Around 2010, searches for the word austerity peaked. The term entered public life in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when governments across much of the world adopted it as their response to economic turmoil.

Some time ago, I read Know Your Place, a book that has stayed with me ever since. Through a series of stories, it examines life in Britain during the years of austerity and its effects on working-class communities and immigrants who powered much of the labour force.

The title itself is a keen observation on how democracies have evolved in an era of deep inequality. Citizens, once encouraged to see themselves as empowered consumers, increasingly came to be treated as subjects and, in many cases, as liabilities to be managed. The cutbacks came in overt and covert ways.

If you use public transport in India, you can see it in the gradual atrophy of services into skeletal networks. In the slowing and eventual disappearance of permanent hiring, replaced by contract workers and leased buses.

You can see it in governments falling in love with metros, dreaming of pods and app-based mobility, while neglecting the systems that already exist, because they have money that can give them kickbacks, but austerity when it comes to hiring people to make a public transport system function smoothly.

You can see it in crumbling bus stands and bus stops. In depots that seem permanently under repair. In strikes that periodically disrupt the lives of people who no longer have a voice and have quietly accepted their place in the hierarchy of mobility.

You can even see it in the cycle of hope itself. New electric fleets are announced with great fanfare, only for expectations to outrun reality.

^{Video: This was how new routes of BEST were announced in Mumbai. This was outside Govandi Station.}

Austerity in India rarely announces itself loudly. It arrives one cancelled route, one lower frequency, one unfilled vacancy and one decaying bus depot at a time.

The way BEST in Mumbai and MSRTC or State Transport (ST) of Maharashtra are treated by the state is a great example of decay.

Today’s images are also from Kerala, where I stayed for a few days: Muthukulam, a village in Alappuzha district situated on the road between Kayamkulam and Haripad towns.

This route once had a reliable bus service operated by both private operators and the state transport corporation, with buses every fifteen to twenty minutes during peak hours.

Not any more.

It’s the same story as in Mumbai or Maharashtra.

I found myself waiting for long stretches at bus stops alongside people who depended on this now-skeletal service in Kerala. Most of them were older women and migrant workers, while many locals with means appeared to have shifted to two-wheelers and cars.

The economics of decline are startling. An autorickshaw at the local bus stop charges ₹300 for a journey that cost ₹15 by bus, if it arrives on time.

And perhaps that is how austerity ultimately works. Not through dramatic announcements, but through quiet withdrawals. One day, a bus simply stops coming. And the people who relied on it learn their place.

The seats that are reserved for different kinds of passengers in Mumbai.

The bus is the only reliable public transport for the seniors.

The State Transport and BEST Canteens:

Worli:

The old mobile BEST Canteen in town.

And finally, a few Kerala State Transport Buses.

The bus stop of a small village up in the hills with rubber plantations serviced by jeeps and a few buses.

Mr Bussy McBusface.
Kayamkulam Depot, KSRTC.

That’s all, Folks! Ting… Ting…

I am not sure how the people who measure the economy classify people who survive off markets like the flower market in Dadar. But one thing is clear from the way the state treats the millions who are engaged in it in Mumbai and other cities - not too well. Laws ensure that people operate in the grey area. Observing the state, with no capacity to educate, house, provide healthcare or create stable jobs, behave with its own people using sticks (and occasional carrots) will make one cry.

These days, under orders from the courts, the bureaucrats have cleared the streets of hawkers who do not have licences. Dadar West has a very large morning flower, vegetable and fruit market that has operated for decades or centuries. It has changed the character of the bustling place. However, it is too large a market to be completely shut. While the licensed shops function, a good number of people continue to do business in the mornings. Some have shifted to the inner lanes playing hide and seek.

During the rest of the day, the bustling streets of Dadar now wear a relatively deserted look. It would be interesting to see how this cat and mouse game between the lathi wielding state and its subjects will play out.

Here are a few images from the early morning flower market.

Flowers :
The identity of Dadar market -according to the art on its walls.

THE GREY TRUCK

Dadar is the place where two main lines of the Mumbai suburban network converges. Hundreds of women from communities that farm or gather in the hills and coastal villages come here to sell their produce. It’s a great place to buy seasonal and other forest and cultivated produce.

Not the export quality mangoes.

The women have set up shop along the narrow by lanes - far from their old pavement spot.

Other trades.

The market is Dadar’s reason for existence. Not far from the flower market is a street called JK Sawant Marg lined vegetable and fruit traders who supply restaurants and other large customers. And down that road is where the people who are responsible for cleaning up, and working for the city live.

That’s all, folks!

My son used to sit for hours with older people, unbored, asking hundreds of questions, with a twinkle in his eyes. He preferred silver hair to children his age. Conversations that we, who are addicted to constant dopamine, would exit, he stayed. I began to notice something in those exchanges that I have since seen often: when older people are listened to properly and patiently, they come alive in a way that feels almost physiological.

It’s actually magical.

Stories do this. Not the facts of memory, but its telling. The act of retrieving bytes of data, arranging, often embellishing and offering an experience to a younger person seems to sharpen something, attention, recall, or a change in posture. I have seen it in my family, which has a median age similar to that of Japanese families. There are very few children left under eighteen, none I can think of under twelve. Most hover above 50; many well past sixty. In that tilt, you begin to see patterns. The ones who tell stories often, and to willing listeners, seem to carry their years differently.

I don’t have clinical proof for this. But I have repetition. And repetition, observed closely enough, begins to feel like a kind of knowledge.

Recently, this intuition found a tangible form.

Venkat’s Food Court - Simple Recipes For Your Healthy Life
by TN Venkatraman.

The book came to me through a college friend, Sunita, now based in Canberra. An accomplished chef and former restaurateur. The book was written by her father, T.N. Venkatraman, now in his eighties, proudly retired from corporate life, now living a retired life in that old pensioner’s paradise of East Bangalore. It is, on the surface, a recipe book, a remembered reconstruction of his mother’s cooking in Kerala’s Palakkad Tamil tradition, the kind you still encounter in a few dishes at the original Mani’s in Matunga.

But the recipes are not the point of this week’s photo essay.

In those opening pages, another life unfolds. I also learnt from Sunita that Venkatraman was born in Matunga before the formation of the Indian Union. In the late 1950s and early 60s, he captained the Maharashtra weightlifting team for four years. It was his father, in 1941, who had founded Modern Health Home, a gym at the Matunga Gymkhana grounds, opposite Ruia College. Was it a war years thing? After his father’s early death in 1944, the institution passed into other hands and, over time, into history. It exists now in a different form: updated and rebranded.

But in the book, it returns. Not as nostalgia, but as continuity.

Venkatraman has written other books as well. They are self-published accounts of memory, learning, and experience. I am guessing that there is something deliberate about this act. To write, to organise, to publish, especially at that age, is not merely to document a life. It is to extend something precious. To remain in circulation. Leave behind a positive world that looks to the past through a mythological lens.

Self-publishing is not vanity. It is a kind of metabolism.

Forcing engagement with one’s own past, exercising language, engaging with readers, however few. It requires remembering, fact-checking, meeting people, sharing copies, and speaking about what one has made. It creates occasions for conversation. And conversation, in turn, creates more story.

A beautiful loop.

One Sunday morning, wishing to see if Modern Health Home still stands, I took the book to Matunga. To stand, if possible, where the old gym once stood. To photograph the book in that space. A way of returning memory to the location. Perhaps even sending those images back to him.

Ignite new book ideas for him.

Imagine taking pictures and telling stories not for preservation, but for reactivation. A story told once is memory. A story told again, to someone new, is life continuing.

If that is true, longevity may not be only a question of food, support, medicine, or movement, but also of narrative. Of whether one’s stories are still in motion. Of whether there is someone, somewhere, willing to listen.

And whether we are willing, in turn, to keep telling. To tell stories, blog, meet people, and self-publish, then, is not just to leave something behind. It is to stay.

Never let the dust settle for as long as you can.

For a city that is at war with open spaces, the ground in Matunga CR has aged gracefully. A sunday morning is a great time to visit the place.

That’s all, folks.

Last week, sent me a message. It was the kind of question people ask when they still believe in something.

“Is anyone from your photography circle documenting what’s happening in Dharavi? This feels like an important moment in history.”

Minaz archives the city and life around us in her own style; check out her Substack and her books. That is her instinct. Buildings before they change, cities before they forget, details before they are flattened into diagrams, she sees love - everywhere. She assumes, reasonably, that what is recorded has a better chance of surviving. Therefore. her question wasn’t political, it was archival.

Of course, Dharavi is being documented.

DRP: Dharavi Redevelopment Project.

The people who live there are forced to do it: Carefully, urgently, collecting and arranging documents. They don’t exist if there are no papers.

Kagaz.

Proof that they exist: Aadhaar cards, ration cards, dates of birth, birth certificates, death certificates, names, election cards with spelling errors that need to be corrected, and eligibility cut-offs. They are forced to learn new vocabulary at speed, always a few steps behind the people who keep inventing new kinds of documentation.

There is also hip-hop poetry, stories, reels, and YouTube channels made by residents. The real documentation. The tail, the eyes, the ears, the rough skin, and the teeth of the elephant. But there is no large tusk here, nothing singular enough to become the official story.

Is anyone photographing?

Yes. Thousands of them, and the images reside in their mobile phones, in data centres, training AI. There are outsiders watching too. Journalists on different beats. Photographers. Researchers. Students. Urbanists. Foodie Anthony Bourdains. Armchair psephologists. People on guided Slumdog Millionaire, inspired tours. Some with care. Some with curiosity. Some with projects.

Because right now, Dharavi is framed as a moment. A transition. A before-and-after.

History prefers transitions.

But the most intensive documentation is happening elsewhere. In files. In forms. In survey maps, where density becomes an inconvenience, and proximity becomes potential. This borderland of the old city is the next central business district, with its Navi Manhattan, Upper Nariman Point, BKC Version 2, Canary Wharf of the east, and Next Altamont Road. In documents that turn lived space into legible land.

Indian settler colonialism does not announce itself. It footnotes itself.

It proceeds through caste networks fluent in paperwork, inheritance, and patience. Networks that understand land not as home but as a delayed reward. They do not need to erase people. They only need to reclassify them and send them to New Lalubhai Compounds, Shivajinagars or to MHADA colonies built on toxic dump yards, where the same story will replay itself two decades from now.

Lines are drawn.
Thresholds are fixed.
Eligibility is decided retroactively.
Consent is produced statistically.

Meanwhile, the elephant is disassembled calmly, each man describing the part that suits him.

What survives is not the story, but the asset.

Towers will rise where density once embarrassed planners. The redevelopment will be declared successful. The spreadsheets will balance. The language will be aspirational, global, and hygienic. Get ready for a barrage of ads for the Miami lifestyle, overlooking the pristine Mithi River estuary and its riverside promenades, which will bombard you.

The people’s stories will travel a little longer. Into pockets around the city, Malwani mangroves, Mulund salt pans. They will appear here, on my Substack, in captions, essays, exhibitions, and conversations that begin with before all this changed. They will circulate just long enough to be safely past. Then they will stop.

Not because they were untrue. Because they were no longer required.

Minaz asked whether anyone was documenting Dharavi.

Yes. We are measuring its parts.

This week’s photo essay takes you to Dharavi.

Education:

Above: The bridge that connects Dharavi to the private schools in Sion.
Below: The largest landmark in Dharavi is Kamraj School.

Labour: The fuel of Dharavi’s economy.

The informal settlements of Mumbai are where people work (and also live).

Textiles, recycling, manufacturing or food. Name the industry, and you will find it here.

The last tannery of Dharavi.

Pooja Ashokkumar and Hallu Hallu aka conduct a walk called ‘From Tirunelveli to Dharavi’ that explores Dharavi through a Tamil lens. It’s a multifocal lens exploring the neighbourhoods through their languages, dialects, caste, religion, labour, gender and more. A few of these images were shot in their company. Her walk takes you to the last tannery of Dharavi.

Identity and community are probably the social security.

Below: The man with a moustache - Rao Bahadur Rettamalai Srinivasan (1859–1945) was a prominent Adi-Dravida leader and a crucial representative of the ‘Depressed Classes’ at the Round Table Conferences in London. He was a close associate of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, and together they represented the interests of the Tamil Nadu Dalits (Paraiyars) in the first and second Round Table Conferences (1930 and 1931). Next to him is the Tamil poet and icon, Thiruvalluvar.

Hidden under the different layers of Dharavi is the original Koli and East Indian village. This village is and was on the estuary of the Mithi River. Hard to imagine now.

The Tazias during the Muharram procession in Dharavi.

Temples, dargahs, churches provide the markers that identify the different segregated ghettos of Dharavi.

The many castes involved in the leather-related trades across India, as depicted on a signboard.

Keeping count in the Kumbharwada - where the potters live.

Film World:

The look Superstar Rajnikath sports in the hit film based in Dharavi was inspired by the man in the poster below.

This oasis of green is also Dharavi: The Tadwadi Muslim Cemetery.

Dharavi, like Mumbai, is segregated along the lines of a soft apartheid with Indian caste characteristics. Like the vegetarian oppressor-caste enclaves in the rich neighbourhoods, the various oppressed castes (who are not above oppressing others here) have their own enclaves. How they developed and evolved is a story for another day. Pooja’s walk is a good place to observe the caste dynamics of this place.

This lane is named after Sant Kakkayya. A 12th-century saint, poet, and prominent Sharana (follower) in the Lingayat movement, which was led by Basavanna in Karnataka. He is considered one of the key figures in the social revolution that aimed to eliminate the caste system and promote equality in society.

The stories of the people are probably hidden in the hard drives and photo negatives of these photo studios.

That’s all for now. O.K. Bayy.

A few months ago, thousands of Maratha reservation activists arrived in South Mumbai, and it was widely reported that the city was struggling to cope with the influx. However, something far larger has and continues to pass almost unnoticed every year.

For decades now, thousands and in recent years up to 2 million people have converged at Dadar on December 6th.

Beginning with the first such gathering in 1956, the city’s administration has managed this movement with such quiet efficiency that most of Mumbai barely registers it, despite it being the single largest annual congregation the city witnesses.

This, along with the Ganesh immersion processions, where residents, not visitors or pilgrims, take to the streets, are masterclasses in how a city absorbs scale. Unlike the melas, temple fairs, dargah urs or church feasts across India, where sudden crowd surges too often end in tragedy, Mumbai has learned to choreograph mass movement as routine. The administration and the Mumbai Police operate with a competence that rarely announces itself, even when handling gatherings that dwarf headline-making events elsewhere.

The River of Humanity.

The river you dip your feet into here, the one you immerse your head in, is not water but people. A steady human flow arriving from across the Deccan, most of them by train, most of them stepping down at Dadar. At Dadar station, that rare hinge where the Western and Central Railway lines meet, the current gathers force. Get off the train, and you are carried along, almost involuntarily, westward, towards the sea.

People move with bags balanced on their heads, warm clothes that seem misplaced in Mumbai’s coastal humidity, and eyes holding a faraway gaze, the look of people who have travelled with purpose.

That gaze loosens only after hours spent standing in line at Chaitya Bhoomi, after respects have been paid, having spent time with thousands of others who have made the same journey in life and to this place, and the journey, in its most essential sense, is completed.

What replaces it is something else: curiosity. Awe. The slow turning outward of attention as the vastness of the city begins to reveal itself: its streets, its crowds, its shops, and its other invitations. How many young ones or the desperate ones stay back and become part of this city?

I too was carried into the flow this Mahaparinirvan Day, and as always, my walk ended at the bookstalls along Shivaji Park. For a few days each December, this playground becomes something else, a mela ground of argument and assertion, where publishers and organisations sell histories, pamphlets, futures, ideas. It feels fitting that the pilgrimage loosens here, among books, before the city quietly returns the ground to budding cricketers, children on malkhamb poles, gossipping WhatsApp uncles and joggers.

Mumbai makes room, then moves on.

The River of People.

Blue or Indigo + White: The Colours of the Ambedkarite movement. The colour of the Chakra on the Indian flag.

Crowd Control Assistance by Samata Sainik Dal or The Equality Soldiers.

This group was initially formed in 1927 by Dr Ambedkar, comprised of ex-soldiers who would protect the Dalits from the oppressive caste mobs that could attack them. They were assisting the Mumbai Police in crowd control here. This was two years after the formatiuon of the RSS that represented the higher or oppressor caste group who opposed the agitation of the Oppressed classes, especially in Mahad, where led by Dr Ambedkar, tried to access water that was deprived to them because of caste discrimination.

Also, the colours makes us think of the militias, muscles and uniforms in the 1920s that are inspired by fascism in Italy.

A visitor returning with a framed picture of Dr BR Ambedkar or a similar image from the event.

Reading and the City: The Bookstalls.

The titles on the tables speak not just of history but of unfinished arguments, ongoing struggles, and futures still being imagined. I wanted to glimpse the debates within the movement, to see how its ideas travel, argue, and renew themselves in print.

Note: These titles are just a small selection of what was on display and don’t reflect the full width and depth of what’s available. It’s coloured by my biases.

Below:
“Let us eliminate casteism, classism, and misogyny from education” -
Truth-Seeker Equality Foundation - Sindhudurg/ Revolutionary Light Publication - Maharashtra.

Below:
Koregaon Bhima Victory Pillar Protection Committee - Legal struggle related to encroachment - Public Awareness Campaign. They had books about the many battles in which the Mahar caste (the one Dr Ambedkar belonged to), which has a Maratha heritage, including being part of the British Army that defeated the Maratha Confederacy/Peshwas in the battle of Bhima Koregaon in 1818.

Below:
Rebel Publishers: Dedicated to shaping and asserting cultural creation.

A publisher from Hyderabad, Telangana, reflects the attitude of a city connected to the global economy, IT entrepreneurs and a favourite location for Global Capability Centres and the software back offices of transnational corporations.

A selection of their books:

Below:
Author Gautamiputra Kamble’s organisation - Secular Movement / Secular Art Movement. I was there too early to meet the author. I am currently reading a recent translation of The Seekers (translated by Sirus - The Flaky Pastry) by Gautamiputra, and I highly recommend this book - it is an excellent example of the depth of Marathi and Dalit literature. I could’ve got the book signed by him and his translator if I had gone a day later.

Vinimay Publication is setting up shop.

Below:
This organisation, the Maharashtra Committee for the Eradication of Superstition, was, and probably still is, a voice for the idea of a progressive Maharashtra. The terrorists of an ultra-right Hindutva organisation based in Goa are alleged to have targeted and killed the founder of this organisation because of its opposition to superstitions, rituals and practises which are central to their extreme religious, caste supremacist beliefs.

The message below says: “Come, let us raise the voice of reason.”

Below:
Dr BR Ambedkar converted to Buddhism along with thousands of his followers. He called it Navayana Buddhism or New Vehicle. It is a modern, socially-focused Buddhist movement initiated by him for all of India’s Dalits (formerly untouchables) to achieve social justice and equality. It is distinct from traditional Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana paths. It emphasises morality, liberty, equality, and fraternity, rejecting caste, rebirth, karma, and traditional monasticism, focusing instead on practical social action and collective liberation through rational, Ambedkarite principles outlined in Buddha and His Dhamma, making it a political and social movement as much as a spiritual one.

The Pali Canon of Buddhism is important to Navayana as well, and Kaushalya Publications had the largest range of books about Pali as a language and its comparisons with Marathi - also an Indo-European language.

There were several publishers and bookshops in Vikhroli, Mumbai, such as Sudisha and New Direction Publications. The publishers and book sellers came from all over Maharashtra, and this is probably their biggest book fair.

Here are a few book titles:

Thanks to Dr BR Ambedkar’s US education, there has been a deep connection between the Civil Rights movement in the USA and the Dalit movement in India, from the Republican Party of India to the Dalit Panthers, which was born in Mumbai. There were quite a few books from the Civil Rights movement that were translated or packaged for the Indian audience by small publishers in Maharashtra

Actually, it goes back to before Dr Ambedkar was born. In his seminal 1873 text Gulamgiri (Slavery), Jyotiba Phule used the language of slavery not merely to invoke chattel bondage, but to describe the deep, institutionalised system of caste oppression in India, a form of social apartheid with Indian characteristics. Phule drew deliberate parallels with African American enslavement to insist that caste was not a cultural flaw or social lag, but a structure of domination sustained by Brahmanical power. His argument was uncompromising: the condition of the oppressed demanded liberation, equality, and dignity, not reformist sympathy.

In 2025, that argument returns with disturbing familiarity. Across the world and in India, oppressors have new names, wealthy lawmakers, billionaire patriarchs, and the systems they command, but the direction of travel is recognisable. Hard-won freedoms are being rolled back; labour protections are being diluted; dignity is being reframed as privilege. What we are witnessing are not new injustices, but flashbacks from an ever-present past.

Vidrohi (Rebel / Dissenter):
Rediscovering/Re-reading Ambedkar. An ‘iconoclastic’ analysis.

A critical analysis of his life is a very current and active debate. Please check out the biography called Iconoclast by Dr Anand Teltumbde if you are interested in his life being critically examined.

‘Mother’ by Suresh Bhosale with the ‘Girl with Bangles’ from the Indus Valley Civilisation.

Black Panther Party for Self-Defence. / Women’s Habitat / Women’s Settlement. / One’s Own Religion and Savitri Temples. / The Dictatorship of Consent / For the Economically Weak - Milind Kirti / Reservations: A Spark and the Blaze Anand Teltumbde (Navayana Publication) / The Caste Census Anand Teltumbde

Not the usual representation of the country’s main character.

The cover of Fascism That Is Going to Kill Democracy by Milind Kamble.

The other titles: Constitutional Literacy / Mahatma Phule and Religion - AH Salunkhe/ Ambedkar and Hindutva Politics / The Challenge of Fascism and… (The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance)

Beware. Enemies of the Nation Are Active Again / Which Path Is This? (A classic Ambedkarite interrogative framing)/ The Historical Struggle of Political Identity and Today’s Challenges - BN Yuvraj / Ecological Vision / Nature Perspective

Is Cow-Protection Politics Anti-People? Dutta Desai.

Indian Corruption and Today’s Caste–Class Struggle

Images/Representations of Manhood - Charu Gupta.
Check out the Charu Gupta’s other books.

Dr Ambedkar’s Quotations / Thoughts : Educate, Organise, and Agitate.
The Constitution and Brahmanism
21 Lessons for the 21st Century - Yuval Noah Harari

An Inquest into the New Education Policy - Dr Manohar Naik. (It has a picture of an oppressor caste group (RSS) vigilante/gatekeeper outside a school)

Class or Caste? Sharad Patil (A foundational Dalit–Marxist debate text in Marathi.)
Which Path Leads to Liberation? Dr B. R. Ambedkar portrait
Yellow booklet: Beware of the Hypocritical Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh!
In Search of the Muslim Mind - Basharat Ahmed

The Tradition of Patriotic Resistance - About Balladeer Amar Sheikh by Dr Azeez Nadaf

Who Is Sensitive? Vidrohi Cultural Movement, Maharashtra. /
Caste and the Exploitation of Women: From the Hindu Code Bill to Honour Killing /
The message of Mahad Revolution (The Mahad protest kickstarted anti-discrimination as a mass movement)

Karl Marx and Xuanzang. Also Kabir, Savitrinai Phule and the Mahar World

Who Killed Karkare, and Why? SM Mushrif /
The Mahars and Their Homeland or Slavery in the Twentieth Century - Dr BR Ambedkar / The No. 1 Terrorist Organisation in the Country: RSS by SM Mushrif

Girl Students, Awaken!

The Naked Century - Namdeo Dhasal

The Poona Pact - Dr BR Ambedkar

Critical Questions in Hinduism - Dr BR Ambedkar.

The Pan Asian Buddhist Network.

Falun Dafa is an annual visitor here. This year, they had a stall too.

The event is not just about books. The ideas are translated into ballads, songs and street theatre too, which I was not able to capture this year. Maybe I will return next year and see it through another lens!

That’s all, folks,

In a world where everyone, including me, is constantly promoting themselves, much like prime ministers and presidents selected and shaped by social media, reading an anthology of contemporary writers without looking at the names is a real task. Some of us, or at least I, are invariably drawn to the names that make up the anthology, carrying expectations based on what I’ve already read or heard of them.

I’m curious to know if you feel the same way. How do you read anthologies, judge covers, blurbs, etc?

This thought struck me during the B3B event, where three writers and a photographer from the latest anthology were in conversation with readers at the Bombay Sweet Shop. These images are from that event.

Meanwhile, here are images from the event. I should add: focusing on individual writers makes the stories more interesting for readers, but if you ignore who they are and read only the stories, the ones by those present here are excellent. I would definitely recommend adding this book to your collection.

Also pehchaan kaun. Can you identify the authors and the photographer here?

B3B of Broke Bibliophiles Bombay. You will find the club and information about their meetups and events on Instagram.

It is profoundly interesting to watch how we extend our footprints across the planet, how we gnaw away at forest land, and any land to spread our tendrils. How we hunt the animals we fear, then clear the forest, sow grass, and harvest the grain for the next expansion.

We are an unlimited expansion pack that’s ever improving in our methods of draining wetlands and remoulding them into neat grids, fit only for species we can domesticate (or, some would argue, for grass to domesticate us, but that’s another story). And when the domesticated prove not domestic enough, we try to kill them, or replace them. Ask the dogs in Delhi.

What we do to animals, plants, rivers, forests, and the wood-wide web is, strangely, what we also do to each other. That is what people in the informal settlements of Mumbai already know. We don’t have to go to Tanzania like Jane Goodall to expand our knowledge of primate behaviour; what we do to each other daily is a masterclass enough.

In this island city without housing, the pioneers, the informal settlers, the poor and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free from the caste oppression they faced in the rest of India come to find peace and discover no place to sleep. Instead, they end up as the foot soldiers of expansion. People seeking a place to sleep and cook find themselves in the mangrove wetlands or the forested hills.

Our scouts and workers reclaim new lands between the islands and up in the forests with sweat and blood. But in the end, their fate often mirrors the forests and rivers they help conquer for the rest of “us.” The first settlers, those who root themselves in place, are nearly always displaced by the more mobile, the more connected, those whose networks span the larger world.

The cycle repeats: they are either “domesticated,” absorbed into the order of the new, or they flee, seeking another place to root, reclaim, and develop. Only to be uprooted again by those with more money, complex paperwork, dodgy Aadhaar cards, and electoral rolls that tag people like cattle. The oppressors themselves will eventually feel like the oppressed, especially when they bend before sovereign funds, the lazy capital of the Japanese, or Saudi princes’ oil money, weapons, and slow violence.

Dharavi

All these stories come together in Dharavi (of Slumdog Millionaire fame), just as they do in poor countries worldwide. Here, the cycle of root, domesticate, displace plays out in real time, with Aadhaar numbers and DRP codes scrawled on walls instead of cattle tags.

For the global audience who don’t live with their heads deep in a 56-inch bull’s arse like us, this might seem eerily similar to Gaza. After all, the same billionaire makes drones (for Elbit in Hyderabad) for the genocide perpetuated by Netanyahu and the IDF that hunts people and levels Gaza, before the favourite weapon of both Zionists and Hindutva regimes, the JCB bulldozers, come in.

Today’s photo essay has images from Dharavi. I have been there with a Hallu Hallu Walk led by Pooja Ashok Kumar, who has a family of extended relatives living there right now, who speak Tamil. Her pet project is to document the history of Tamil in Mumbai. She belongs to a community from Tirunelveli in South Tamil Nadu that settled and raised this place in the Mithi river estuary above the high tide line. They are among the tens of communities that moved here from across India. There are a few images from a walk by Historian (among other things) Raamesh Gowri Raghavan, who explores the history of the villages, forts and camps that existed here before the settlers came in too and not just the settler communities.

The older village and the fort are not likely to be directly redeveloped by Adani’s Dharavi Redevelopment project, but the rest of Dharavi would be. These images show a small glimpse of the place made famous by Slumdog Millionaire.

Rewa or Kaala Killa - Black Fort of Dharavi Fort

The land, wetlands and mangroves surrounding the village were slowly settled by people migrating here from all over India, starting from the late 19th century. This was the northern margin of the city, where migrants settled down when they found no space in the town proper. I think it was in 1884 that it was officially recognised as a settlement for migrants and workers in the polluting industries like tanneries and slaughterhouses. This was when it also became a dumping ground for debris and waste. The first step in reclaiming land in Mumbai, then, now and in the future.

People poured in from all over India. Thanks to the leather business, communities from across India related to the trade set up shop and lived. This map on a signboard on the main road with leather shops in Dharavi underlines the presence.

The Last Tannery of Dharavi.

Pooja took us to the last surviving leather workshop in Dharavi. In the days before plastic, leather was a thriving business, and Dharavi was a significant leather production and finishing centre. This tannery did not have a DRP number on it, and we have to wait and watch what happens to it when Adani redesigns this place.

There was probably a population of Bhandaris here besides the fisherfolk. They were the toddy tappers, because Dharavi also has a green oasis called Tadwadi, which is now a cemetery with a small mosque and Dargah. The palms here have now become mostly coconut trees and not the original Tad.

Dharavi became a refuge for caste and religious minorities, without class clout and engaged in trades that serve the oppressor castes and co-religionists, but weren’t given room in the blueprint, plans, hearts or minds. They settled here on the margin and transformed it.

People from North India form a large part of the population here. Here, they mark Muharram with Tazias.

Then there are the Kannadi or Bangle makers of Kannadi Chawls, who are from Southern Tamil Nadu.

From Tiruneveli to Mumbai.

The Hallu Hallu walk with Pooja is called ‘From Tirunelveli to Mumbai’ because the migrants from that part of South India have a very long history in Dharavi. We visited a temple to Kali and Maari (Sithala Devi/Pox goddess). Since it was the Aadi month according to the Tamil calendar, a tasty porridge was cooked and distributed.

The photo studios here sadly don’t archive their photos, except for the ones that are on the wall.

A few faces from today’s Dharavi.

Sadly, the community seems to be divided by a baggage that never left them - caste—the dominant Nadars and the rest, including the Adi-Dravidars. If you would like to know more, I would recommend that you follow her, or you can find her on Instagram.

A trip here to taste the food is also a good idea. Dharavi supplies and makes most of the idli atta and idlis that the working class eats in the city. Then there are restaurants on 90 Feet Road here where you get good Tamil food. But that’s a story for another day.

The shops here stock food from South Tamil Nadu. Ask for Muscoth/Musat halwa from Mudalur in Tirunelveli. Muscoth is the Sinhala word for coconut milk, but it inspired this sweet created by Joseph Abraham and his team in the 1960s.

And it’s not all idlis and South Indian food. It’s home to hundreds of packaged food makers where thousands of women and men work making snacks Mumbai consumes daily. Where will they relocate?

The Dharavi of the Filmmakers:

Dharavi is a city within a city and quite vast. It’s also a popular tourist spot thanks to Slumdog Millionaire, which explains this poster:

One movie to start your exploration of Dharavi is the film by the same name by Sudhir Mishra.

There was Rajnikanth’s Kaala that was shot here. Mr Maran inspires Rajni’s look in the film. This poster marks his birthday.

And then there was Gully Boys, which is inspired by the stories of hip-hop artists DIVINE and Naezy.

Home is where the work was.

Rehabilitation during redevelopment projects is about far more than just providing homes to displaced residents. These neighbourhoods are not merely places to live, they are also their workplaces. People’s livelihoods depend on networks of relationships and economic activities built up over decades, intricately connected to the city’s larger economy. Scattering residents into isolated spots across the city not only destroys these networks but can also reshape local economies in unpredictable ways. Experts in urban planning and redevelopment have documented how such disruptions create deep anxieties for those affected, upending both their work and community life.

The jobs seem to be for the next generation of white-collar entry-level jobs in the service sector, while the economy of the place was and is textiles, leather, recycling, food processing, pottery, etc.

This is the bridge that connects Dharavi with Sion, which has schools and colleges. Even though Dharavi has schools, many prefer to send their kids across to Sion, Bandra or Mahim schools for what they perceive as better education.

“Good Days are going to come”, says the now-forgotten election promise from 2014, behind a taxi. I hope it does for the mosaic of humanity here, too, as it has been for Gautham, the Adani one, thanks to the people who believed that election slogan.

That’s all, folks!

Links:

• Forts of Mumbai Region.

• KRIVIA paper on Dharavi Redevelopment Project wth extensive materials on the place.

• Ashutosh Bijoor’s documentation of Dharvi Fort.

Politicians, conquerors, settlers, and those in power often rename places to leave a mark: a way of saying, We were here; we have pissed; we have marked this territory. One can only wonder how many names a place, trampled by many feet, has worn through the ages, through different waves of change, sudden or gradual.

But have you noticed that people who seek to get closer to nature often do the opposite?

Instead of renaming, they try to learn the names already given. They listen. They trace etymologies. They pay attention to what the land and its people have long known.

Recently, we read this in Marginlands by Arati Kumar-Rao. She shares the story of pastoralists in the Thar Desert, who have dozens of names for clouds and the readings they take from them. Before that, there was Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, a quiet manifesto on the poetry of place names and the urgency of recovering a vanishing natural lexicon.

They are among the few who have written books. Many others pass this knowledge down orally, in fragments, in smaller circles. You only have to look carefully. On blogs, in local archives, to start unearthing these lost words.

Glossary of Things Past

Take, for instance, the Oral History Narmada project, which has preserved a beautiful, fading list of fish names once found in the river before the dam altered its flow. Rehmat and Dilip Zelve of Manthan Adhyayan Kendra compiled it:
https://oralhistorynarmada.in/the-fish-variety-in-the-river-narmada

Or pore over this list of toponyms across Karnataka, patiently collected by Pushpa and Siddeshwar on their blog Karnataka Travel:
https://karnatakatravel.blogspot.com/2017/04/toponymy-across-karnataka.html

Each name, each way of naming, opens a door. It reveals a logic, an ecology, a worldview. Often, it gestures to a world far removed from our screens and the imposed language of urban planners and builder-politicians who name and act on our behalf: NAINA, Mumbai 3.0, NOIDA, Cyberabad. MIDCs, SEEPZ. These are not names of memory, not yet. They are names of marketing and a reflection of ourselves.

Yet there’s a difference between Douglas Adamish naming and the deep-rooted names that emerge from a lived relationship with place. The older toponyms from agrarian, indigenous, or place-bound cultures carry layers of memory, ecology, and belonging.

The people mentioned above, along with others who quietly maintain such practices, view naming as a means to cherish and protect the natural world. To speak the names of rivers, rocks, hills, trees, winds, fish, and communities now lost is a form of love. And perhaps, resistance.

Macfarlane’s work, especially, responds to the slow erasure of this vocabulary. When children’s dictionaries began dropping words like acorn, bluebell, and otter in favour of iykyk, broadband, cut-and-paste, and chatroom, he saw it for what it was: a shift in worldview. A loss of intimacy with the natural world. A kind of forgetting.

But remembering is possible. Understanding names and the knowledge they convey re-enchants the world. The Narmada fish list shows how language and loss are intertwined. Toponymy, then, becomes a form of resistance, a quiet defiance against the tsunami of greed that troubles landscapes and our futures, not to mention other species.

Their observations whisper a deeper concern: when we lose the shared language of nature, we lose a part of ourselves.

This finally brings us to today’s photo essay from the salt-kissed village of Dhanda adjoining Khar and south of Juhu.

Zuem. Juem. Juhu. Danda.

Zuem, also spelt as Juvem or Juhu along the Konkan and Goa coast, refers to a slender, elongated island or peninsula found along the western coast of India.

The original Danda is the sandbar located above Bandora, as shown in the following map.

These landforms were typically shaped by coastal or riverine processes such as sandbar formation, tidal flats, or land reclamation, resulting in narrow strips of land parallel to the shoreline or riverbank.

Danda (or Dhanda) in Marathi coastal toponyms refers to a sandbar, spit, or narrow strip of land, often formed by the action of tides and currents, that projects into the sea or separates a creek from the open ocean. You would encounter Danda not only in Khar but also in Rev near Alibag, Madh, Dapoli, Arnala, and other places.

Zuem. Juem. Juhu. Danda. These aren’t just place names. They are salt-kissed fragments from older geographies. For example, the locality of Khar is named after the salt pans that dotted this intertidal landscape and means ‘ Salty’!

We live in a time when names are engineered, sold, and packaged, where place becomes product. Where cities change their names every few years. But the older names remain—in old maps, waiting to be seen online; in an old fisherman’s song or voice; in a sandbar that is now poured over by concrete; and sometimes, in photographs.

Can photographs, like names, carry memory?

They hold traces of salt, light, and silence. They help us remember what we risk forgetting. So here are some pictures from the Salt-Kissed Danda, still stubbornly connected to the memory worlds that came before Mumbai.

This following shrine is older and on the southern edge of the Danda village bordering Chuim Village of Bandra.

Adjacent to the temple is the large Danda fish market, catering to the affluent residents of Bandra and Khar.

The space between Danda and Chuim was a vast expanse of land where Bombil, ribbonfish, and other fish were dried. Over the decades, the space has shrunk along with the catch of Bombil along our polluted coast.

On the edge of these grounds are the graves of members of the Gujarati community who reside in Khar. Once surrounded by breathing space, the road, parked vehicles, and new construction are gradually encroaching on them.

Translation:
Local/Resident Shri Bapu
Died: Vikram Samvat 2035 (Sud Pancham, Sunday)
Date: 18-01-1979

A memory of a living soul.
Dedicated to the reverence of culture.

Also Kisan Parmar, who passed away in 1979.

The Northern Boundary of the Danda.

In the following image, you can see the northern border of the old sandbar. This inlet now drains the large Govindnagar and other settlements that occupy the former wetlands that existed here.

Danda is one of the few villages where hockey is a popular Sunday morning game. That old national game of India no one plays anymore in the age of WWE-style cricket and its large betting ecosystem.

The village still has a sizable population of traditional fisherfolk and motor boats.

The Future Beach

The shifting sands of the sandbar are constantly expanding, not by the action of the waves, tides and wind but with cement, stones and powdered rock that we now use instead of sand for our buildings.

Just off the beach and in the soft sand is probably the smallest well you will see in Mumbai with the shallowest of water tables.

Not sure if the water is potable because the village seems to prefer packaged water for drinking.

I have only skimmed the surface of this wonderful sandbar of a village, and hopefully will be going back for more salt-kissed images.

But for now, that’s all, folks!

The Deonar Abattoir, the central slaughterhouse of Mumbai, hosts an annual market of goats just before the festival of Bakrid. It’s one of the most important melas/markets hosted in Mumbai, bringing shepherds, goats, and buffalo herders from all over Western India, as well as from Telangana, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh: a mini-India built for livestock and the humans who bring them here.

And overseeing: the BMC and Mumbai Police, arguably the most efficient crowd managers in the republic. The Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah, the proud Kuruba (shepherd caste), and the Bangalore Police can learn from them about crowd management.

They came from different states, speaking different tongues, wearing different turbans, their clothes covered in different dust and smelling almost the same to a city resident’s nose.

But they also brought the same tools: sticks and ropes. And watching them, penning animals, negotiating turf, the chaos with choreographed discipline, I began to see something that felt oddly familiar.

The way the humans treated each other and the animals reminded me of the current state of democracy in the world today, in the age of big tech. 21st century democracy not just in India, but everywhere the cloud of Big Tech Sticktatorship hangs low over the people and weaponised local systems of patriarchy and control.

Welcome to the Bamboocratic Ropeublic of (Insert Nation Here), where the citizens' voice is leashed, policed, and promptly monetised.

The mela was a democracy of enclosures. Each shed and pen is carefully demarcated. Some with bamboo, some with nylon, and wires. A federal architecture of partitioned chaos. Goats from here. Sheep from there. And buffaloes with yellow ear tags and possibly Aadhaar-linked hooves. This city is the end of their Digiyatra.

Unlike the human melas held every few years on riverbanks, this mela is in the city, specifically in the poorest ward of Mumbai, the M Ward. Here, the walls are high, but not to keep anything in or out. They were just tall enough to mount cameras with drowsy cops on watchtowers, silent, blinking votes of no confidence. Inside, a show choreographed with sticks and ropes.

Sticks and Ropes of the People’s Pen

Unlike the sticks that these animals feel on their backs, the ones we are shepherded with are not made of bamboo. Some are vague laws with a broad sweep. Some are selective rules. Many are apps.

Some ropes are visible. Twisted coir, jute or shining nylon. But most are not. They are 5G, geotagged or possibly Starlinked in the near future, with a data centre for the masters to see, or in another country with commercial spies . They are also worn around the body or wrists as a sacred thread or a smartwatch. Across the chest, like honour. Tied to the soul, like a nationalism.

Some ropes come disguised as new legislations, dictats of senile old men, passed by a majority in a fancy house by selected men and a few women who didn’t read the text. Ropes made of unread bills, debated like lullabies, then tightened like nooses.

A stick for the goat is a poke on the thigh.
For the human, it’s an 8 pm announcement or a government circular, vague enough to ruin the day, make you stand in queues and take several poor lives.

A rope for the lamb is a tug on the neck.
For the citizen, it’s a biometric update reminder. Miss it, and your work, food or a child’s schooling vanishes.

And for the stubborn buffalo, there’s the old crack across the back.
For the people, it’s a colonial-era law, still polished daily in the capital, that proudly states that the Empire never left. It just outsourced the lathi to someone you know - ‘Lathi, oppressor caste sunday morning drill uncles ke saathi’.

And then there’s sports, WWE-style, everything
A circus of coloured ropes, bright lights, and endless chatter, binding millions in joyful captivity. A leash made of cheers and advertisements, pulling eyes and wallets away from what matters.

When the ropes tighten, many turn to god or his secular equivalents. Not for mercy, but for muscle. Religion becomes the hoof we grow to trample the next. And these ropes have silent memories. Some remember necks. Others remember wrists. A few remember the land that once belonged to someone else.

And each one of us will be counted and monetised. In units. In weight. In worth.

By the end of it, we all know what life had in store: a fair price, a clean cut, no complaints from the headless and a few super-rich business families.

And me? The innocent lamb, watching it all, camera in hand, chuckling under my breath, too cowardly to protest, too clever to stay silent.

Here are some more photos from the annual goat market of Mumbai:

Fodder.

Food for humans: The pom pom idliwallah

The Shepherds

Cleaning/Care

That’s all, Folks!

Mumbai, Matsyagandha.

An island born from the sea. A city that grew up gobbling up fishing villages and the smells of the sea.

As we all know, fish is one of our primary protein sources, and this Island city still harvests its nutrition from the surrounding waters.

This port city, once the Gateway to India, became a melting pot, attracting people from every corner of the region. With them came diverse social, cultural, and religious habits and traditions, transforming something as essential and ordinary as protein into a fascinating reflection of our collective identity.

These images offer a glimpse into the proteins of Mumbai’s streets, their diversity, and what it says about who we are.

The nutrition supplements to the children in anganwadis of Mumbai by the state. Wheat and chana.

You won’t get more locavore than this.

The vegetable waste from markets outside stations ends up in milk farms in the city. From waste to protein.

More local protein - milk.

Patriotic protein for the members of communities that like to police what their family members and others of the diverse Indian society (whom they consider below them) consume as protein. They pay extra for A2 Milk.

Proteins and protein supplements.

The state of our historical awareness. It could be popular with people who like A2 milk.

Proteins from lentils for the builders of our metro network.