The Mall and the Street: Practices of Public Consumption in Mumbai

Abstract

Practices of consumption are at the center of diverse debates surrounding the changing landscape of post-industrial Mumbai, India. For many, the city’s glittering new supermarkets and shopping malls and the consumption possibilities offered within them herald Mumbai’s membership into an elite group of ‘world class cities.’ Malls have also produced a euphoria among business and political elites, as well as some journalists, who see them as signaling a city-wide revolution in consumption practices in which localized retail formats — such as street markets and kinara stores (the ubiquitous small, family-run shops) — are gradually replaced by ‘global’ retail environments. With regularity, newspaper articles with titles such as ‘From mills to malls, the sky’s the limit’ and ‘Mall mania’ announce the arrival of a new kind of consumption that will irrevocably alter the city’s social and physical landscape by ‘supplant[ing] the riotous urban Indian street market’ (Johnson and Merchant, 2005). By contrast, others more critical of the mode of urban development of which the shopping malls are a part see malls as representing a capitulation to the forces of global capital, and as symbolic of the government’s skewed development priorities. Yet for these critics as well, the elite forms of consumption found within the mall fundamentally contradicts previous practices of consumption, and thus are seen as radically changing the experience of daily life in Mumbai.

In this chapter I refer to the city as ‘Mumbai’ simply because it is the official name of the city. In everyday speech, however, the city is commonly referred to as ’Bombay‘.