India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  Papu said, ‘I like the concept of purity. I like it as a way of life.’

  His mother came out and was introduced: a grave, silent lady, part of whose life had been spent in Burma, until, with the independence of the country, the Indians had been expelled. She brought her palms together in the Hindu gesture of greeting – and I remembered that she walked barefooted every morning to her temple.

  ‘In India religion enters every sphere of activity,’ Papu said. He opened a drawer. These are company reports.’ He took one out. This is the annual report of a South Indian company.’ He showed the photographs at the front of the report. They recorded the visit of a holy man to the company’s headquarters, and showed him standing in the middle of the board of directors, all the directors standing stripped to the waist and in puja garb.

  They are one of the most efficient cement plants in the country,’ Papu said. ‘At the back of our minds we always have this idea that following religion or rituals is not going to harm us at all. So why not do it? There was the father-in-law of one of my friends. He told me one time that to succeed in a certain thing you’ve got to feed a cow every day with certain things. Say, wheat. Feed a cow every day with wheat. Well, at that stage in my life, if I’m working towards a goal, I don’t want to leave a single stone unturned. And I know that by doing this thing I’m not going to harm myself. So why not do it?

  ‘There are certain places of worship in Bombay – temples, mosques, even churches – where people go on certain days. On Tuesdays they go to Siddhi Vinayak Temple, devoted to Ganesh. Why Tuesday? No one really knows, but all the people there are probably doing it for the same reason, and on the same principle: Why not do it?’

  ‘A materialist attitude?’

  ‘Certainly. Ninety per cent of us call to God when we need something. There is a church here that Hindus go to. It’s something they believe in, but it isn’t their religion. If you’re a Hindu, how can you go to a church?’

  On the sloping middle shelf of the wall unit there was a copy of Fortune magazine and a book, Elements of Investment. Papu was aware of the oddity: those practical books and magazines, his own Jain faith, his need for a comprehensive purity, the setting, the other faiths around him.

  Tea was brought out, on small stainless-steel trays. It was a Jain tea, vegetarian, nothing prepared with eggs. There was a puri, and various fried things made from flour and ground lentils.

  I thought that Papu had given up the idea of the visit to the great slum of Dharavi. But his spirits had revived in the sitting room of his flat, and after our tea he took me to a back room, to show me the view. The slum was closer than I thought. It lay just beyond the railway tracks that ran at the back of the street on which Papu’s block stood. Papu’s middle-class area, so established-looking when one came to the street, was contained in a narrow strip between the area of the quarters and the area of the great slum.

  He said, of the slum, ‘You wouldn’t be able to stand the stink.’

  A little later, with the determination and suddenness with which people go out into bad weather, he said we should be going.

  We set out on foot. The slum was only a short walk away. We began to cross the busy, dusty bridge over the railway lines. The afternoon traffic was hectic. We had barely got down the hump of the railway bridge, when Papu, losing a little of his resolution, said we should take a taxi.

  To stress the extent of the slum, he said, ‘Look. No tall buildings from here to there.’ It was a good way of taking it in. Otherwise, moving at road level, one might have missed the extent of the flat ragged plain, bounded by far-off towers.

  And then, in no time, we were moving on the margin of the slum, so sudden, so obvious, so overwhelming, it was as though it was something staged, something on a film set, with people acting out their roles as slum dwellers: back-to-back and side-to-side shacks and shelters, a general impression of blackness and greyness and mud, narrow ragged lanes curving out of view; then a side of the main road dug up; then black mud, with men and women and children defecating on the edge of a black lake, swamp and sewage, with a hellish oily iridescence.

  The stench was barely supportable; but it had to be endured. The taxi came to a halt in a traffic jam. The jam was caused by a line of loaded trucks on the other side of the road. The slum of Dharavi was also an industrial area of sorts, with many unauthorized businesses, leather works and chemical works among them, which wouldn’t have been permitted in a better regulated city area.

  Petrol and kerosene fumes added to the stench. In this stench, many bare-armed people were at work, doing what I had never seen people doing before: gathering or unpacking cloth waste and cardboard waste, working in a grey-white dust that banked up on the ground like snow and stifled the sounds of hands and feet, working beside the road itself or in small shanties: large-scale rag-picking.

  Papu said he hardly passed this way. In the taxi he sat turned away from the slum itself. He faced the other side of the road, where the loaded trucks were idling, and where, in the distance, were the apartment blocks of the middle-class area of Bandra, on the sea.

  The traffic moved again. At a certain point Papu said, This is the Muslim section. People will tell you that the Muslims here are fundamentalists. But don’t you think you could make these people fight for anything you tell them to fight for?’

  The stench of animal skins and excrement and swamp and chemicals and petrol fumes, the dust of cloth waste, the amber mist of truck exhausts, with the afternoon sun slanting through – what a relief it was to leave that behind, and to get out into the other Bombay, the Bombay one knew and had spent so much time getting used to, the Bombay of paved roads and buses and people in lightweight clothes.

  It had been hard enough to drive past the area. It was harder to imagine what it was like living there. Yet people lived with the stench and the terrible air, and had careers there. Even lawyers lived there, I was told. Was the smell of excrement only on the periphery, from the iridescent black lake? No; that stench went right through Dharavi. Even more astonishing was to read in a Bombay magazine an article about Papu’s suburb of Sion, in which the slum of Dharavi was written about almost as a bohemian feature of the place, something that added spice to humdrum middle-class life. Bombay clearly inoculated its residents in some way.

  I had another glimpse of Dharavi some time later, when I was going in a taxi to the domestic airport at Santa Cruz. The taxi-driver – a Muslim from Hyderabad, full of self-respect, nervous about living in Bombay, fearful of sinking, planning to go back home soon, and in the meantime nervously particular about his car and his clothes – the taxi-driver showed the apartment blocks on one side of the airport road where hutment dwellers had been rehoused. In the other direction he showed the marsh on which Dharavi had grown and, away in the distance, the low black line of the famous slum.

  Seen from here, Dharavi looked artificial, unnecessary even in Bombay: allowed to exist because, as people said, it was a vote-bank, a hate-bank, something to be drawn upon by many people. All the conflicting currents of Bombay flowed there as well; all the new particularities were heightened there. And yet people lived there, subject to this extra exploitation, because in Bombay, once you had a place to stay, you could make money.

  And people could be made by the conditions in which they lived. As animals could be made by the conditions in which they were reared: as chickens (to call up a Trinidad memory of 40 years before), reared in a small cage, found it impossible to walk when they were released, and half hopped, half flew, as they had done in their cage. So people who lived in the little spaces of Bombay dwellings got used to those spaces; got used to the communal life of those spaces, and could find the other life, the life of privacy, emotionally disturbing.

  Mr Ghate was a high Sena official. He had grown up in the mill area, in one room in a chawl or millworkers’ tenement; and he still lived in a chawl, though it was open to him, as a man of position, to live in better accommodation in a better area. He had tried t
o do that some years before, but it had ended badly. His wife had suffered in the comparative seclusion and spaciousness of the self-contained apartment they had moved to. This was more than moodiness; she had become seriously disturbed. Mr Ghate had moved back to a chawl, to the two rooms he had now, back to the sense of a surrounding crowd and the sounds of life all around him; and he was happy again.

  I went to Mr Ghate’s chawl in the company of Charu, a young Maharashtrian brahmin. Without Charu, I might not have been received by Mr Ghate. Mr Ghate, Charu said, was one of the ‘brash’ men of the Sena; and ‘brash’ was Charu’s brahminical word for someone rough and aggressive.

  Mr Ghate lived at the top of his chawl block. Without Charu, I don’t think I would have made it even to the internal staircase of the place – I was so demoralized, so choked, driven so near to a stomach-heave, by the smell at the entrance, with wet mangled garbage and scavenging cats and kittens in a little patio, and then, in the suddenly dark passage, by the thick warm smell, catching at my throat, of blocked drains. It was Charu, with his brahmin’s sense of duty, with his feeling that an appointment should be kept, who (constantly looking back at me, and sometimes even stretching out a hand, like a father leading his child from sand to sea for the first time) led me on and on, up the chawl steps, past open doors giving glimpses of family living spaces.

  Hot air should have risen; but at the upper level the air was fresher. A tiger emblem outside a door, the Shiv Sena emblem, identified Mr Ghate’s room or apartment. It overlooked the main road. The little windows, frosted glass in green-painted frames, were open behind their wire-netting burglar-proofing; the traffic fumes they let in were even refreshing.

  Mr Ghate had two small rooms. One, beyond a curtained doorway, was the kitchen. The room we were received in, where people would have slept at night, doubled in the day as a kind of Sena office. It was full of papers. They were in a fitted cupboard against the side wall – an unexpected modern touch. Among other decorations on one wall was a poster, perhaps originally from an oil company, with a colour photograph of a tiger and the English words, You observe a lot – by watching.

  Mr Ghate’s father had been a millworker. He earned 400 rupees a month, a little over £30. The family had been large, five brothers and two sisters. There had been four sisters, but two had died. The one room they had all lived in was the standard chawl room, 10 feet by 10 feet; and it had worked out quite nicely when they were children. In the mornings they just had tea for breakfast, no cooked food. From seven in the morning till one in the afternoon the children went to school. This meant that in the mornings, for a month or so at a time, Mr Ghate’s father would have had a certain amount of room for himself. Mr Ghate’s father did shift work at the mill; every month the shift changed.

  I remembered what Mr Raote had said about the culture every Maharashtrian had, and I asked Mr Ghate whether he had gone to the gymnasium as a child. He said no; but the question had some meaning for him, because he added immediately that he had taken part in sports. I asked about religion. How, growing up in his chawl, had he learned about religion and the teaching of the saints? He said he wasn’t himself a religious man – so there had been a kind of break with the past. But, he said, his father had done the puja at home; though neither his father nor his mother was educated, and until he went to college his family had never owned a book.

  It sounded a basic life, a hard life. But everyone had rubbed along. Things changed when he got married. His wife left her family chawl for Mr Ghate’s chawl; and then there was a child. The time came when 10 people were living in the 10 feet by 10 feet room. There were ‘differences’, and constant quarrelling. So Mr Ghate had taken his wife and child to ‘staff quarters’ – a self-contained apartment in an apartment block – in a suburb 30 or 40 minutes away by train.

  It should have meant a new life – the distance from the family, the end of the quarrelling, and the space: after 100 square feet for 10 people in the chawl, they had 300 square feet for three people in the new apartment. But it had led to calamity. Mr Ghate’s wife had lived all her life in a chawl. Now, left alone for much of the day in her self-contained 300 square feet, not seeing anyone, not having anyone to talk to, she had become frightened. She had begun to suffer seriously from claustrophobia, and she had been taken close to breakdown.

  So they had come back to the mill area, where they had grown up, and Mr Ghate had had the good fortune to find a place in a chawl. The two-roomed suite or apartment such as he had was called in Bombay a ‘one-roomed kitchen’. The main room was actually a little bigger than the standard 10 feet by 10 feet chawl room. Five of them lived there now, and there was no space problem.

  He had bought the rooms in 1985, and the mechanics of the purchase were like this. The chawls, many of them decades old, from the very beginnings of the Indian industrial revolution, were originally attached to mills, and were meant to accommodate millworkers. Technically, the millowners still owned the chawls; but (because of rent-control laws) the millowners no longer looked after the chawls, had virtually abandoned them; and tenants were nowadays free to sell the lease of the rooms they held. A buyer paid a premium to the sitting tenant, and then the buyer paid rent to the millowner. In 1985 Mr Ghate had paid a premium of 35,000 rupees for his two rooms, about £1400. But now all he paid to the millowner in rent was 12 rupees a month, 50 pence – which no doubt explained why the millowners had stopped looking after the chawls.

  Mr Ghate was now a protected tenant; he said he could stay in his two rooms forever. And from the way he talked, that was what he intended to do now, after having tried to break away. Not everyone was like him, he said. Many people who didn’t have the means dreamed of moving to an apartment. He had the means; he could get a loan from the bank; but he was perfectly happy where he was.

  Reviving in the fresher air of his room, I began to see it a little with his eyes. I noticed the amenities. There was a ceiling fan; there was a sturdy step-ladder for climbing up to the loft. Below the loft was a utility area, with various conveniences: a clothes cupboard, a wooden stool, a clothes-horse (now hung with towels), a length of hose pipe, and a rubbish bin in blue plastic with a pedal-worked cover. The utility area was at Mr Ghate’s back, near the open window. The area at the front of the room was more the office part of the room, and it had that big fitted cupboard. Mr Ghate, as though apologizing for the extravagance, said he had bought the cupboard last year, because with his Sena work he had many papers to deal with.

  There were more than papers behind the glass doors of the cupboard. On a top shelf were tumblers and plates in plastic and stainless steel. On other shelves were photographs, and a gold-coloured plaque with the new Marathi slogan of the Sena I had heard about: Say it with pride: ‘I’m a Hindu’. The Sena, as it had become more powerful, was trying to be less regional. It was appealing now to a more general Hindu sentiment, and some people found this as worrying as its earlier call of Maharashtra for the Maharashtrians.

  I wanted to hear a little more about chawl life. Charu and Mr Ghate talked for a while in Marathi, and then Charu summed up.

  ‘He likes the life here. He grew up in this atmosphere. He doesn’t feel a bigger room or apartment would make any difference to him. He doesn’t envy or hate other people’s wealth. He values people for their mind alone.’

  ‘What is it about the life here that he likes?’

  Talking in Marathi to Charu, Mr Ghate seemed to get carried away as he described the advantages of chawl life.

  Charu said for him, ‘In a chawl you always know what’s happening everywhere. You know what’s going on in all the other families. You hear everything, you see everything. In this way people live life together, sharing one another’s problems. There is no life in an apartment.’

  There was a lot of life in this chawl. On the upper floor alone, where we were, there were 40 rooms. Five toilets served those 40 rooms. You saw people all the time.

  ‘Doesn’t he want privacy?’

  C
haru’s reply was emphatic. ‘He doesn’t want privacy. He says that those who want privacy can always move out to a block.’ There was a touch of sharpness in that, after what he had said earlier about people who didn’t have the means but wanted to move to apartment blocks. ‘If you need some privacy for reading and writing, it’s always available here after one o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘Does he often stay up?’

  ‘Yes. He often reads until 2.30, 3 o’clock in the morning. Otherwise there is no chance of reading and writing here.’

  ‘Doesn’t he believe that a little more privacy would lead to better education?’

  ‘Your intelligence, or the reading you do, doesn’t depend on whether you live in a block or a chawl. It is more your tendency – your aptitude, your character.’ And he referred to a famous recent case where a local boy from a slum came first in a Maharashtra state examination.

  ‘Shouldn’t he be offering a better life to his followers?’

  The reply, in Charu’s direct translation, was severe. ‘I don’t want to help anybody to a luxurious life. This is a millworkers’ area.’

  ‘He wants people to remain millworkers?’

  The question was slightly altered in translation. Charu seemed to have put it as a personal question, and he got a personal reply.

  ‘He himself has a job in a bank. One brother works in a state corporation. Another, younger brother works in a mill. But that brother is not too educated; he didn’t have the intellectual capacity. That brother now gets 1000 rupees a month. That isn’t a good wage. To live in Bombay satisfactorily, you need a minimum of 2000 rupees.’