Edit: Pictures to come soon!
Before we knew it we were back in the vans and on our way to our first Mumbai attraction, Mani Bhavan, a former headquarters for Gandhi's political work converted into a museum all about the Indian leader. While the museum itself was rather small (though to be fair it is just a house), it had some truly incredible artifacts on display including letters Gandhi sent to FDR and Hitler as well as a perfectly preserved room used by the man himself during his stay there over 80 years ago. It also had an informative but slightly unsettling collection of dioramas chronicling Gandhi's life as seen below.
Once we had had our fill of round glasses and non-violence, as well as a quick lunch, we made our way to the next stop of our grand Mumabi tour - the Bombay High Court (not a typo - they just didn't want to change the name). Essentially the equivalent of a state supreme court in the US, this particular house of law was a relic of the city's British past, a beautiful Gothic castle with more pointed archways and wrought ironwork than you could shake a stick at. The only downside to using this incredible architectural wonder as the state's judicial headquarters was the complete lack of provisioning for electrical and plumbing infrastructure back when the building was completed in the 1870s. Because of this pipes and wires laced most of the hallways, creating a bizarre contrast with not just the brownstone but with the throngs of lawyers and judges who all sported the same black robes circa 1845. I'd like to say that the three hours we spent at the High Court was nothing but non-stop, pulse-pounding legal drama, Law & Order style, but unfortunately t'was not so. Instead we were shuffled through a series of court rooms, each with a trial already well underway, and while everything was in English, the complete lack of background on any of the cases made it very difficult to get swept up in the judicial proceedings. That's not to say there wern't other highlights since we did have an opportunity towards the end of our stay to speak with a female justice of the court who spoke candidly about the challenges of corruption and being a woman in a typically male-dominated field.
Once back at the hotel we had some time to kill before dinner so a few of us decided to take a stab at finding the Gateway of India (sort of like the Arc de Triomph only more British and ever so slightly less pompous) which was supposedly only a short five minute walk from the YWCA. While the walk was short as promised, the Mumbai monsoon season (which in theory had ended over two weeks earlier) made sure the jaunt was not without excitement. The rain speckled picture below simply doesn't do the weather justice; by the time we reached the Gateway it felt like the Hindu gods were bailing out the Indian ocean on each of our heads. Fortunately I made it back to the hotel with my clothes only half drenched thanks to my rain jacket, but even that hadn't completely saved me.
The next morning was spent primarily in a class room, listening first to a lecture on the plight of the former mill workers of Mumbai (the city used to be a major textile hub, with literally hundreds of mills, but redevelopment has converted many of the old mills into malls and other modern fare) and then to a lecture on slums. Though the first lecture was by no means uninteresting, I found the second the most compelling since the speaker (a young Swiss guy who's lived and worked all over the world) spent much of the time just breaking down what a "slum" really is. In his view, the term had grown to become damagingly broad and negative, serving as an unfair catchall for a variety of living situations that varied wildly in quality and character. He backed up his view point by showing photographic mash ups of so-called "slums" in India and average neighborhoods in Tokyo, but didn't tell us until after we had agreed that the picture shown seemed like a perfectly respectable place to live. While conventional wisdom suggests that slums must be terrible places to live and the people who inhabit them all miserable, our speaker argued that this was not the case, in fact many people lived quite well in slums and had no interest in being transplanted somewhere else. Rather they simply desired the same access to public good and services, like transportation and sanitation facilities, that are available to other urbanites. I can't speak for my fellow Alliancees, but the lecture really altered my perspective on slums and their residents, suddenly I wasn't quite sure how I felt about government redevelopment and removal projects.
All of this was particularly relevant and fascinating since later that afternoon we were taken to Dharavi, a mega-slum in Mumbai, made famous to Americans in Slumdog Millionaire (that's where the kids are from at the beginning) and also popularly, if incorrectly, referred to as the biggest slum in Asia (according to Wikipedia there are 4 bigger ones in Mumbai alone). Without question, our all too brief visit to Dharavi was my favorite part of my Mumbai experience. In keeping with the morning's lecture, the "slums" were actually quite normal, with regular if somewhat ramshackle shops lining major streets populated by decidedly non-destitute looking people. That's not to say we didn't come across some truly brutal living conditions, particularly the kiln-keepers. These residents/workers (mostly female from what I could tell) burned just about anything they could get their hands on (largely discarded clothes and fabrics) to heat the kilns used for Dharavi's bustling pottery industry. These kilns poured out smoke in incredible quantities, many of us had trouble breathing during just the 5-10 minutes we passed by them, leaving us to only wonder about the undoubtedly charred state of the workers' lungs. After touring the pottery district, we were taken to the "recycling district," an area where goods from all over the city are brought to be sorted, chopped up, melted down, and generally remade into a usable resource again. Unfortunately while the area certainly embodies the principles of eco-friendliness, the working conditions were once again terrifying. Men worked with huge vats of boiling plastic without so much as a long sleeve shirt on (see below) while others took about as much precaution using a mechanized dicing machine as they would using a food processor. Its hard to imagine many days go by without some sort of work place injury, but since all of this activity is part of Mumbai's "informal economy" the prospect for regulation or workplace safety standards is pretty much nil.
At this point one could very reasonably wonder why I enjoyed this part of Mumbai more than any other given the numerous incidences of distressing living conditions. While I would have much rather seen the residents of Dharavi not suffering or putting their lives in danger simply because of where they live, I found everything else about the area absolutely incredible. Despite it's negative casting as a "slum," Dharavi contained some of the hardest working and upbeat people I've seen in India. Someone else in our group pointed out later that we hadn't come across a single beggar while in Dharavi, a fact that points to how industrious and proud the people of this community are. When we left Dharavi (a little earlier than we would have liked thanks to the return of the Mumbai monsoon) I couldn't help but with we could have spent a whole week just walking around there - talking to the people, finding out what their lives are like, what they like about Dharavi and what they hate. More so than any other part of our trip to Mumbai, our visit to Dharavi seemed like a cultural experience that we simply had to have - an up close look at a part of India that we're rarely exposed to going to and from classes every day. I only wish we had been able to look a little longer and a little closer.
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