In recent years, the conflicting models of the city as either a subscription to suburban middle-class life or a dense urban development has left planners in doldrums. The bungalow ideal of independent city living has always been at odds with the more cohesive overlapping patterns of older, denser communities. The Mumbai chawl is an architectural type that emerged out of the need to house industrial workers for the mills of Bombay, 19th century migrants from across rural Maharashtra who flooded the city.
The chawl, as the book points out, is a form of industrial housing, which defines home in the most rudimentary type of confinement, ‘a dislocation of the sky and earth’. The only connection to the outside is a single window. Everything else is shared: verandah, water tap, toilet, garbage dump, play area, temple. The personal histories of many of its long-time residents, the deep and inexhaustible resolve of their daily existence, and the search for dignity in such dense confinement, all form a complex web of experiences that make for compelling reading. Among them, the difficulties of sharing a room with a tenant; the painful comparisons of enclosed urban defecation, against a memory of the open field in the village.
For believers of the middle-class lifestyle, it is hard to imagine the possibilities of dignity, privacy and nurturing relationships in so compressed a form of living. Yet the honeycombed, overlapped life of the chawl is, oddly, not a compromise on these needs, but instead attracts people with the natural ability to collaborate—to live not with the privacy of walls, closed doors or windows, but with human regard and judgement, sometimes three generations to a room, and what appears to the outsider a messy and impossible life.
Part travelogue, part history, the book is an unorthodox mix of anthropology and architecture. Its disjointed vignettes of people’s lives assembled together as academic papers on the same subject is oddly a positive feature. A continually shifting focus by a range of writers cross the boundaries of culture, habitat and history. Had a single author produced the work, perhaps it would have been less engrossing.
However, after some time, the dense and involved format of the academic writing begins to nag and distract from the fine research and social comment buried beneath the heaving text. Moreover, the publishers offer no advantage in the oversized format to integrate larger pictorial displays; rather, a subject so vital and engaging is presented in a mean-spirited layout.
Today, the study of chawls and other dense city types as pieces of anthropological investigation are certainly valuable intellectual assets in themselves, but beyond their library value, they suggest the possibility of becoming guiding principles for future urban design. The self-indulgent life of the middle class that has shaped cities so far needs serious revision. The chawl—in a revised design form—as a possible middle-class home may be a serious contender for future housing in big cities.
