Landscapes hold memories, they tell stories of place and people through their spatial histories
and relational geographies. Salt pan lands of the once colonial city of Bombay, now Mumbai,
trace the violence of colonization and the voice of India’s freedom struggle through the salt
satyagraha. Ironically, these very memoryscapes that epitomize the representation of India’s
freedom, continue to remain postcolonial spaces of oppression, warranting the question -
freedom for whom? In this article, I make visible the ‘unfreedom’ of three communities interacting with Mumbai’s salt pans - the kolis, agaris, and adivasis while drawing on Amartya Sen’s provocations of ‘unfreedom’ - poverty and tyranny. This research analyzes interviews, archival and court documents to critique the colonial epistemologies that fix land and fragment resources on these fluid ecologies. Mumbai’s salt pan lands offer a charged site to study the caste, class dynamics of the tiller and landlord that continue untouched post-independence as colonial categorization of these lands under the ambit of ‘industry’ omit them from land reforms. The article concludes that the nexus of the State, developers and judiciary, continues to perpetuate these epistemologies with strategic change in land-use policy and probes a re-imaging of freedom in a planning process inspired by Amartya Sen’s 'Development as Freedom. '
