Street vending and public space
Street food vendors are considered both a symbol and a scourge of Mumbai: cheap roadside snacks are enjoyed by all but the people who make them dance on a razor's edge of legality. While neighborhood associations want the vendors off cluttered sidewalks, many Mumbaikers appreciate the convenient bargains they offer. In The Slow Boil author Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria studies these vendors’ livesa nd stresses to illustrate how the struggle for space creates generative relationships among diverse parties. Pushing past the rhetoric that paints these people as either oppressed subalterns or inventive postmoderns, Anjaria advocates acknowledging the mingling of diverse political, economic, historic and symbolic processes on their own terms.
[This is the publisher’s blurb from the back of the book]
The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Bill, 2014, was finally passed by the Rajya Sabha on February 19 and received presidential assent last week. This is to be lauded. Since the late 19th century, the official view has been to treat street vending as a problem, a nuisance, a backward practice that has no place in a modern city. The result has been a century and a half of skirmishes between hawkers and the authorities. This conflict is one we all know well: in most Indian metropolises, street vendors fleeing with bundles of vegetables in advance of the arrival of anti-encroachment trucks are common scenes.
Tucked in a forgotten space beneath a densely trafficked overpass connecting eastern Mumbai with the city’s more affluent northwestern suburbs is a godown, or warehouse, of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). On most days, a small group of hawkers can be seen standing in front of this dreary gray structure, having come to retrieve goods confiscated from them during one of the municipality’s sporadic efforts to decongest the city. These traders are rarely able to pay the required Rs 1,200 fine to retrieve their goods,1 and the BMC staff have little desire to keep hold of the iron griddles, weighing scales, and display tables typical of Mumbai street markets. So, after a lengthy negotiation, the hawkers’ property is usually released for a lesser, unofficial and unrecorded, amount. At times, this negotiation is verbal, but at other times, it is conveyed through the hawkers’ act of standing in front of the warehouse office, leveraging the nuisance their presence creates for a lower payment...
On the quiet residential street in front of the apartment where I stay in northwest Mumbai, the day begins with a woman selling tea next to her husband, an occasional banana vendor. Their grandchild plays on a scooter while his father washes his autorickshaw. By the late afternoon, a cigarette and paan vendor appears across the road. Around the corner, a vendor toasts sandwiches opposite a man selling nimbus and leafy green vegetables from a small pushcart. A raddiwala cycles by, collecting old newspapers. An itinerant barber, his equipment stored in a small briefcase, sits in the shade of a shoe repairman’s roadside stall. A block away, a cluster of women sell vegetables perched against a fence, a man fries pakodas from a small metal stand, others pre- pare chaat and vada pao. Beneath an old tree, magazines are displayed next to two young men repairing tires, stacks of which are used to support a table for their neighbours’ food preparation.
How are we to interpret these street scenes?