South Bombay

During the 2017 election season I trained research attention on an area of the city very different from the peripheral—so-called “slum”—neighborhood from which Seema had contested in 2012 (the subject of chapter 1). On the suggestion and invitation of the candidate upon whose (ultimately successful) 2017 campaign I focused, a man named Sayeed Rizwan, I headed to an area I’ll call Badlapur,1 situated in the inner-city districts generally known as “South Bombay.” I had met Sayeed for the first time in 2012, in the aftermath of his successful electoral bid to the municipal corporation, where he represented a district in the eastern suburbs of Gowandi with which I was intimately familiar from my earlier research about municipal water. Sayeed was elected in 2012 from an area not far from the one from which Seema (whose bid for office was the subject of chapter 1) had been displaced by a change in the gender and caste reservation for that district seat. While I had not followed Sayeed’s 2012 bid for office in Seema’s former district in the suburban slums (I had spent that election season following Seema’s campaign), I had watched Sayeed’s political career quite closely over the following years—especially because, during his tenure in Gowandi, Sayeed had taken a keen interest in the area’s hydraulic landscape. His tenure as corporator coincided with the implementation of some large-scale infrastructural interventions and water-related projects in the area that I had long been following, and by the time the 2017 election season rolled around he had grown accustomed to my general hanging about and constant questions.2

I had mixed feelings about Sayeed’s invitation to follow his 2017 election campaign in South Bombay. Anchored by the arterial Mohammed Ali Road stretching eastward from Mumbai Central railway station toward the JJ Flyover, the area encompassing Dongri, Nagpada, Madanpura, Mazagaon, Pydonie, and Bhendi Bazaar is the historic home of Mumbai’s Hindu, Muslim, Parsi, and Jewish communities comprising the city’s mercantile classes, as well as to the bustling bazaars and wholesale markets comprising the city’s erstwhile colonial-era “native town”—situated just north of the fortified area where the British Raj’s offices and officers were clustered (see Map 3). Historians have written about the extraordinarily cosmopolitan character of these market districts, which have been the subject of much scholarly attention, both historical and anthropological.3 And yet notwithstanding the neighborhood’s storied cosmopolitanism, in recent decades the neighborhoods in and around present-day Mohammed Ali Road tend to be characterized in both popular and scholarly discourses as an insular space: as a “Muslim ghetto.”4 The area is not infrequently described in an offhand (and often disparaging way) as “mini-Pakistan,” even by Mumbaikars professing not to harbor Islamophobic predilections.5 In this context, political subjectivity in Bombay’s “Muslim heartland” is generally presumed to be given by religion and by religious identity.

Although I began the 2017 election season without any previous ethnographic experience in South Bombay, the area felt familiar, not least because so much Hindi cinema (especially that of the gangland genre) is set and filmed in and around the neighborhood. I had long been a regular visitor to the markets and bazaars in and around Mohammed Ali Road, hunting for old film posters, a new bicycle, or a coconut scraper. During the monsoon season of 2015, I had joined a Sunday-morning “Urdu for Hindi Speakers” course at Anjuman-e-Islam’s Akbar Peerbhoy College, and spent soggy Sunday afternoons wandering the muddy lanes and savoring paya soup at the storied kebab spot, Sarvi—as famous for its succulent kebabs and perfect paya as for the stories and secrets that infused the atmosphere of the fabled favorite haunt of some of Mumbai’s saltier mafia dons of yore. In this context, I wondered whether engaging Badlapur as a research site would risk presuming the categories it professes to research: “Muslim politics,” for instance. And yet for these same reasons, researching in Mumbai’s “Muslim heartland” seemed to present an important opportunity to probe these same relations—between concepts and concrete, words and worlds, streets and screens.

When the Muslim-identitarian All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) party announced in 2017 that it would be fielding candidates in the Mumbai elections for the first time (contesting nearly a third of the 227 races), Shahid Latiq, editor of the Urdu daily Inquilaab, wrote (echoing a common refrain) that “there is lot of confusion among the Muslim voters with all secular parties contesting against each other.”6 Latiq’s diagnosis of “confusion” pointed to the widely held presumption in Mumbai that the political lives of Muslim Mumbaikars are determined by religion—a puzzling presumption which research (my own included) readily reveals as unsubstantiated. For instance, the eastern suburbs where Seema had sought election five years earlier was also a Muslim-majority area. And yet, as demonstrated in chapter 1, while religious leaders and associational ties certainly played prominent roles in that electoral campaign, the relational work that the authority of religious leaders accomplished (or sought to accomplish) was of a piece with that of myriad other, equally prominent election-season actors: caste association leaders, chit fund managers, neighborhood plumbers, prominent businesspeople, schoolteachers, building contractors, and so on. In this context, the interesting question is not whether religious institutions and individual leaders play a role in election campaigning (obviously they did); rather, the question concerned precisely what role religious authority did (and didn’t) play.

Following a change in the gender and caste reservation of Sayeed’s incumbent district in Gowandi (a low-income neighborhood not far from Seema’s), the Samajwadi Party had offered Sayeed the party ticket to contest from Badlapur—the neighborhood where he was born and brought up but where he was largely unknown as a politician. And yet, while Sayeed may have been a political newcomer to the area, South Bombay politics were not at all unknown to him; he had lived in the neighborhood his entire life. Sayeed’s personal history provides insight not only into his own political trajectory but into that of Muslim Mumbai more generally.

While both Sayeed’s parents are Muslims from Maharashtra, their caste, class, and linguistic backgrounds could not have been more different. His mother hails from the Dakhni-speaking region of Sawantwadi, some five hundred kilometers south of Badlapur, near the Goan border. They’re “Goan Maharashtrian,” Sayeed told me over breakfast in January 2017.7 His mother’s mother (his Nani) grew up “in the village,” where she married twice: her first husband was a wealthy merchant of the Barelvi community—a Sunni revivalist sect of South Asian origin that marries Sufi devotionalism with adherence to Sharia. Nani’s husband was “educated,” Sayeed tells me, both formally as well as “culturally.” He too had Sawantwadi roots, but his businesses were based in Bombay, which is where Nani moved after marriage. Sayeed’s mother was one of two daughters from that first marriage, and in line with the family’s commitment to education, his mother was sent to Bombay’s highly reputed Urdu-medium Anjuman-e-Islam school (not far from where I studied Urdu during the 2015 rains). Sayeed never met Nani’s first husband (Sayeed’s Nana), because he died young. But more importantly—insofar as Sayeed’s trajectory was concerned—Nana died without any sons, leaving Sayeed’s Nani to manage the family business and assets together with her daughters. In this context, Nani’s husband’s family (her in-laws), who were not as successful as Nani’s husband had been (and perhaps always a little jealous of their brother’s business acumen), grew ambitious, wanting to inherit their late brother’s assets—especially the pottery shop in Null Bazaar. For this reason, Sayeed tells me, Nani’s late husband’s brother fabricated an allegation against her, accusing her of having had an affair with a local doctor. So, Sayeed tells me, Nani “approached a relative of her husband and had a quick marriage, overnight. She didn’t tell anyone. She became the fourth wife.”

Nani managed the pottery shop in Null Bazaar on her own, “in a burkha,” Sayeed tells me, adding that “she was a very strong woman.” Nani began searching for a husband for Sayeed’s mother, “a boy who they could bring into their own household. There were no men in the house,” Sayeed explained, so they needed an inmarriage. They found a suitable boy whose family was willing to settle him in his wife’s household, but he was from a “different community,” from the region of Mahabaleshwar, in the Western Ghats. Nani knew the boy’s uncle, who had a vegetable vending shop nearby her pottery shop in Null Bazaar; she had met the boy once when he was visiting from the village. “He was a village boy,” Sayeed tells me, “poor, but educated.” And the man who would become Sayeed’s father was Maharashtrian; he spoke not Urdu but Marathi.

The marriage was arranged, and the Marathi-speaking village boy moved to Bombay, taking up residence in Nani’s household. His new family changed his Maharashtrian-sounding name to something more “identifiably Muslim”—which from his Urdu-speaking family’s perspective, as Sayeed explained, meant Muslim of the North Indian, Urdu-speaking variety. “They forced my father to change his name and his language as well; they forced him to speak Urdu.” Sayeed would eventually become one of six brothers, and when it came time for their marriages, Sayeed’s father wanted his sons to marry girls from Mahabaleshwar, “so that they could speak Marathi.” But Nani prohibited it (Nani was “very dominating,” he repeats). “She was cultivating a North Indian Muslim identity,” Sayeed explains, “so she insisted, ‘Urdu Urdu Urdu.’”

In Sayeed’s early childhood, his mother gave private Urdu lessons from their home in Badlapur. When Sayeed was six, his mother fell ill and spent the next decade in and out of the hospital. “She stopped cooking” Sayeed remembers, “so I was virtually adopted by my neighbors.” These neighbors belonged to North Indian families of Sheikhs and Quereshis—Urdu-speaking Muslims with family businesses in goat butchering. “I was raised in that community,” Sayeed tells me, adding that now, here in Badlapur, “they’re my biggest supporters.” Sayeed himself eventually went on to marry an Urdu-educated Bombay girl. His father paid a fine to their jamaat (religious community) in Mahabaleshwar, Sayeed tells me, because his sons all married outside the community.

Notwithstanding Nani’s preoccupation with the refined piety of learned Urdu, Sayeed went to an English-medium school, where he recalls having been powerfully influenced by his English-speaking mentors and teachers as well as by the English-speaking “Khoja lady” who lived above the school and tutored him in English in the afternoons. “The Khojas are philanthropic people,” Sayeed tells me, adding that he was “very influenced by them.” Only one of the six brothers was sent to an Urdu-medium school: “Nani decided at least one son should be properly Urdu educated,” Sayeed explains. But when this Urdu-educated brother enrolled in an English-medium college, “he couldn’t keep up because he’d done his maths and sciences in Urdu and was unprepared for the language switch.” Sayeed, on the other hand, reached college fluent in English and well prepared. He recalls it was in college that he discovered his real passion: “I love to organize things!” He described for me organizing all sorts of events for his college-going peers, including fashion shows and proms, adding, “I was never the performer; I was the organizer.” I ask him to say more, and he pauses, becoming reflective and adding: “I wanted to create. I wanted to give opportunities to people, to create an environment where people could perform.” He emphasizes the word perform.

Sayeed’s interest in politics came much later, in his final year of college, following the 1992–93 Hindu–Muslim riots in Bombay. The immediate impetus of the violence was the destruction on December 6, 1992, of the Babri Masjid in the North Indian town of Ayodhya by a 150,000-strong crowd of kar sevaks (volunteers), affiliated with right-wing Hindu organizations comprising the Sangh Parivar (association of groups comprising the Hindutva “family”) who had crashed thorough police barricades and razed the sixteenth-century mosque.8 The kar sevaks had traveled to Ayodhya from all corners of India to attend a political rally at the contested site, which had been declared by Hindu nationalist outfits to have been the birthplace of the mythical god-king Ram. In the aftermath of the destruction, Muslim Indians all over the country had poured into city streets in protest. In Bombay, those protests became sites of violent clashes with city authorities when police sought to disperse the assembled protesters using lethal force, opening fire on crowds of Muslim demonstrators and arresting people in droves. Within a few days of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, nearly two hundred people (mostly Muslims) had been killed in the Bombay violence. Tensions increased a few days later when Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray claimed personal credit for the destruction of the Babri Masjid—claiming (falsely) that the demolition had been led by Shiv Sena “storm troopers” who had been specially trained and dispatched to Ayodhya for that purpose.9 Over the following weeks, the Shiv Sena, which had recently suffered a humiliating defeat to the Congress Party in the municipal corporation election, seized the opportunity to consolidate their effective control over city space and institutions by channeling the affective energies of the moment—of Hindu assertion and Muslim fear—into public displays of sovereign authority. In his ethnographic account of the Mumbai riots, Thomas Blom Hansen describes what transpired in Bombay that December:

While the police shot at and arrested Muslim demonstrators, Shiv Sena was allowed to conduct large public celebrations of the demolition, even to construct a makeshift hutatma (martyrs) column in the Marathi-speaking area of Dadar listing the names of Hindus killed in the December 1992 riots. Shiv Sena also began the so-called maha aartis, mass prayers performed in front of temples as a show of strength against Muslims as well as a way to boost confidence among Hindus. The maha aartis were clearly political demonstrations, as Hinduism has no such tradition of public mass prayer; it was a symbolic response to the Muslims’ Friday prayer, regarded by many Hindus as a public show of strength. Accompanied by extensive press coverage, and under the protection of police and army personnel, Shiv Sena leader Pramod Nawalkar led the first maha aarti on December 11, a Friday, at a time coinciding with the Muslims’ Friday prayer throughout the city. By the end of December the Shiv Sena leadership decided to launch a regular campaign, and hundreds of maha aartis were performed all over the city well into January 1993.10

It was in this general climate that a month after the onset of the December violence, on January 8, 1993, the sporadic violence erupted into a concerted effort led by the Shiv Sena to obliterate Muslim Bombay. Following the gruesome arson-related murder of a working-class Hindu family in the northern suburb of Jogeshwari, groups of men “rampaged the city, systematically looting and burning Muslim shops, houses and businesses” which had been marked for that purpose using electoral data from civic offices.11 Sayeed recalled how, when he was very young, their family maid—a Hindu Maharashtrian who stayed in the adjacent building—“used to dress me up as Ganesh during festivals.” He recalls that his parents were “happy about it; they thought it was cultural.” During the riots however, this easy, neighborly coexistence became a source of fear; from the windows of their second-floor home, Sayeed recalled watching police firing bullets into buildings. Amid the violence (which killed an estimated eight hundred people over the month of January), 150,000 Muslims fled the city while another 100,000 huddled in quickly erected refugee camps set up in South Bombay—an area that, due to the Muslim-majority character, was (somewhat inaccurately) hoped to be something of a safe haven.12

Unlike earlier episodes of communal violence in Bombay, which had mostly affected lower-income areas of the city (its popular neighborhoods and “slums”), the 1992–93 riots were unprecedented insofar as they implicated the city’s upwardly mobile middle classes—systematically targeting Muslim professionals and business families, and thereby dashing the hopes and dreams of escaping stigmatization through upward mobility that Muslim elites’ successes (and social acceptance) had signified to the struggling classes. It was in this context—of terror, humiliation, and rage—that, in March 1993, a group of people with ties to Bombay’s underworld (specifically, to Nagpada-born mob boss Dawood Ibrahim, whose character and life history was recently made famous by Netflix’s adaptation of Vikram Chandra’s novel Sacred Games) carried out a series of citywide bombings, targeting transit hubs and other crowded areas, killing scores of civilians. The blasts were widely interpreted by popular media as retributive—a “Don’t mess with us” message from Muslim Bombay.13 As a Nagpada schoolteacher told Hansen in 1993:

We all felt horrible during those four months . . . all over you would hear these derogatory remarks about Muslims, you felt the hostility all over, in the trains, in shops, in my school. I recall riding on a train when a group of Hindu women spotted me and started talking quietly. One said “We Hindu women should also do something. Look at that Muslim woman there—one should throw her off the train.” . . . All this stopped after the bomb blasts—not because they accepted us, but because they feared us.14

Before the riots, only one of Sayeed’s college friends had been interested in politics—a “political radical,” Sayeed explained, “but not radical about religion; he was a leftist.” All that changed in 1993, when in the aftermath of the bomb blasts the Bombay police began rounding up prominent Muslim leaders, arresting them under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA). “They rounded up all the wealthy Muslims in the city after the blasts,” Sayeed recalls, people such as Abu Asmi Asmi,15 a wealthy South Bombay businessman—president of the Maharashtra branch of the Samajwadi Party since 1995—whose travel agency was accused (and eventually cleared) of having helped those responsible for the 1993 bomb blasts to flee the country. “I liked Asmi,” Sayeed tells me, “He was philanthropic; he gave money for our college functions, things like that. He wasn’t into politics; he was just a businessman.” Furious at what seemed an arbitrary, politically motivated targeting of businesspeople like Asmi, Sayeed and his college friends joined their first political protest. “There had been so much violence during the riots,” Sayeed recalled, “and they were only rounding up Muslims. We were really angry.” After the riots and the blasts, Sayeed channeled his newly awakened political sensibility, volunteering for the newly constituted Ulema Council, a nominally independent body of Muslim theologians formed under the leadership of some of South Bombay’s more prominent and respected maulanas (Islamic scholars). The council’s mission was to constitute a united body that might represent through “non-political” channels—that is, non-elected channels, and especially non–Congress Party ones.16

Now . . . Muslims in Bombay do not (and never have) constituted anything like a monolithic “community”—whatever Islamic fundamentalists, Hindutva organizations, and some political strategists might like to believe (and want others to believe). Like Sayeed, Muslims in Bombay hail from different regions of the Indian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean region and ascribe tremendous value to these regional and linguistic identities. Regional and linguistic groups are further divided by sect and subsect—Deobandis, Barelvis, Wahabis, Bohras, Khojas, Elae Hadis, Ismailis, and Memons—each having its own priesthood committed to the idea that their own sect is the most faithful to the tenets of Islam. Bombay Muslims are also extremely diverse in caste and class, with these differences intersecting in complex ways with already mentioned regional, linguistic, and sectarian identities. Overlaid onto this already staggering complexity is partisan allegiance, with parties and candidates negotiating and forging constantly shifting alliances with local elites (clergy, caste associations, business families), all while voters regularly ignore the advice of local leaders—who anyway rarely agree on who or what to support.17

Indeed, notwithstanding the widely held belief—cultivated by parties and fueled by the media—that Muslim Mumbaikars vote their religion as a bloc, this is simply not the case; sociologically and historically speaking, Bombay Muslims have had very little in common outside their shared claim to be adherents of Islam and their geographic concentration in the city. And yet notwithstanding this staggering diversity, during the 1992–93 Bombay riots, Muslims were discursively framed and targeted as a monolith—a framing that was of a piece with national-level “iconography” that surrounded the Sangh Parivar’s Ram Janmabhoomi (“birthplace of Ram”) campaign to “repossess,” in the words of a BJP white paper published in the aftermath of the demolition, “the birthplace of Sri Rama.”18 Reflecting on the “perplexing” character of the campaign’s demonization of a relatively poor religious minority, historian Richard Davis describes how the consolidation of Hindu nationalist political agenda hinged upon the “mythologization” of a monolithic Islamic adversary: “Framing Muslim identity around a history of medieval conquest and iconoclasm embodied in the person of Mughal rulers [such as Babar, the sixteenth-century patron of the Babri Majid], rather than the social state of contemporary Muslims, rendered the Indian Muslim community much more of a threat.”19 The demonization of contemporary Muslim Indians as an uninterrupted lineage of this “occupying Other,” Davis demonstrates, was a crucial step in consolidating a Hindu nationalist political agenda.20

Back in Bombay, it was in this context of the broader discursive framing and iconography of Indian Islam as a monolithic threat requiring “forceful subordination”21 that, in the aftermath of the violence, the Ulema Council was constituted (where Sayeed cut his political teeth)—an attempt by some members of Bombay’s clergy to establish a common platform from which to speak on behalf of the city’s Muslims. The Ulema Council, then as now, sought to ground its authority to represent the “Muslim community” not through the formal institutions of electoral politics but rather in the varied and conflicting expertise of its myriad religious leaders. The council was of a piece with a broader shift in Muslim Bombay’s political landscape in the aftermath of the riots, which saw the proliferation of explicitly “non-political” bodies pursuing back channels by which to advance collective claims; as one prominent journalist describes, Muslim leaders and organizations (such as the Ulema Council or the Bombay Aman [Peace] Committee) took to “holding press conferences (given scant attention by the English media), and going in delegations to ministers,” acting (with somewhat unclear mandate) as “brokers” between Bombay Muslims and the offices and officers of the state.22

Sayeed’s background and personal history made him a valuable asset to the Ulema Council’s efforts to knit together a united constituency with a singular Muslim voice: “I grew up in a really diverse environment,” Sayeed recalled, had close contacts in a wide variety of social circles, and “was able to use those connections as part of the Ulema Council.” His ease with difference and general affability landed him a job managing a prominent and politically connected local eating establishment owned by a relative of Abu Asim Asmi, the travel agent whose arrest following the 1993 riots had prompted the young Sayeed to pay attention to local politics and had jump-started his political career.

In college, Sayeed had focused on computers rather than management. “All my friends went in for management,” he told me, “but I didn’t want to. I said to myself: ‘Where will management take me? What will I learn that I don’t already know?’” His real dream was to start an advertising agency, he tells me, but the industry wasn’t well developed, which is why he “chose computers.” He managed the restaurant for a few years until he had put away enough money to open his own business: a computer training company, which eventually morphed into a design shop. “I was fond of creating logos,” he recalls, repeating “I love to create.” Eventually, Sayeed’s design work outstripped computer training, and by 2002 he finally decided to open a proper public relations firm: “PR came naturally to me,” he tells me. By 2007, the young marketing professional’s growing reputation earned him his first (and last) “political account,” managing the (ultimately unsuccessful) electoral bid of a man named Junaid Khan—a well-known area social worker, educationalist, and passionate advocate of Urdu language and literacy who would become one of my main interlocutors during Sayeed’s 2017 electoral campaign. Junaid had fought the 2007 Mumbai municipal election on a ticket of the Samajwadi Party, a party with roots in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, but which had been gaining ground among Mumbai Muslims under the leadership of Abu Asim Asmi. Junaid too grew up in Nagpada, not far from where he currently lives, and where he runs a bustling cosmetics shop that keeps his family comfortable. Junaid is fluent in English but prefers to speak in Urdu; promoting Urdu language, education, and literature is his true calling and life’s work. Indeed, while his income comes from cosmetics, he spends most of his time organizing Urdu literature and poetry festivals and liaising with area educational institutions to support Urdu literacy in local schools and colleges. Junaid prefers to stay out of the direct political limelight, but he hails from a politically active family; his father and brother had each, on separate occasions, contested (unsuccessfully) the civic polls. And, as already mentioned, he too had once thrown his hat in the ring, which is how he had met Sayeed.23 This time around, however, during the 2017 election, the tables were turned, and Junaid would become Sayeed’s right-hand man and principal Urdu orator.

Before we end our conversation, I ask what Sayeed what he likes about PR. He pauses, then says: “See, I’m like a film director who enjoys watching his own movies. If there’s some person or subject that deserves the limelight but can’t get the exposure . . . if I can support that person to achieve their goals . . . I like that. I create the stage,” Sayeed smiles, the theatrical language pleasing him: “the stage for worthy ideas and people.”24