Dharavi: Touring the Slums

(Audrey) One of the final things we did in Mumbai last week was tour Dharavi, a slum that’s located on some of the city’s prime real estate. Dharavi is famous many times over, has inspired much research and writing, and was recently featured in the film Slumdog Millionaire. Before I describe our experience of going through the slum for about 2 1/2 hours, let me address some of the initial objections at the idea of a “slum tour”.

Put simply, a lot of people think that a slum tour is in bad taste. When Slumdog Millionaire came out, the phrase “slum porn” was thrown around quite a bit to describe Westerners’ tourist-like fascination with the slums. Many decried this development as masking the true horror of the slums and objectifying their inhabitants, not to mention making India look bad. Regardless of the merits of portraying slums in films, touring a real slum where real people live in something else entirely. My defense of the slum tour is 3-fold. First, a large part of why I travel is to try to better understand the world and different ways of life. I don’t glorify the slums but lots of people live there so shouldn’t I try to get some insight? It’s not light tourism, that’s for sure, but my desire to learn is honest so why not take a tour. Second, the slums are increasingly a political issue in India (largely because the government keeps trying to tear them down), and shouldn’t I be educated on the issues of the day? A few hours of walking around is no substitute for serious research, but it’s a start no doubt. Finally, the money. 80% of the proceeds from the slum tour go directly to the neighborhood, so there is a charitable aspect rather than a pure capitalist interest on the part of those who run the tours. In short—empathy, education, and sharing the wealth.

With these interests in mind, we toured Dharavi with a group of 4 other Westerners led by a guide who was himself raised in the slums. The experience was fascinating. Our first surprise was just how built-up and seemingly permanent Dharavi is. In retrospect, we realized that we were expecting more of a refuge camp, kind of a hodge-podge of people thrown together with no real order. Instead, we saw concrete buildings, addresses, electricity, running water, and multiple story homes. There are even people who have gotten “rich” by Dharavi standards, moved out, and now rent their slum-flat to other people.

Another surprise was the variety and sophistication of work in the slums. People do plastic recycling, pottery making, brick making, soap making, chip packaging, and so forth—all kinds of stuff. A lot is by hand but they had fancy machines as well, some worth tens of thousands of rupees (below pics courtesy of Reality Tours).

Finally, I was quite touched on a human level in the slums. One of the immediately perceptible qualities of Dharavi is just how crowded it is; there are people in every nook and cranny (1 million people in less than 1 mile of space, roughly). It seemed even more crowded than normal the day we went because there was a Muslim festival that involved lots of people in the streets. We, meaning our group of 6 foreigners, were quite a novelty. People kept talking to us (me in particular since I was the only one of the group to speak Hindi), inviting us for cold drinks, asking us to take photos, and just saying “Hi. How are you?” in English. The kids in particular kept after us, some following us for most of the tour. I shook more hands with children in those 2 1/2 hours than I have the entire rest of my time in India—they just craved the human (perhaps, foreign?) touch.

My most memorable moment was one women who was around 50. She was walking behind me on a crowded street in the slum, put her hand on my shoulder to get my attention, and asked in Hindi, “who are you people, and what are you doing here?” I explained that I was visiting Mumbai with my husband and that we were from America but living in Delhi. At her request, I communicated where each of the other people on the tour were from as well. Then she said, “but what are you doing here? Is this tourism?” I said something to the effect that we were just curious to see what Dharavi was like. She said, “you’re good people”, smiled, and then we went our separate ways. I’m sure not everybody in Dharavi appreciates a bunch of tourists traipsing through, but the message of human understanding and connection wasn’t lost on at least this woman.

All in all, I was deeply impressed by the slums. I don’t want to mask that it’s an awful place in many respects. Hygiene is lacking, a lot of the work is highly unsafe (no protective glasses, gloves, etc.), and education levels aren’t very high. There’s much to be done to improve the quality of life there. However, I was surprised to see how much Dharavi is really people’s home and where they’ve developed sophisticated industries, not just some huts that can be torn down with no regret because the government legally owns the land. I have no political solution to the slums, but I can say that I now view their inhabitants with a great deal of consideration and respect.

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Tags: Bombay, Dharavi, education, empathy, industry, Mumbai, slum tour, slumdog millionaire, slums, tour, tourism