Rediscovering Dharavi

"This book is by Kalpana Sharma who is a doyen among women journalists in our city. It’s about Dharavi which is known as the largest slum in Asia. To outsiders, even within the city, but especially to westerners, slums feel like dark, uninviting places almost, but she takes us into Dharavi and just makes it so full of light and enterprise and this tremendous, wonderful, positive energy. It’s a microcosm of the city and of the country because she shows you how all these people from different communities, from different parts of the country, came to occupy this place. So, say, Tamilians came from here and set up tanneries and Gujaratis came from there and set up the potters’ community. All these communities have their own little lanes, their corner of Dharavi is a microcosm of where they came from. They speak their languages, continue the businesses of their ancestors, and eat those foods. Then there are the fisher folk who were supposed to be the original inhabitants of Dharavi, but then the sea got reclaimed and the city grew over it and people came from all over. She is showing us how the city was built. When I started my nonprofit, we also began a lot by working in Dharavi, so these lanes are very familiar to me. The sun does not seep into them, but you will find fish drying there, home made crisps drying there. I don’t know how they dry in the dark, but they do. You’re walking on drains, turning corners, going down blind alleys and suddenly finding, ‘Oh, there’s a glove factory here!’ There’s beautiful embroidery being done; expensive wallets being made. Some might be sold as European designer labels, maybe. It’s like a microcosm of the whole city, of the whole country, of the whole world in this tiny place. She talks about it in her book, I talk about it a little bit in my book, in Manto’s book he talks about it. Bombay was a city where because of the lack of physical space there was tension, but there was a lot of intermingling also. It was home to wealthy Muslims, the biggest movie stars were Muslims. So this was a city where people mingled, life mingled, food mingled, but certainly after the 1992 riots—which she talks about and I talk about—there has been a ghettoization in the city. Muslims have moved out to the flinty suburbs of the city. Housing has become segregated in the name of food. That bias associated with militant vegetarianism is more in Bombay than in any other city. So you can only live in some nice buildings if you’re vegetarian, which Muslims and some other communities of course are not. It’s a way of keeping them out. So the city has become segregated, and then there’s redlining, which I talk about. If you now live in that flinty suburb, your pizza will not get delivered to you, credit cards will not be delivered to you, banks are not there. Life now has got segregated; I don’t think it’s fair to say that it has not. What can I say? My book is about the dumping ground which is now mostly Muslim: those who could move out moved out and they were mostly Hindus. They do. I have a great love for Marathi language which is the language of Bombay. I was born in Pune which is just a few hours away and is a much more Marathi speaking city. It was in Marathi that the city was originally called Mumbai. So when I speak in Marathi, I will always call it Mumbai. But Bombay is also a colonial city and they called it Bombay. Bombay is the city we grew up in."