By M Reyaz, TwoCircles.net,
Mumbai: How do the people, who were children in 1992 – 1993 remember their lived experience of the post-Ayodhya riots in Mumbai? How was Jogeshwari then? How it is today?
Most people, especially those living outside Mumbai, have little or no idea what people living in Mumbai then underwent through. ‘Badalte Nakshe’, a documentary, by Farhana Ashraf, a teacher and a writer, is what is described as an attempt to explore the constructed histories of two generations “traversing the tenuous realm of children, memory and the riots.”
This and several other films, photos, audio recordings, study reports and much more are all part of an excellent multi-media project by the School of Media and Cultural Studies of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). It is an effort at documenting the events of the 1992-93 communal riots that gripped Mumbai, following the demolition of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya.
“Every event of the 1992-93 riots, documented in the Justice Srikrishna report, has been catalogued and mapped on this site,” declares the banner at http://mumbairiots.tiss.edu/ titled “Remembering 1992”. A reader can select a date from the timeline to see where events took place on a particular day on the site.
Launched recently, ‘Remembering 1992’ is part of a larger project of TISS called “Diversity,” where it is building a visual archive of Mumbai. ‘DiverCity’ is a family of websites showcasing thematic packages related to the city of Mumbai.
The site has been conceptualised by two eminent professors of the School of Media and Cultural Studies, TISS Prof Anjali Monteiro and Prof K P Jayasankar.
DiverCity brings together work done at the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences where students and faculty engage with diverse communities and spaces within Mumbai, seeking to celebrate with the unrecognised subaltern energies that have made the city.
The projects under DiverCity combine documentaries, transcripts of interviews and related research materials to bring you an experience of the city through intersecting narratives of precarious livelihoods, shrinking public spaces, communal violence, labour struggles and caste politics. Ultimately, the idea is to reach a wider audience and to escape the regimes of control that apply to documentary films in India.
Besides chronicling the communal riots of 1992-93, ‘M-Ward’ examines life at the edge of the city, ‘Koliwada Gazing’ surveys a little village within the big city, ‘Castemopolitan Mumbai’ explores caste relations in the megapolis, and ‘Giran Mumbai’ revisits the mill lands and its people.
On December 6, 1992, Hindu fundamentalists demolished the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. In the aftermath of this event, there was violence in many parts of India, including Mumbai. Over 900 people lost their lives in two phases of violence between December 1992 and January 1993. Of these, 356 people died in police firing, the website describes about the background why this project was taken up.
Thousands were injured, lost their homes and livelihoods and left the city. This violence changed the city in many ways that we need to reflect upon. From spatial segregation of communities on religious lines to a growth of the politics of hate, these changes have deeply affected the cosmopolitan fabric of Mumbai.
This site brings together the work done by the students and the faculty of School of Media and Cultural Studies, between 2012 and 2014, which seeks to revisit and remember the violence that the city of Bombay/Mumbai experienced in December 1992 and January 1993.
The work resulted in a series of six films, excerpts of which are included here. This work was initiated as a part of the campaign Bombay ki Kahani Mumbai ki Zubaani which was held between December 2012 and January 2013.
In a political and social context where the memory of this violence has been rewritten and all but erased, it is crucial to remember, to explore the contours of normalised prejudice and to understand how the survivors have struggled with the denial of justice. It is also necessary to think about how and why the memory of such a watershed event gets erased and who benefits from this erasure.
The website explores different kinds of memory, organised around themes:
Dislocation
Memories of forced shifting and resettlement, the emergence of ghettos and segregation (stories from Mumbra and Jogeshwari).
Divided City
Memories of bystanders in communally polarised areas, the formation of stereotypes and rewriting of history (Mohammad Ali Road, Mahim).
Struggle for Justice
Memories of and struggles against denial of justice (the Hari Masjid police firing, interviews with lawyers and activists).
Peace Initiatives
Memories of those who tried to work for peace in communities torn apart by the violence (Dharavi, Mohalla Committee Movement Trust).
Media Representation
Memories of those who represented the events of 1992-93 in print and visual media (journalists, photographers, artists).
Every event of the 1992-93 riots, documented in the Justice Srikrishna report, has been catalogued and mapped on this site.
All quotes that appear on the site are from interviews conducted during the filming of the Remembering 1992 series of documentaries. News clippings were accessed from the archives of the Centre for Education and Documentation and the research reports showcased on the site were made available (to the site) by leading activists and journalists.