Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary” is a multimedia exhibition under way at Mumbai’s National Gallery of Modern Art and soon to travel to Bangalore and Delhi. The authors/designers are Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, faculty at the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, US, who have previously curated two travelling exhibitions and books, Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape and Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain. In this project, they respond to the 2005 Mumbai deluge with a focus on the Mithi.

“Soak” attempts to do many things: to present a new, more fluid visualisation of Mumbai’s terrain; to propose solutions to flooding that hold monsoon waters rather than channel them out to sea; to evolve an aesthetic format with an eclectic mix of tools, including those of design, architecture and planning; and to use the medium of an exhibition to generate debate. The book under review, a companion piece to the exhibition, offers an opportunity to test these aims.

The book is divided into three sections: the first deals with the authors’ main contention, which is that the English coloniser, with his love of mapping, drew lines to denote hard edges where none existed, making an island or a series of islands out of a shifting, swampy land and bequeathing assumptions that continue to form the basis of administration and planning for Mumbai. These assumptions, the authors say, need to be reversed. The second section looks at the swamp-talav-oart-bazaar-pitted terrain of the estuary and its operation as a filter between land and sea. The third section proposes 12 initiatives as a response to the problem.

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