The story of the disrupted and delayed immersion of Mumbai’s famous Ganpati idol, Lalbaugcha Raja, over the weekend, has by now turned into something of a modern folklore.
The delay of more than 13 hours on Saturday-Sunday has been attributed to a number of issues—some said there were technical snags, others justified that the high tide did not allow the idol to be transferred from the trolley on which it was taken for the visarjan to the raft that would finally immerse it, and a growing section of devotees pointed to another aspect altogether.
Bappa’s darshan, they pointed out, was determined by class. The average devotee stood in queues for hours on end and was then shoved or pushed even before she/he could take the darshan. The rich and the famous were, unsurprisingly, given due respect and time at the feet of the idol.
Videos were circulated showing the difference. Then, on the visarjan day, the people who did it traditionally were apparently ignored to allow the Ambani scion to do the honours and accompany Bappa on his long journey to the immersion point at Chowpatty.
Here, the story goes that the traditional people, like the fisherfolk, and their ways of visarjan were again sidelined in favour of modern methods by the omnipresent corporate. Those who visited spoke of how the pandal was air-conditioned and replete with posters of Jio. The narrative pointed to the fact that Bappa was displeased with being hijacked by deep pockets, so to say, and divine energy somehow ensured that the will and presence of the common folk ultimately prevailed.
Well, the corporatisation of urban space, essential services, and festivals is hardly new. It has been with us for years now but is visibly enlarging its scope and hold over the city’s space and services. Neighbourhood celebrations acquired the increasing patina of sponsorships as the economy boomed; celebrations that were largely family or community-driven, like the Ganeshotsav, Dahi Handi, and Navratri, turned into full-scale advertising and promotional venues for small and big donors. It happened pre-1991 too, but economic liberalisation, in its wake, saw the re-emergence of the corporate as a major player in urban affairs. This appears to have enlarged its scope.
What has changed in the past decade is the nature of sponsorships—from the small and medium players in the capital world to mega corporations bank-rolling the big mandals and their idols. In a city where names of metro stations are branded with the name of a paying corporation, as seen in the old and new metro lines, public festivals would be fair game. In fact, to go back into Mumbai’s history, the very creation of the city in the colonial era and its consolidation as India’s commercial capital had a rather large footprint of the industry and private capital.
In the wake of independence, the Bombay Plan drawn up by the major corporates, including the Tatas, is well-known. Post-liberalisation, the Vision Mumbai document that sought to turn the city into a financial hub was essentially the work of corporates, under the aegis of their organisation ‘Bombay First’, outsourced to the international consulting firm McKinsey and Company. The agitations then—justifiably so—were about the exclusion of people’s ideas and needs, as the plan envisioned Bombay as a gleaming city of finance and entertainment.
It is not the mere presence of corporates but, as internationally reputed urbanist Dr Saskia Sassen pointed out about a decade ago about global cities, their nature and scale that’s worrying. Writing about London and New York, among other cities, Dr Sassen observed about global capital buying up large tracts of land, housing and other services: “This proliferating urban gigantism has been strengthened and enabled by the privatizations and deregulations that took off in the 1990s across much of the world…The overall effect has been a reduction in public buildings, and an escalation in large, corporate private ownership. The result is a thinning in the texture and scale of spaces previously accessible to the public. Where before there was a government office building handling the regulations and oversight of this or that public economic sector, or addressing the complaints from the local neighbourhood, now there might be a corporate headquarters, a luxury apartment building or a guarded mall.”
If the trend continues, she and other urbanists warned, the outcome would be cities with less cosmopolitanism and increasingly less space for the powerless to leave their socio-cultural imprint or simply assert, as the marches in Latin American cities did in the last decade: ‘We are present; this is our city too.’ “Indeed, at the current scale of acquisitions,” wrote Dr Sassen, “we are seeing a systemic transformation in the pattern of land ownership in cities: one that alters the historic meaning of the city. Such a transformation has deep and significant implications for equity, democracy, and rights.”
This, in other words and phrasing, is what the aggrieved fisherfolk pointed out about the Lalbaugcha Raja visarjan—that the social and cultural equity in front of the divine was being captured by the corporate, that their traditional role in sending Him off was stymied. Indeed, cities are economic engines, and, in today’s economy, it invariably means the over-arching imprint of mega and transnational corporates. But cities are also living and vibrant places created by the participation and energy of their people from all walks of life, where the economically less powerful assert themselves. These include the urban common spaces and, of course, public festivals. The legend of Lalbaugcha Raja is nothing without its lakhs of devotees and traditional caretakers. It’s time sponsors, however deep-pocketed, understood that.
Smruti Koppikar, an award-winning senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’ and can be reached at smruti@questionofcities.org.
