Twenty years on, the film explores some of the ways in which the '92 riots in Bombay have been and continue to be represented - in the realms of art and photojournalism. It weaves in and out of...
Cities have long been imagined as sites of filth, corruption, alienation and despair. This dystopic vision emerges from the fact that urban agglomerations, as they grow on the back of accumulation of economic and political resources reproduce sharp inequalities among its inhabitants. Yet, on the other hand, cities have also presented themselves as beacons of hope to people who find opportunities of dignified livelihoods diminishing elsewhere. Driven to the city by poverty and aspirations of a better future such migrants, while trying to make a living in the bustling urban environment, also shape it in definite ways. They create habitable spaces out of nowhere and run the city with their unassuming intellectual and physical efforts.
While they make the city their home they do not quite get to enjoy the accompanying sense of belonging. They are required because of their central importance to processes through which urban spaces are renewed and world class cities created, yet they are treated like the unwanted residual by-products that such process are wont to throw up. On the one hand their labour is important to keep the cities running while on the other they are continuously rendered invisible and even marginal. This contradiction is the defining feature of the experiences of the urban underclass. A rapid decline in the steady sources of employment and non-existent social security coupled with systematic stigmatisation and marginalisation exposes such disadvantaged groups to frequent and brutal surges in the political and economic spheres.
The violence that the city of Mumbai experienced in 1992-93 and its aftermath then need to be examined in the context of both the liberalisation process and the resurgence of right-wing politics. The subsequent reconfiguration in the makeup of the city and the melancholy discourse about the demise of the cosmopolitan city should not lead us to only contemplate the experiences of the violence and the subsequent physical dislocation but also remember the turbulent days, more importantly, for the destruction of life-chances of those who were already living on the edges of the city.
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