Bombay and the Yale Summer Session

In the summer of 2012, Ashish Chadha will teach the course Bombay: City, Society, Culture in the Yale Summer Session.  Offering students a unique opportunity to study of this dynamic metropolisin Mumbai itself, this intensive course, now in its third year, takes place over five weeks. 

The course is led by Ashish Chadha, a filmmaker and scholar based at the University of Rhode Island, and a former postdoctoral fellow at Yale’s South Asian Studies Council.  Recently, Ashish described the course for the South Asian Studies Council.

How did the idea for this course come about?
The idea of this course emerged from my own engagement with the city of Mumbai for the past 20 years. I moved into Bombay as a college student in 1991 and lived in the city throughout the tumultuous decade of the 1990s. I worked as a social worker, activist and anthropologist during these years and saw the city very closely and deeply. During this time the city witnessed its most gruesome postcolonial riots in 1992-93, it suffered the bombing of 1993 and saw the coming of Shiv Sena as the ruling party causing significant social, cultural and political upheaval in the city. At the same time because of liberalization of the Indian economy Bombay became the booming capital of global India, which in turn transformed the city and ghettoized it. Urban industrial complexes were closed, the population of the city exploded, the working class and poor were pushed at the fringes and a post-industrial financial city emerged.

Why make Bombay the subject of an academic course?
Bombay represents a distinctive mode of cultural experience in India – an unceasing traffic in things, people, images, and ideas. It has been the crucible of social and cultural politics in India.  It is the epitome of modern Indian imagination. The course I teach will examine this state of modernity by doing a focused study on the city of Bombay as a city, society and as the capital of popular culture in India. We will trace how Bombay has become a site for citizenship and other political claims in India. The course will attempt to understand the contentious politics around creating spatial and social order through ethnographic, cultural, historical and literary works that deal with Bombay.

The course will explore issues of urban poverty, urban town planning, housing problems, sanitation, cultural politics, religious fundamentalism, Bollywood, caste politics, communal violence, migration and urban–rural divide.  Some of the questions we will address in the course are: what happens in India when cities within-cities coincide or collide? How are the categories of caste, class, and ethnicity mapped onto urban bodies and landscapes? What are the political implications of the production of popular culture? How does violence transform the geography of a city and its urban experience? How are urban spaces, cultures, and modes of sociality mutually produced?

Bombay is the entry point and the organizing framework for this course.  What additional opportunities are created because of the fact that this course is taught in Bombay itself?
Teaching a course about Bombay in Bombay offers the opportunity for direct study and exploration of the city.  Classes are held on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays we make visits to sites in and around Bombay.  These include day long field excursions to distinctive urban enclaves of Mumbai such as slum cities, sectarian ghettos, colonial town, native town, sprawling suburbs, mill districts, industrial complexes, postmodern gated communities and Bollywood film studios.  We also make trips to museums, galleries, theatres, cinemas, archaeological sites, heritage precincts and other sites within Mumbai, as well as a mid-term weekend trip to the spectacular UNSCEO World Heritage sites of Ajanta and Ellora.  Along with trips to these multiple urban enclaves in the city for a sustained engagement with urban Bombay the students will be given inputs by specialists – anthropologist, sociologists, activists and filmmakers who have lived and worked in Mumbai for decades.