MUMBAI WITHOUT FILTERS

In his new book, The Opium of Time: Photographs of Mumbai 2010-2020, film-maker and photographer Sunhil Sippy provides an unvarnished glimpse of the city, particularly its marginalised people and places

- RADHAKRISHNAN NAIR

The Opium of Time, the intriguing title of Sunhil Sippy’s brilliant new book of photographs of Mumbai, sets the tone for what unfolds over its 200 or so lavishly printed pages. The title is part of GermanBritish author W G Sebald’s quote (On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation. There is no antidote to the opium of time), from his book The Rings of Saturn, about the inevitability of annihilation that looms over everything in life. The smell of decay and the feeling of imminent gentrification pervades through large parts of the book. Though Sippy says he came upon the title only recently, a majority of the pictures, either by design or by the accident of curation, are a visual manifestation of Sebald’s gloomy prediction.

The book is a powerful monochromatic album that documents people and ways of life in the city, much of which we know will vanish sooner or later as gentrification marches on — the crowded chawls, the local trains, the barbershops, the wrestling akharas, the slums, the government office still without computers, the mathadis, the single screen theatres, the fairgrounds, the fisherwomen and the fisherman’s villages, the shipbreakers, the salt pan workers, the photographers at Gateway of India, the shoeshine boy, the ageing bettors at the racecourse, the ageing Parsis by the window. Even the intermittent pictures of the city landscapes have a haunting quality about them. The skyscrapers are always at a distance, while the foreground is filled with the detritus of urbanisation, the pylons, industrial chimneys, sagging electricity cables, boat pieces, sea garbage, construction cranes, excavators, etc.