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Kala Ghoda Festival, Hawkers And Use of Public Space

By Vidyadhar Date

04 February, 2013
Countercurrens.org

These people selling their wares on the street get heavy police protection. But the hawkers elsewhere face the lathi of the police. This was the contradiction one noticed in the Kala Ghoda festival which opened in Mumbai last weeek. The festival is enjoyable but it is mainly an upper class affair. It offers a rich mix of cinema, theatre, literature and other arts, eating out and shopping and heritage walks and all.

The contradiction lies in this. It shows the double standards in the use of public spaces. The entire Rampart Row stretch of the road is taken over and converted into one big café, people sat around tables in the open, there are cultural programmes, also in the open. The sort of atmosphere one sees in Europe.

The road is lined with food stalls and shops selling a variety of items.That is fine. But then hawkers do exactly the same. They too sell on the road. But they are viewed as a nuisance because they come from a different, lower class and their customers are mainly from the middle and lower class.That is where the contradiction lies.

At the festival the shops and food stalls were all run by NGOs or corporate,and the customers were mostly of the upper class. Technically, the festival was open to all. But the very presence of so many upper class people sends the message to the poor that they are not welcome in such places. . Besides there is the security, visible and invisible.

It is a welcome sign that the road became a public space. Indeed we need to reclaim more and more roads for the people, take them away from cars. But the upper class wants to appropriate public spaces for itself. Even while corporates lavish sponsorship on this festival, upper class citizens want to pounce on hawkers. There were many big companies and commercial establishments occupying public space on Rampart Row. But the ruling establishment wants to crack down on ordinary hawkers. Nothing illustrates this more than the sad death of a hawker who was trying to run away from the police who were chasing hawkers in Santa Cruz a few weeks ago.

A big shoe company, known for its expensive shoes, and a mineral water bottle company, were among those who found prime space in the festival on the road. What over overzealous citizen groups against hawkers forget that the national policy on street vendors very much supports hawking on streets. It makes a lot of economic sense. The same upper class citizens seldom raise their voice against big shopping malls which flout all kinds of civic norms, not to speak of safety norms. They also forget that the massive pro-democracy protests in Arab countries were fuelled by the death of a hawker in a crackdown in Tunisia.The man actually burnt himself to death because of police harassment.

At the Kala Ghoda festival a star attraction last Saturday was a young man in traditional Rajasthani clothes performing acrobatics on a rope. It shows that people are genuinely interested in these things but in real life on streets in daily life there is no place for these real, toiling people, for these artistes. An acrobat on a street elsewhere in Mumbai would be quickly seen as a nuisance to motorized traffic.

Some time ago there was Pali Haat at Pali Hill in Bandra where the atmosphere of a village fair was created . Stalls were put up all along the Nergis Dutt road and these were managed essentially by people from the upper strata of society. The clients were of course from the upper class as well at the show put up by the Pali Hill Residents Association. This association is totally silent on the complete absence of footpaths on the entire Pali Hill. It is such a shame, it shows such callous disregard for the needs of common people. This appears more cruel if one sees how jealously such associations want to gentrify their areas and keep the poor out. In fact, the absence of footpaths may be a clever device to keep the poor out. Footpaths would make the hill more accessible to people.

A report spoke of a Tarot card reader’s accurate reading sessions, each costing a fortune in itself. That shows how upper class this affair was. And also how essentially irrational and gullible many people are.

It was good to know that one of the stalls offered hand-made items made by mentally-challenged people.

The truth is people like to shop in the open. But the better off people want to create their own open air spaces, for their own class, where the poor will have little scope. How else, does one explain the open hostility of the upper class to hawkers ? Hawkers also stand and serve in the open. But most of them sell some low-priced goods for which the rich have no use. As a result, the hawkers are seen as a nuisance though they are serving a useful social role, catering to the poor who cannot afford to buy from regular shops.

At the Kala Ghoda festival, a posh restaurant took over the entire footpath and road in front of its premises However, this is not seen as a nuisance since this is an upper class activity.

One major reason why so many people flock to the festival and walk around is that it is virtually closed to vehicular traffic. So, one could walk around freely without fear of being knocked down by a car. It is the same in Disneyland in the US and elsewhere.. It becomes pleasurable mainly because of the absence of cars and the freedom people get while walking in the absence of vehicles. However, this crucial fact will never be admitted by the upper class because this militates against its car culture which gives this class so much mobility while inflicting immense misery on others.

There are two excellent street vendors near my house. One is a sugarcane juice walla. He works really hard and is a favourite with the college students in the area. His place is an excellent hang-out. But this man, who is so very useful, is the most insecure. He is constantly under threat from the BMC. He has no access to water or electricity. So he manually crushes the cane which must be tough in his advancing age. In non-residential areas, it seems, it is much easier to get an electric connection as one can see powered cane juice machines all over around the CST terminus, Fountain and Churchgate areas in Mumbai. He keeps the area scrupulously clean and brings water from a place some distance away. Another is obviously a South Indian on a bicycle who sells Idlis and Medu Wadas, again very clean, nothing is left on the road.

That the upper class is afraid of the poor was clear from an observation made some time ago by architect Ratan Batliwala when he was set to renovate Marine Drive at a cost of several crores of rupees. He said the main question would be of crowd control in the renovated site. They can screw up your design.
To his credit he was also forthright about the corporate sector which he said was willing to sponsor projects of open spaces partly to get over its feeling of guilt and having screwed up somewhere else.

What we need are not just open spaces, but spaces which are open to the public. I noticed the that the nice lawns in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Museum are completely sealed off , inaccessible to visitors. It is the same in Nehru Centre and several other places. The establishment is afraid of common people. In the name of security, a basic courtesy of offering a place to relax to common people is denied. There is too much of regimentation of our open spaces.

Activists like Nayna Kathpalia, Shirin Bharucha are doing a good job of rescuing open spaces from a largely insensitive government machinery and the abominable builder lobby.. There is clearly need for openness in the government’s functioning. When it wants to clandestinely dereserve a plot, it gives the mandatory advertisement in some corner in a less-circulated newspaper so that it escapes notice and there are few suggestions and objections.

The campaign on open spaces is launched mainly by the upper class. The real need is for architects and activists from the middle and lower class to become sensitive and create awareness on the issue.

(Vidyadhar Date is a senior journalist and author of the book Traffic Transport need priority. datebandra in the era of climate change. Walking, Cycling, Public @yahoo.com)

 

 




 

 


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