New Delhi: Every time a building disappears in Mumbai, journalist and author Sidharth Bhatia said, he wonders about the people who vanish with it. During a discussion on his book, Mumbai: A Million Islands, at Delhi’s Kunzum bookstore on 24 March, Bhatia talked about the constant displacement reshaping India’s financial capital.
In a conversation with journalist Rishi Majumder, Bhatia described the book as an attempt to trace the human cost of Mumbai’s transformation from its colonial beginnings to its present day redevelopment boom. Through stories of neighbourhoods, workers, and forgotten spaces, Bhatia argued that the city’s celebrated upgradation often masks displacement and a growing divide in a society shaped by capitalism and politics.
“The building close to where I was living simply vanished one day. There is a displacement happening—social, economic, or spatial,” said Bhatia, while discussing his book that was published in November last year.
He wanted to determine the scale of community loss that comes with displacement.
“This was an inquiry that I set out to answer,” he said, addressing an audience that included Supreme Court advocate Raju Ramachandran, journalist MK Venu, and journalist Seema Chisti.
Bhatia took the audience back to the British Raj, when the rulers stitched the city with a colonial objective in mind such as commerce, travel, and convenience.
“It brought the city together,” he said, adding that the creation of Marine Drive was the direct result of the plague in the 1890s.
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‘Comforting the comfortable’
Rishi Majumder asked Bhatia about why protests have not happened in recent years when slums are removed from Mumbai: “Is it because of the co-option of the media?”
“The whole idea of journalism should be about comforting the oppressed and making them comfortable. Now we are comforting the comfortable and we are basically telling people, everything is fine, said Bhatia.
He added that the change has not emerged out of nowhere. It happened gradually.
Mumbai was built on the backs of the sweat and blood of textile workers for a long time—from 1855 to the 1970s. After the 1982 strike, most mills shut down and have been redeveloped into malls.
Bhatia said there has been talk for the last 25 years about creating museums for textile workers, but nothing has materialised yet. “We won’t even find them as museums because the idea is to eliminate memory,” he said.
Over the decades, the city has become segmented according to class. “It was not there earlier,” Bhatia said.
After the discussion, an audience member asked Bhatia where Mumbai stands in the national imagination.
“It’s still got the sea. That makes a big difference to its entire way of being.”
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)