The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai

Introduction

1 i n T r o D u C T i o n A Mansion in the Slum The narrow lanes and pathways through Dharavi’s densely packed central neighborhoods open up in front of Aneesh Shankar’s house. A flower garden and a courtyard—seemingly out of place in a part of the city where nearly every bit of space is used to either house someone, make something, or sell something—give way to a freshly painted two-story bungalow with a brickshingled roof. The door to the house, an almost three-inch-thick piece of intricately carved teak, is the building’s most striking feature and its most conspicuous display of the owner’s wealth. On the other side of the door, the home’s interior is equally striking, but more for its sparseness than for any of its particular features or furnishings. One rarely finds this much open space in Dharavi. Iconic image of Dharavi’s seemingly endless expanse of aluminum rooftops. Photograph by Benji Holzman. 2 INTRODUCTION Aneesh Shankar ushered me inside and into his formal living room. He wore a plain gray T-shirt and a brightly colored lungi, a saronglike skirt worn by South Indian men. Looking as if he had just woken from a nap, he was visibly relieved when his wife entered with a tray of South Indian coffee and sweet biscuits. After just one sip of coffee he looked refreshed, and he launched, practically unprompted, into a story he appeared to have told a hundred times: Dharavi’s early history and the role played by his community, the Adi Dravidas, in its economic and social life. A lifelong Dharavi resident and president of the Bombay South Indian Adi Dravida Mahajan Sangh (ADMS), one of the settlement’s oldest social organizations, Shankar is both de facto historian and official spokesperson for Dharavi’s long-established South Indian dalit, or untouchable, communities. As we sipped coffee in his comfortable living room, Shankar relayed the history of migration to Dharavi from his native place of Tirunelveli, in the southern part of Tamil Nadu. Since the 1930s and 1940s, several waves of migrants have come to Dharavi to escape caste persecution and gain secure employment in the expanding tanning and leather manufacturing industries. His father was among the first wave, settling in Dharavi in the late 1930s and sending for his new bride, Aneesh’s mother, soon after that. By the 1950s the senior Shankar had built his own factory and was employing dozens of newer migrants driven by a similar set of push and pull factors. As he relayed the almost universal immigrant story of persecution, opportunity, adversity, and upward mobility—but with a distinctly Dharavi flavor—Shankar’s tale also conveyed equally classic narratives of urbanization, enclave formation, and city building. Just one of more than a dozen ethnic, caste, and religious communities that have settled in Dharavi over the past century, the Adi Dravidas formed organizations and political parties, built schools and temples, and constructed homes and factories — in doing so, helping build the settlement of Dharavi and city of Bombay. From inside Aneesh Shankar’s spacious bungalow, Dharavi looked much different than slums are supposed to look. It looked more permanent , possessing a dynamic stability that comes with pucca,1 or well-built, buildings, economic vitality, and established social institutions . As Shankar described his family’s role in Dharavi’s leather industry and later showed me his thirty-thousand-square-foot factory adjacent to his home, it seemed wealthier and less marginal to the economic life of India’s richest and most global city. From here, the slum 3 INTRODUCTION did not seem to be quite synonymous with poverty, as it is often treated in both popular narratives and dominant scholarly accounts, and Shankar did not resemble the “surplus humanity” depicted in these writings: excluded, exploited, and expendable (Davis 2006). From this vantage point, Dharavi, and the experiences of at least some of its residents, seemed to complicate the typical accounts of the slum. The now notorious settlement of Dharavi—immortalized in several recent magazine cover stories2 and in the popular film Slumdog Millionaire , which includes several iconic shots from the slum—was a prominent site in Mumbai’s social landscape before it attracted the attention of film producers and magazine editors. The 535-acre area of Dharavi once contained a small fishing village and, in the eighteenth century...