Chawls are housing blocks of the early 1900s Bombay, built en masse to house individual contract workers near the textile mills, railways and ports. Workers of various castes and creeds came from all over and gradually got their families to move in too. Being tied to the respective mills, and consistent salaries, the rentals didn’t change much over time. When the Great Bombay Mill strike happened in 1982, operations ground to a halt and the status has pretty much remained as-is-where-is ever since.
Built on the outskirts of Bombay a century ago, chawls have now come to occupy prime real estate bang in the centre of the financial capital of 21st century India. The rentals for comparable areas in any of the nearby mushrooming high-rises, designed by architects like me, are 5-10 times costlier, with small-area formats being practically unavailable.
Families of up to six continue to keep life buzzing in any typical kholi (room of about 3m x 5m). I made many friends here: the kind Punjabi landlady next door who ensured breakfast every day (free of cost for my good health, she said); the family who would send a home-made Gujarati thali (INR 30) every evening when I made it home at a reasonable hour; the little girl who enjoyed my attempts with a Hohner harmonica so much that I gifted it to her on her birthday. Then there was the family exactly below me whose home got flooded one day due to a pipe bursting in my room.
I can’t forget the elderly Chairman of the society who possibly felt it his duty to get to know each of the 500-odd humans residing there (and the thousands visiting daily).
Cricket was played within the same 5m x 20m courtyard that held the annual Ganapati and Iftar pandals and the incredible Govinda competitions. Boys, dreaming of becoming the next Tendulkar, showed off their straight-drives with cricket balls inside socks that hung from ceiling battens.
With the 1982 strike resulting in a stutter of steady income, the younger men loitering in the streets were conveniently recruited as fresh talent by the underworld. This caused an immediate scaling up of organised crime and gang wars spilled onto the streets. Bhais (elder brother or the gang members) and taporis (rowdy men) often used their chawls as protective fortresses against each other and the police. Through later stories and legends, they came to personify likeable parts of the unique sub-culture of Bombay, having generated their own elaborate slang (Bombaiyya: a mix of at least 4 languages), fashion (a mix of many cultural attires as far as Afghanistan, with material from the mills of course) and cuisine (inexpensive, glorified street food). Tellingly, some of these graduated to politics, some to the Most-Wanted in world lists, some became film stars and some simply disappeared.
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