Research Strategy

Akshid Rajendran
July 2018
Trabajo Fin de Máster
Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica
Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
Housing in Bollywood:
The Mumbai housing crisis revealed
through Indian cinema
Introduction

But home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle

around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited
space. Many, very diverse, components have a part in this,
landmarks and marks of all kinds.

— Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Thousand Plateuas

The domestic condition of a typical ‘Mumbaikar’ is one that is indeed spatially and
temporally drawn. However, this is not the case for every citizen of this culturally,
economically and politically diverse city. Mumbai experiences wide disparities in
housing between the affluent and the lower-middle income groups living in the city.
Despite a vibrant economic growth in the city since independence, housing conditions
have not improved proportionately. As comfortable living conditions accessible at a
premium, the working class often resides in cramped and poor-quality spaces. These
spaces, while far from ideal are oftentimes relatively expensive housing and usually
far from workplaces. Despite the housing crises, Mumbai continues to attract
migrants in search of new opportunities thereby contributing to a difficult cycle to
disrupt.

Housing in Mumbai: A Social Divide

As of 2018, Mumbai houses 18.4 million people at a density of around 21,000 /sq.km.
However about 60% of this figure consists of regular citizens living in informal
housing, slums and other unhygienic living conditions. This 60% population is
concentrated on parcels of land that cover a mere 6-8% of the city’s land. Dharavi,
located in the heart of Mumbai is Asia’s largest slum and informally houses over 1
million people. A large number of these dwellers simply occupy footpaths and
construct chawls (informal houses) over decades. However, partly owing to its high
density of over 277,136/sq.km, Dharavi is able to sustain a rich and diverse economy
of an annual turnover of US $1 billion.
On the other hand, Mumbai’s housing market according to the Economic Survey
(2017-18) tolerated about 0.48 million vacant houses. “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.

In early 2018, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed by the Maharashtra

government promising the development of 550,000 affordable houses. While builders
and developers have hope in these measures, experts argue that the first step must be
to make accessible the unsold half-million empty apartments.

In the preceding decades, the government has focussed on housing problems in a

variety of ways. From slum-rehabilitation, to slum-upgradation, to remotely located
social housing, a large number of MoUs, acts and bills have been passed.

Slum Rehabilitation
The Government of India has made efforts to eradicate the problems of urban slums
since the 1880s: the colonial era. However, these efforts have grown in effectiveness
since the 1970s, and especially after 1985. A series of events have motivated this
development of a sympathetic attitude towards the problem of slum upgrading.

Between 1991 and 1995, socialist policies in India were brought to an end. With the
liberalisation of the economic market, India experimented with a wave of
privatisation which empowered substantial participation amongst most industries.

The uniqueness of Mumbai’s approach also lies in its promotion of entrepreneurial

activity in the slum dwellers. The enabling schemes were aimed at giving them a
sense of security and making them self-dependent. It has lately become evident that
the optimal route to slum-rehabilitation is a participatory method wherein slum-
dwellers using their entrepreneurial activities collaborate in the construction and
development of their environments.

The central issue is not the absence of academic research and well-construed
solutions. Rather it is a problem of communication. If the right resources are directed
in a responsible way that doesn’t solely favour the developers’ necessities, slum
dwellers can self-initiate an upgradation. What is lacking in this case is a collective
effort to bring about social change. Effective community communication can solve this
problem using the right tools to empathise with communitarian sentiments. This is
where Bollywood would come in.

The Bombay Film Industry

“Or poking through a house, in closets shut for years,

Full of the scent of time - acrid, musky, dank,
One comes, perhaps, upon a flask of memories
In whose escaping scent a soul returns to life.”

— Charles Baudelaire, The Flask

Baudelaire tells us how talking about domesticity can never be isolated from the
sensorial. Bollywood has quite mastered this sensationalisation of cinema over the
last century. The movie-making business in India is the world’s largest by all
measures. By the 1930s, Indian cinema was already producing more than 200 films a
year. Today that figure is close to 2000 including all languages. Bombay and its
cinema have grown significantly over the last century; however, it would be difficult
to assert which influenced the other to a greater degree.

In fact, the exhibition of films in India existed from the late 19th century although
entirely dependent on imported films until 1912. This was also around the time that
Bombay began to undergo fundamental structural transformation as the city went on
a drive to clean up the city and align urban spaces to well-connected networks.
Bombay cinema grew from the in the early twentieth century as demand and supply
raced to meet each other. In the year 1925, the first upmarket cinema hall to show
exclusively Bombay films was inaugurated at the Dubash Theatre on Charni Road.

Following India’s independence and the second world war coming to an end, some of
the most critically acclaimed Hindi films of all time were produced. The city began to
emerge not merely as the landscape that blanketed social narratives, rather a as its
own theme. Awaara (1951) addressed how urban life was perceived as both a
nightmare and a dream while films such as Pyaasa (1957) critiqued the surreality of
city life.

Bombay’s cinema continued to grow steadily, past this “Golden Era”, and was
eventually granted “industry” status towards the turn of the twentieth century.
Seemingly, the state never viewed Indian cinema as a culturally relevant generator of
media in spite of its decades of success as an industry. Perhaps lines can be drawn
from the nationalist narrative of the political climate at the time. Popular cinema on
the other hand, began in the city and almost always stayed there as a large percent of
Indian cinema’s landscape came to be dominated by urban narratives.

Towards the 1970s, India as a subcontinent underwent a variety of changes. Indira

Gandhi and her Congress returned to power with an overwhelming majority along
with a large number of socialist and nationalist policies being enacted. Around this
time, economic and social problems as well as partisan tensions grew increasingly
unrest within the then political landscape. Gandhi was accused of corruption and
shortly thereafter, strikes erupted across the country practically paralysing the
economy.

As a result, films such as Zanjeer (1973) and Deewar (1975) reinterpreted rural
themes similar to Mother India (1957) and Gunga Jumna (1961) in a fresh
contemporary urban context, reflecting the then socio-economic and socio-political
climate. A growing dissatisfaction and apparently suppressed frustration began to be
expressed in cinema, including themes related to mass disillusionment about the
unprecedented growth of slums, urban poverty, corruption and crime. This resulted
in the creation of the “angry man” figure played often by Amitabh Bachchan thereby
empathising with the urban poor.

Frame from Zanjeer (1973)

Perhaps the film industry has served as an archive of the city’s history while film has
obviously influenced popular culture, fashion and the music industry alike. Bollywood
has been shown by numerous scholars to be the greatest reservoir of the urban
experience of Bombay at our disposal, and with good reason. From high-budget to
low-budget, every film representing the city of Bombay has recreated or rethought
urban space to craft a unique cinematic archive of the city.
Not only has Bollywood successfully acted as a sort of escape from the troubles of a
city-life, rather it has acted as a self-reflexion of the collective urban vision of Bombay.
Bollywood has remained through the turn of the millennium as the clearest, most
immediate and entertaining medium of communication with the masses. Owing to its
characteristic captivating nature, Bollywood as a medium of communication for social
change has been explored by various filmmakers.

Bollywood and Social Change

As we see in Colin Young’s study entitled, Film and Social Change (1969), in the late
60s and early 70s, fictional film was often devoid of any sort of complicated cultural
statement. Such a conclusion comes from a quick analysis of films such as Weekend
(1967) by Godard or Shame (1968). Young goes on to criticise filmmakers such as
Godard stating that although later films tackled social issues, they have done so in a
quasi-journalistic style using characters that overshadowed the real issues
themselves.

In the Indian film industry from the very beginning, films used themes surrounding
the “city” and urbanisation to express prevalent nationalist narratives. The birth of
the Indian cinema coincided with the national struggle against British colonialism,
and therefore, from its very inception, cinema was engaged in defining a cultural
identity that was Indian in its “allegory, shape, and form” (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 52). In an
ethnographic study Shakuntala Rao recognises the relation of the slum to its larger
social and urban context. “By calling the slum an “unintended city” that forms the
“underground” of a modern city—the one that provides “energy, cheap labor, that
propels both the engine of civic life and the ambitions of the modernizing elite”,
Nandy (pp. 16–17) argues that the Indian cinema represents the tastes and longings
of the slums which dominate the urban public sphere.” She goes on to assert using
various interviews to back up the ethnography that social messages often get lost in
the commercialisation of Bollywood. However, Bollywood and the themes that it
deals with are not solely influenced by market trends. Perhaps the international and
urban demands have contributed to a certain influence but social themes have also
been dealt with over the last two decades.

Numerous documentaries such as An Insignificant Man (2016), India’s Daughter

(2015) and Born into Brothels (2004) have spread awareness on wide-reaching
topics of social interest in India. Documentary film is said to be convincing if an
adequate record of an idea, process or event was communicated. However fictional
works in local culture have a much more ordinary reach using strategic storytelling
methods influenced deeply by local cultures of dance, music and colour.

Hypothesis
The principal objectives of the study are two-fold: Firstly, the study aims to translate
to an accessible and popular language the architectural and urban studies conducted
by academic, public and private investigations on the housing situation in Mumbai.
And secondly, to use Bollywood to reveal the asymmetry of the social conditions in
Mumbai.

The studies selected shall be constricted to research that compares high-density,

informal, urban settlements to the large amount of housing vacancy and
unaffordability of housing in the city. The unaffordability shall eventually contend
with architectural matters such as construction practices, material research as the
format attempt to ease the viewer’s introduction to the existing research.

The work then becomes an exercise primarily of architectural communication,

looking into making existing urban research accessible to the Mumbai local.

The hypothesis thus is as follows: Bollywood being a medium that catalyses socio-
political change, can function as a medium of architectural communication in order to
tackle Mumbai’s housing crisis.

The contemporary architect can never cease to be at the service of the society.
However, this does not imply imposing urban design onto a given society, rather that
the society itself must become part of the architectural design. A large part of the
design process then involves both listening to a diverse variety of concerns as we as
communication of architectural and socio-political and economic concepts to a
generic public. As public-participation intensifies, we see that complexities become
easier to receive from and transmit to participants. But the work of the architect must
be facilitated by various methods of communication. James Carey referred in
Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society to the “Ritual View” of
communication wherein one understands communication as a maintenance of society
over time. The study proposed would act as “drama” according to J. Carey, through its
dramatic portrayal of the arena of the housing crisis.
Object of the study
The study shall work as a bridge between popular cinema and popular academic
research on housing affordability in Mumbai. Hence, there shall be two initial fields
identified for background research.

The research on cinema shall deal with looking at the stories about the typical
informal-settlement neighbourhood in Mumbai. Primarily scrutinising Dharavi and its
socio-political tensions a contextual understanding will also be emphasized. Once
achieved, the study shall go into the household in order to understand how the
intricacies of social and urban studies can be explained through Bollywood scenes. All
the films that treat Dharavi as part of its narrative shall be treated as classifiable. For
instance, Salim-Javed’s Deewaar (1975), Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay! (1988) where
several child actors were from the Dharavi slum, Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Parinda
(1989), Sudhir Mishra's Dharavi (1991), Ram Gopal Varma's "Indian Gangster
Trilogy" (1998–2005) and Sarkar series (2005–2008), Vikram Bhatt's Footpath
(2003), Anurag Kashyap's Black Friday (2004) and No Smoking (2007), Madhur
Bhandarkar's Traffic Signal (2007), Rajeev Khandelwal's Aamir (2008), and other
films based on the Mumbai underworld. The study shall take into account several
films by Mani Ratnam based on the experiences of Tamil immigrants to Mumbai have
depicted the Dharavi slum, including Nayakan (1987) and Bombay (1995).

Picture depicting the incongruency of the housing landscape in Mumbai

On the other hand, the study shall focus on architectural investigation into the
housing crisis and conduct a primary categorisation of existing work. The research
shall attempt to classify based on classic architectural housing themes such as
materials, prefabrications, affordability strategies and technology as well as policies.
These studies would include studies such as Bredenoord, J., P. Van Lindert, and P.
Smets. Affordable Housing in the Urban Global South: Seeking Sustainable Solutions.
Taylor & Francis, 2014.; Gandhi, Sahil. “Economics of Affordable Housing in Indian
Cities: The Case of Mumbai” Environment and Urbanization ASIA 3, no. 1 (March 1,
2012); “Housing in the Urban Age: Inequality and Aspiration in Mumbai - Anand -
2011 - Antipode - Wiley Online Library.”; Padora, Sameep. In the Name of Housing: A
Study of 11 Projects in Mumbai, 2016.; “The Changing Right to the City: Urban Renewal
and Housing Rights in Globalizing Shanghai and Mumbai - Weinstein - 2009 - City &;
Community - Wiley Online Library.”, Hohmann, Jessie M. “Visions of Social
Transformation and the Invocation of Human Rights in Mumbai: The Struggle for the
Right to Housing.” Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal 13 (2010): 135.

Project Scope and Deliverables

The research aims to present itself as a video essay that documents the research
process itself. With a length of about ten minutes, the viewer shall get a documentary
perspective on the urban tensions of the city’s state of housing.

Development Strategy
The project shall be confronted as a documentary process through a step-by-step
approximation to the cinema industry’s work at three different scales:

a. The City Scale: Cinema that talks about city of Mumbai using
slums/housing as a filmographic element, with a contextualising of the
neighbourhood (e.g.: Life in a Metro, Deewar, Salaam Bombay)
b. The Neighbourhood Scale: Cinema that deals with the themes within the
neighbourhood and stories that interrelate various parts thereof. (e.g.:
(Slumdog Millionaire, Kaala, Dharavi)
c. The Domestic/Intimate Scale: Cinema that surround domestic
narratives and architecturally represent the home as a filmographic
element. (e.g.: (Parinde, Life in a Metro)
On the other hand, the research on the phenomenon of urban housing in Mumbai
shall be confronted and consequently classified into the following architectural
topics:

a. Material and Labour Research: Studies investigating the role of materials

and construction methods in relation to their contexts and local traditions.

E.g.: Venkatarama Reddy, B. V, and K. S Jagadish. “Embodied Energy of

Common and Alternative Building Materials and Technologies.” Energy
and Buildings 35, no. 2 (February 1, 2003)

b. Urbanism and Site Planning Research: Studies that talk about housing in
Mumbai from a settlement point of view, and land-use planning

E.g.: Chakrabarti, P. G. Dhar. “Urban Crisis in India: New Initiatives for

Sustainable Cities.” Development in Practice 11, no. 2–3 (May 1, 2001)

c. Public Participation Models: Studies involving models of public

participation and critical analyses of their ups and downs

E.g.: Mitra, Sanjay. “Planned Urbanisation through Public Participation:

Case of the New Town, Kolkata.” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 11
(2002)

d. Engineering Research and High-tech Fabrication: Here studies that

negotiate between high and low tech, dealing with scaling in cities shall be
considered.

E.g.: Singh, Amarjit. Creative Systems in Structural and Construction

Engineering. CRC Press, 2001.

Projected Utility of the Study

As Indian cinema began to gain popular appeal over the 60s and the 70s, in spite of
political tensions of the time, the typical viewer would go to the cinema in search for a
quick escape into a crafted fantasy land. As we move into a globalised world where
most slum dwellers of Dharavi possess a smartphone and watch clips of Bollywood
online and movies in groups of 3-5 on a single smartphone, we see that the typical
resident of the “informal housing” is not from a completely different cultural stratum.
The study intends to sew existing urban research on housing and affordability in an
accessible fashion. If communicated appropriately, the intent is to influence policy
decisions on slum rehabilitation and look into slum upgradation rather than
demolition and reconstruction. On the other hand, the study intends to create educate
local residents of Mumbai on the actual cause of the asymmetry of the housing
situation in the city. Taking on an activist tone, the video essay shall bring to light
prevalent social tensions in the housing scenario in Mumbai and urge residents to a
call to action which would essentially become the equivalent of signing a petition.
 Bibliography

Bachelard, G., Jolas, M., & Stilgoe, J. R. (1994). The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press.

Bhaumik, K. (2001). The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913-1936.

University of Oxford.

Bredenoord, J., Van Lindert, P., & Smets, P. (2014). Affordable Housing in the Urban
Global South: Seeking Sustainable Solutions. Taylor & Francis.

Ciecko, A. (2004). Into the Sc(re)enery: Bollywood Locations and Docu-diaspora.

Asian Cinema, 15(2), 5–19.

Chakrabarti, P. G. D. (2001). Urban crisis in India: New initiatives for sustainable

cities. Development in Practice, 11(2–3), 260–272.

Chakravarty, S. S. (1989). National identity and the realist aesthetic: Indian cinema of

the fifties. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 11(3), 31–48.

Chakravarty, S. S. (2011). National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987.

University of Texas Press.

Gandhi, S. (2012). Economics of Affordable Housing in Indian Cities: The Case of

Mumbai. Environment and Urbanization ASIA, 3(1), 221–235.

Kapur, J., & Pendakur, M. (2007). The Strange Disappearance of Bombay from its Own
Cinema: A Case of Imperialism or Globalization? Democratic Communiqué, 21(1), 43.

Kavoori, A. P., & Punathambekar, A. (2008). Global Bollywood. NYU Press.

Caws, M. A. (1991). City Images: Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy, and Film.
Psychology Press.

Lefebvre, H. (1968). Le droit à la ville. Anthropos.

 McFarlane, C. (2008). Postcolonial Bombay: decline of a cosmopolitanism city?

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26(3), 480–499.

Mehta, S. (2006). Maximum city: Bombay lost and found. Penguin Books India.

Nijman, J. (2009). A Study of Sapce in Mumbai’s Slums. Tijdschrift Voor Economische

En Sociale Geografie, 101(1), 4–17.

Padora, S. (2016). In the Name of Housing: A Study of 11 Projects in Mumbai.

Punathambekar, A. (2013). From Bombay to Bollywood: the making of a global media

industry. New York: New York University Press.

Shiel, M., & Fitzmaurice, T. (2011). Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a
Global Context. John Wiley & Sons.

Srinivas, L. (2009). Cinema in the City: Tangible Forms, Transformations and the

Punctuation of Everyday Life. Visual Anthropology, 23(1), 1–12.

Sawhney, R. (2012). The Virtual Reality of Indian Cinema. Interventions, 14(3), 395–

409.