Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav

“The dance of the karaga in the city choreographs a pattern of urban space and sense of the body-in-the-urban that relies on a different concept of the city and the body. It breaks up the map of the city constructed by technology, planning models, caste, and neighborhood and converts it into a performative space at the same time that the body is also transformed through rituals, representations, and kinetic, oral, and somatic practices.[i] “

Two random things occurred to me as I was walking down the street from Matunga towards Lalbaug. The first is the palpable fetish for wrapping up things. This is probably exemplified by the sai baba ganpati display where all we saw were these two hands, large, forming a toran, we entered through them into a tunne with paintings of only eyes, hands, feet, legs in parts. They all seemed remotely familiar; they were zoomed in parts of sai baba. Then we were released from the tunnel into a display where professionals doing god’s work were labeled ‘doctor sai’, ‘engineer sai’, ‘scientist sai’. This was classic because no one seeing the display had any conception of what the space used to be. With the device of the tunnel, that little court or niche in the street was transformed into a bubble of something else.



Can one speak about wrapping up things without remembering the work of Christo?

And have Jean Claude and Christo yet conceived anything as outrageous as wrapping up an entire city?

The other random memory I had was of an art project I read about called ‘am (not) sterdam’. People were asked to bring their radios to a square in Amsterdam when a radio ballet was being broadcast. The ballet would suggest certain actions like lying down, sitting, that were not usually permitted in the street. Through the disconnected collective actions they might possibly do what was not permitted to the individual.

In Mumbai we understand the role of the body in the city very ritually, climbing to form pyramids regularly or wrapping up street corners and parading down the streets or flogging oneself in public and praying in the streets are all collective disruptions of the order of the planned city.