Nebulous Neighbourhood: Urban Redevelopment and Histories of community , strife, and aspiration in Mumbai's Bhendi Bazaar

Paper Abstract: A massive urban renewal project is currently underway in the heart of the South Asian megapolis Mumbai. Through an initiative spearheaded by its most populous community - the Shia Bohris - Mumbai's historic Bhendi Bazaar locality is being redeveloped by the Saifee Burhani Upliftment Trust (SBUT). What happens to a neighbourhood and its inhabitants as they experience such a colossal de/reassembling? How are hold homes let go of and new ones fashioned? What does one do as they 'wait' for the state of transition to end? What role does/can faith play into both ideas of aspiring for progress and holding on to history? I entered the field in the summer of 2022 with these questions to understand the ways in which the Bohras of Bhendi Bazaar are experiencing and articulating the ongoing transformation of their lived environment while simultaneously trying to locate the locality within the city's urban history and the Bohra community within the locality's (and by extension the city's and the nation's) imaginaries of the 'other' - albeit a 'desired' one.  Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research conducted over the summers of 2022 and 2023 in Mumbai, this paper shall argue the emergent picture  is complex one of a neighbourhood long marked by histories of both conflict and cooperation as well as a community straddling discourses of inclusion and exclusivity along four registers: 1) the neighbourhood 2) the city 4) the nation and 5) the (Indian Ocean) region.