Tucked away in one of Mumbai’s oldest colonial neighbourhoods is a village that has made many urbanites, architects and travellers succumb to its charms with unfailing regularity. Every year, a startled reporter rediscovers it and pours her enchantment into a loving ode to this anachronistic collection of homes nestled behind a bustling main road. For the diehard city dweller in Mumbai, the village seems almost unreal. What right do quaint cottages, tiny chawls, lavish bungalows with intricate carvings, and narrow lanes that block off traffic noise, have to exist in a city being eaten away by speculation and towering high rises?
Khotachiwadi is compared by some of its residents to Asterix’s Gaulish village holding up against the Roman empire, especially in the story ‘Mansion of the Gods’. It has been covered, written about and acted upon by heritage activists more often than the annual erosion of its concrete existence. This happens when one house after the other gets extracted from its foundations to make way for one more standard structure that the city passes off as architecture.
Khotachiwadi, mostly due to its very dynamic, passionate, articulate residents, can never be completely ignored by the city. Its anachronism is what gives it its charisma. It is a nugget of fantasy in a landscape that has defined itself in very narrow terms. A fantasy that unfortunately has lesser legitimacy than colonial buildings, modernist aspirations and futuristic sci-fi imagery that contemporary cities revel in all over the world.
Of course, thanks to a few heritage-preservationist activists, Khotachiwadi has managed to claim some right to a nostalgia industry—but its residents often find themselves torn between the pragmatics of living there and the demands of being located in a narrative of a special past. Their nostalgia is actually very personal, connected to real memories and experiences, which change as people grow.
For this reason, they see it as a living neighbourhood connected to their lives in ways that cannot be frozen or enshrined. That would mean as much of a death as the physical decimation of a structure. After all, each house has a story to tell: of its growth, of an addition or improvement; a new room, an awning created during a particularly strong monsoon, a new porch. The wadi grew and wants to continue to grow but on its own terms.
Unfortunately, this is not allowed by both sides of the opposing groups. Only those living there know how challenging it is to maintain things the way they are. While most don’t want to take the easy way out—eventually the exigencies are such that they do—they sell their beautiful houses to developers, who replace them with buildings of no architectural value.
Often residents ask why the city’s rich and famous—many part of the wadi’s fan club—aren’t putting their money where their mouth is? Why can’t they help out by keeping the city’s history alive by helping residents find buyers who won’t destroy their heritage homes? The houses could be transformed into boutiques, cafés, hotels or social clubs. Of course, this is not something that the preservationists want to hear—for them this is a slippery slope and a sure fire road to self-destruction. Ideally for them, things should be the way they are, residents and all. The problem is that when a neighbourhood or home stops evolving it loses relevance.
Perhaps it is worth looking back at the element of fantasy that Khotachiwadi represents. Is it really such a lone presence in the city? Not really. But to acknowledge that, the city needs to open up its imagination and see itself afresh. There are villages galore all over Mumbai. From the fishing Koliwada villages to the East Indian enclaves of Bandra, Kurla, Mazagaon, Andheri and Santa Cruz. The East Indian community’s traditional habitats are seen to be part of a 200-odd village network that manages to survive, against odds similar to what Khotachiwadi faces.
Some of them live with being misrepresented as slums; some are just lost in the dense fabric that the city is made up of. Some of them are being slowly gentrified by artistes and expats. The village as a habitat is certainly not anachronistic to the form of the city. This is true not only of Mumbai but of many global metropolises, including Shenzhen or Tokyo.
Look closely and they can all be counted as readymade fantasies that the city can draw from to restore the validity of spaces like Khotachiwadi. Mumbai needs to open up to new possibilities and newer fantasies a bit more uninhibitedly but well, that’s another story.
The writers are co-founders of urbz.net, an urban network that’s active in Mumbai, Goa and beyond.
