Girangaon Out of Focus: By Rachel Lopez Time Out Mumbai Magzine 2009

Mumbai’s mills were already fast disappearing when Ajit Abhimeshi began to photograph them in 2005, in an effort to capture the changing face of Girangaon. A former resident of the area, 27-year-old Abhimeshi found that several decaying structures had given way to malls and office complexes even as the neighbourhoods around them stayed the same. “I grew up at a time when the mills had already shut,” said Abhimeshi. “I got to see only empty buildings. But my children won’t even be able to see these structures. An important chapter of Mumbai’s past will have disappeared forever.”

 

Abhimeshi’s images, roughly 30 of which will constitute Girangaon Out of Focus, an exhibition at Rachna Sansad, help archive what’s still standing. His images show lone chimneys lost among new skyscrapers and neighbourhoods that house the last of Mumbai’s former mill labourers. Empty shells of outer walls offer views of new constructions beyond, while moss and creepers take over factory facades.  

 

The exhibition is part of a continuing project by the research group Pukar to examine the area’s livelihood, infrastructural and educational opportunities through the lens of the caste system. Though there’s a belief that caste barriers dissolve in a metro like Mumbai, Pukar’s executive director Anita Patil-Deshmukh said that these divisions “are actually reinforced and stronger than ever”, pointing to city ghettoes and caste-specific professions. Abhimeshi contributes with mill photography and research on city celebrities who emerged from chawls, the commercialisation of community festivals and Girangaon’s khanavals – tiny kitchens run by women for millworkers living alone in Mumbai.  

 

Abhimeshi’s exhibition opens on January 18, the date that marks the anniversary of the day union leader Datta Samant started the enormous mill workers strike against the Bombay Mill Owners Association in 1982. “Twenty-six years on, most mill workers’ children are unaware of the strike,” said Abhimeshi, who hopes his images say what history books don’t.

 

The photo exhibition is a preview to a Girangaon festival that Pukar will organise later this year. “Two locations in Mumbai, Dharavi and Girangaon, are going through an unprecedented transformation never before witnessed in history,” she said. “Dharavi has been studied and studied and studied, but no one has looked at Girangaon. We’re telling these people that we revere their contribution to the city. We understand what they have been through.”