She looked up at me with watery eyes, a subtle smile relaying her understanding. I was lost, she knew it. She turned to lead me down an alleyway, carefully stepping over open sewers, greeting familiar faces, looking back to check on me. I glanced through open windows, and clocked miniature rooms, tiny furniture, compact spaces seeping spicy smells, children crowded around a small TV, grinning brown faces at doorways. All around us, electric wires ran and looped and whorled with dendritic complexity, as if we were travellers inside a giant fibre optic cable. The alleyway narrowed and widened, never more than a metre or two across, a tiny slit of distant sky recognisable above. Shanties, shop fronts, staircases – even an internet cafe – crowded in, haphazardly perched over and around like a teetering deck of cards. It was as if these shacks had grown there over time, a colony of splitting cells, a clutch of barnacles smattered across a hidden wreck.
We were treading through the Dharavi slum, a sprawling settlement in India’s financial capital, Mumbai. But Dharavi was no ordinary slum. Woven onto a ramshackle skeleton of inroads and train lines, on prime real estate in the middle of a mega-city, she is a financial centre in her own right, a bubbling micro-tropolis of small industry that has featured in Hindi and Tamil films, as well as Danny Boyle’s 2008 sensation, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. Dharavi is a makeshift enterprise of pottery, tannery, textiles, exporting goods around the world and turning over an estimated USD$600 million per year. That’s slumdog multi-millionaire, thank you very much.
My visit to Dharavi was adventitious. National Geographic covered the slum in 2007, and the article quietly wedged itself inside me, to resurface when I found myself in Mumbai last year. ‘Reality Gives’ was an NGO conducting educational tours of the slum, pledging 80% of their profits to low-cost education for slum dwellers. With the help of Krishna Poojari, co-founder of Reality Gives, our group set out to inspect a recycling factory on one of Dharavi’s main drags. From the darkness of a narrow room, forty-odd people slowly emerged, lined up in two rows on the ground, sifting through a central pile of plastic. Incredibly, over 80% of plastics are recyclable in Dharavi, compared to Western standards of between 7% to 30%, depending on the type of plastic.
Despite her title as ‘Asia’s largest slum’ - inaccurate, as the Orangi Township in Karachi is larger - Dharavi is incredibly dense. In one square mile of land (three square kilometres), she manages to house over a million residents (or two-thirds the entire population of Perth). In typical Indian fashion, the population is a mix of tribes and creeds, with a majority of dalit (formerly ‘untouchable’) caste, and minorities of ethnic Gujaratis, Maharashtrians and Tamils. The slum is accessible via two of Mumbai’s main suburban railway lines, and affordable, with rent as low as $4 a month. These privileges, crowned by the possibility of employment in a nation where over 300 million people live in poverty, explain Dharavi’s other moniker as the ‘Rolls Royce of slums’.
We moved on to a textile factory, where distinctive Indian patterns were hand-stamped onto fabrics, destined for retailers in Asia and beyond. There were soap factories, bakeries, embroideries, all condensed and humming with quiet efficiency. Bit by bit, we hopped a handful of the estimated 15,000 single room factories operating in the slum.
At one such room we were greeted with a turning of heads, some twenty or thirty children sat at sewing machines, producing children’s tracksuits. Children sewing for children; it was disarming. Was this a sweat shop, the much-bandied ‘evil’ of multinationals, at work? Krishna explained a more complex, uneasy reality. No, these children were not strictly indentured. But for many of them, family circumstances necessitated fast money, an additional paycheque, over the long term investment of education. The chance to send a child to work was seen as a blessing, which eluded families in many other parts of India. It made unsettling sense.
In the year since our visit, work on an urban redevelopment plan has commenced in Dharavi, led by American-trained architect Mukesh Mehta, and aimed at transforming Dharavi into a modern township. Mehta’s critics claim that the plan is driven by profit, not rehabilitation. At stake is an estimated return of USD $3.3 billion for the government and developers. Yet the issue of property and land rights for existing slum dwellers is less clear, and many families currently renting in Dharavi will have to be resettled.
Visitors to India often speak of the ‘spirit’ of the place, a term which courts banality and ignores her frequent intolerance and sectarian clashes. A few personal interactions with Dharavi locals, however, and it was easy to fall for this ‘cult of spirit’. Toothy grins, offers of food, even fluent English. Never a request for a handout. More than anything, an apparent acceptance – no, an embrace – of their reality. Some families can trace their residence in Dharavi back for almost 300 years. For them and many other working families, Dharavi is not a slum, she doesn’t need rehabilitation, or a role in an architect’s vision of a ‘next Shanghai’. She is simply their home.
In the passages of Dharavi, too narrow for a rickshaw, I heard English accents. We had found my group. Another flash of clear eyes, a hint of sweetness, and my impromptu tour guide, five or six years old, signalled my delivery … and was gone, quietly padding down another alleyway and out of sight.
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