The bustling streets of Mumbai’s Chor Bazaar are not the witness to usual ‘shor sharaaba’ (noise and mayhem) anymore. Now, small-time hawkers and street vendors are zealously selling those cheap rubber footwear, flashy and bright-coloured tees and even the delicacy of malai kulfi to the locals.
Those used to the Chor Bazaar’s legends, those who visit the market taking it as an historical place will surely wonder, where those vintage shops have disappeared? The shops that once catered to the exquisite and exclusive impulses of the rich, the wealthy maharajas, bounty hunters and later the Bollywood stars, even the Hollywood celebrities!
The ‘Market of Thieves’ or what everyone knows it as, Chor Bazaar, seems to have been demoted to the past. The market’s degenerating walls act as a backdrop to a quaint little market, which the Guardian’s Travelogue described as a place that “provides prospective buyers everything from ‘Raj-era’ steamer trunks to vintage Baccarat crystal to antique silver to old Bollywood movie posters.”
The Free Press Journal reported that since the Saifee Burhani Upliftment Trust (SBUT) took over the massive 16.5 acre Bhendi Bazaar redevelopment project, rumours of Chor Bazaar shutting down have been doing the rounds.
From a walk down the Mutton Street in Bhendi Bazaar is a gulley (lane), where 122 shops have been pulled apart as a part of the project. However, shops on the backside of the lane have not been touched, but the redevelopment projects’ side effects is impacting one and all present there. Small trinket businesses that once flourished here have now downed their shutters, moving to the greener meadows of Goa, Udaipur, Pune and Jaipur.
The oozing ancient-world charm and glory of the bazaar has vanished into thin air. “Chor Bazaar is finished… deconstructed and done… that era is gone,” exclaims Asif Bhai, owner of the famed ‘Taherallys’, the furniture art shop that has a client filled with the who’s who of the world; from Shah Rukh Khan to Sabyasachi Ray to wealthy princes of Morocco.
The Business Owners’ Dilemma
Asif has sold Hussains, Souza’s and Razas in the original along with elite antique furniture and expensive chandeliers said that his business is ‘finished’ after he moved to a temporary commercial place near JJ Hospital. “Where I had 100 walk-ins on an average, today it is as low as 10. We didn’t have any option left. SBUT is a massive project and Chor Bazaar was a small portion of it… We had to move along with it,” Asif was quoted as saying.
His business also has a digital takeover as he said that much of his business takes place over the phone. “People who want to buy things from me just find me minus the Chor Bazaar tag,” he said. Recently, Asif collaborated with Gauri Khan and Suzanne Khan on their interior design projects. He also got to work with designer Sabyasachi on his studio in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda.
The SBUT, as part of their redevelopment project, are offering these 122 shop owners a high street shopping complex — which is still under construction — where they would be put up in clusters and zones on ground plus two levels. This, however, did not sit well with some of the owners.
A business owner explained that a walk through gallery, a flea market — where you walk around the streets and buy what you fancy — is different from going up and down in an elevator of a high-street shopping complex to buy antique, old, limited-edition movie posters, designer clocks and gramophones. “That feel is lost,” he said.
To this, Asif agreed saying that it is not easy to mimic that old-school charm of Chor Bazaar in a closed space. “Malls are meant for fancy things not vintage furniture,” Asif said.
Agreements and disagreements are everywhere, such is the case among the Chor Bazaar shop owners as well. The point is, some of the owners, like Mohammed Farman Mansuri — a fourth-generation owner with five shops of antiques and objects d’art in the bazaar — are happy and enthusiastic about this makeover. These shop owners believe that the offer is a win-win and that they only gain from the deal, logic being the title of being tenants will be replaced by that of ‘full-fledged owners’. Moreover, they will also get extra space, lofts along with benefits of a shopping complex infrastructure, including parking space.
“Yes my business has been affected by the temporary relocation, but I am positive that once the shopping complex opens up properly, we will be back in business,” Mansuri added.
Remaining firm on his stand, Mansuri’s point at the end of the day is that he will benefit monetarily — ownership title, better infrastructure, extra space and other benefits. He added that, “Over time, people’s shopping patterns and lifestyles have changed and so have the ways of business. We will figure it out.”
What Does SUBT Have to Say About The Project?
Senior Manager and Head of Design of SBUT, Malikarjuna Rao said, “With changing times, where everything is on social media, we are giving a chance to Chor Bazaar to reinvent itself and come out in a new avatar. Now as it is their businesses have moved to telephonic or online modes, so we don’t see how the high street shopping complex will negatively impact them. Instead it will give them added advantage of better facilities in place of their previous infrastructure which was old and crippling.”
A SUBT spokesperson also added that the shop owners will be given street-facing shops which will enable them to display their signature pieces. “When the owner and the stuff that he is selling remain the same, I don’t understand what the fuss is all about. People who are interested in buying those artefacts will come to them either way,” he was quoted as saying by the Free Press Journal. He also said that the bigger picture of the project should be looked at, as in its totality. “After all it is going to benefit and empower a total number of 3,200 families in Bhendi Bazaar, and Chor Bazaar is just a small part of it.”
But for the art connoisseurs, like the late Jennifer Kapoor, who walked these dusty and charming lanes of Chor Bazaar — along with director Aparna Sen — for her home production 36 Chowringhee Lane, the experience of finding the on-point kind of lampshade or of an antique table-chair set might never be the same again. For now, it’s almost an alvida (farewell) to the flea market.
Comments
0 comment