“Jab babri masjid shaheed huyi”: Memories of violence and its spatial remnants in Mumbai

Abstract

This chapter interrogates the secularist notions of Mumbai’s public life through the tensions between mainstream cityscape as (Hindu) nation-space and Muslim locales as excluded territories. While shared conceptions of locality play an important role in the creation of “imagined communities”, political violence plays a significant role in the way urban localities are ruptured, created and transformed. The violence that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 remains a landmark in the communalisation of Mumbai’s landscape. This chapter traces recollections and memories of communal violence decades later, which have come to transform Shivaji Nagar, a predominantly Muslim basti (locality) in Mumbai. Based on ethnographic material, it argues that intense political contestation that juxtaposed notions of nation, locality, community and individual, as experienced during these events is significant to the construction of belonging in Muslim localities. The experience of communal violence has made the notions of belonging to a locality a political process, contributing to the construction of collective identities. The violence not only reconfigured communal identities locally but the transformation of localities and neighbourhoods that followed stands as signifiers of these processes even today.