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MUMBAI INDUSTRIAL MUSEUM COLLABORATION

Proposal to the Arts Collaboration Programme

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), Bangalore

Submitted on 12 April 2004

Revised on 4 October 2004

Accepted for Seed Grant on 15 February 2005

© Copyright 2003–2004 CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust), Mumbai

Contents of Proposal

1. Introduction.................................................................................................

2. About CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust).......................................

3. Reimagining the Museum............................................................................

4. Reimagining Collaboration..........................................................................

I. Industrial Museum Workshops..........................................................................

II. Industrial Museum Archive...............................................................................

5. Background of Project Coordinators............................................................

I. Anirudh Paul.....................................................................................................

II. Shekhar Krishnan.............................................................................................

6. Industrial Museum Collaborators .............................................................

Supporting Materials to Proposal

1. CRIT Organisational Plan

2. CRIT Trust Deed and Registration Certificate

3. Report of the Study Group on the Cotton Textile Mills in Mumbai,

Charles Correa, Chairman and Anirudh Paul, Project-in-Charge, August

1996

4. Shekhar Krishnan, Murder of the Mills: A Case Study of Phoenix Mills,

Mumbai: Girangaon Bachao Andolan and Lokshahi Hakk Sanghatana,

April 2000

5. CD-ROM of Photography by Rajesh Vora and Shekhar Krishnan

1. Introduction

The Industrial Museum Collaboration seeks to address the crisis of civic imagination

driven by two dramatic transformations in our contemporary urban landscapes —

the deindustrialisation of manufacturing and production, and the dematerialisation of

culture and information.

These parallel transformations have replaced largescale factories and organised

urban working classes with dispersed networks of subcontracted and informal

production in slums and hinterlands on the one hand; and on the other hand, they

have replaced the space of the traditional museum, library and archive with virtual

networks of communications, entertainment and commerce. While these historic

industrial and technological changes are common to cities across the world, in

Mumbai their articulation in the public sphere remains deeply contested and

polarised.

In the twenty years since the Bombay Textile Strike inaugurated a postindustrial era

of social and spatial restructuring — in which nearly a million factory workers lost

their jobs in various industries — political and cultural responses to urban change are

divided. They range from the celebratory rhetoric of the utopia of finance and

services, styled on Singapore or Hong Kong, to the passionate protests of activists and

community groups against the destruction of livelihoods and homes, in factory

closures and slum demolitions. The new politics of space and work in postindustrial

Mumbai has yet to be comprehensively documented, much less reimagined, and the

importance of a collaborative urbanism to this task is obvious.

CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust) Industrial Museum CollaborationMumbai Page 4 of 35

In this proposal for the Industrial Museum Collaboration, we outline a project to

develop an Archive and Network, which can bring together various individual

practitioners and groups into dialogue and action on these questions, in relation to

the textile mill districts of the innercity, also known as the Mumbai Mill Lands or

Girangaon.

2. About CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust)

CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust) is a group of architects, scholars,

technicians and artists who have worked together in different contexts over the past

seven years. CRIT is was registered in June 2003 as a public educational trust in

Mumbai, with the aim of undertaking research and intervention on contemporary

cultural and spatial practices in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. CRIT regards this

vast urban realm as its laboratory and terrain for articulating a critical urbanism. Our

concept of urbanism is based on the recognition that everyday exchange between

disciplines and across sectors is the basic condition of urban environments and civic

formations, and that collective research is essential in transforming city spaces and

institutions through knowledgebased interventions.

3. Reimagining the Museum

The idea of a museum today departs radically from the concept of the modern

museum as we know it. The form of knowledge represented by the traditional idea of

the museum is often alienating — representing the abstraction of knowledge from its


living contexts. Postcolonial critics have charged that museums in the colonial world

represented the objectification of living cultures, and their classification and

exhibition as a sets of lifeless artefacts and exotic objects is part of the domination of

colonial science and racist ideology over native knowledge systems. Another critique

of museums sees them as preserves of the past, of the lost history of communities or

peoples, with no contemporary relevance except as cultural or historical memorials,

or as tourist sites. Yet another critique views museums, like art galleries and other

cultural spaces, as narrowly fixated on aesthetics or symbolism, reflecting increasing

consumerism and the emptying of meaning in public culture. What makes traditional

museums so alienating is that while they exhibit artefacts and objects, the knowledge

about them is produced somewhere else — by experts, scientists, and bureaucratic

authorities.

The sense of wonder and amazement which traditional museums generate is of

knowledge as static object, of individual perception removed from personal meaning

and social context. A similar alienation around knowledge is mirrored in many

modern institutions — from the school and university to the central library and state

archive — whose power and forms of knowledge we are only now beginning to

question. Recent advances in communications, information and media technologies

have provided the conditions for this questioning, by blurring boundaries of time and

space, of the actual and virtual dimensions of perception. Television and visual media

have radically altered our perception of the written word, and the Internet has

subverted traditional means of organising knowledge in libraries. This

dematerialisation of perception through mass media presents an opportunity to re


orient our relationship to knowledge and its representations in public culture and

space, thereby reconceptualising the museum as institution.

Unlike many institutions which tend to isolate themselves from their the surrounding

community, the museum as a space is explicitly organised to admit a constant stream

of visitors into its boundaries. However, despite recognising its character as a public

space, we ignore the agency of the public which frequents museums, bringing their

own ways of seeing and constructing subjective meaning from narratives, objects and

artefacts. Going to a museum can be an experience in understanding the complex

relationships of perception and imagination that we have with objects, artefacts, and

technology. Museums are spaces which allow for a more tactile understanding of

knowledge, and how it is produced. Seen in this way, they are also the hub of vibrant

cultural communities publicly interacting in a shared space of reflection and

pedagogy.

Today museums can accommodate multiple narratives about objects, artefacts and

their relationships to people, living relations which can be animated and narrated,

rather than simply exhibited. The idea of objects or artefacts taken out of their living

contexts and selfevidently standing for themselves has no place in our conception of

the museum, which seeks to explore how deeply enmeshed are objects — especially

technological objects — with human activity and social formation.

Our conception of the Industrial Museum builds on the recognition of these

possibilities, and seeks to take them further by engaging with the politics of

museumisation, the tourism and culture industries, and practices of urban heritage

and conservation. The Industrial Museum Collaboration will enter these debates by


articulating a new kind of cultural institution, challenging the colonial and nationalist

tradition of the modern museum, and revising their identity as public spaces.

In Mumbai, public awareness of urban arts and heritage has experienced a significant

revival, in the same historical moment as manufacturing industries and factory

workers have fled the Island City and Suburbs of Greater Mumbai. However, heritage

discourse and conservation practice has only implicitly acknowledged this important

fact. Urban heritage has been almost exclusively about the colonial city — protecting

its built fabric and rendering visible its monumental signs — reinvigorating civic pride

through historical nostalgia.

Heritage has been about the colonial or modernist city, not about the industrial city.

As heritage has increased in public consciousness and visibility — through legislation

and protection, the organisation of new city and neighbourhood festivals, and an

outpouring of romantic cultural representations — industry and manufacturing have

been obscured from public view and memory.

Vast complexes of production and entire workingclass communities across the city

have been decimated and extinguished, in a prolonged social and spatial

restructuring of the city’s economy since the Bombay Textile Strike twenty years ago

— in the textile mills of central Mumbai, the chemical and engineering factories and

industrial estates in suburban Greater Mumbai, and in the old docks of the Bombay

Port Trust.

Through the Industrial Museum Collaboration, we hope to chart a shift in the focus of

urban conservationists, arts and heritage enthusiasts, and the public from the

monuments and signs of the colonial or modernist periods to illuminating this hidden


Other of the picture postcards and coffeetable representations — the people,

machines and places that produced the twentiethcentury industrial metropolis of

Mumbai.

The Collaboration is premised on rendering visible the history of the industrial city

which has been extinguished by factory closures and the flight of manufacturing, as

well as the new “global city” which is developing around economies of services,

information and culture. Our proposed Collaboration seeks to recover the active

presence of work and technology in our everyday lives, challenging the commonly

accepted vision of manufacturing inevitably giving way to services.

In the era of globalisation, megacities like Mumbai have emerged as the primary site

for the articulation of new social, economic and cultural imaginations, and the

various technological means to realise these visions. The Industrial Museum

Collaboration seeks to find a new culturalinstitutional form to narrate these histories,

and invite the urban public to tell its own stories of work, aspiration and movement

that produced the thriving megacity we know today as the Mumbai Metropolitan

Region.

While practitioners such as historians, architects, activists and artists each have their

own powerful ways of imagining the city, it is only recently that their isolation from

each others’ ways of seeing and understanding has been loosened. Wider economic

and technological changes are breaking the sway of a generation of institutions which

established the postcolonial nationstate as the dominant form of cultural and

political imagination.


The breakdown of these forms — so far experienced largely as crisis and decline —

presents an opportunity to reimagine the relations between knowledges on which

nationalist institutions had imposed an estrangement, in the name of disciplinarity

and expertise. Amongst these alienated forms are the traditional museum and

archive, whose present crisis holds out the possibility of forging new forms of inter

disciplinary knowledge which arise from the deep disjunctures between different

practices when they address the city as an object.

Indeed it is in only in cities and urban contexts that practices are compelled to

recognise their complex interdependence when confronting crises of public spaces

such as institutions, environments, and markets. The highly polarised and contested

nature of the debate on Mumbai’s Mill Lands demands such a recognition of the

collaborative nature of urbanism.

4. Reimagining Collaboration

The idea of collaboration contained in the IFA Request for Proposals for the Arts

Collaboration Programme notes that “alongside forging new connections between

individuals/groups and their specific practices, collaboration often enables

disciplinary convergences, breaking new grounds for interdisciplinary practices and

creativities”.

In the context of the proposed project, our idea of collaboration is centred around the

possibility of creating new imaginations of civic community by engaging with the

themes of dematerialisation/museumisation and deindustrialisation both within and

between disciplinary practices in the city. Each of the Collaborators (see below) have


joined the project on the basis of concerns unique to their disciplines, as well as

through their common desire to construct an inclusive platform to address a post

industrial city torn apart by the forces of a chaotic and predatory capitalism. The

Industrial Museum Collaboration will thus be operationalised at two levels.

Through the Industrial Museum Workshops, the specific disciplinary concerns of the

collaborating practitioners — in film and photography, architecture and urban design,

history and geography, and activism and urban development — will be explored

through a series of intensive pedagogic interactions. Each collaborator will design and

organise a Workshop involving fellow practitioners, selected resource persons, and

students and young persons from the local community, in addition to the other

Collaborators.

Parallel to this, the Project Coordinators and Collaborator will help compile and

curate a webbased, public Industrial Museum Archive from existing materials and

documentation on the Mill Lands — from digital photography, video and sound

resources, to maps and documents and reports — contributed by the Collaborators

from their own work, as well as through their contacts with community members,

activists, artists and collectors. The Archive will both serve as an index and repository

for the Collaboration — containing and sharing the previous work of the

Collaborators, archival resources, and the material generated in the Workshops — as

well as an ongoing virtual exhibition of the Industrial Museum.

In a meeting of the Collaborators in September 2004, we agreed that we all feel a

need for a common platform to support the aspirations and concerns of the local


community and activists, as well articulate a dialogue with the rest of the city, which

the community is unable to address in its own terms, and where we have a special

responsibility as concerned practitioners.

We also agreed that the time is now, considering the rapid changes in the locality,

and the urgency of constructing a public platform and producing a document with

which to negotiate with the city and state for creating a permanent institutional space

in Central Mumbai — whether an industrial museum or kamgar kendra or cultural

centre — through which local youth and the community can take ownership of their

past and future in the city. The impetus of the Collaboration has arisen amongst

outsiders with concerns animated by their own disciplines and creative practices, but

we feel that the real meaning of collaboration is in exploring the relationship of our

practices to a specific neighbourhood and community, and their crises of recognition

when confronted with the culture and politics of the mill lands.

The idea of Girangaon is itself a product of an imagination through which the present

Collaborators rallied together in support of the rights of workers in the closed mills

through the nineties. This is the form of Collaboration which we hope to achieve in

the proposed project. The Workshops and Archive, as interactive processes, will evolve

the Industrial Museum from a curatorial concept to a public document, over the year

long Collaboration. These two processes will be operationalised after a preliminary

threemonth phase, in which the Collaborators will hold an internal workshop to

detail out their plans for their Workshops and Archives. It is through these two

processes — the intradisciplinary Workshops and interdisciplinary Archives — that

the phenomena of dematerialisation and deindustrialisation in Girangaon can be

better visualised and understood through a range of urban practices, and the


imagination of the city can therefore be reclaimed.

I. Industrial Museum Workshops

The Industrial Museum Workshops will form a key medium by which to bring the

Collaborators into regular and sustained dialogue through participatory pedagogic

and documentation activities. They are the fundamental structure of the

Collaboration, in which we envisage holding six bimonthly Workshops over the

course of the yearlong Collaboration. These six Workshops will be convened after an

internal Workshop for the Collaborators and Coordinators in the threemonth

preliminary phase of the grant (see below), in which they will detail out their plans

and ideas for their Workshops and activities related to them (see Section 6, Industrial

Museum Collaborators, below, for the list of Collaborators and their brief proposals).

Each Collaborator will design and convene a Workshop involving fellow practitioners

from their discipline, as well as selected resource persons, students, activists and

young persons from the local community (in addition to the other Collaborators). The

six Industrial Museum Workshops will tentatively be organised as follows:

• Music/Sound/Performance (Paromita Vohra)

• Documentary Photography (Rajesh Vora)

• Heritage Conservation and Architecture (Neera Adarkar)

• Urban Development, Land and Housing (Arvind Adarkar and Meena Menon)

• History and Geography (Raj Chandavarkar and Douglas Haynes)


The workshops will explore specific issues of concern to practitioners when they are

addressing the culture and politics of Girangaon, and the phenomena of

dematerialisation/deindustrialisation in relation to their own and each others’

disciplinary practices and specific concerns. The Workshop programmes and plans

will be further articulated by the Collaborators in the threemonth preliminary grant

phase in an internal Workshop (see Sections 6 and 7, Collaborators and Budget,

below).

At the initiative of the Collaborators, the Workshops will also encourage and yield

further work and documentation on Girangaon — such as narrative photography and

video, audio recording of local musical and performance traditions, chawl,

neighbourhood and housing designs plans and designs, and translations of literature

and poetry. We hope to work with the youth of the Rozgar Hakk Samiti in these

documentation activities, to both teach them about our own practices, as well as learn

from their own ways of seeing their locality, and their understanding of its history,

culture and politics. The work resulting from these activities will be digitally stored in

the Industrial Museum Archive, and form the curatorial resources for the final

document and exhibition.

We will aim to organise the Workshops in conjunction with other local educational

and cultural institutions, and interested groups in their specific disciplines. In these

Workshops, we expect to create a community of practitioners who can openly share

and explore their affinities and differences, as they collectively confront the concerns

of the Industrial Museum Collaboration.


While supporting such a dialogue initially through the participation of Collaborators,

the Workshops will further aim at the formation of concrete institutional and project

agendas in direct partnership with associations of local community stakeholders such

as the Girangaon Rozgar Hakk Samiti, and other interested parties such as the State

Government and National Textile Corporation (NTC). The Girangaon Rozgar Hakk

Samiti, an organisation of youth and former workers, hopes to establish a community

centre or ‘kamgar kendra’ in Central Mumbai.

The proposed activities of this centre include vocational and educational training,

sports and entertainment, and civic and cultural activities inspired by the traditions of

workingclass theatre, poetry, literature and arts in Girangaon. In partnership with

this and other community organisations, we hope to achieve our objective of

reimagining the form of cultural institutions such as the museum and urban

discourses such as heritage conservation, in a less elitist and more inclusive direction,

through the direct participation of the community in the representation and

imagination of their history, aspirations and identities in a new public space.

II. Industrial Museum Archive

In the past ten years, the debate on the Mumbai Mill Lands and Girangaon has

yielded a rich fund of documentation, critical literature and creative expression on the

phenomenon of urban deindustrialisation — from academic monographs and books,

to activist factfinding reports, to urban design studies and planning documents, to

photographic and video documentation of mill workers’ struggles, to artistic


representations of the city’s postindustrial landscapes. All of the Collaborators have

been involved in these efforts at documenting, understanding and imagining these

epochal social and spatial transformations, through their own work as filmmakers,

activists, architects, photographers, historians and curators.

Our proposed Industrial Museum Archive will comprehensively index, collate, and

compile into a online, publicaccess digital database these valuable resources and

materials, many of which are at present inaccessible, out of circulation, or unknown

to the public. The Archive is intended to foreground the people’s struggles and

resistances to urban deindustrialisation since the Bombay Textile Strike in the early

eighties — a watershed event which, twenty years earlier, inaugurated new practices

of factfinding, investigation and documentation for a generation of young urban

activists.

The Archive aims at both empowering the people’s struggles through a recognition of

their place in history, as well as encouraging new research and documentation on

local and community histories of the urban working classes, the shifting social and

spatial dynamics of land, labour and technology in the postindustrial city, the

aesthetics and politics of industrial landscapes in art and cinema, and other concerns.

The Industrial Museum Archive will be initially developed as a comprehensive index

of resources, people, and materials presently known to the Collaborators.

These include historical photography of the strikes and working class movement in

the neighbourhood; oral histories of poets, activists, and workers; development plans

and policy documents relating to landuse, planning, and the redevelopment of the

mill districts; maps and urban designs of the mill districts done in previous studies;


architectural documentation and lists of structures for heritage conservation;

bibliographies of Marathi theatre, poetry and literature specifically concerned with

the mill workers movement; video footage of the neighbourhood and the

community’s struggle over the past twenty years; and directories of individuals in the

community and city concerned with all of the above. The Collaborators’ Workshops

will generate more materials for the Archive, which we see a key medium of exchange

— linking the specific disciplinary concerns of the Workshops with the wider inter

disciplinary agenda of the Collaboration.

As an outcome of the proposed project, this public digital archive will be

operationalised through a web portal run on free/opensource software, published on

a copyleft license which will protect the original rights of the authors and

contributors, while encouraging reproduction and dissemination in new forms for

education, research and advocacy.

The Archive will base itself on an overall map of Girangaon and Central Mumbai —

listing both tangible structures and spaces and intangible memories, narratives, and

images — providing a framework for indexing and archiving existing materials, and

developing new inquiries about specific local institutions, neighbourhoods, or mill

districts in a spatial context. This Archive will comprise the virtual resource base for a

curated exhibition organised by Coordinators and Collaborators at the end of the

grant cycle. The Exhibition will feature installations, documentation, material and

artefacts which could provide the basis for a future museum or cultural institution,

which the Central and State Government have already proposed establishing in the

Mumbai Mill Lands, with the support of the National Textile Corporation (NTC).


Apart from those cited above, some of the many institutional sources of material for

the Industrial Museum Archive we have identified are:

Study Group on the Cotton Textile Mill Lands of Mumbai (Correa Committee Report),

Girangaon Bachao Andolan, Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti and Maharashtra

Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti, Lokshahi Hakk Sanghatana, Committee for the Protection

of Democratic Rights (CPDR), Congress of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), Girni Kamgar

Union, Maniben Kara Institute, Trade Union Solidarity Committee (TUSC), Bombay

MillOwners’ Association (BMOA), Indian Cotton Mills Federation, Indian Textile

Journal, Maharashtra State Archives, Office of the Textile Commissioner, East India

Cotton Merchants Association, Asiatic Society of Bombay Special Collections, National

Textile Corporation (NTC), Union Research Group, BUILD Documentation Centre,

Centre for Education & Documentation (CED), Bombay Textile Research Association

(BTRA), and the libraries of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce and the Indian

Merchants Chamber.

We hope that, through additional funding from other sources, the Archive will

subsequently develop into a resource base for researchers, activists, and cultural

practitioners seeking a broader understanding of industrial and technological change

in contemporary Mumbai.


5. Background of Project Coordinators

I. Anirudh Paul

After many years of chaotic and piecemeal redevelopment by private millowners and

builders, on 29 February 1996, the Government of Maharashtra established the

“Study Group on the Cotton Textile Mill Lands of Mumbai”, chaired by noted

architect Charles Correa, to prepare an integrated development plan for the textile

mill lands of central Mumbai (see supporting materials enclosed herewith). Under the

recently revised Development Control Rules, the Government of Maharashtra felt that

an opportunity for releasing space for public housing and urban space could be

meaningfully generated through this planning exercise. The Study Group, which

henceforth was known as the Correa Committee, appointed the Design Cell of the

Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture (KRVIA) to assist in preparing the

integrated development plan, for which I was the project incharge.

The Correa Committee was allowed access to the mills owned by the National Textile

Corporation (NTC) — a public sector undertaking formed in the eighties to

nationalise and modernise ailing private textile mills. The Committee was not

permitted access to the privatelyowned textile mills by their owners. The Committee

undertook physical documentation of the NTC mills for their buildings’ historical

importance, structural condition and present use, landscape features and physical

transformations over time. The Committee also carried out a visual analysis of the

midtown mill districts, analysing their existing movement pattern, open space


structure and urban form. The immediate imperative of the Committee was to

formulate a broad landuse plan for the city, and their methodology did not at all

address the local workingclass communities and their relationship with this part of

the city. The final episodes of the workers’ struggle against closures and

retrenchments in the textile mills was the backdrop against which the Committee

conducted its work in 1996–7, but this did not figure at all in the Committee’s

deliberations.

The Committee worked with the broad assumption that visibility, accessibility and

spacemovement relations would create a system of inclusive public spaces serving

the local communities and the city as a whole. While old buildings and other physical

markers were seen as possible symbolic links to the local community, the possibility

of exploring these historical relationships was never seen as an important part of the

integrated development plan. Interestingly, the Committee suggested that these

structures were of heritage value, and needed to be conserved and reused for

commercial or institutional purposes. By retaining these markers, the Committee

argued that the history and memory of the textile industry would be retained in

public consciousness. In this context an industrial or textile museum was also

proposed by the Committee, behind which there was a tacit assumption that the

struggle of the workers had conclusively ended. This plan, created with the lofty

intention of making inclusive public spaces, thus was neither able to address the

community’s feelings and aspirations, nor gain their support or wider public

endorsement for the plan.


The Mumbai Mill Lands have witnessed a rapid transition in the past twenty years

from an active industrial and manufacturing centre to a new frontier for realestate

expansionism, gentrification and land profiteering by builders, millowners, criminals

and politicians. The objective of the Correa Committee — to coordinate and promote

integrated development of these areas with the city and community — has been

subverted through haphazard commercialisation, which has continued apace in the

seven years since the Committee was formed. The proliferation of elite office and

residential complexes, shopping malls and retail outlets, discotheques and bowling

alleys, and new flyovers in the Mill Lands are creating an exclusive elite enclave in

the former industrial heart of the city. This urban form derives its logic from the

speculative real estate market, and is systematically erasing all traces of history and

memory, driving the local community out of their homes and livelihoods.

The Government has been unable to lay out any clear policy, guideline, or overall

strategy for the area and the transformations it is undergoing. The Correa Committee

Report was shelved almost immediately after its completion, without any public

discussion or debate on its limited findings. However, various activist groups, unions

and public intellectuals have continued to fight for the local community’s rights to

work, housing and new economic opportunities. This movement has transformed

from one of strikes and protests against closures — agitating for restarting of the mills

— to fighting for workers’ rights to compensation and rehabilitation for their lost jobs

— mostly through litigation in the courts — to the present struggle over tenancy and


housing rights of the local community, faced with displacement by the physical and

demographic transformation of the Mill Lands.

While there is now a widespread acceptance of the decline of the city’s textile

industry, the future presents a complex scenario. Responses to the commercial

exploitation and redevelopment of the Mill Lands, while critical, have been disparate,

polarised between groups with sharply different views on the status of workers and

the industry in relation to the city. However, whether one believes that industry must

be restarted and employment provided to the locals, or one feels that the community

must be rehabilitated through service employment, all groups engaged in the debate

have considered the process of documentation as important to articulating the future

of the Mill Lands in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. The Industrial Museum

Collaboration is conceived in this context, in which we expect that the provocative

and loaded institutional legacy of the museum will bring together various stake

holders to scrutinise and debate the related questions of institutional memory, civic

heritage, and the history of struggle, in relation to the contemporary history of the

Mumbai Mill Lands. While the transformation of this area is ongoing, it is vital to

evolve new methods of documentation which displace the conventional subjectobject

relations of the modern museum, a process which can play an important in

integrating the local community and giving them new stakes in their future in the

postindustrial city. The notion of the Industrial Museum helps me engage with the

gaps which were evident in the formulations in the Correa Committee, in terms of the

community’s history, identity and aspirations, which as architects and planners we

must recognise in the articulation of public spaces in the city.


II. Shekhar Krishnan

Since completing my undergraduate and postgraduate studies in social theory and

area studies in the U.S. and U.K., I have pursued a freelance career in journalism,

research and the nonprofit sector in Mumbai. My interest in the Industrial Museum

Collaboration proceeds directly from several stints of independent fieldwork and

project collaboration over the past five years — first with trade unionists, labour

lawyers and activists (19992000), and then with architects, urbanists and media

practitioners (20012003).

Through fieldwork with the Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti, I documented and

participated in campaigns for the economic and cultural rights of innercity textile

workers displaced by closures, gentrification, and realestate profiteering in the mill

districts of Central Bombay. During this time I wrote a pamphlet for the union,

published by the Girangaon Bachao Andolan, called “Murder of the Mills: A Case

Study of Phoenix Mills” (see supporting materials enclosed herewith). In the same

year, I also did research with the Trade Union Solidarity Committee (TUSC) — a

coalition of nonparty employees’ unions in suburban petrochemical, pharmaceutical,

consumer goods and service industries. Through numerous case studies of

manufacturing units, and frequent visits to factories, offices, and labour courts, I

became familiar with the broader contours of the city’s postindustrial landscapes —

the evacuation of largescale industry and workingclass communities from innercity

and suburban lands; the outsourcing and dispersal of manufacturing activities into

slums and the urban hinterland; and the growth of globaloriented service, retail and


culture industries in the city, whose rapid expansion has exhausted the boom and

bust of the real estate market in the nineties and continues apace.

After this year of fulltime fieldwork, my concerns shifted from labour to technology,

and from activism to pedagogy, as I allied myself with technical and aesthetic

disciplines — architecture, urban design, and film and media — whose practices I

have subsequently found helpful in anchoring my research inquiries. In this context, I

founded and was the Joint Convenor of the Mumbai Study Group, a fortnightly

seminar and lecture series on the city at the Academy of Architecture (20002002).

The other convenors of MSG included Arvind Adarkar, architect, Darryl D’Monte,

journalist and writer, and Pankaj Joshi, conservation architect, each of whom had

critically explored urban deindustrialisation their own work, and who joined together

to start a forum to debate this phenomenon in a public context. From this series

which I ran for two years, I subsequently helped to start, was first Coordinator, and

then Associate Director of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research)

(20012003), where I was employed as a fulltime administrator of a crosssectoral

collective of social scientists, journalists, architects and media practitioners concerned

with the urban experience and globalisation. The notion of the Industrial Museum —

while not in itself unique — was first conceived in the context of my work with my

former colleague Rahul Srivastava, whose methodology in his Neighbourhood Project

has informed this proposal. While in PUKAR, I continued my research on post

industrial landscapes and the politics of space with the Design Cell of the Kamala

Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture (KRVIA), where I first met Anirudh Paul

and the team which later became CRIT, of which I am now an Executive Member.


Unlike with Western cities, on which there is a welldeveloped critical and scholarly

literature on deindustrialisation and contemporary urban transformations, there are

very few historical or ethnographic studies of technological and industrial

restructuring in Indian cities. Recent accounts of Mumbai as a “global city” have

neglected the specific histories in which globalisation is embedded, assimilating the

city’s complex social history into just another instance in the relentless march of the

information economy and its leading service industries.

It is in this conjuncture that I have situated my inquiries into the historical geography

of the deindustrialisation of Mumbai in the mid to late twentieth century. In this

period, Bombay grew into one of the great commercial and industrial metropolises of

the colonial and postcolonial world, the centre of India’s capitalist economy, as well

as the heart of its working class movement. In the twentieth century, several large

industries successively redefined the city’s history and geography — its contingent

networks of people, machines, and places — from textiles to pharmaceuticals, from

banking to call centres, from films and television to telecoms and software.

In the period since the Bombay Textile Strike of 19823, the city has witnessed an

overall social and spatial transformation, from a prominent industrial and

manufacturing centre of the nationstate to an everexpanding metropolitan region

with an increasing share in new regional and global economies in the making. These

reconfigurations, visible everywhere across the urban landscape today, are neither

inevitable nor uncontested, and remain to be researched and analysed.


6. Industrial Museum Collaborators

The following persons are the core collaborators of the Industrial Museum

Collaboration, who will contribute to and steer the activities of the Archives and

Workshops, with the Project Coordinators (above) responsible for all administrative,

financial and logistical matters related to the Collaboration. This list contains brief

submissions from the Collaborators about their proposed Workshop and Archive

activities within the Collaboration.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (Fellow, Trinity College and Director, South Asian

Studies, Cambridge University, U.K.) is an historian and author of The Origins of

Industrial Capitalism in India (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Imperial Power

and Popular Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1998), on the history of trade

unionism and the mill neighbourhoods in colonial Mumbai.

Douglas Haynes (Professor of History, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New

Hampshire, U.S.A.) is a social historian who has worked on the handloom and

powerloom textile industries in Gujarat and Maharashtra.

As historians, they will organise a workshop on the history of the textile industry in

India, focusing on western India. The three main purposes of this workshop are: to

capture the current state of research on the history of the textile industry; to point to

visual resources and objects of material culture that might be available for a museum;


and to brainstorm about how the history of the textile industry might be presented

in the context of a museum. Major themes to be discussed in the workshop are

handlooms and the question of deindustrialisation; the origins of the textile industry

and related issues of markets, technology, and entrepreneurship; the development of

the working class, issues of migration, and conditions of work; the effects of

industrialization on the urban environment, the development of workingclass

neighborhoods, trade union organisation and local politics. Possible participants

include sociologists, historians, economists and other academics such as Tirthankar

Roy, Manjiri Kamat, Subho Basu, Chitra Joshi, Sujata Patel, Jan Breman, Garrett

Menning, Douglas Haynes, Emma Alexander, Makrand Mehta, Samita Sen, as well as

the other Industrial Museum Coordinators and Collaborators, and curators from

industrial heritage initiatives and working class history museums in Manchester and

Lancashire, U.K.

Meena Menon (Vice President, Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti) is an activist and co

author, with Neera Adarkar, One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: Glimpses from

the History of Bombay’s Textile Districts (Calcutta: Seagull, 2004), an oral history of

Girangaon. She is also a Senior Fellow with FOCUS on the Global South, a global

policy research organisation.

With Neera and Arvind Adarkar, she is facilitating links between the Collaboration

and community activists in the Girangaon Rozgar Hakk Samiti, a recently formed

youth organisation in Central Mumbai seeking to establish a community centre for

local students and workers.


Arvind Adarkar (Convenor, Girangaon Bachao Andolan, Architect and Faculty,

Academy of Architecture, Mumbai) is a practising architect and urban researcher. He

is the coconvenor, with Darryl D’Monte and Pankaj Joshi, of the Mumbai Study

Group at the Academy of Architecture.

He is currently coordinating a committee of distinguished lawyers, journalists,

academics and architects to monitor sales of state and private textile mill lands in

Central Mumbai. He plans to organise a workshop of these individuals and other

resource persons to analyse, critique and offer policy suggestions for amendments to

the Greater Mumbai Development Plan and Development Control Rules, in the

context of housing, infrastructure and land markets in Girangaon and Central

Mumbai.

Neera Adarkar (Convenor, Girangaon Bachao Andolan, Architect and Faculty,

Academy of Architecture, Mumbai) is a practising architect, urban researcher, and

activist in the women’s movement. She is coauthor, with Meena Menon, One

Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: Glimpses from the History of Bombay’s Textile

Districts (Calcutta: Seagull, 2004), an oral history of Girangaon.

She has proposed convening a workshop on urban heritage conservation policies in

related to the postindustrial landscapes and built environment of Girangaon, in

collaboration with other noted conservationists, architects, urban planners and policy

makers.


Paromita Vohra (Devi Pictures, Mumbai) is a filmmaker who has been documenting

the workers’ struggle and wider transformations in the Mumbai Mill Lands for the

past seven years with the Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti. She has been working on a

film, tentatively titled The Forgotten City of Girangaon, on the rich cultural and

political history of the Mumbai Mill Lands told through stories of local poets,

musicians, activists and workers. She has proposed developing a sound archive for the

Collaboration.

Bardic poetry/song have been an intrinsic part of the cultural and political life of the

mill area and there have been both poets and singers who made this form popular.

The songs have been a special kind of urban folk culture, reflecting life in the city in

the rhythm and structure of folk music. Most famous of these is of course, Mumbai chi

Lavni, a satirical song in the classic mode of listing the city’s glories and venalities.

Typically this singing was also used to gather workers at mill gates as a prelude to a

meeting.

The more popular of this music and poetry has been recorded and is available on

music cassettes in the area. However, there is no comprehensive collection of all the

songs. I would like to do a sound documentation/oral history project along with

young people and women in the area. The documentation would involve doing about

4 workshops in all to talk about sound documentation – not just its technicalities, but

also the concerns central to the form, as well as to the process of interviewing – as

well as to evolve a set of themes along which the documentation would happen.

Through this documentation I would like to draw out a sense of a part of cultural life


in the area – what were its actual contours? How did people perceive the supposed

culture of Girangaon? The actual process would involve giving minidisc sound

recorders to the field researchers. Documentation would be primarily of two types:

interviews with singers and poets about the songs they wrote, and recordings or

recitations in their voices; and interviews with people from the neighbourhood who

may remember these songs – how do they remember hearing them, what relevance or

enjoyment do they perceive in these songs.

Rajesh Vora is a freelance professional photographer.

While visiting the stateowned, partially functioning mills of the NTC over the past

two years, I discovered that, within the cavernous industrial spaces of the textile

mills, the workers had created their own private nooks and corners in their factories

— satisfying their physical, social and emotional needs for “safe” homes and spaces

within an often harsh and anonymous workplace. These include canteens and locker

rooms in the mills, as well as common and social spaces within the mill compunds,

such as gates, tanks and open grounds. With the closure of the mills, these private

corners and personal spaces will be erased from existence, wiping out the memories

of how they were inhabited and used by the workers, both for their daily livelihood

and sustenance, as well as for everyday leisure and celebration. I would like to

photograph these personal spaces of the mill workers, both inside their factories and

in their surrounding neighbourhoods, and combine photography with the narratives

of the local community, to tell a visual story of the personal spaces and everyday lives

of mill workers.


As part of the Collaboration, I will convene two photography workshops, one with the

local community, and the other with photographers in the city media. The first

workshop with the mill workers’ children living in the mill areas, part of the

Girangaon Rozgar Hakk Samiti. With the help of the other Collaborators, we will

identify group of local youth who either individually or through their families, have

been affected by the closures of the textile mills in the past twenty tears.

While training them to use digital cameras, will attempt to capture their

interpretations of the social, economic and environmental changes in the areas where

they grew up. We would like to go with them to these sites, and encourage them to

tell their stories — narratives which can be a creative combination of digital

photography, sound, words, essays and poems. In the second workshop, we will

engage with photographers in the city’s print media, who have been covering the mill

lands issue for many years, through the strike and closures to the present struggle.

The emphasis in this workshop will be to understand what professional

photographers’ responsibilities are in visually representing important civic issues such

as the mill lands redevelopment. The findings of this workshop could be published in

the photographers’ respective publications, thus raising awareness of the issue to a

potentially wide audience. All of the visual material generated from this Workshop

will be published and exhibited in the online Archive, and form part of the proposed

exhibition.

As a more personal contribution to the Collaboration, I would also like to photograph

the dreams and desperation, and the anger and aspirations of the present generation

of local youth who have grown up in the shadow of closed mills, communal violence,


and loss of economic and cultural opportunities. I propose to do this through living

with a group of young or middleage locals, who have lived through a generation of

change and dislocation in Girangaon, attempting to understand and visually

document their experiences as a personal, creative journey into their lives, which are

rarely represented in the dominant media and official accounts.


7. Map of the Mumbai Mill Lands

From the Report of the Study Group on Cotton Textile Mills in Mumbai

Chair: Charles Correa

Project Coordinator: Anirudh Paul

Government of Maharashtra Urban Development Department, August 1996

National Textile Corporation (NTC)


1. Kohinoor Mills no.3 (North)

2. India United Dye Works no.6 (North)

3. Elphinstone Mills (South)

4. Jupiter Mills (South)

5. Shree Madhusudan Mills (South)

6. Jam Mills

7. Sitaram Mills

8. New Hind Textile Mills



11. Tata Mills (North)

12. Mumbai Textile Mills

13. Bharat Mills

14. Digvijay Mills

15. Apollo Mills (South)

16. India United Mills no.4




20. Gold Mohur Mills

21. Poddar Processors (Edward Mills)

22. India United Mills no.1 (North)

23. Finlay Mills

24. Poddar Mills

25. New City of Bombay Manufacturing Mills

26. Western India Spinning & WeavingMills

Privately Owned Mills

27. Swadeshi Mills

28. Standard Mills

29. Matulya Mills

30. Phoenix Mills

31. Modern Mills

32. Hindoostan Mills no.1


34. Ruby Mills


36. Bombay Dyeing (Spring Mills)

37. Victoria Mills

38. Gokuldas Morarjee Mills no.1

39. Swan Mills

40. Mafatlal Mills no.3

41. Khatau Makanji Mills

42. Century Mills

43. Bombay Dyeing

44. Prakash Cotton Mills

45. Shriniwas Mills

46. Kamala Mills

47. Shree Ram Mills

48. Gokuldas Morarjee Mills no.2

49. Dawn Mills

50. Standard Mills no.2

51. Piramal Mills

52. Raghuvanshi Mills

53. New Great Eastern Mills

54. Simplex Mills

55. Bradbury Mills



58. Mukesh Textile Mills

Documents

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