By LILIANA GIL, 6/13/2016. Right in the heart of Mumbai, surrounded by a rising skyline of shiny buildings, is Dharavi, a more than one-hundred-year-old slum that is home to about one million people. Dharavi became famous after the movie Slumdog Millionaire, in which the young Jamal recalls his traumatic childhood as he answers questions on a TV show. A spiral of poverty, violence, and dirtiness delivered in beautiful saturated colors has made of Danny Boyle’s portrait a controversial one. According to our tour guide – Rahul, a young kid from nearby who grew up being told to never come to this part of town – Dharavi is only now recovering from the bad fame the movie brought to it eight years ago. The subject is sensitive and it fed into my own hesitations about taking pictures in a place that I visited just once and where I don’t really speak the language. That’s why there are no pictures on this post.
In any case, I can assure you that what strikes the most in Dharavi is not its immediate aesthetics. For those who are minimally familiar with slums, the tin roofs, incremental architecture, and narrow alleys would not impress much. What seems really unique in Dharavi are its productive structures. Having started as a fishing community, throughout the decades the area grew to become a major pottery and tannery center, and more recently an important garment and food producer, as well as a recycling hub. Here, every day, a mass of people toil to make some of the city essentials – fabrics, shrines, aloo puffs, tin cans, bottle caps, oil lamps, papadums. Dharavi meshes with the fabric around it not only through cheap service work, but also through its manufactured products and recycled materials that circulate in a pulsating system.
The recycling industries, in particular, come across as incredibly resourceful and organized, as they manage to generate value from what in other contexts would appear as entirely disposable materials. Early in the morning, huge quantities of plastic and aluminum are dumped in Dharavi. With swollen hands and sore lungs, men and women sort out broken toys, car bumpers, and air conditioning units by type, strength, and size. Some of these objects may be reassembled into new products without a lot of processing. Most of them, though, will be broken into little pieces in locally produced shredding machines, washed in small tanks, sun-dried, and packed. They are now ready to be shipped back to factories outside Dharavi to take yet another new shape.
The long walk in the humid hot weather had got us exhausted, so Rahul took us to a small leather shop to rest. As our sweaty tee-shirts dried against our bodies under the extremely cold AC, I felt like trying a leather jacket. Five thousand rupees, what a bargain, I thought. But the smallest piece they had was too big for me. It turns out that some of these products are also made for export and will end up in luxury markets in places like Dubai and South Africa. Like a nodal point with endless extremities, “made in Dharavi” feeds Mumbai, India, and well beyond.