My first sight of Dharavi, the part of Mumbai reputed to be Asia’s largest slum, was as unlike the conventional tourist tableau of India – all snake charmers and sadhus – as it is possible to witness. On a smouldering garbage dump above a mangrove swamp on the slum’s edge, men squatted here and there with tucked-up loincloths, defecating in the morning light. Mangy dogs skulked between mounds of construction waste and household rubbish.
This was reality tourism with a vengeance. Even as we entered the bustling and somehow less daunting streets and alleyways of Dharavi itself, some of our tour group began to wilt in the heat, damp and stench of the monsoon season last year.
“It is a bit of a culture shock,” said Marion Lepage, a 22-year-old French student on an exchange visit to Mumbai from Cergy-Pontoise on the northern outskirts of Paris. “You never expect it to be so poor.” Television documentaries, she pointed out as she waved away a swarm of flies, were all very well for images but did nothing to prepare you for the smells.
If all human life is not here in Dharavi, it certainly comes close. As you stoop and stumble along open sewers and between the press of shacks and houses – in the darkest lanes, homes are just six inches apart from each other above pedestrians’ heads – you might see four generations of Indian slum-dwellers in as many seconds going about their daily tasks: a naked boy, his head disfigured by two large boils, runs past; an apparently mad old man stumbles into a huge sack of plastic pieces ready for recycling, spilling the contents into the dirt; a woman in a green sari washes her hair in a doorway; the ground – compacted garbage – shudders alarmingly as a boy with a catapult leaps down from a wall to collect his spent missile; a pair of girls with immaculate school uniforms and red ribbons in their hair make their way to class. On a rare patch of bare earth, four or five young men are playing a casual game of cricket with a tennis ball.
HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS
An FT correspondent’s guide to Mumbai
For places to stay it is still hard to beat the Taj Mahal Hotel (www.tajhotels.com), writes Joe Leahy. The tower has reopened after the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November but the atmospheric palace section is still being rebuilt. The location on the waterfront near Gateway of India and the famously attentive staff still make it a winner.
Also being rebuilt after the attacks is the Taj’s counterpart, the Trident-Oberoi (www.tridenthotels.com). But the recently reopened Trident part of the hotel, with its excellent Italian restaurant Frangipani and location on the sweeping, beautiful Marine Drive, makes it an excellent choice.
If you’re staying outside south Bombay, the Four Seasons (www.fourseasons.com/mumbai), which opened last year, remains the most stylish modern option.
Nowhere as luxurious but redolent with character is the Britannia and Company restaurant. Located in south Mumbai (Sprott Road, Ballard Estate, Fort, next to New Custom House, +91-222 2515 264), the open arches of the façade under the faded sign board let in the Mumbai heat while the whirring ceiling fans above lazily ward it away again. A waiter who must be 80 years old makes his way to our table and his open and friendly smile is just as winning as it must have been when he was in his youth. Britannia is only open at lunch on working days – Monday to Saturday. It captures what is charming about Mumbai, a city that does not go out of its way to kid-glove tourists but rewards those travellers willing go out of their way to experience it.
Not far from Britannia, is Trishna Restaurant (www.trishna.co.in). Trishna’s hallmark starter, prawn koliwada, and its famous main courses, the truly calorific butter garlic crab and Hyderabad fish tikka, are not to be missed.
Aurus Restaurant & Lounge in the city’s north (Juhu Ground Floor, Nichani House, Juhu Tara Rd, next to Anita Dongre Showroom, tel: +91-226 7106 667). With an open-air terrace jutting out over the expansive Juhu beach – the district that is home to Bollywood – Aurus captures the breeze off the Arabian Sea.
Joe Leahy is the FT’s Mumbai bureau chief
Even before the release of Slumdog Millionaire, Indian slum tours had become increasingly popular among visitors wanting to see something a little more gritty than Goan beaches, ancient Mughal forts and tiger reserves whose numbers have dwindled alarmingly because of poachers. Reality Tours Travel – a small company founded by Chris Way, a British accountant inspired by a tour of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and Krishna Pujari, our guide for the morning – pioneered the Dharavi destination, and their concept has now been imitated by several local competitors. Reality’s prices are deliberately kept low, and most of the customers are backpackers. Every now and then, however, an adventurous guest quits the air-conditioned luxury of the $500-a-night Taj Mahal Palace hotel to join the tour.
Slum tourism, which seems to have emerged first in politically aware tourist destinations such as South Africa and Latin America, was given a boost in India by the publication of Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts’s bestselling 2003 epic about life in the criminal underworld of Mumbai. Roberts lived in the smaller slum of Colaba, but he had plenty of slums – 2,000 by most counts – to choose from in India’s largest city. Two-thirds of Mumbai’s 15m or so inhabitants live in such illegal, unofficial or quasi-official settlements.
If Mumbai is the world’s slum capital, Dharavi is the grand panjandrum of the Mumbai slums. An estimated 1m residents are crammed into a 1.75 sq km triangle squeezed between the city’s central and western railway lines.
I later met Mukesh Mehta, a real estate magnate who has been trying for a decade to redevelop Dharavi and who calls the 1m population “a total bullshit figure”. (He reckons the true number to be about a third of that, based on the 55,000 households identified in the slum).
Yet Dharavi’s massive size has a hold on the imagination of Indians as well as foreigners. Our guide Krishna Pujari, who migrated to the glittering job attractions of Mumbai 15 years ago from a smallholding in Karnataka, recalls two examination questions at school. One asked which of the seven wonders of the world was in India. Answer: the Taj Mahal. The other asked the name of “Asia’s biggest open dirty place”. Answer: Dharavi, a place of filthy fascination once notorious for criminal gangs and assumed by Pujari to be far away from the clean and peaceful rural India he knew. We tourists were in no doubt that Dharavi – with all its life and occasional death (“Someone got expired,” I was told when I inquired about an old woman being wheeled along the main street on a handcart heaped with flowers) – was right here in the middle of India. Our fear was not that we would see nothing, but that we would see too much, that we would be accused of voyeurism and an unhealthy interest in the sort of misery we ourselves would never know.
We need not have worried. It is not just that Reality bans tourist cameras and donates 80 per cent of its slum tour profits to local charities. As you wander through the slum, you quickly realise that Dharavi’s residents are far too busy to pay much attention to tourists. The slum hosts an estimated 10,000 small businesses, including potteries, garment factories, tanneries and recycling companies, and is said to have an annual gross domestic product of $665m. The leather industry alone employs 40,000.
No plastic bottle top, piece of scrap metal, or length of old electric wire is safe from Dharavi’s international recycling industry. We watched with satisfaction as the plastic casings of old computers were fed into a machine to be sliced and shredded with a hideous screeching noise, before being melted and converted into pellets as a prelude to reincarnation as other plastic objects. The rooftops are covered with multicoloured layers of washed plastic chunks drying in the monsoon breeze.
There is no reason, though, to be starry-eyed about Dharavi’s enterprise or its green credentials. Working conditions are Dickensian and appallingly unsafe – no masks, goggles, or ear plugs are visible – and both air and waste water are heavily polluted by industrial and human waste. Lack of sanitation, in Dharavi as elsewhere, is probably the greatest scandal of modern India. But it would be equally wrong to exaggerate the horrors of the slum. People try to keep their shacks and houses immaculately clean. There is electricity (some of it sold legally to residents rather than stolen), and, for three hours a day, running water. Some shack-dwellers have televisions and many have mobile telephones. By the standards of rural India, Dharavi is not even particularly poor, and like many Indian slums it is evolving by fits and starts into a series of neighbourhoods differentiated by money and class, with shack rents ranging from around 700 to 4,000 rupees (£10-£56) a month.
Dharavi may not be a melting pot, but it is certainly mixed. About a third of the inhabitants are Tamils from the south, another third are from the state of Maharashtra around Mumbai, and the rest are from poverty-stricken north India and other parts of the country. Next to a bakery, we came across a Muslim workshop making cheap wooden spirit-houses for Hindu dwellings.
And above all, the teeming slum – its residents are either welcoming or indifferent to visitors because, as Chris Way says, “Indians are used to having lots of people” – feels safe. It would be interesting to see whether anybody would dare organise similar tours of the poorer parts of suburban Paris or London.
Dharavi – hot, sweaty and dirty – was also full of energy and enterprise; as Fouad El Akkad, one of the French students on our tour, reminded me, the potteries and tanneries in the commercial quarter were reminiscent of those in the Moroccan town of Fes. The tour did more than reveal to us the extent of our privileges. It also showed us why Dharavi and India’s other urban slums will continue to attract millions of migrants from the countryside for decades to come. Even for casual tourists, it is not easy to leave the slum behind. Take as many showers as you want when you return to your hotel – the smell of Dharavi will linger on your shoes.
Dharavi walking tour Rs400 per person; tour with car pick-up Rs800; private tour Rs3,200. www.realitytoursandtravel.com
Victor Mallet, a former FT Asia editor, is the paper’s Madrid bureau chief
