The Beauty Half-Remembered

Many of South Mumbai’s earlier structures and spaces are defined by Art Deco, an architecture and design movement with its genesis in the 1920s. A festival is underway celebrating its 100th anni­versary, thus also a reminder of how carefully thought out Mumbai used to be, with buildings fitting within a neat visual language and curved around streets. The city has long stopped considering beauty as a requirement of its own pre­sentation. Chaos governs its appearance now, even though on paper there are minute specifications. This includes a rule called Floor Space Index that decides how tall buildings should be, an idea gamed and bypassed through loopholes and corruption. Mumbai is now ugly and it is not unique in that. Every Indian city and town is the same.

 However, maybe there is no need to la­ment it either. Aesthet­ics in public spaces are a function of prosperity, chiselled out from the surplus left after neces­sities are met. Mum­bai started off as an enclave of the British, and as their fortunes grew, surroundings became finer. Consider however what must have been kept out of sight for that creation. Beyond the appeal­ing centre, the poor still lived in crowded small homes that came up from disorderly need. They lived within knocking distance, but just out of sight, making up the labour that kept the wheels of the city rolling.

That has been the universal rule, more or less. The upper end of the spectrum, who have the means, make their liv­ing spaces better, while the rest remain outside looking in with envy. A city needs vast numbers to cater to it but cannot house them all. The poor don’t get to live in Art Deco build­ings. You can go as far back as the Indus Valley Civilisation, which we know had walled, delineated towns with drainage systems. But even then, the settlements outside, or the tribes farther away, lived in very different conditions. Beauty ought to be celebrated, but lamenting the past is lamenting some­thing embellished by imagination. Because we see only the slice of it that endures, not the everyday edifice under it.