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H-ASIA March 19, 2011 Member's publication: __The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life_, edited by Neera Adarkar ***************************************************************** From: neera adarkar <neeraadarkar@yahoo.co.in> I am pleased to share the news that a new volume: _The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life_, Neera Adarkar, ed., has now been published. _The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life_, edited by Neera Adarkar (New Delhi: imprintOne, distributed by Cambridge University Press, 2011) 176pp ISBN : 9788188861125 Mumbai's chawls: a ubiquitous yet misunderstood housing typology are often compared to tenements and clumped in with slums. For many of us these structures are unfamiliar, as the city of extremes is often understood through only slums and mansions. This ambiguity has generated a plethora of questions surrounding their form, history and culture: What do they look like? How do they feel inside? Where are they located throughout the city? Why do we need to get a sense of them before they all disappear? How have cultural formations emerged through the limitations imposed by such limited living space? These are not easy questions to answer, but this book attempts to consider the ways in which the chawl emerges as a unique marker of the city of Mumbai, holding not only the history of the city's transformation but also it's unique social identity. It is true that such buildings, saturated as they are by the changing urban form , are often coated with a nostalgia of what once was and what now can never be. In the book the nostalgia shares space with other tales: those of hardship and struggle in extremely difficult living conditions. It is impossible to tell the following stories without these two conflicting and contrasting sentiments, especially now, as redevelopment projects raze the chawls of Central Mumbai, displace large communities of people, relegate even more to indefinite limbo in transit camps, and erect replacement buildings that may not offer a liveable norm. In the 15 chapters of this multi-genre book, with the help of an assemblage of visuals a diverse group of writers have tried to trace the past, present and future of the city, as told through and within the chawl while considering a complicated and interwoven set of themes and questions. TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword Charles Correa Preface and Acknowledgements Neera Adarkar Overview Sandeep Pendse, Neera Adarkar, Maura Finkelstein Part One: History in Context 1. Salaries and Wages: Girgaon and Girangaon Neera Adarkar 2. The Making of a Working-Class Area: The Worli BDD Chawls (1920?40) Vanessa R. Caru 3. Chawls Overseas Colin Cunningham Part Two: Towards a Present 4. The Chronotope of the Chawl: A Ghost Story in Three Acts Maura Finkelstein 5. Ganga Building Chronicles Prasad Shetty 6. Mill, Market, Milieu: Redevelopment and Rights to the City Vyjayanthi Rao Part Three: The Space of the Chawl 7. The Terrain of Home, and within Urban Neighbourhoods Kaiwan Mehta 8. Chalchitra/Chawlchitra: The Representation of Mumbai's Chawls in Hindi Films Amrit Gangar Architectural Drawings Rupali Gupte Ravan and Eddie: Paintings and Excerpts from the Screenplay Dev Benegal Photographs Rajesh Vora, and Rupali Gupte Part Four: Issues of Identity 9. After the Violence: How the Mumbai Riots Changed Life for Muslims in Chawls Sameera Khan 10. The Flavour of Memory Still Holds Me: The Gujarati Chawl Experience Sejal Shah 11. Inner Spaces, Women's Voices Smruti Koppikar Part Five: Personal Narratives 12. My Old Neighbourhoods Namdeo Dhasal 13. Siddharth Nagar Days Pradnya Daya Pawar 14. Marathi Manus in Girgaon Arvind Adarkar 15. Girangaon via BDD Chawls G.K. Ainapure ------------------------ Neera Adarkar Architect, Urban Researcher Partner, Adarkar Associates Mumbai ****************************************************************** To post to H-ASIA simply send your message to: <H-ASIA@h-net.msu.edu> For holidays or short absences send post to: <listserv@h-net.msu.edu> with message: SET H-ASIA NOMAIL Upon return, send post with message SET H-ASIA MAIL H-ASIA WEB HOMEPAGE URL: http://h-net.msu.edu/~asia/
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