Mumbai’s quiet histories: Critical intersections of the urban poor, historical struggles, and heritage spaces

Abstract

Informal and improvised practices of occupation and settlement have been known in the Mumbai region since before the birth of the city. These practices have since evolved into a tactic of the poor as they assert a “right to the city” among various structures of inequality and domination produced by the state and civil society. Heritage preservation, as it is practiced in Mumbai, participates in such state work and its failures render it as an object and instrument of class struggle. Within this context, heritage regimes agitate certain wounds of misrecognition borne by urban marginals and have produced assemblages, such as the Jogeshwari Caves, that assert a demand for their redress. Long pursued practices of “quiet encroachment” have become a generative urban force in Mumbai, but their histories remain understudied and unarticulated. This paper seeks to bring historical attention to these struggles and suggests that archeology can further attend to this project of redress.