settleme

nts in

Grant

Roa d

and toward the

Muslim

a reas in Moh

amedall

i Road .

f

you

turned a

sharp

left

befo

re

ge

tting to the poorer

Anglo-Indian

communities

of Bycul la , you would en ter the once-Jewish

q

uarters of Nagpad

a wi

th wrai

th-like

women

se lling

string

cheese and

flat

Iraqi-Jewish sesame breads.The t eeming hin

terland of the city is wh

ere

the communal

riots

have left their

most

lasting

memories.

But

this

multistoried world of Mumbai exists beyond the

inspired

m ti r

of

Rushdi

e's middle-class world. t develops

a very

different kind of

n rgeia

in the interior

landscape

of

Mumbai's

northwest suburbs, part of the hinterland I just

sketched

out for you. Here the

old

closed-down

cloth

mills

decay

, and the unemployed settle in slums around their for

mer place

of

work as if

to suc

k on a

dried

-out teat. There, in

a

poem

titled "Under

Dadar

Bridge,"

named after

a

Mumbai

landmark that

conne

cts the centr

al

ci ty with t

he

nearest of

its once

indu

s

tr i

alized and now mall-ified s

uburbs

, a

Mara

thi Dalit

(U

ntou

chabl

e)

poet Prakash Jadhav tells a different

Hindu-Muslim st ory:

Hey,Ma,

tell

me my religion. Who am I?

Wh

at

am

I?

You are

not

a Hindu or a Muslim!

You

are an

abandoned spark of t he

World's lusty fires.

Rcligion?This is where I

stuff

religion!

Whores have only one religion, my son.

f you want a hole

to

fuck in, keep

Your cock in

your

pocket!

7

The place of "ecological" e

th i

cs lies

somewhere in-between

memory and the present;

it

dwells in th

at

transit ional move

ment

, the to-and-fro , between a

past

whose

ghosts

refuse

to die and

a

future whose gods

re

fuse to await the moment

of their destined birth.The enraged god of Eco Oikos Dwelling

screams

to

be properly housed, made

to

feel at

home

in

th

e

realms of

alterity and

proximity. "

Language

is ho

sp

it

ality,n

Emmanuel Levinas att

es

ts. And in the tension through which

we

move hither

and thither,

in

-be

t

wee

n

th

e

built

a

nd

the

unbuilt- t h ere

will

emerge a currency of creative

communica

tion

- l

anguag

e, landscape, the vocabulary of everyday life-

that may not

save

us

for all

time

, but will at least help

us

to

survive the

history ofour own existence.

Mumbai on

My

Mind: Some Thoughts on Sus

ta

inability

83

Bhabha, H.- Mumbai on My Mind, Some Thoughts on Sustainability (Article-2010)

Documents

Transcript of Bhabha, H.- Mumbai on My Mind, Some Thoughts on Sustainability (Article-2010)