INTRODUCTION

WHILE IDLED IN TRAFFIC ONE AFTERNOON, an elderly driver of an autorickshaw, the affordable, three-wheeled, motorized taxi ubiquitous in Mumbai's northern suburbs, leaned back to strike up a conversation. He had a speckled beard and a broad smile, and he seemed to enjoy his job and the conversations with strangers it offered. After asking where I was from and what I was doing in Mumbai, the conversation took an unexpected turn. "What's the famous monument of New York?" he asked rhetorically. "It's the Statue of Liberty, right?" Without waiting for my response, he continued: "What's the monument of Mumbai?" I stumbled while searching for an appropriate answer. I proposed the Gateway of India, the arch overlooking the Arabian Sea, completed in 1924, an icon of city promotional materials and popular tourist spot. He shook his head. If this was a test of my research credentials, I had failed. "No, no, it's the vada pao!" he said. And with that, he turned again to face me and took a hearty bite out of an imaginary sandwich.

Vada pao consists of a fried ball of battered mashed potato, the vada, crushed within a sweet and spicy chutney-soaked bun, the pao. It is Mumbai's most popular snack. There are others that are famously associated with the city, such as bhel puri and pao bhaji, but no other food is as ubiquitous and passionately consumed. Vada pao hawkers can be seen in front of train stations; near schools, colleges, and hospitals; atbusy street corners; and near the entrances of parks. They prepare the snack on makeshift metal tables perched on the curb. The vadas are deep fried in well-used black pots. The chutneys are stored in small metal tins. The sandwiches come wrapped in recycled newspaper, accompanied by a green chili pepper. They are cheap and filling and consumed by a broad spectrum of the city. To some, eating vada pao is a guilty pleasure — a quick bite on the way home from work. To others, it is a means of surviving in an expensive city. However its role is conceived, the humble vada pao was an unlikely object to elevate to monumental status. Monuments, write Wohl and Strauss (1958), are "symbolic representation[s]" of a city. They produce images that circulate, shape, and, their creators hope, elevate a city's global status.

Monumentalizing street food was surprising in other ways. To many political leaders, journalists, and residents, hawkers represent a "symbol of metropolitan space gone out of control" (Rajagopal 2001). They are often described as a "'menace' [and] a 'problem' that needs to be 'addressed'" (Patel 2013). On seaside boardwalks, signs such as "Do not patronize hawkers and beggars," make avoiding street food into a civic duty. Alarmism over the hawker "menace" is seemingly everywhere. One day while waiting for the elevator in my Mumbai apartment, I noticed a flier freshly posted to the foyer wall. I looked closer. It was an article, titled "Hawker Proliferation — Economics and Impact," that listed the inconveniences to drivers and pedestrians that hawkers cause. "Hawker encroachment [is so pervasive]," the article explained, because of corruption and the fact that "people do not care enough to protest." Taking up the provocation, a neighbor had scrawled a message above the title: "WHY WE SHOULD NOT DO BUSINESS WITH HAWKERS." Writings like these are commonplace. Two years earlier, Citispace, a civic group, distributed a pamphlet with a similar message. If you want "clean and orderly surroundings," you should "play the role of 'watch dog'" and "complain about persistent illegal hawkers" (Citispace 2004).

Local newspapers display a similar perspective on hawkers. Every week newspapers report on hawker trouble spots and the efforts by the state to deal with them. Articles with titles such as "Keep Vendors away from No-Hawking Zone" (Verma 2005), "Download an App, Take an Illegal Hawker to Task" (Subramanian 2013), and "Hawkers Look to Take over Rs 4 Andheri Auto Deck" (Rao 2015) depict Mumbai's streets and public spaces as conflict zones consisting of pitched battles among residents, state functionaries, and a ragtag army of encroachers. Newspapers regularly describe "pedestrians [who] have been battling for two decades to reclaim their streets from encroachers" (Subramanian 2006) in neighborhoods "worst hit by [the] hawker invasion" (Bhatia 2007). "The hawker issue is important for citizens, who are used to fighting — most often, a losing battle — for space" ("Times View" 2015), says another. Articles describe the feeling of disempowerment among residents living in areas where hawkers have "laid siege" (Baliga 2013) to the roads. Says one resident, "We have been fighting this battle for many years now but over a period of time the number of hawkers have [sic] actually increased" (quoted in Bhatia 2007).

The vada pao is an unlikely "monument" for other reasons. To civic activists frequently quoted in the media, hawkers are often a symbol of poor governance, an indifferent bureaucracy, and broken democracy. Unlicensed vada pao vendors and hawkers like them are thus not only physical annoyances but understood to be part of a larger problem of encroachment enabled by corrupt officials. Hawkers are understood to be a manifestation of a nexus with state functionaries fueled by a mix of retail corruption, unofficial compromises, and dubious appeals to social welfare. While unlicensed, they appeal to the state on the basis of entitlements owed to particular disadvantaged groups. They mix rights claims based on individual citizenship with belonging in a larger collective. They are said to blur the boundary between private subjecthood and public practice. In this discourse, the mere presence of hawkers signals the failure of the state to abide by the principles of liberal citizenship and the rule of law. To them, hawkers not only obstruct pedestrians; they also obstruct the flourishing of political modernity itself.

In 1998, the Citizens' Forum for the Protection of Public Spaces (later renamed Citispace) brought their campaign against encroachment to the Bombay High Court. To Citizens' Forum activists, not only was the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) failing to fulfill its obligations to regulate public space, but its ad hoc practices gave unlicensed hawkers "rights" to the street. By 2003, the case went to the Supreme Court of India, which issued a groundbreaking ruling in Citispace's favor. In addition to instructing the BMC to implement a hawker regulation system, it issued new guidelines restricting hawking. Among them was a ban on curbside cooking. And yet following the 2003 ruling, vada pao vendors and other hawkers were as visible as before. Few hawkers, or state functionaries, were aware of the ban. Implementing the law was complicated by another factor: most hawking was already criminalized. If Mumbai's street food vendors already lacked licenses, how could they be banned? In a telling sign of this legal confusion, Mumbai's hundreds of thousands of hawkers continued to work on the street...