Redefining representations

Popular stereotyping has reinforced the image of Dharavi as a place of dirt and filth, breeding criminal activities. Kalpana Sharma's book looks at it as representing Mumbai's real cosmopolitanism, a place where people from different regions of India have forged new identities and lives through sheer grit and determination, says SUJATA PATEL.

ALOT of people in the country have heard about, read about or have an idea of what Dharavi is. Known as Asia's largest slum, it received a grant of Rs.100 crores (later reduced to Rs. 37 crores) from Rajiv Gandhi to free itself from the negative connotations of urban development that it had got itself caught into. Despite the fact that a truncated, but still a huge, grant was used to develop the infrastructure of Dharavi, not much changed in this township. It remains even today an icon, symbolising at once, the dirt and ugliness, crime and illegality, strife and communal clashes that have overtaken many cities in India, but more particularly Mumbai.

It is no wonder that the Hindi film industry has freezed this image in the minds of the audience through films that depict Dharavi specifically and slums generally as haven of thieves, smugglers, murderers and the mafia, a citadel of criminality. Dharavi's most famous criminal was Vardarajan Mudaliar. Varda had his life depicted in two block buster films played by Kamal Hassan in Tamil and Vinod Khanna in its Hindi version. For many, Dharavi represents the squirm of Mumbai.

Unlike the positions taken above, Kalpana Sharma's book is a discovery of a different Dharavi, a Dharavi built on sweat, energy and struggle, but with creativity and humanism. She is always conscious of what Dharavi's representations are, but she makes the reader go beneath this ugliness and stink, behind the dirt and open drains, under the layers of illegal and criminal activities to understand the grit, determination and courage with which the people of Dharavi have built new lives, identities and through which they have become active citizens of Mumbai.

If the people of Dharavi have shown initiative and enterprise, Kalpana Sharma suggests it is not because the city helped them to realise their dreams, rather this was despite the way the city has treated them. In discussing Dharavi thus, Sharma narrates the way the city developed through migrations and settlements, displacements and resettlements, its shape, both geographical and metaphorical, driven by an elite who carved out for themselves the core, hugged all the urban services to themselves and relegated the underclass to the periphery, displacing them through demolitions, as they once again reclaimed the periphery to make it their core. This is how the city came into being, unevenly and haphazardly, with the majority of its population being constantly threatened by displacement, having no guarantee of a pucca settled life on the horizon. Mumbai, where more than half the population lives in slums, cradles many Dharavis.

The narrative that Sharma crafts moves at two levels; first are the stories of migrations, settlements, displacements and resettlements of varying communities of the sub-continent, who have constructed a cultural mosaic which symbolises the real Dharavi. This, according to Sharma, is Mumbai's cosmopolitanism. These communities live cheek by jowl in the many localities that divide Dharavi spatially according to caste and ethnic boundaries, but which are being increasingly broken as new migrants find space in the already dense environment. The largest community in Dharavi is Tamil-speaking with a close second being Marathi-speaking. The rest of the township's people are from Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Kerala, Rajasthan and Bihar in order of proportion.

This book weaves together life stories of sometimes two, sometimes three to four generations of families in Dharavi as these struggled to survive and triumph against all odds, all recounted with deep empathy. It is also a narrative about the varied economic enterprises of Dharavi: the famous leather goods industry, the export oriented suture unit or the zarodozi embroidery and garment industry, of the many foods marketed in the Bombay-A-1 chikki, khari biscuits, bread as well as kaju katri and gulab jamuns and Bengali sweets sold in shops of Ghasatiram Halwai Karachiwala and Lijjat pappad being supplied to various households in the city. Many of these enterprises started as caste-based occupations and have now moved on to new orientations as the market has expanded. Dharavi houses the biggest potters' colony in the city, the Kumbhar wada. Sharma estimates that Dharavi generates a turn over of about 5 crore a day or 1500-2000 crores a year. Most of these establishments are not legal and generate incalculable pollution and is a risk not only to Dharavi's residents but also to the city.

Whether in work or in housing, illegality pervades every aspect of Dharavi's life, an illegality manufactured by the myopic policies, programmes and legislation on housing that exists not only in Mumbai but the entire country. Housing policies have not been equipped to deal with the processes of migration, settlement, demolitions and displacements with which the mass of underclass live. People have to live, work and survive wherever possible and if no arrangements are made for their work, their homes can and will become a place for work, as it has happened in Dharavi. Any policy on housing has to accept that the first step to mitigate the problem is to provide housing for all. But is this possible in a context where land and housing are part of the market? Can the market provide for anyone who cannot afford to pay high prices?

Thus the second issue that dominates this book is a discussion on policies of housing of the poor in Mumbai. These policies and legislation, Sharma suggests, invite arbitrariness of bureaucratic decisions and eventual politicisation of the housing question as it does not and cannot address the moot problem: the right to housing. Sharma at the end of her book discusses the limitations of the Slum Improvement Scheme and the Slum Redevelopment Scheme that have been implemented together with the 37 crore Rajiv Gandhi Fund for Dharavi. Sadly, it has benefited only a few who have moved to high rises, merely creating a space for new migrants to settle in this township.

Given the high earnings, extreme density, "illegal" housing, it is not difficult to understand how Dharavi became prey to communal violence in the 92-93 riots that affected Mumbai. Dharavi and other parts of Mumbai became entangled in highly charged identity politics which attempted to redefine peoples' felt deprivation into victimhood and which put the blame of deprivation on the minority community. Sharma laments that these riots have now redefined the social and spatial boundaries of the communities living in Dharavi and added one additional factor in the conundrum that is Dharavi and Mumbai.

What is the solution to all this? Sharma puts faith in the initiatives of the NGOs in Dharavi who are fighting to obtain a foothold for the underclass and the poor of the city. But can this be enough? Is the issue only that of housing and the right to housing for all? Or is it also of right to health and against violence and for peace? Surely all this boils down to the issue of work - who gets work, what is the nature of work available, what is the kind of wages one gets and more particularly, is there at all work for all? These are large questions which we all need to ask given that by the next decade around 40 per cent of India's population will be living in urban India.

This book needs to be read by one and all, not only because it asks both small and big questions of contemporary urban life. But because it is rare to find a book that invites the reader to question these processes without forgetting that in so doing we all are discussing conscious and creative human beings, who as individuals and as part of communities have built the many worlds that we inhabit, but take for granted, in India. All solutions can only be thought of with them and not about them. Urban policies, programmes and theories have until now promoted reified knowledge; this book demands a return to praxiological knowledge.

Rediscovering Dharavi, Stories from Asia's Largest Slum, Kalpana Sharma, New Delhi, Penguin Books India, 2000, p. xxxviii+209, Rs. 200.

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