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TISS to study how ethnicity, religion have shaped our city…….Mihika Basu
A group of scholars at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) will soon work on a five-year research project to map changes in Mumbai and corresponding shifts in aspirations across class groups. The project will be part of a study on ‘urban aspirations in global cities’ that will look at the role of factors such as religion and ethnicity in the urban context and the ways in which they impact aspirations in Mumbai, Shanghai, Singapore and New York.
TISS, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and Partners for Urban Knowledge And Research are collaborating on the project which will compare post-colonial cities in Asia, including Mumbai, Singapore and Shanghai and the non-colonial city of New York. TISS will focus on Mumbai. An urban media laboratory will be created to document various aspects of the city.
“It will explore the diversity, changing aspirations and how they manifest in people’s behaviour. There will be policy implications that will be made available to stakeholders. All documents, research papers and findings will be compiled, digitised and put up on a website,” said S Parasuraman, TISS director.
The primary focus will be the young population. “One group will work on when religious processions started in Mumbai. They will look at very popular ones like the Lalbaug immersion procession. The aim is to find how processions play out as a way of marking one’s identity in the city,” said Professor Lakshmi Lingam, who is coordinating the project at TISS.
“Urban researchers assumed that metropolitan cities would be secular spaces and religion would either disappear or be relegated to the private. This didn’t happen. Religion and ethnicity do become important vehicles for articulation of people’s identity, the ways in which they mobilise, resist marginalise or attempt to consolidate their position in a city,” said Lingam.
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