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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Review |
The Honey Gatherers
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| A definitive account of a Mumbai slum from one of the world’s best reporters |
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Published : 1 February 2012 |
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MANOJ PATIL / PENGUIN BOOKS INDIA |
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| To Sunil and Kalu, the slum’s lop-sided huts look like they have “fallen out of the sky and gotten smashed upon landing”.
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It seems to me that if you give a writer the choice of living in heaven or hell, he chooses hell... there’s much more literary material there.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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ACK WHEN TERMS SUCH AS ‘Third World’ and ‘Non-Aligned’ were current, European and American writers and artists found Calcutta the most fascinating metropolis in India. Louis Malle, Dominique Lapierre, Gunter Grass and Roland Joffé each took his turn at interpreting that city, a byword for poverty and misery assuaged by the ministrations of Mother |
Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity. After 1991, Calcutta’s particular kind of suffering, having ceased to adequately reflect the new order and new chaos of the post-Soviet world, grew increasingly irrelevant to the concerns of intellectuals. Bombay, as it was then officially named, made a far better hell in the time of globalisation: gaudy, violent, innovative and atavistic, it offered a higher contrast ratio than most minds could register. Films and books set in Mumbai generally have fared better in critical estimation than Calcutta-focused efforts. Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire won awards by the bushelful, including an Academy Award for Best Picture. Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity promises to continue that trend. It is the best non-fiction narrative about contemporary India I have read, a definitive account of slum life published at a time when Mumbai looks set to hand over to Delhi the title of India’s most compelling city.
Boo locates her book in Annawadi, a settlement established by Tamil labourers near the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in 1991 when repairs were being made to a runway. The settlement’s character was altered by an influx of Marathi migrants, and is being reshaped again by a wave of North Indians. Its changing demographics and proximity to a recently privatised terminal make it an ideal site for exploring economic opportunity and gross inequality—the exacerbation as well as transcendence of social divisions that the metropolis engenders. Annawadi is hidden beyond a concrete wall painted with an advertisement for ceramic floor tiles that, if the repeated slogan is to be believed, remain “Beautiful Forever”. The effort to keep the shanties out of sight behind a high barrier is futile: once aloft, airline passengers are bound to notice slums spreading like eczema around the airport, alongside roads and railway tracks and across once-green hills. More than half the residents of Mumbai live in such settlements, which represent both the city’s capacity to offer jobs to millions of new migrants, and a catastrophic failure of urban planning.
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Behind The Beautiful Forevers:
Life, Death, and Hope in a
Mumbai Undercity
Katherine Boo
Penguin India,
254 pages,  499 |
More than half a century ago, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote in his book Tristes Tropiques, “Filth, chaos, promiscuity, congestion; ruins, huts, mud, dirt; dung, urine, pus, humors, secretions and running sores: all the things against which we expect urban life to give us organized protection, all the things we hate and guard against at such great cost, all these by-products of cohabitation do not set any limitation on it in India. They are more like a natural environment which the Indian town needs in order to prosper. To every individual, any street, footpath or alley affords a home, where he can sit, sleep, and even pick up his food straight from the glutinous filth.” Affluent Indians often suggest that eliminating the grime which so disgusted Lévi-Strauss demands a kind of delete button to erase squatter colonies from existence and memory. However, NGOs like the National Slum Dwellers Federation have led a salutary reimagining of shanty towns as centres of productive labour rather than the habitat of dispensable parasites. Foreign correspondents reporting on Mumbai’s emblematic slum, Dharavi, are now more likely to focus on textile exports than on poverty.
This more sympathetic approach has been taken to an extreme by Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, who describe themselves as urbanologists. Writing about Dharavi in The New York Times in the wake of Slumdog Millionaire’s success, Srivastava and Echanove claimed, “The urban legend of its squalor has taken root because few Mumbaikers have ever been there.” I’ve been to Dharavi, and its squalor is no myth; but it does have a complex history, containing long-established colonies of potters and fisherfolk alongside recent settlers. In that sense, ‘Asia’s largest slum’ is an outlier rather than the generic model it is often taken to be. Srivastava and Echanove, in fine social constructionist fettle, leap, in their writings, from the example of Dharavi’s koliwada (fishing colony) and kumbharwada (potter’s colony) to conclude that the very concept ‘slum’ is a falsification, and demeans “millions around the world who actually live in villages that are misrepresented as slums”. Slums are “user-generated habitats” displaying bottom-up built forms preferable to top-down government-mandated projects. The Prince of Wales, long ridiculed by architects in the UK for his conservatism and general battiness, echoed the Srivastava–Echanove thesis in his book Harmony, pointing to Dharavi as a model of sustainable development where the “absence of physical assets such as power, water and sanitation,” is less important than the presence of the “immensely important but less tangible element of community capital”. Prince Charles lauded what he saw as organic or naturally emergent order, “the rich complexity and diversity that holds the community together...”.
Having observed that slum-related issues were “over-theorized and under-reported”, Boo has produced a microscopic account that helps us assess the validity of such claims. The first character she introduces is Abdul Husain, who is probably 16 but could be as old as 19. Abdul deals in garbage, or rather recyclables extracted from it. In the trade’s hierarchy, he’s a notch above scavengers who trawl through trash looking for bits of plastic and metal, and petty thieves who raid construction sites and cargo sheds in the vicinity. In early 2008, when the story begins, the stock market is sky high, and metal prices are buoyant thanks in part to Beijing’s gargantuan Olympics-related construction projects. Abdul, who can tell good quality polyurethane by its smell, and identify the worth of a piece of metal scrap merely by tapping on it, earns 500 on a good day. Times are good for many of Annawadi’s 3000 residents, though only six of them have permanent jobs.
…almost no one in this slum was considered poor by official Indian benchmarks. Rather, the Annawadians were among roughly one hundred million Indians freed from poverty since 1991, when, around the same moment as the small slum’s founding, the central government embraced economic liberalization. The Annawadians were thus part of one of the most stirring success narratives in the modern history of global market capitalism, a narrative still unfolding.
| MANOJ PATIL / PENGUIN BOOKS INDIA |
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Despite its many shortcomings, the women of Annawadi prefer it to the alternatives available. |
Abdul’s neighbours now speak of better lives, “casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past.” Global market capitalism, however, bowls a well-disguised googly in late 2008. After the financial meltdown, commodity prices plunge, Abdul’s profits begin to evaporate, and a number of Annawadi’s residents have to “relearn how to digest rats.”
Even when things are going well, though, Annawadi is hardly a salubrious place. It sits west of a lake of sewage, and close to a concrete plant whose emissions turn green leaves gray and lungs phthisic. Mosquitoes and vermin abound, rat-bites are frequent and maggots, worms and lice facts of everyday life. At no point does Annawadi resemble the model of organic order that Prince Charles saw in Dharavi. To Sunil and Kalu, two of the book’s youngest and most interesting characters, the slum’s lop-sided huts look like they have, “fallen out of the sky and gotten smashed upon landing.” When terrorists attack the Taj Hotel and Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in late November 2008, Abdul’s younger brother is fascinated not by the commando operation being telecast, but by the red turrets of the hotel, the ornate façade of the train station and the symmetry of the precinct’s buildings. South Mumbai looks coherent, “like a single mind made the whole place”. In the minds of Annawadi’s minors, there’s a lot to be said for good urban planning.
Despite its many shortcomings, the women of Annawadi prefer it to the alternatives available. Abdul’s mother Zehrunisa is reluctant to move to a plot her husband has purchased in Vasai because it would entail a return to purdah. When Asha, a wannabe corporator, visits her village in Vidarbha, she stands like a giantess among older women bent over by farm-work and osteoporosis. Asha’s daughter Manju and her friend Meena think of village life as impossibly backward. Manju is a Kunbi and Meena a Dalit; their relationship would be impossible in a traditional community.
Boo’s focus on the lives of Annawadi’s women and youngsters is consistent with her previous journalistic work, which has focussed on the marginalised and dispossessed. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for articles published in The Washington Post on neglect and abuse in homes for the mentally challenged. In 2002, she received a MacArthur Fellowship (popularly known as a ‘genius grant’), and from 2003 was a staff writer at The New Yorker. Even in the context of a magazine renowned for scrupulous fact-checking, her writing stood out for its obsessive attention to detail. I’m tempted to label her one of the world’s leading Method Reporters; she is to journalism what Daniel Day-Lewis is to acting.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Saurabh Garg
17 February 2012
02:15 PM
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The last para imparts a beautiful almost heroic perspective to the life and story reviewed...loved it
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Akshay
9 February 2012
03:05 PM
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Brilliant, just brilliant, especially the last paragraph. Looking forward to the book! Would a City-of-God-style movie too much to hope for from this book?
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saleem peeradina
30 January 2012
01:27 AM
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Loved the review, Girish. Will look for the book and recommend it to others.
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