Your Huddled Masses

Kids on Dharavi street © Dante Montella


John Bhai. Video still, Michael Montella

by Arjun Manyiar

As I meandered along the dirty and narrow streets of Dharavi, I was reminded of the old American adage; “Send me your tired, your weak, your poor, your huddled masses”. While immersing myself into the world that is Dharavi, I have been overwhelmed by both the stark differences and also the subtle similarities between the dense, vibrant slums, and my relatively calm and peaceful city of Washington D.C. With that said, I would like to systematically share my observations with you, particularly as I spend time in learning about the slums during my visit to Mumbai.

I wanted to open with the fore-mentioned quote because I believe that it applies just as equally to the city of Mumbai as it did in the 1850’s on the ports of Boston and New York, albeit people are all of the same color in Mumbai, but they stem from every corner of India, are involved in numerous different religious affiliations, and are from every walk of life. Take for example, Imran, a young Muslim boy who directed us through Dharavi. His family comes from Banares, Utter Pradesh, which is a poor city in one of the poorest states in the country. He and his father have moved from slum area to slum area in Mumbai for almost the entirety of his life. He exemplifies the Mumbai immigrant, someone who decided to leave the direly poor area of Utter Pradesh and try and make a life for himself in the city of dreams, Mumbai. He is accompanied by thousands of other Indians, coming from every state of the country to provide for themselves and their family.

They see people go to Mumbai, which is often called “the New York” of India, and create wealth for themselves and consequently, they make the same trip hoping for an opportunity. These people are typically poor and malnourished, ones who need to come to a big city because their local economic endeavors are fruitless. This bears striking resemblance to the Europeans emigrating to Boston and New York in the 1850’s. Just as impoverished Indians risk everything and move to Mumbai, Europeans left, sometimes even as whole towns, and attempted to make a new life in the United States. Similar to what Mumbai has been doing, the United States accepted Europe’s tired, weak, and poor.

These immigrants to America tended to live in small apartment complexes and “shack-type” structures. An Indian-Catholic man in Mumbai, John, shares a similar immigrant story; he moved from Goa in the 1930’s and lived with his family in a shack. Eventually, through perseverance, he created his own construction company, and now controls 15 different brick and tin houses. This sounds like “the American dream” to me. A true rags to riches story. The only difference is that John, unlike immigrants who found wealth in America, decided to stay with his community in Dharavi to help his people. This is because Dharavi has one feature that is unique to any big city in the world: a community. The community in Dharavi is strong, so strong that it allows women to walk around alone at night without any fear, keep crime at a minimum, and retain a sense of family in an increasingly individualized world. And people like John are the ones who maintain the integrity of the community. The truth is that forget about slums, most cities do not have equivalently low crime rates. So this is where I see real differences in Dharavi; I see a proud people, people who are not ashamed of where they live, people who will not move out of Dharavi even if they could. John put it perfectly when he said, “I feel that I must go with the people.” And then I was really surprised.