“The fifth stage of life,” jokes filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee, standing outside his office after a photo shoot, “after vanaprastha and sanyasa, comes redevelopment.” It’s the afternoon of the Maharashtra legislative assembly election, and redevelopment has been a hot topic. We are also standing in the sunlit corridor of a 100-year-old building which, if all goes according to plan, will soon be acquired by a developer. The terracotta tiles and vaulted ceilings we are swooning over, will go, making way for another luxury mall or gated residential high-rise. Banerjee’s joke is a response to photographer Hashim Badani, who rents the studio right across from his on this very corridor, and has just finished telling us a story about a man whose greatest wish in life was for a developer to acquire his property. Like hitting a gold mine, redevelopment is an Indian property owner’s surest shot at wealth creation. Once, we dreamed of fame and fortune; now, Mumbai dreams of redevelopment.
But the case of Ravji Sojpal Compound, in Mumbai’s Sewri area, is a curious one. The building is a chawl by design, set within the ordered sprawl of a locality that was once an 18th century military stronghold and later an industrial area. The first floor is as colourful and chaotic as you’d imagine: children running, mothers shouting, clothes hanging, pots clanging. On the second floor is a corridor so white and quiet, it feels a world away from the floor below. For many years, the corridor fluttered with school children and functioned as a BMC school, but eventually, the school moved out and the rooms remained empty. Slowly, they started to fill up again—Banerjee rented a room for his accounting office. A tuition class took up some other spaces. An interior design firm took up another. And then, one by one, came the artists.
Avantika Shankar chats with these artists about what drew them to this place, and the community they've fostered.
