Passages of Play in Urban India: People, Media, Objects, and Spaces in Mumbai’s Slum Localities

Prasad Khanolkar

Rishika Waghmare,

Prasad Khanolkar’s Passages of Play in Urban India offers an insight into urban slum localities in Mumbai by exploring the dynamic relationships between media, objects, spaces, and people. Instead of seeing slums through the usual lens of deprivation, the book examines how residents engage in various forms of play through improvisation, storytelling, and recycling, to navigate the limitations imposed by governmental programs, socio-economic constraints, and urban planning strategies.

Like many Global South cities, Mumbai has undergone large-scale governmental missions to transform it into an efficient, modern, and profitable metropolis. However, its slum populations, which house a significant portion of the city's people, exist outside the rigid categories imposed by urban planning. These communities live within constraints shaped by caste hierarchies, communal conflicts, and infrastructural deficiencies. Khanolkar argues that instead of being passive recipients of urban policy, slum residents actively reshape their urban experiences through everyday acts of play. Each chapter in the book revolves around a specific element of stories, films, toilets, and waste, through which the inhabitants interact with the city in creative and unexpected ways. These elements are not isolated but exist in various other urban materials, such as bodies, mobile phones, money, and bureaucratic documents. Through this lens, Khanolkar suggests that urban slums should not be seen as spaces of excess or failure but rather as "passages" where new urban possibilities emerge.

The book opens with the chapter, On Idling, Storytelling, and Impartibility. This chapter examines how slum residents use storytelling as a way to navigate urban life. In spaces like waiting areas outside government offices, stories circulate as a form of informal knowledge-sharing. These stories are not just entertainment but serve as guides for dealing with bureaucracy, avoiding pitfalls, and finding opportunities. For instance, outside a ration card office, residents engage in an informal storytelling network that helps them understand which officers are approachable, what documents are required, and which bureaucratic hurdles they might face. This circulation of knowledge creates a form of collective intelligence that allows slum dwellers to maneuver through an otherwise rigid and exclusionary urban system. The chapter suggests that storytelling is an act of survival, a way of making claims on urban space that formal participatory forums often exclude.

The book further goes on opening up such insights from the slum dwellings and their stories of everyday, as it also opens up several larger questions about the city’s urban form and understanding. The book challenges the traditional view that urban slums are spaces of mere economic hardship. Instead, it suggests that play, whether in the form of storytelling, media consumption, or material reuse, is central to how people inhabit cities. Government policies and urban planning often ignore or misunderstand slum dynamics. By focusing on everyday acts of play, Prasad highlights how residents create their systems of urban engagement, and thereby effectively reshaping the city. Prasad Khanolkar builds on the idea that cities always generate excess in terms of things, people, and practices that do not fit neatly into planned urban structures. He asks whether urban governance can move beyond trying to control or eliminate excess and instead find ways to engage with it more inclusively. Through its focus on everyday urban interactions, the book prompts reflections on the meaning of urban citizenship. If official frameworks fail to accommodate slum residents, what alternative forms of belonging and participation emerge? Further on, the book raises essential questions about how cities function, who gets to define urban futures, and how the play might serve as a means of reimagining urban life. In doing so, Passages of Play in Urban India challenges dominant narratives and calls for a more nuanced understanding of how people inhabit and reshape the cities they live in.