Who You Are By Where You Are: Mumbai ’s Location Politics
My Mumbai explorations have been mostly alone. I didn’t know anybody else who was as intrigued by Mumbai’s neighborhoods, subcultures, architecture or streets.

Listen to my reading of this post here.
Neither of my parents is from here, and I grew up surrounded by those more focused on gender roles than city explorations. Womanhood was presented as delicate fussiness about sweat, dust and crowd; masculinity was performed as policing of female bodies into this box. City excursions did not fall anywhere in this system.
Happily, I grew up in a place that made it possible to explore alone. And perhaps this is an ongoing journey of my identity so is best done solo. What does it mean to be a Mumbaiker or for Mumbai to be Mumbai?
Public Transport & Social Class Divides
I love public transport. It tells you so much about a city. How it is governed, how its society divides itself, who it gives what access to and how it manages the most fundamental of its identity – its people. And it tells you about the people – where, how and when they choose to move around in their home grounds. Unlike in other cities, the majority of Mumbai citizens are workers (including homemakers). Historically, we have had to commute across a linear city to have a truly metropolitan life.

The caste system of this city for decades had to do with the suburbs being inferior to town. Suburban Mumbaiker lives were shaped by struggles to access even basic urban amenities like a movie theatre or bookshops. These would involve long and complicated journeys. The sense was that we were poor/verny/low-class people who didn’t deserve easy access and that the struggle was the price for having ‘big dreams’. It’s very Indian to gatekeep people’s aspirations.
I visited South Bombay recently and was struck by how rudimentary, irrelevant and well, dead everything was – while still parading some yesteryear glory about colonial-era British architecture or nostalgia about Parsi food. The more North you proceed, the taller and newer the buildings get. Admittedly, I’m biased. There’s a grim sort of glee in seeing the condescending fall.
Mumbaikers of my generation & class are native to the Internet, have seen other cities in the world and think of ourselves as global citizens. So we compare the design, pricing etc. with those places. We are resentful that Mumbai was the last of the Indian cities to get a functional metro system, despite being the country’s cash cow, its most populous city and needing it the most from a logistical standpoint.
From benevolent Bombay to mean Mumbai
At the same time, Mumbai is made of waves of immigrants. This entire city doesn’t belong to my class or even generation of people. Should I be gatekeeping cultural influences & behaviours any more than the SoBo elite did for decades? Mumbai (as opposed to Bombay pre-90s) is angry, a bit brutish and not really that cool. At middle age, I feel the effort it takes to adapt even as I still have the ability to do so.
The autorickshaw network is pretty overwhelmingly dominated by North Indian male immigrants. Often without families in the same city and still identifying with the gender/class systems of their native cultures. This distinction may only be visible to a specific slice of Mumbai’s citizenry—those who can afford to be passengers, who choose public transport over vehicle ownership, and women, in particular. I sit in a higher socioceconomic class in Mumbai. But my gender (and I suspect, my darker skin) place me at an inferior class to these men in their native cultures. This is an example of the unspoken social conflict that defines interactions of commute in this city.
There was a time when Mumbai cabs were considered a symbol of safety. The vehicles would be gleaming, their drivers smart in their uniforms, always running on meter and with an extra brand of silent solicitousness if you were pregnant, ailing, disabled, elderly, underage or female. Uber & Ola cabs tend to be glossier vehicles on an average today. Their drivers are not necessarily better workers (or people for that matter). But they have smarter phones, glossier screens and may speak English.
An occasional older driver may have upgraded after years of driving a kaali-peeli but the majority of them are young. And it shows in the way they navigate the city’s roads as well as human interactions. They do not inspire the same trust in me now. The black/yellow cabs on the other hand, haven’t all kept up either. The drivers like their vehicles feel a bit left behind and the deep-seated bitterness sometimes leaks through. The city isn’t hardworking & peaceful anymore; it’s hungry, greedy and very angry.
How the metro is changing the social fabric of Mumbai
There are still those who see the metro as an extension of the railway – people for whom track travel falls well beneath their class and very likely have never set foot in a Mumbai station (of any kind). Then there are the those who see it as an unsatisfactory compromise. They have moved to Mumbai as adults, in search of a better life.
This usually means more luxury associated with car travel, not the class-blurring of going through turnstiles, buying tickets and travelling with a thousand others. These would be the people who sat in cars running their ACs during the 2005 floods, while the rest of the city trudged past on foot.

I know many other native Mumbaikers who would rather brave bad roads & nightmare traffic than set foot in a metro. They do not feel as invested in the social fabric of our home city as I do. Perhaps for many, life becomes a quest for upward mobility, defined by wealth and luxury.
For non-native Mumbaikers, the metro is just another mode of transport, not an integral part of the city’s fabric. I have spent a considerable part of my life getting around in this city and becoming invested in it as part of my identity. Thus I cannot relate to either group of people.
Native Mumbaikers who moved abroad come home with odd displacements & perspectives. An NRI friend grew up in Borivali (which had even less social value than Marol) and now lives in Canada. He mentally contrasted the Mumbaiker life of the 90s with now and also with city-dwellers everywhere else in the world. It was joyful glee for him. When he said goodbye, he also gently let me know there wouldn’t be a lot of contact because he had a busy life elsewhere. Maybe it’s easier to objectively rejoice in this city when you don’t consider yourself a part of it anymore.
I only noticed it in contrast with another NRI friend who struggles with wanting to still identify as a Mumbaiker while internalising the racism of his adopted homeland. Both stories feel sad in different ways.
Kala Ghoda Art Festival: SoBo to a suburban Mumbaiker
I brought my family to the Kala Ghoda Art Festival when it first began. I read about it in the newspaper and then overran my father’s exhausted objections over a commute to South Bombay. At the time I took the name literally and assumed that art was only paintings in galleries. I was thrilled to discover that I ‘was allowed’ to enter the museums and also to find art on the pavements, accessible.

A family friend asked me what I thought and I said, “I don’t understand what this is supposed to mean.” And he said, “Art can simply have aesthetic value too and that’s okay.” I was studying science at the time and had I not received this insight, I might have been trapped in the regimented, hierarchial thinking of a science education.
A few years later, I discovered the literary events. And in my first flush of defiant adulthood, I haunted the festival on weekend mornings, prowling every workshop, panel discussion and book launch I could find. I was so scared of literary/artsy people and that they’d realise I was an unartistic science/business type.

At one workshop, Rochelle Potkar introduced me to Caferati, and later, I saw Manisha Lakhe on stage—my first encounter with unapologetic, badass womanhood. I attended a book launch and discovered the author was my age and like me, had a full career outside writing. These women embodied roles that I had never seen before.
In the years to come, I would watch them navigate the same mundane, grinding suburban lives as myself. But a corner of my mind would know the ‘something special’, the colourful imagination, the wonderous appreciation for history & beauty, the sheer art in these everyday faces in the crowd. I learnt to craft my identity from these scraps of belonging. Who am I? Andheri-dweller who prefers the page to the screen. Intrepid train traveller who finds poetry in broken mill windows. Corporate slave with pencil sketches in her office diary.
As with everything else in this city, the art/literary/festival action has moved Northward and become shinier, harder, costlier. There are countless other events within the city. I became a name on the Spoken Word circuit. I founded and ran a popular community of my own. I’ve done the dance. I belong. I also got to chronicle the Kala Ghoda Art Festival on its official blog one year and was paid for it – my first ever writing gig. And another fine year, I saw my name appear on the program, as one of the speakers in a literary workshop. It has been a big journey.
Yet, it’s so complicated for me to find this sense of belonging in South Bombay. The festival got harder and harder to get to. The commute was gruelling, the events became more commercial and the people thronged, making it more fashionable and less authentic. I’ve had wry realisations about art & creating. All of us are insecure and needy. Musicians are, “I’m the greatest. Kiss my feet.” Painters are, “I am mysterious and my personality is to confuse you.” Actors are, “I am everybody and nobody so please tell me who I am.” And writers are, “I will be whoever you want me to be because I’m a figment of imagination.” Me.
KGAF 2025 – A full circle
This year, after losing or letting go of everything that was me, I went back on the KGAF’s silver anniversary. Family health issues stymied two attempts to visit (suburban mundaneities are the central conflicts of my life). I wasn’t allowed into one event (because SoBo Brahminism continues). But I found sweet comfort in a solo trip mid-week in a sparsely occupied David Sassoon Library talk. It made me remember writing. The moment pointed to me and said, “You are a writer. Have you forgotten?”.

Pencil sketch by me
This year’s festival feels like the close of a chapter, one in a much longer book. I returned after a long distance in my mind. Everything was familiar from the mismanagement/rudeness of the event I wasn’t allowed into to the surprise familiarity in bookshops; from the instincts telling me which lanes & events to avoid guiding me to places of reflection in the noise to the sudden intimacies in worlds of words. As if to ensure that I got it, it ended on an alignment of gender & history at the ‘Murder, She Wrote’ event.
Cities constantly change. As human beings, we don’t change at the same pace or even in the same directions. Identity becomes a jerky ride on rough terrain, not unfamiliar to anyone from Andheri. We are always going to be beset by oppressive social class structures, especially in a culture like India. The interesting thing about cities is the gaping holes that show up in social fabric, through which you might blossom or rip apart.
Mumbai historically has allowed for a near-complete erasure. The city has been stagnating and choking for years. I have complicated feelings about the sudden galvanisation of road-laying, metro-building, station inaugurations and flyover building. They are long overdue reprieves in this city. But they are driven by forces and agenda that I may not align with. I may not have a choice, though. When the wave comes, we are all washed away or embedded. Maybe that’s the only thing an island city dweller can hold to.