start

The Hellenic xenos designates the foreigner, but it also designates the guest[1]. This is the story of Pier Paolo Passolini in Mumbai coming and leaving as a xenos.

Blurred imprints may result from softness, from adulteration, or from overlapping in a ‘small mind’[2] Small minded would, be what discribes Pasolini on arrival in Mumbai airport the best. Like a man, while travelling in order to prosecute his studies, suffers shipwreck. Impure, adulterated: suffused with self awareness. [3]

You cannot use the idiom of purity, purgation, and contamination and at the same time take easily to the postures of acceptance and toleration.[4] He is like a concurbine polluting their bed.[5]

Serres, Rome [1],Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy Volume 5 The Later Plato and the Academy[2]. Seneca, Complete Works [3], Danto, After the End of Art [4], Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony[5]

sacrificing the goat

Crawford Market rose before me, a wound dressed in red brick, the colonial hand still gripping the city’s throat. They built it to impose order, to bleach the bazaar of its dust, its caste, its chaos. A marketplace made sterile—Western, disciplined. But history gnawed at it, and now it stood feverish, neither dead nor fully alive. Colonialism was pollution—psychological, cultural—seeping into a city’s bones, corrupting its rhythms. The West had left, but its shadow remained.

Inside—flesh and fruit, the raw matter of survival. Goats’ throats slit behind plastic drapes, their heads stacked in trays, eyes blank in death. Alphonso mangoes sweating in the humidity, coriander wilting, fish glistening like severed tongues. The air thick, unbreathable. Luckily, a wide avenue was cut clean across the island, allowing breezes from the Arabian Sea to reach Crawford Market, whose butcher shops and produce stalls badly needed the ventilation. [10]

Outside—another world. The market spilling over itself, metastasizing onto footpaths, choking the roads. Hawkers crouched over tarps, scattering at the first crack of a lathi. Street dwellers, hawkers, and scavengers are the worst sufferers, as they spend most of their days in congested intersections where the air pollution is most concentrated. [9] The blueprint had failed; the city had redrawn itself. Like Shanghai, Mumbai has become a city filled with street-level entrepreneurs, many of whom operate in a shadow economy where the line between the formal and the informal is deliberately blurred. [8]

A white cow nosed through trash, indifferent to the auto-rickshaws coughing black smoke. A barefoot child weaved between taxis, an irate vendor’s slipper flying past his head. A man beside me adjusted his plastic buckets and sighed.

Above us, neon signs flickered, their promises already peeling at the edges. Vodafone banners and Bollywood posters [4] warped in the heat, selling fantasies I could never believe in. Famous for producing […] glittery melodramas… […] It was an odd scene. [5]

And beneath it all, the pulse, the friction, the machinery of a city devouring itself. A hidden frequency, a rewired metabolism. This toxic waste and this acid rain generate conditions in which mutant Rhythmachines thrive. [3]

If colonialism was pollution, then the city had learned to breathe through it. The market, the language, the very rhythms of Mumbai—corrupted, yes, but also reclaimed. Here, beneath the shadow of empire, new forms emerged, neither wholly free nor wholly bound. What if I wasn’t witnessing contamination, but a chemistry of survival, a process still unfolding?

Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun Adventures in Sonic Fiction [3], Hollis, Cities Are Good For You [4], Koolhaas Obrist, Project Japan [5], Greenspan, Shanghai Future Modernity Remade [8], Zimring, Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste [9], Brook, A History of Future Cities [10]

hidden frequency, rewired metabolism

Pasolini stopped at the goat market. The stench of flesh and damp straw, the low murmur of bargaining voices, the occasional bleat—an unbroken ritual, older than the city, older than the colonizers who had once tried to erase it. Salman Khan stood among the cages, his hands dark with the memory of blood. He looked up, half-smiling.

"You want to see the goat?"

Pasolini nodded. Salman motioned to a black one tethered near the stall. Its eyes, unreadable, caught the flickering neon from a distant sign.
"For sacrifice?" Pasolini asked.

Salman laughed, shaking his head. "For eating. But it is the same, no?" He pulled the rope, guiding the animal closer. "In your country, the goat wears another face. Tragedy—trágos, the goat song." [1]

Pasolini crouched, watching the animal breathe. "A scapegoat," he murmured. "To cleanse the sins of others. The ancient Greeks dressed in goat skins to perform their plays—the tragic mask of sacrifice." [2]

Salman wiped his hands on a rag. "In our world, it is purity. A gift to the gods. But tell me, in your world, do the gods still accept sacrifices?" He did not wait for an answer. "This is the contradiction, isn’t it? The same act, but two meanings. A common body, yet divided." [3]

Pasolini stood, brushing the dust from his knees. "Indifference, between ways of thought, is much more difficult to surmount than difference." [4]
Salman nodded. "Because the same thing can be bitter to one and sweet to another." [5] He patted the goat’s back. "Even a broom is different in the hands of two men." [6]

The neon flickered again, catching the blade of a butcher’s knife as it slid through muscle.

"Your people say tradition must be preserved, unchanged," Salman continued. "That pollution is dangerous." [7] He gestured around. "But look—this is not the same India my grandfather knew. These streets, this city, even the way I speak… all of it, touched by foreign hands. And yet, it is ours."

Pasolini exhaled. "Cross-breeding—that’s my cultural ideal." [8]

Salman laughed again. "Then perhaps you understand. This is not contamination. It is something new."

The goat shifted its weight, restless. A motorbike roared past, leaving behind a cloud of smoke. Pasolini watched it dissolve into the air. The city itself was
breathing—an old lung, filtering the past into the present. He turned back to Salman.

"And what do we call this new alloy?" [9]
Salman shrugged. "India."

Barber, A Companion to World Mythology [1], Girard, The Scapegoat [2], Serres, The Incandescent [3], Jullien, The Book of Beginnings [4], Campanella, The Book and the Body of Nature [5], Serres Latour, Conversations on Science Culture and Time [6], Girard, Violence and the Sacred [7], Noble, The Music of Life [8], Serres, Variations on the Body [9]

Pasolini:
Tell me, Taxi Uncle, what about Azad Maidan? A place of resistance, they say. But it’s also a colonial space, isn’t it?

Taxi Uncle:
Azad Maidan, sahab? A place where the British once held power.We can no longer enclose a piece of land.[1] Now, it's the arena for our cricket, our fight. They used to discipline us with games like this.

Pasolini:
Yes, cricket, the imperial game. "Cricket was the British way to control, to discipline." [2] But now, it's ours. We’ve turned it into a vehicle for self-expression, a tool of resistance. This is the contradiction of colonialism, isn't it? We are trapped in the pollution of their culture, yet we’ve learned to live within it, transforming it into something our own.

Taxi Uncle:
Indeed (sahab), by generalizing or globalizing dirt and so erasing the borders where polluting starts or stops, and hence appropriation, the right to property suddenly reaches an intolerable treshold and becomes literally unbearable.[3]The British gave us this game, yes, but now it’s a part of us. It’s not just theirs anymore.

Pasolini:
And so it goes. "While colonial structures imposed foreign epistemologies and value systems that polluted local knowledge frameworks..." [4] Yet, the same structures have given birth to a new form of resistance. A strange form of freedom, built on their very tools of control.

Taxi Uncle:
We still play the game, sahab. But it's no longer just about them. We’re making it ours. Cricket is like our fight, our stand.

Pasolini:
It’s as if the artifacts of colonialism—the things they left behind—become "vessels for cultural revitalization." [5] What once oppressed us now feeds our resistance. It’s a game, yes, but a battlefield, too.

Taxi Uncle:
That’s right, sahab. Even this city, with its British buildings, its colonial past, it’s all a part of who we are now. We’ve taken what they gave us and turned it into something new. A fight for our own identity.

Pasolini:
It’s the tension between the past and the present that defines us. "This tension between colonial pollution and its repurposing as vessels for cultural revitalization reveals the complex dialectic at the heart of postcolonial identity formation." [6] In Azad Maidan, we see it—cricket, a symbol of colonial power, now a symbol of our strength, our resistance.

Taxi Uncle:
Yes, sahab. The past never really leaves us, but it doesn't own us either.

[1] Serres, Malfesance,[2] Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968,[3] Serres, Malfesance,[4] Zimring, Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste, [5] Serres, The Incandescent, [6] Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.