Mumbai, India
Marathi, Hindi & English
The film is based on concept, field and archival research by Lalitha Kamath and Gopal Dubey from Tata Institute of Social Sciences Mumbai
The film is framed as a juxtaposition, the story of two Mumbais, that are entangled in dynamic tension. It is told through the experiences of Mumbai's indigenous fishing community, the Kolis. The first is the city of the sea, that comes from living according to the rhythm of rising and falling water levels. The second is the terrestrial, propertied city, driven by the imperatives of capitalism. As fishers negotiate these wet and dry terrains, we seek to recover their living histories, knowledges and practices so that we may understand how to inhabit the city and yet embrace wetness.
We base our work on the fisher's community archive – a collection in the making, inspired by two ongoing processes of fishers: estrangement and reclaiming. Seen as a community that’s subaltern and on the move, fishers have typically played a minor role in official histories. We seek to overturn this by asking: How can we create an archive that relates to the intimate and global movements mediated by the sea? That draws from customary use rights, memories, knowledges and relations with beyond-human entities (land, sea, mangroves, fish) that transgress property boundaries? That serves as an archive against erasure?
The archive of estrangement draws from documents of the Turbhe Cooperative Fishing Society. It reveals the shifting position of state agencies from officially recognizing the community's claims to actively endangering these, causing estrangement from sea-based life.
The archive of reclaiming takes shape as a glossary of terms that evoke community memories, knowledges and practices that emerge through involvement with their fluid landscape. Reclaiming here recalls the erased past but in new acts of futuring. These oppose state-led land reclamation projects that rely on erasing Koli modes of habitation and polluting and making property of the sea.