Religious architecture, everyday life and urban space in Mumbai

Sarover Zaidi

My work will focus on religious architecture in Mumbai and its relationship to neighborhoods, markets, street cultures and municipal planning and urban space of the city. Working between theological architecture (especially of the three Semitic religions), ghettoized neighborhoods, and the formation of city plans I aim to look at the forms in which these expand into, the social, the political and the pluralistic practice of religion in a cosmopolitan city. Locating myself first on religious architecture and religious space I will aim to trace its relations to the everyday life of different religious groups, specifically on Muslims, Christians and Jews residing in Ward B of Mumbai.  Understanding how religious structures organize the everyday, both in a contemporary and historical sense and how they contend and concede with the rise and formations of markets, housing colonies , street cultures and city plans around them would be a core aspect of my research. Unpacking the logic of space in a historical port city and the commercial capital of India, I would look at how city planning, bureaucratically secular intentions, and infrastructures of a globalizing city deals with aspects of the historical, the traditional and the religious in its contemporary form.