Artist Chittaprosad’s 1950s depiction of a labour camp speaks to Mumbai’s fast-changing present

Photographic and artistic representations of Bombay’s pasts tend to acquire a patina of nostalgia for times when things were seemingly different from the present – when streets were clean and uncrowded, or when natural features such as beaches could be enjoyed at leisure and in comfort. Such representations had already acquired a nostalgic aura by the 1990s, when the city’s population had grown dramatically, and many of the grand buildings in areas like Flora Fountain had fallen into a state of disrepair.

The transformation of the city through ‘redevelopment’ over the last twenty-five years has accelerated change to an extent where even the cityscapes of the 1990s seem impossibly distant. Houses have become buildings, which, in turn, have become towers. Flyovers, sealinks, freeways, monorail, coastal roads, bridges to the mainland and now the underground metro have completely transformed both the appearance of the city as well as the experience of navigating it.

Such is the pace of change that a particular vista of the city cannot be guaranteed even over the short cycle of a real estate sale. Brokers now routinely issue disclaimers disavowing the continuity of the view from the flat that a potential buyer might have between initial viewing and completion of the sale.

What are we to make of representations of Bombay’s past in the shadow of the tall towers created through redevelopment? Cityscapes such as Flora Fountain or Hornby Road – human-made through and through – are paradoxically rendered into the city’s ‘natural’ past through these recent changes.

Among such representations of Bombay’s grand buildings, boulevards and beaches, Chittaprosad’s Labour Camp appears anomalous in its portrayal of a cluster of hutments with crouched inhabitants in the foreground, while in the background rise the towers and factories of the modern city.

In contrast to the fixity and permanence of Flora Fountain – and the sense of arrival such representations convey – the labour camp with its humble hutments appears fleeting and transient, still in motion. The tension between the two images offers an insight into the nature of the urban process in Bombay.

Chittaprosad was born in colonial Bengal and is perhaps best known for his sketches of the Bengal famine of 1943-1944. He is also widely recognised for his drawing of a hat-wearing, staff-bearing peasant that adorns the poster of Bimal Roy’s film Do Bigha Zamin. Chittaprosad had joined the Communist Party of India, having been recruited by general secretary PC Joshi, and was sent to Bombay in the early 1940s. There, he participated actively in the party’s cultural activities, including the Indian People’s Theatre Association. In 1943, the party sent him to Midnapore to document the unfolding famine in a series of sketches, later published in a volume titled Hungry Bengal.

Towards the end of the 1940s, however, Chittaprosad grew disillusioned with the CPI and left the party. He retreated to his home in Andheri, where, among other things, he established ‘Khelghar’, a puppet theater for children in the vicinity. Chittaprosad’s life in Andheri and its environs from the late 1940s through the 1960s offered him an opportunity to observe the city of Bombay – also an occasional, though lesser-known, theme in his work – transform into Greater Bombay.

He would have witnessed the physical and administrative absorption of the fields, jungles, swamps, villages and towns of Salsette into the expanding city. He certainly sought to capture the landscape as it existed then, as suggested by the linocut titled Landscape, Bombay Out-Skirts. Dated 1953, it depicts a rural scene with peasants working cattle in the foreground, a hut set amid fields in the midground, and trees and hills skirting the background.

In the same period, had he chosen to do so, he might have also noted the rapid development of the northern portions of the island city of Bombay. Mahim, Dharavi, Sion and Wadala – although already theoretically part of the ‘city’ and of various urbanisation ‘schemes’ of colonial planning interventions by the Bombay Improvement Trust, the Bombay Development Department and the Bombay Municipal Corporation – only underwent actual development in the years during and after the Second World War.

It is likely that Chittaprosad’s Labour Camp was inspired by the Matunga Labour Camp, the best known of Bombay’s labour camps. Located in the heart of the larger Dharavi settlement, Communist party stalwarts Annabhau Sathe and RB More both lived in the Matunga Labour Camp in the 1940s.

Sathe and, to a lesser extent, More were also very active in the party’s cultural front at the time – More’s grandson Subodh More referred to Sathe as the ‘[Maxim] Gorky of Maharashtra’. It is likely that Chittaprosad, through his close association with leftist cultural circles in Bombay in the 1940s, had encountered one or both of these prominent figures.

Urban planning in Bombay over the course of the twentieth century sought to establish fixity and stability in land tenure, building quality and occupancy.

Yet, the very profusion of interventions by various agencies created a cluttered mosaic of schemes and programmes for various parts of the city, each with specific rules and restrictions. At the same time, urban planning also perpetuated forms of transience and impermanence.

By the 2000s, urban development – in the sense of a concerted effort by planning bodies to realise a vision for the city – had yielded to redevelopment, which incentivises private initiative through relaxing the very regulations that planning had put into place. In this most recent era of the creative destruction of the twentieth century urban fabric, Labour Camp assumes a renewed significance.

Whether by design or not, Chittaprosad’s Labour Camp offers an insight into the process of urban development. Unusually for representations of the city from the time, the image focuses on the people whose labour made possible the buildings and factories of the modern city.

But by juxtaposing the transient-seeming labour camp with elements of the modern city in the same frame, the image also suggests that the two forms of urbanism exist in tension with each other, in a dialectical relationship rather than in a sequential one.

The particularities of urban planning in Bombay – that it unfolded in such piecemeal fashion, that housing construction was hampered by shortages, that histories of political mobilisation meant that plans could only ever be partially and incompletely executed – have meant that the very process of urban development created the conditions for its own supersession by redevelopment.

Nikhil Rao is associate professor of history at Wellesley College. His book titled House, But No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898-1964 was published in 2013.

This is an excerpt from Nikhil Rao’s essay, “In the shadow of redevelopment: Bombay’s past through Mumbai’s present”, from the book Bombay Framed: People, Memory, Metropolis accompanying the eponymous exhibition which is on display at The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai, till April 11.