Tej City. Protests in Mumbai, 1988-2008

The paper aims at understanding the types, scope and contents of urban protests in Mumbai for the past twenty years. Firstly, it tries to define the nature of mass struggles within the city. Then it deals with the rather violent history of the city in the past twenty years. Thirdly, it describes the different types of urban protests and their evolution over time. Finally, it offers a typology of urban protests and discusses the changes occurring in the popular milieus. The class content of the ‘popular’ (which is not altogether dead) has been increasingly fragmented by a process of community-based assertion that led to protests led by groups representing small categories of the popular classes. In the period studied, workers’ struggles were lost while the more recent assertions of the rich who launched (near) urban protests were acknowledged and listened to. This segmentation helps to understand the limits and the ambiguousness of “civil society” rhetoric.