Through the Prism of a Structure
Kalpana Sharma
THE CHAWLS OF MUMBAI: GALLERIES OF LIFE by Neera Adarkar Imprint One, 2011, 161 pp., 1200.00
August 2017, volume 35, No 8/9

The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life edited by Neera Adarkar gazes at the city of Mumbai through the prism of this specific structure—the chawl. The result is an interesting and rather different view of a city that has gathered global notoriety through some recent popular books about it. The Mumbai in this book is not the city of the underworld dons, slumlords or bar girls. It captures the strong working class centre of Mumbai, it documents the ability of people without basic civic facilities, living in impossibly crowded homes, to maintain a civility that has now vanished and a creativity that lives on through the poems and books of the authors it nourished.

“The Mumbai in this book is not the city of the underworld dons, slumlords or bar girls. It captures the strong working class centre of Mumbai, it documents the ability of people without basic civic facilities, living in impossibly crowded homes, to maintain a civility that has now vanished …”

The majority of the chawls or ‘chaali’ were built in the early 20th century to house male workers, most of whom left their families behind in the villages. The typical chawl consisted of rows of single rooms with toilets at either end of a floor and a wide corridor separating the rooms. Another form consisted of rows of rooms with a common open gallery connecting them. These common spaces were put to multiple uses—to store excess luggage and furniture, to dry clothes, to socialize during the day and to sleep at night.

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