Industrial Afterlives: Histories, Memories, and Contemporary Life in Mumbai's Colonial Port

This paper reflects on the concept of “difficult heritage” through the histories, memories, and contemporary life of the primarily informal neighborhood of Darukhana in Mumbai’s eastern dock lands. The site of Bombay’s primary industrial port from the mid-19^th century through the 1980s, Darukhana and its three main shipping docks (or bandars) – Lakri Banda, Tank Bandar, and Coal Bandar – tend to be regarded as relics of the past, situated less in the present than in a time when “king cotton” ruled and Darukhana was a site of labor and protest and economic might. By late-1970s and throughout the 1980s, amid industrial decline, Darukhana became a sight of illicit goods smuggling and organized criminal activity. This era, still vivid in the minds of Mumbaikars, helped produce the territorial stigma that continues to shape the communities of Darukhana. Drawing on oral histories, extensive archival research, and two years of ethnographic research in Dharkhana’s 12,000-person informal settlement of Kaula Bandar, this paper highlights some of the tensions between the area’s historical significance and heritage value and its current residents’ and workers’ abandonment, invisibility, and stigma. The paper uses the concept of “difficult heritage” to refer (perhaps not exactly as Sharon McDonald intended) to the uncomfortable coexistence of the past and present in the site of labor struggles, class and caste exploitation, criminality, and post-industrial abandonment. While the archival data and oral histories help excavate difficult memories, the ethnography and interviews with current residents and workers reveals the contemporary meanings of Darukhana's difficult heritage.