Mumbai Day 25: Holi
In American cities, public space requires definition. In New York, for example, the city's grid can be seen as an organizing element, a neutral substrate onto which smaller pieces of the city's amalgam––public or private––are grafted. Public spaces are formalized as parks, gardens, or plazas, and are conceptualized according to their finite extents. Outside these boundaries, urbanites enter a seemingly indeterminate zone. Streets here are an in-between space; emptied of their social capacities, they function as mere spatial adhesives, connecting one walled frontier to the next.
In Mumbai, however, the static city merely interrupts an indefinite plane of the collective and kinetic. Skyscrapers, apartment blocks, and private parks punctuate this territory, each with varying degrees of severity. Their finite boundaries mark the edges of these voids, small subtractions from an overwhelmingly free, chaotic, and kinetic sphere. The city, in this sense, is not object-oriented. Mumbai's urbanism rests in the in-between, the tissue which architecture has not yet captured within its bounds.
This paradigm shift is made particularly visible during the festival of Holi. Mumbaikars, armed with varying hues of colored powder, pour onto city streets to eat, drink, and douse one another with color and water. Interstitial spaces are soon transformed by the annual spectacle, as thousands of residents flood the city's roads and sidewalks in celebration. At the height of the festival, an overwhelming sense of oneness radiates from this amorphous realm; strict social norms, especially those of age, gender, status, and caste, are temporarily muted. As streets hum with color-drenched urbanites, architecture (more than ever before) remains silent: it is a mere backdrop for the formless spectacle which thrives in its absence.