Instituting Worlds: Architecture and Islands
 
essay, Of Land and Sea: Reclamation, Infrastructures and Ambiguities in Mumbai, edited by Marko Jobst and Catherina Gabrielsson, Routledge, 2024
 
 
 
Before Mumbai was Bombay, it was several separate islands. The East India Company (EIC) brought them together by reclaiming land and bridging the archipelago's many communities starting in the seventeenth century. The number of islands that existed before reclamation has a contested history—the Portuguese claimed there were four distinct islands, while the EIC said there were two and then seven. Historian Tim Riding characterized this discrepancy in Mumbai's origin story as a deliberate and politically motivated mapping misinterpretation of land and sea by the two colonizers to foster territorial exchange. Centuries later, after India's liberalization in the 1990s when Bombay was renamed Mumbai, reclamation re-emerged as a crucial part of the city's neoliberal growth blueprint. Reclaimed land has served the city's need for picturesque water-adjacent, car-friendly infrastructures such as the sea-link road, coastal road, promenades, and waterfront developments in the last few decades. During the colonial process of landscape transformation, EIC labeled the lands that came underwater during high tide—which the locals considered to be sea—as land that was "drowned" or "overflown" to suit their conception of the archipelago. Recently, Mumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) called the intertidal areas between land and sea "unproductive wasteland" that can be reclaimed. They also renamed certain shorelines as "bays," which radically changed development clearance distance from 500m to only 100m under the Indian Coastal Regulation Zones rules.  
 
From its colonial past to its neoliberal present, ambiguity between what constitutes land and sea is in Bombay and Mumbai's DNA. My essay argues that these deliberate misinterpretations between land, sea, bay, shoreline, drowned land, and wasteland have intentionally been left murky to be weaponized for the promise of land, development, and profits. The essay studies reclamation and reclaimed land as infrastructural and material artifacts of these misinterpretations. On the surface, these investigations reveal narratives of connectivity, concrete, modernity, and colonial origin stories. However, closer inspection exposes the obscured archaeologies of displaced and exploited fishing communities, fragile, damaged ecosystems, and corrupt environmental regulations. Between the many narratives and misinterpretations are the political and speculative act of creating land where there was none, which generated an island city comprised of static territorial extensions into the sea and an urbanism that venerates uninterrupted sea views at all costs.