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Post-Industrial Gothic

Will the mill lands, once Bombay’s pride, remain only a sepia-tinted reminder of the past, even as it is stalked by the evils of the present?

The Bombay gangrape shocked India partly bec­ause it happened in the heart of the city, a few minutes from the Mahalaxmi railway station and Famous Studio. But the spot was the abandoned Shakti Mills. Part of a unique detritus that dots Bombay’s urbanscape, it’s one of the textile mill sites orphaned by the ill-fated strike of the 1980s. An expanse overgrown with shrubs and strewn with beer bottles reveals a world of waste, decrepitude and hints at worse as one peeps in. The incident has compel­led city police to identify 272 such deserted places and take a hard, critical look at the central mill district—once the throbbing heart of India’s financial capital, where thousa­nds of mill workers toiled day and night, and lived in adjoining chawls, raising families and celebrating festivals. After the mills were loc­ked out and parcelled out for redevelopment, things changed gradually, but dra­m­­atically. The lurid chasm between rich and poor marks these divided acres, where fancy malls and lounges jostle for space with careworn and crumbling chawls. Some mills (like Shakti) are occasionally used for film sho­ots, but are mostly a breeding ground of drug peddlers and gamblers—the flotsam of society. With fragmented communities clashing violently with lavish development, will the mill lands, once Bombay’s pride, remain only a sepia-tinted reminder of the past, even as it is stalked by the evils of the present?

The print version of this article carried only the first four photographs

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