Cogs in Mumbai’s Machine: A new book spotlights the resourceful yet invisible workers who prop up the city

The cover of the book `Bombay Brokers`. Photo Courtesy: Lisa Bjorkman/Duke University Press

Mehmoodbhai, a ‘toilet operator', is proud of the ‘model toilet' installed in the informal settlement in Mumbai where he lives. He played a key role in getting it made by mediating between the local residents, a few NGOs, and municipal officials in the Slum Sanitation Program (SSP).

Then, there is Nirmala. A self-described health worker or social worker in the Kamathipura area - Mumbai's oldest red light district. She has the trust of most of the residents and people in that neighbourhood.

These are two among 36 colourful and vibrant profiles featured in a new book titled ‘Bombay Brokers'. It was conceived and edited by Lisa Björkman, an anthropologist who has previously authored two books about Mumbai: ‘Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai' and ‘Waiting Town: Life in Transit and Mumbai's Other World-Class Histories'.

One of the dilapidated buildings in Kamathipura, an area that was part of Ratoola Kundu's research. Photo Courtesy: Ratoola Kundu

Her connection with the Maximum City goes back to 2008 when she was here for a research project about water infrastructure for her PhD. "As with any other city, but perhaps particularly with Mumbai, the more time one spends here and the deeper one digs, the more one discovers there is to know and explore," she says.

Ever-present but invisible

The idea for ‘Bombay Brokers' was conceived over a dinner in Mumbai in 2017, when Björkman and a friend were having a conversation about the many skilled people they had encountered during their research here. Björkman had been telling a story about a "plumber" named Sunny. His proficiency in procuring official water connections for households without residential documents fascinated her. "Even though people wanted to pay for water connections and engineers wanted to provide water, the policy framework was full of contradictions that complicated the process. Sunny was able to manage these contradictions and so was able to make the water connections possible," she explains.

That is when Björkman set out to gather such stories from urban researchers and anthropologists who were working on or had worked on research projects in Mumbai. The idea was to write up profiles of people who were not central in their research in Mumbai - neither the film director, nor the water engineer, for example - but who always seemed to be omnipresent. While this type of person's job doesn't usually have an official title, they are indispensable in whatever it is that the researcher is trying to understand: say, how movies get made, or how buildings get built.

She sent emails to almost 70 ethnographers to enquire if they knew such people. "Every single person I wrote to, they wrote back in a heartbeat. And they said, the question isn't whether I know a person, the question is, which one of them should I write about?" Not everyone had the time to contribute and 36 profiles made it to the final book, which took four years to put together. Published by Duke University Press and dedicated "for Bombay", it features the likes of Shazia, a ‘proof maker', and ‘rumour navigator' Afzal Taximan, among others.

Björkman asked each author to address four basic questions while writing up their profile. "The first question was: what do these people actually do? What does their expertise allow to happen? The second was, what are the knowledge and resources these people possess and how did they become experts of these work?" Björkman continues, "The third question is my favourite part. How do other people talk about the expertise of these characters? Others might talk of these people as ‘agents' or ‘khabris' but some describe the same labour as ‘kindness' or ‘social work.' And the fourth question was about what kinds of gaps need to be bridged today?"

A colourful cast of characters

Prasad Khanolkar, assistant professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT-Guwhati, wrote a chapter on ‘Mehmoodbhai - Toilet Operator'. He says, "The book is about characters who mediate, when things are ‘broken' - when there is no money or one is ‘broke'; when relationships or infrastructures don't work or are ‘broken'; when cities are ‘broken' into fragments by conflicts and frictions, and so on. So the book is about individuals and their practices, who experiment and invent ways of making things happen in ‘broken' situations."

The chapter ‘Nirmala - Kamathipura's Gatekeeper' is written by Ratoola Kundu, an assistant professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences's School of Habitat Studies. "These are characters in our field work that we need to engage with. But they don't find a way possibly into our academic writing," she says, talking about the idea Björkman approached her with. "Although our academic writing tends to be nuanced but we don't know exactly how to sort of place them in the story. But they enable us to see and approach the field in a different way." According to her, they may be exciting or mundane characters but the kind of work they do, they definitely energise the city in very different ways.

Lisa Björkman (left) and Ratoola Kundu

Given the many words used to describe these people and their work, why did Björkman settle on ‘broker'? "Actually, there was a lot of back and forth about the word, because it's a very loaded term. We realised that even if we don't use the word, others will surely use it. So, we decided to deal with the concept head-on," she explains. "We called it ‘Bombay Brokers' because we're trying to problematise this category of ‘broker', and to really explore it. Everybody thinks they already know what a broker is, or does. We're saying, if we actually re-theorise this concept empirically, and look empirically at what all these people are doing, then we end up somewhere else - both theoretically and conceptually - and that's so much more interesting."

So how do Mehmoodbhai, Nirmala and other characters fit into the concept of ‘Bombay Brokers'? Khanolkar opines, "Mehmoodbhai is not a character-type to be judged. In many ways, he can't be, because he is deceptive and elusive. I was more interested in that form of operating in a city - where everyone works with each other despite knowing that the other might deceive you. So deception was something I am exploring in my work."

As for Nirmala, Kundu says, "We were looking at the Mumbai cityscape, in the urban context. In order to be able to broker, they also need to have incredible amount of knowledge and make that knowledge work not just for their own gain but to be able to create bridges and access to various information." Kundu continues, "Nirmala fits the bill in that sense because her work with commercial sex workers over the years has enabled her to break into that field regardless of the environment, and develop a certain amount of trust with the women there."

Mumbai is made up of many Nirmalas and Mehmoodbhais who mostly remain in the background, yet play an intrinsic role in the city's daily functioning. While these 36 profiles do give a peek into the variety of Mumbaikars who make the city interesting, there are many more that have the potential to be featured in a book like this.

Is there a chance of a sequel? "I don't know - maybe. See, my idea is also that this is not a book only about Mumbai. What I'm really curious as well is what if we ask a similar question in other cities? Say, the Italian city of Napoli?" says Björkman. But when it comes to Mumbai, Björkman quips, "Wouldn't this be a great Netflix series? I am hoping some creative-type will fall in love with the book. I want Nawazuddin Siddiqui to play Rasheed - the ‘broker' who delivers my gas cylinder to the chawl in the book's introduction."

Also Read: How a Mumbai lensman inspired students with hearing loss and cancer to click pictures even amid lockdown