Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary is a multimedia exhibition under way at Mumbais National Gallery of Modern Art and soon to travel to Bangalore and Delhi. The authors/designers are Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha,faculty at the School of Design,University of Pennsylvania,US,who have previously curated two travelling exhibitions and books,Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape and Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalores Terrain. In this project,they respond to the 2005 Mumbai deluge with a focus on the Mithi. Soak attempts to do many things: to present a new,more fluid visualisation of Mumbais terrain; to propose solutions to flooding that hold monsoon waters rather than channel them out to sea; to evolve an aesthetic format with an eclectic mix of tools,including those of design,architecture and planning; and to use the medium of an exhibition to generate debate. The book under review,a companion piece to the exhibition,offers an opportunity to test these aims. The book is divided into three sections: the first deals with the authors main contention,which is that the English coloniser,with his love of mapping,drew lines to denote hard edges where none existed,making an island or a series of islands out of a shifting,swampy land and bequeathing assumptions that continue to form the basis of administration and planning for Mumbai. These assumptions,the authors say,need to be reversed. The second section looks at the swamp-talav-oart-bazaar-pitted terrain of the estuary and its operation as a filter between land and sea. The third section proposes 12 initiatives as a response to the problem. To start with the aesthetics: the binding and the hard cover convey the feel of a journal where you would expect to find jottings rather than a finished work. The cover title sinks into a pale blue background (clearly meant to evoke the idea of sea,though the colour is prettier by far than the murky grey off the Mumbai coast). The thin edging of the pages,alternately gold and blue,emphasises the interplay between land and sea throughout the book. Inside,measurement,text,photographs,maps,charts and old illustrations are used to create a stunning visual effect. The back and forth reading motion necessitated by the arrangement of body text,captions,extracts and graphics on the page seem to mimic the gentle motion of being at sea. And this is where the book scores and scores brilliantly: in evoking the image of a soggy land that should live in harmony with water rather than fight it. The rest,however,seems to be steeped in abstraction. (An estuary demands gradients not walls,fluid occupancies not defined land uses,negotiated moments not hard edges.) The authors propose new perspectives and projects but skim over the business of implementation. There is no evidence or projections provided to judge the cost or efficacy of the proposed measures. One would also have wished for a far greater appreciation of complexity. The authors claim of the island-ification of Mumbai being a colonial project has been challenged by commentators who point to a similar perception arising from local sources. Moreover,for all its sensory appeal,Soaks conceptualisation comes across as something of a timeless dialogue between empty land and sea. The visual absence of the hustle and jostle of buildings,traffic,animals and people and the authors aversion to filling and reclamation seem to constitute a willful blinding to the reality of Mumbai; to the thrust,greed,desperation and crowds without which there would be no city just a bog nobody cared about.
