Reflections from Mumbai

Note: One assignment for our Contemporary India Class is to write about our experiences in Mumbai after the Mumbai visit. This is a adaptation of that paper.

A lit-up horse-drawn carriage near the Gateway to India welcomes us to Mumbai's nighttime buzz.

Thursday night around 9:30 seven of us sat around a large table at Colaba Social, a cafe that morphs into a bar at night. Around us are dozens of t-shirted, suited, and skirted Mumbaikars, all socializing, drinking, yelling over the noise of the music and people or sitting shielded from the sound by cushy booths and short walls. Our group of white Americans stands out somewhat, but the waiters and bartenders don't give us a second glance and speak fluent English; it may not be tourist season, but in this part of the old colonial center westerners are hardly newsworthy. Much of the conversation around us is partially English. Several of us have alcoholic drinks, which with tax cost upwards of 600 rupees, a price that wouldn't look unusual in an American establishment.

The stamp we received upon entering. It says the English words "You are awesome" in Devanagari script. Is it a quirky stamp or a distraction from the brutal inequalities outside?

One of us tells us that she saw a child outside, who was begging for change (change that amounted to a small percentage of what we all, Mumbaikars and Americans alike, were spending that night) get hit by one of the men guarding the door. As we discuss that a few minutes later during a smoke break outside of the bustle of the bar, we wonder at how strange it is that none of the Indian patrons seemed to even notice the incident. Not knowing anyone but our group personally, I suspect that at least some of the wealthier Mumbaikars do care about social uplift, and may even work actively for better opportunities for those in the city without them. However, just like our group was at this bar at least in part to distract ourselves from the implications of our experiences in Dharavi earlier that day, those socially aware Mumbaikars could be willing to turn a blind eye in order to more fully enjoy their night off.

Of course, that does not make it okay to ignore the abuse of children. One of the other children comes up to us and asks for money using an eating gesture. Neither of us give her anything.

The next day on the bus, we discuss how unique the use of violence to attempt to erase poverty from the minds of affluent consumers is to Mumbai. I express the opinion that American cities do precisely the same thing, though the weapons used to control the expression of poverty are somewhat different (at that point I mention the purposeful reshaping of benches to make it impossible for people to use them as beds, though in retrospect a combination of zoning laws and predatory lending practices are much more to blame; Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations does a good job of discussing the mechanisms). Another person is not convinced that poverty is expressed in a qualitatively different way on the streets of major cities. I have walked by homeless men begging in Evanston, Illinois dozens of times, after all (and homelessness among school-age kids continues to increase in Chicago). I agree with this perspective, and while quantitatively India remains much more unequal than the US, many of our first reactions overstated the difference of “glaring poverty”. Perhaps a better explanation is that we forget that in the US we are in that privileged position where poverty is often invisible, or at least we block it out. Perhaps the reason none of the Mumbaikars we saw reacted to a kid being beaten for begging is that the inequality is commonplace and thus easier to block out.

Government-sponsored housing being built as part of "slum-rehabilitation" advertises its finished form. Who knows when or if it'll be finished like in the sign?

 Of course, this is not to deny that there are major differences between the character of poverty US and India. Government-based social welfare, especially, is much more expansive in the US. There is much more government-subsidized and built housing the US than the comparatively limited slum rehabilitation projects, and those projects have existed for much longer in the US. Thus, a much higher percentage of Americans are have access to formal social welfare, which puts them, at least legally, in a very different category than people in Dharavi and other non-homeless people outside the Indian formal economic-housing sector. Yet those American communities have their own problems, such as rampant unemployment and high crime rates. By contrast in Dharavi entire industrial and artisanal communities live in places that to us appeared deplorable but remained thriving communities, full not only of economic production but grassroots organizations such as LEARN that are devoted to social uplift within the community.

Potters in Dharavi knead the clay to get out the air bubbles. There are dozens of artisanal communities in Dharavi, who make everything from leather goods to clothes to raw materials extracted from trash.

 If we look closer, though, poor American neighborhoods also have grassroots organizations dedicated to social uplift. Both in India and the US communities develop solutions to their problems, and even though many of the problems common in the US are different from those common in India, the tools of analysis and organization used in Dharavi's grassroots organizations can both raise awareness of and contribute to grassroots organizations in the US.

Seeing the inequality on the ground in India, feeling the discomfort that comes with being made aware of our privilege as we walk through Dharavi or see kids begging on the streets, learning the solutions community organizations have developed, should not just make us personally more aware of the challenges faced by large parts of the population of Mumbai and India more generally, but should motivate us to seek change where we can be most effective using those tools. As American students (most of whom to my knowledge did not grow up in the projects) who are allies to underprivileged groups in the US, our experiences in Mumbai must help us see not just the poverty, but also the vibrancy and solutions (economic and social) that have been developed in places like Dharavi. We must use that knowledge to contribute to social an economic justice both abroad and at home.

Dharavi, an area of Mumbai settled by informal communities. Though it is known as "Asia's largest slum", it is a thriving community with dozens of major cottage industries.

Wetlands in the heart of Mumbai. Dharavi is built on land that claimed from these wetlands by dint of considerable labor.

I don't have any formal questions for the interactive portion, but I'm curious wha thoughts you all have about different sorts of poverty, what the responsibilities of people with extra resources are with regard to creating a more equal society, and how decisions can be made that take into account the needs and choices of various groups.