The exhibition invites the city's planners, engineers, bureaucrats, as well as historians, artists, photographers and ordinary citizens to look at Mumbai's terrain as a continuous dialogue between land and sea, rather than the rigid visual divide between the two that gained primacy from the time of the earliest British maps. "In maps," says da Cunha, "land speaks and sea is silent. But when you put away maps and use sections to understand terrain, the sea speaks and brings in a totally different perspective." In this view, Mumbai is not the cliched coastal city, or the network of seven islands, but instead locates itself in an estuary, the meeting point of land and sea. An estuary demands gradients and fluidity. Yet, over centuries, planners have built walls and drains across the city with the dual purpose of channelling the monsoon runoff out into the sea, and keeping the sea water out of the city.
The exhibition, titled 'SOAK—Mumbai In An Estuary' turns this planning principle on its head, and suggests that design and planning in Mumbai must appreciate its "aqueous terrain" to accommodate the monsoon. It begins with an evocative section called 'Collective Memory' where texts, images, newspaper archival material, and literary responses to the July 2005 flood are woven together. This then leads into three sections, each an amalgam of historical maps, drawings, photographs and verticals by Mathur and da Cunha, accompanied by an installation designed by Rajivan Aiyapan that uses the sounds of Mumbai, including the much-maligned Mithi river. The sections—Coastline, Estuary and Aqueous Terrain—show a fresh way of looking at island, coast, river; re-examine the concepts of port, swamp, talao, maidan, nullah in a spatial and temporal sense; and lastly suggest twelve "initiations" or projects across Mumbai's terrain that stretches from the hills of Salsette, across the five historic forts that "were once waterfront sentinels of Mumbai's estuary", through the Mithi and into the sea, so that the city can soak in the rainwater rather than struggle every year to drain it off.
The exhibits also project an alternative view of the Mithi—a river to some, a sewer to others—that planners, engineers and citizens perceive as the villain of the July 2005 flood, because it failed to carry the rainwater out. "Mithi is a hard line on the map," says Mathur, "now they are working to widen the river to carry rainwater, should it rain another 944 millimetres in 24 hours. We have deconstructed that line—when you say the Mithi is in Mumbai, there's an element of controlling it; we say Mumbai is located in and around the Mithi ..." Explains da Cunha: "The way we represent landscape reflects the way we engage with it. 'SOAK' is about designing and planning for the monsoon in an estuary. This solves the problem of floods not by flood control measures, but by making a place that's absorbent and resilient". The three sections of the exhibition are brought together in a coffee-table volume that is a collector's delight.
"It's an incredibly simple concept and perspective that encompasses great complexities and many disciplines," says lawyer-industrialist Kavita Khanna, who nurtured and part-financed the Rs 70 lakh exhibition project. Khanna was impressed with Mathur and da Cunha's work on Bangalore, which resulted in the book Deccan Traverses, and believed they should bring their unique multi-disciplinary cultural and academic vision to Mumbai and the Mithi river as well. "This is a work in progress. I want citizens to get involved," says Khanna. She hopes it will also influence the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority that works only to an archaic masterplan of drains and outflows. Through the two months of the exhibition, there will be discussions, public meetings and conferences to create wide public awareness of what social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls, in his foreword to the book, "an exercise in unthinking".
The question is whether this fascinating exhibition will nudge planners and designers to "unthink" and place Mumbai in the estuary that it really is, so that Mumbai can stop worrying about the monsoon and once again take delight in the glory of it.
