Cotton 56, Polyester 84 holds the key to a city lost to time, hubris, and market forces. In these pages, you will travel in time to the early 1990s and walk the bylanes of Girangaon, through Parel, Byculla, Chinchpokli, Lalbaug. There you enter the world of the girni kamgar, where Mumbai’s cosmopolitan character and rich culture were forged, until the city they built turned on them.
Somewhere amidst the mills and chawls is a vachnalaya, a communal reading space, where you will meet Bhau Saheb and Kaka, who are mill workers and best friends. Their story is the story of lakhs of kamgars who were exploited by mill owners, strung along by union leaders, betrayed by politics and law, and ultimately cast aside. Death came close on the heels of despair, often by suicide or starvation. Lives were lost; so was a way of life. As Bhau Saheb put it, “My dear chap, there’s something called the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves in them. Once upon a time, it was possible. Today, it is the most neglected of our rights.”
By and by, insidiously, the textile workers of Mumbai were written out of the history and mythology of the city.
Playwright Ramu Ramanathan set out to right this wrong. Using One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices, Meena Menon and Neena Adarkar’s book based on an oral history of the mill workers, as a starting point, Ramanathan researched his subject extensively. He sat through legal hearings, documented conversations, explored the geography and history of resistance, and recorded the music and songs of the people. The result is one of the finest examples of the genre that Ramanathan has mastered, the docu-drama: an intersection of fiction and non-fiction where forgotten histories come alive.
The play traces the arc of the contemporary politics of the city – from the fall of the communists to the rise of Shiv Sena, fueled by the Indian National Congress.
And where there is politics, there is caste. Ramanathan rips into the fallacy that India’s metropolises are not divided along caste lines.
Consider Ghatotkach Bhai who is part of the “underworld mafia” that held the city in a chokehold for decades, until the early 2000s. Ghatotkach Bhai grows up a Shudra and goes on to make his fortune from the very garbage he was condemned to live with. He controls the movement of the waste generated by the city and, on the back of that, an army of henchmen that give him access to corridors of wealth and power otherwise designed to keep “people like him” out.
Fault lines of caste also get in the way of class solidarity. As an untouchable chamaar, Bhau Saheb faces acute discrimination within his own community of mill workers. He is married to Aai who is a Mahar, a scheduled caste but one that is a notch above untouchables in the complex hierarchy. However, this does not improve their son Chottu’s lot. Upon joining the mill where his father has worked all his life, he finds, “The workflow management was Brahmin or Bania. We were Chamaar, but Aai had given me an upper caste. When the mukkadam took me to the time keeper, I was asked my name. I replied with an upper caste surname. The time keeper sniggered. He said, “If you Chamaars start taking our names, what will become of the Brahmins and Banias?”
Bhau Saheb and Kaka’s bond is based as much on their years of friendship as it is on their place in the social hierarchy as a chamaar and musalmaan respectively. They argue, share food and drink, smoke chillum and gossip. Much is revealed in their banter, including the potted history of the textile mills. The oppressive conditions of the workplace, the poor pay, the double blows of strikes and falling demand that led to the closure of the mills, the real estate developers that swooped in, the politicians who worked in tandem with the mafia to break the resistance and help the real estate hawks, the union leaders who fell or defected, the encounters and assassinations that determined the course of history, and, between apathetic lawyers and judges, the court cases that dragged on.
The two ageing confidants tell stories as their world crumbles around them. Their homes are leaking and in disrepair. Around them, garbage decays and drains overflow. There is little to eat. Money is scarce, and so is consolation. But there is plenty of humour.
In the face of a hostile future, Bhau Saheb and Kaka play a game. They watch people go by and make a note of how many wear clothes made of polyester over cotton. The count goes up every day. Cotton 56, Polyester 84. The fabric they once wove is running out. As is time. Their decrepit chawls will inevitably be razed. But in gallows humour lies strength, an inexplicable and inexhaustible well-spring that led mill workers to continue to fight against all odds. We know their story as one of great loss but this play also suggests that resistance is its own reward.
The struggle of mill workers was without hope but not without glory. And Ramanathan’s writing does justice to it. His account is devoted to detail, unflinching in its gaze but never mournful. In the world he depicts there is accommodation, co-existence and absurdity. An atheist signs up to sing at a Ganesh pandal so his friend who is a communist, can perform Hajj. These working-class characters are not mere motifs. They are complex, eccentric and likely to stay with you long after you are done reading, like old friends you regret losing touch with.
In celebrating their lives, the play makes apparent what we have lost in the pursuit of turning Mumbai into a “world-class city”. It opened in 2006 just as the Supreme Court of India ruled that the 285-odd acres of land occupied by the defunct textile mills could be sold for redevelopment. The age-old stronghold of Mumbai’s working classes was all set to be transformed into a cluster of high-end malls, restaurants, clubs and apartments. In the words of Bhau, “a big bazaar” in every corner.
But the play is more than a critique of unchecked neoliberalism; it exposes the grotesque underbelly of capitalism.
Pointing to a wad of notes, Ghatotkach Bhai refers to it as “power”. “And all this money power, it will never disappear… Accumulation of money will never cease,” he adds. He has discovered that in a city besieged by men who are singularly committed to the pursuit of wealth, aided by an incorrigibly corrupt political class, “crime is big business” and “its turnover is three times the combined turnover of Reliance and Tata.” His men have a rate card. “Leg broken: Rs 8,000, Shot in leg: Rs 15,000, Three stabs with a guptee in the abdomen: Rs 25,000, The big job: Rs 1 lakh and above.” Their retail outlet enables profiteering off any number of illicit businesses. But when it comes to capital, nothing yields more than real estate. Following the Supreme Court order mill lands were sold for thousands of crores. Somewhere in there was the vachnalaya where Bhau Saheb and Kaka used to meet to tell their stories.
Today, communal reading rooms are hard to find in the city. But it is not just the physical spaces of the working masses that have vanished; there are fewer and fewer avenues for them to participate in public debate and inform public discourse.
Bhau Saheb and Kaka tell us of a time when the theatre and music of the people coursed through the consciousness of Mumbai. Lok shahirs, tamashgirs, and bhajan mandlis performed to packed auditoriums and grounds over long evenings stretching late into the night. Songs of poets such as Amar Shaikh and Annabhau Sathe rose over the din of the city, bringing the working class together, registering their protest and giving voice to their joys and sorrows. Over time they were priced out of the city.
Kaka imagines a universe in which the entertainment we consume is not dictated by global corporate interests. “Poetry and music from the chalwali would be telecast live, Narayan Surve, the first workers’ poet would be nominated for the Nobel Prize, plays from Ganesh Pandal would get highest TRPs, stories about Hanuman Theatre would be on par with Globe theatre in England, apna Girangaon would be compared to New Orleans by news channels because it is the centre of working class culture, and you, Bhau Saheb, would be as famous as Sonu Nigam, giving interviews after an all night performance for which you have earned Rs 5.”
Today the city may no longer hold room for the culture of the people, but every time Cotton 56, Polyester 84 is performed, for a brief moment, through the songs sung by Bhau Saheb, Lok Shahiri can liven up the prosceniums that are otherwise the exclusive domain of theatre for and by the upwardly mobile classes. And, from an elusive distance, we can tap our feet, grateful for the beating heart of the play – singing in the dark times, of the dark times.
In the words of Amar Sheikh:
Let’s step out in the maidan together
In the field, flutters the flag of happiness
Let’s sing the songs of revolution, together
Our youth has arrived with a huge smile
Even though the blooming bud is withering…
Towards the end of the play, Kaka asks Bhau Saheb, “What is going to happen to this city hundreds of years from now? After the chawls have been demolished, after we have been evicted, after an entire generation has been wiped out? Will a foreign guide conduct a tour for expatriate Mumbaikars? Will this guide say, ladies and gentlemen, here lie the ancient ruins of Lower Parel and Lalbaug and Girangaon? Take a look at these chimneys and spindles, they are a testimony to the existence of a civilisation. Is this the end? Is it?”
Whatever the future brings, as long as this book is in publication, you will always be able to find your way back to the city that was Mumbai.
Excerpted with permission from ‘The Key to a City Lost to Time, Hubris, and Market Forces’ by Pragya Tiwari in Cotton 56 Polyester 84, Comrade Kumbhakarna, Ramu Ramanathan, Red River Press.
