centre of the island on which Bombay is built there is a large area marked ‘MILLS MILLS MILLS’ and
‘chawls chawls chawls’
. The mills needed, and need, workers; and the workers live or are accommodated in these chawls. These textile mills – many of them now with antiquated machinery – should have been moved long ago. Bombay might then have been allowed to breathe. But the readily available crowds of the mill area serve every kind of commercial and political interest; and the mills will stay.
Some time ago there was talk of a ‘twin city’ on the mainland, to draw industry and people out of Bombay. The plan fell through. Instead, at the southern tip of the island, on expensively reclaimed land, there sprang up a monstrous development of residential skyscrapers: unimaginative walls of concrete in an unlandscaped desert with, already, on the unmade roads the huts and stalls of the poor,sucked in by the new development. ‘Here you are … QUEEN FOR YOUR STAY ’, says the most recent
Bombay Handbook
, published by the American Women’s Association, ‘Your dream of having servants is about to come true.’ There isn’t accommodation for the poor; but they are always needed, and forever called in, even now.
So, though every day more corrupted by its poor, Bombay, with the metropolitan glamour of its skyscrapers, appears to boom, and at night especially, from the sea road, is dramatic: towers of light around the central nightmare of the mill area.
The main roads there are wide, wet-black and clean in the middle from traffic, earth-coloured at the edges where pavement life flows over on to the road, as it does even on a relaxed Sunday morning, before the true heat and glare, and before the traffic builds up and the hot air turns gritty from the brown smoke of the double-decker buses: already a feeling of the crowd, of busy slender legs, of an immense human stirring behind the tattered commercial façades one sees and in the back streets one doesn’t see, people coming out into the open, seeking space.
The area seems at first to be one that has gone down in the world. The commercial buildings are large and have style; but, for all the Indian ornamentation of their facades – the rising sun, the Indo-Aryan swastika for good luck, the Sanskrit character
Om
for holiness – these buildings were built to be what they are, to serve the population they serve. Like the chawls themselves, which in some streets can look like the solid town mansions of a less nervous time, but are newer than they look, many built in the 1930s and 1940s, and built even at that late date as chawls, substandard accommodation for factory labour, one room per family, the urban equivalent of plantation barracks or ‘ranges’, the equivalent, in twentieth-century Bombay, of early industrial England’s back-to-back workers’ terraces.
The chawl blocks are four or five stories high, and the plan is the same on each floor: single rooms opening on to a central corridor, at the back of which are lavatories and ‘facilities’. Indian familiesramify, and there might be eight people in a room; and ‘corners’ might be rented out, as in Dostoevsky’s St Petersburg, or floor space; or people might sleep in shifts. A chawl room is only a base; chawl life is lived in the open, in the areas between chawls, on the pavements, in the streets. An equivalent crowd in a colder climate might be less oppressive, might be more dispersed and shut away. But this Bombay crowd never quite disperses.
The chawls, however, are provided with facilities. To be an inhabitant of a chawl is to be established. But in the nooks and crannies of this area there is – as always in India – yet another, lower human level, where the people for whom there is no room have made room for themselves. They have founded squatters’ settlements, colonies of the dispossessed. And, like the chawl dwellers, they have done more: within the past ten years, out of bits and pieces of
‘chawls chawls chawls’
. The mills needed, and need, workers; and the workers live or are accommodated in these chawls. These textile mills – many of them now with antiquated machinery – should have been moved long ago. Bombay might then have been allowed to breathe. But the readily available crowds of the mill area serve every kind of commercial and political interest; and the mills will stay.
Some time ago there was talk of a ‘twin city’ on the mainland, to draw industry and people out of Bombay. The plan fell through. Instead, at the southern tip of the island, on expensively reclaimed land, there sprang up a monstrous development of residential skyscrapers: unimaginative walls of concrete in an unlandscaped desert with, already, on the unmade roads the huts and stalls of the poor,sucked in by the new development. ‘Here you are … QUEEN FOR YOUR STAY ’, says the most recent
Bombay Handbook
, published by the American Women’s Association, ‘Your dream of having servants is about to come true.’ There isn’t accommodation for the poor; but they are always needed, and forever called in, even now.
So, though every day more corrupted by its poor, Bombay, with the metropolitan glamour of its skyscrapers, appears to boom, and at night especially, from the sea road, is dramatic: towers of light around the central nightmare of the mill area.
The main roads there are wide, wet-black and clean in the middle from traffic, earth-coloured at the edges where pavement life flows over on to the road, as it does even on a relaxed Sunday morning, before the true heat and glare, and before the traffic builds up and the hot air turns gritty from the brown smoke of the double-decker buses: already a feeling of the crowd, of busy slender legs, of an immense human stirring behind the tattered commercial façades one sees and in the back streets one doesn’t see, people coming out into the open, seeking space.
The area seems at first to be one that has gone down in the world. The commercial buildings are large and have style; but, for all the Indian ornamentation of their facades – the rising sun, the Indo-Aryan swastika for good luck, the Sanskrit character
Om
for holiness – these buildings were built to be what they are, to serve the population they serve. Like the chawls themselves, which in some streets can look like the solid town mansions of a less nervous time, but are newer than they look, many built in the 1930s and 1940s, and built even at that late date as chawls, substandard accommodation for factory labour, one room per family, the urban equivalent of plantation barracks or ‘ranges’, the equivalent, in twentieth-century Bombay, of early industrial England’s back-to-back workers’ terraces.
The chawl blocks are four or five stories high, and the plan is the same on each floor: single rooms opening on to a central corridor, at the back of which are lavatories and ‘facilities’. Indian familiesramify, and there might be eight people in a room; and ‘corners’ might be rented out, as in Dostoevsky’s St Petersburg, or floor space; or people might sleep in shifts. A chawl room is only a base; chawl life is lived in the open, in the areas between chawls, on the pavements, in the streets. An equivalent crowd in a colder climate might be less oppressive, might be more dispersed and shut away. But this Bombay crowd never quite disperses.
The chawls, however, are provided with facilities. To be an inhabitant of a chawl is to be established. But in the nooks and crannies of this area there is – as always in India – yet another, lower human level, where the people for whom there is no room have made room for themselves. They have founded squatters’ settlements, colonies of the dispossessed. And, like the chawl dwellers, they have done more: within the past ten years, out of bits and pieces of
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