A beach in Mumbai in 2019. | Hemanshi Kamani/Reuters
The many forms of petrochemical-derived polymers known as plastic are everywhere. Plastics, like other materials and commodities, have what many might term – after anthropologist Arjun Appadurai – rich “social lives”. They are engineered and produced for particular purposes, part of diverse material cultures and patterns of use and consumption. Post-consumption, they are further discarded and exchanged as part of diverse economies and ecologies.
Nowhere is the ubiquity of plastics as visible or anxiety-inducing in popular representations as oceans, seas, and other settings often understood as nature separate from human activity. As plastics, oils and other materials sink, break down, float and accumulate unevenly with the rhythms of water, they can travel for long periods of time and across far distances, bringing human and non-human lives across time and space into relation.
For Mumbai to cope with frequent floods, it must see itself as a place in an estuary – not an island
For Mumbai to cope with frequent floods, it must see itself as a place in an estuary – not an island
The operative word in the island city is ‘drain’. The operative word in the estuary is ‘soak’.
In 2009, when we published a book called
Soak and organised an exhibition of the same name, it was not just to redirect the future of Mumbai in the wake of the devastating floods of 2005 and the floods that occur each year with the monsoon. It was also to re-engage the past and present of a place in an estuary rather than on an island, an estuary where the monsoon and sea are at home.
Puneet Paranjpe/AFP
It was an early April day in 2019 – before the past present times of the pandemic – that I went out fishing with Mangesh Sakre and his crew in the waters off Worli Koliwada, a settlement of fishers off Mumbai’s western coast.
The time between December and March is generally peak fishing season. April was still a good time to fish in Mumbai, though Koli fishers were now anxious about getting good catches on the few fishing days that remained before the monsoon arrived.
The water was a beautiful green-blue and very calm. Sakre wasn’t happy seeing it like this. “The water has changed,” Sakre told me when I asked him what he thought of his prospects that day. This colour is not so great for catching pomfret, he said.
‘Cities in water’ A transdisciplinary project looks to transform the current climate crisis into future possibilities for India’s coastal cities. A 2013 flash flood coursed through Himalayan villages in the state of Uttarakhand, killing over 6,000 people and leaving tens of thousands stranded. Scientists attributed the event to climate change a combination of heavy rain, a warm, loose groundcover of snow, and glacial instability. Here, the village of Gangotri is shown on June 13 just a few days before what was termed the “Himalayan Tsunami.” (Image: Mathur/da Cunha)
On the western edge of Mumbai, over a landscape of marshlands and mangroves, construction on an 18-mile-long coastal road snakes its way up out of the silt. The $3 billion development is one of India’s most ambitious infrastructure projects: a proposal to create land out of water, a highway on stilts over the Arabian Sea. An eight-lane freeway