India (8 page)

The chawl blocks are four or five stories high, and the plan is the same on each floor: single rooms opening on to a central corridor, at the back of which are lavatories and ‘facilities’. Indian families
ramify, and there might be eight people in a room; and ‘corners’ might be rented out, as in Dostoevsky’s St Petersburg, or floor space; or people might sleep in shifts. A chawl room is only a base; chawl life is lived in the open, in the areas between chawls, on the pavements, in the streets. An equivalent crowd in a colder climate might be less oppressive, might be more dispersed and shut away. But this Bombay crowd never quite disperses.

The chawls, however, are provided with facilities. To be an inhabitant of a chawl is to be established. But in the nooks and crannies of this area there is – as always in India – yet another, lower human level, where the people for whom there is no room have made room for themselves. They have founded squatters’ settlements, colonies of the dispossessed. And, like the chawl dwellers, they have done more: within the past ten years, out of bits and pieces of a past simplified to legend, and out of the crumbling Hindu system, they have evolved what is in effect a new religion, and they have declared themselves affiliated to an ‘army’, the Shiv Sena, the army of Shiva. Not Shiva the god, but Shivaji the seventeenth-century Maratha guerrilla leader, who challenged the Mughal empire and made the Marathas, the people of the Bombay region, a power in India for a century.

The power of the Marathas was mainly destructive, part of the eighteenth-century Indian chaos that gave Britain an easy empire. But in Bombay the matter is beyond discussion. Shivaji is now deified; he is the unlikely warrior god of the chawls. His cult, as expressed in the Shiv Sena, transmutes a dream of martial glory into a feeling of belonging, gives the unaccommodated some idea of human possibility. And, through the Shiv Sena, it has brought a kind of power. The newly erected equestrian statue that stands outside the Taj Mahal Hotel and looks past the Gateway of India to the sea is of Shivaji. It is an emblem of the power of the Sena, the power of the chawls and pavements and squatters’ colonies, the inhabitants of the streets who – until the declaration of the Emergency – had begun to rule the streets. All shop signs in
Bombay, if not in two languages now, carry transliterations in the Indian
nagari
script of their English names or styles. That happened overnight, when the Sena gave the word; and the Sena’s word was more effective than any government decree.

The Sena ‘army’ is xenophobic. It says that Maharashtra, the land of the Marathas, is for the Maharashtrians. It has won a concession from the government that eighty per cent of jobs shall be held by Maharashtrians. The government feels that anyone who has lived in Bombay or Maharashtra for fifteen years ought to be considered a Maharashtrian. But the Sena says no: a Maharashtrian is someone born of Maharashtrian parents. Because of its xenophobia, its persecution in its early days of South Indian settlers in Bombay, and because of the theatricality of its leader, a failed cartoonist who is said to admire Hitler, the Sena is often described as ‘fascist’.

But this is an easy, imported word. The Shiv Sena has its own Indian antecedents. In this part of India, in the early, pre-Gandhi days of the Independence movement, there was a cult of Shivaji. After Independence, among the untouchables, there were mass conversions to Buddhism. The assertion of pride, a contracting out, a regrouping: it is the pattern of such movements among the dispossessed or humiliated.

The Shiv Sena, as it is today, is of India, independent India, and it is of industrial Bombay. The Sena, like other recent movements in India, though more positive than most – infinitely more positive, for instance, than the Anand Marg. The Way of Peace, now banned, which preached caste, Hindu spirituality, and power through violence, all of this mingled with ritual murder and mutilation and with homosexuality (desirable recruits were sometimes persuaded that they had been girls in previous lives) – the Sena is a great contracting out, not from India, but from a Hindu system, which, in the conditions of today, in the conditions of industrial Bombay, has at last been felt to be inadequate. It is in part a reworking of the Hindu system. Men do not accept chaos; they ceaselessly seek to remake
their world; they reach out for such ideas as are accessible and fit their need.

We were going that Sunday morning to a squatters’ settlement in the chawl area. We got out of the car at a certain stage, and continued by bus. I was lucky in my guide. He was a rare man in India, much more than the engineer he was by profession. His technical skills went with the graces of an old civilization, with a philosophical turn of mind, a clear-sighted and never sentimental concern about the condition of his country, a wholehearted and un-Indian acceptance of men as men.

But he was an engineer, and practical: he offered no visions of Bombay remade, of the chawls and shanty towns pulled down and the workers acceptably rehoused. India simply didn’t have the resources. Its urban future had already arrived, and was there, in the shanty towns, in those spontaneous communities. All that authority could add were services, ameliorative regulation, security. The shanty towns might, in effect, be planned. It was only in this way that the urban poor could be accommodated. But the idea that the poor should be accommodated at all was not yet fully accepted in Bombay. A plan to give the poor thirty-square-yard building plots in the projected twin city had run into opposition from middle-class people who had objected on social grounds – they didn’t want the poor too near – and on moral grounds – the poor would sell the plots
at a profit
and, after this immorality of profit, live where they had always lived, in the streets.

The engineer was a Bombay man, but not a man of Maharashtra, and therefore hardly a supporter of the Shiv Sena. It was his interest in housing for the urban poor that had sent him to live for a week or so among the squatters of the mill area, queuing up with them every morning to get his water and to use the latrines. He had discovered a number of simple but important things. Communal washing areas were necessary: women spent a lot of time washing clothes (perhaps because they had so few). Private latrines were impossible; communal latrines (which might be provided by the municipality)
would bring about an immediate improvement in sanitation, though children might always have to use the open.

But the most important discovery was the extent and nature of the Shiv Sena’s control. A squatters’ settlement, a low huddle of mud and tin and tile and old boards, might suggest a random drift of human debris in a vacant city space; but the chances now were that it would be tightly organized. The settlement in which the engineer had stayed, and where we were going that morning, was full of Sena ‘committees’, and these committees were dedicated as much to municipal self-regulation as to the Sena’s politics: industrial workers beginning to apply something of the discipline of the factory floor to the areas where they lived.

The middle-class leadership of the Sena might talk of martial glory and dream of political power. But at this lower and more desperate level the Sena had become something else: a yearning for community, an ideal of self-help, men rejecting rejection. ‘I love the municipal life.’ Gandhi had said that in the early days; but municipal self-discipline was one of those Gandhian themes that India hadn’t been able to relate to religion or the Independence movement, and hadn’t therefore required. It was the Sena now that had, as it were, ritualized the municipal need, which Independence, the industrial revolution, and the pressures of population had made urgent.

The bus stopped, and we were just outside the settlement. It was built on a small, rocky hill above a cemetery, which was green with the monsoon; in the distance were the white skyscrapers of southern Bombay. The narrow entrance lane was flanked by latrine blocks and washing sheds. The latrine blocks were doorless, with a central white-tiled runnel on the concrete floor. They were new, the engineer said: the local Shiv Sena municipal councillor had clearly been getting things done. In one of the washing sheds children were bathing; in the other, women and girls were washing clothes.

The entrance lane was deliberately narrow, to keep out carts and cars. And, within, space was suddenly scarce. The structures were low, very low, little doors opening into tiny, dark, single rooms,
every other structure apparently a shop, sometimes a glimpse of someone on a string bed on the earth floor. Men and their needs had shrunk. But the lane was paved, with concrete gutters on either side; without that paving – which was also new – the lane, twisting down the hillside, would have remained an excremental ravine. And the lane and the gutters this Sunday morning looked clean. Much depended, the engineer said, on the ‘zeal’ of the municipal sweeper. Caste here! The pariahs of the pariahs: yet another, lower human level, hidden away somewhere!

There were eight Shiv Sena committee rooms in the settlement. The one we went to was on the main lane. It was a stuffy little shed with a corrugated-iron roof; but the floor, which the engineer remembered as being of earth, was now of concrete; and the walls, formerly of plain brick, had been plastered and whitewashed. There was one portrait. And, interestingly, it was not of the leader of the Shiv Sena or of Shivaji, the Sena’s warrior god, but of the long-dead Dr Ambedkar, the Maharashtrian untouchable leader, law minister in the first government of independent India, the framer of India’s now suspended constitution. Popular – and near-ecstatic – movements like the Shiv Sena ritualize many different needs. The Sena here, honouring an angry and (for all his eminence) defeated man, seemed quite different from the Sena the newspapers wrote about.

The members of the committee were all young, in their twenties. The older people, they said, were not interested, and had to be forgotten. But more noticeable, and more moving, than the youth of the committee members was their physical size. They were all so small; their average height was about five feet. Generations of undernourishment had whittled away bodies and muscle (though one man, perhaps from the nature of his manual work, had fairly well-developed arm and back muscles).

The leader was coarse-featured and dark, almost black. He worked in Air India as a technician, and he was in his Sunday clothes. His grey trousers were nicely creased, and a white shirt in a synthetic material shone over the beginnings of a little paunch of
respectability. After greeting us he immediately in the Indian way offered hospitality, whispering to an aide about ‘cola’. And presently – no doubt from one of the little shops – two warm bottles of the cola came. There was more whispering, and a little later two tumblers decorated with red arabesques appeared, snatched perhaps from somebody’s room.

It was a chemically treated substance, the cola, calling for analysis rather than consumption. But consumption was not required. The first sip had completed the formalities; and soon we were out, walking up the lanes, understanding the Lilliputian completeness of the settlement (even a hand-operated printing machine in one of the shacks, turning out cinema handbills), every now and then coming out into the open, at the edge of the hillside, looking down at the roofs of rusting tin or red Mangalore clay tiles we had left below, beside the graveyard, and looking across to the remote skyscrapers, getting paler in the increasing heat.

The technician, the committee leader, had been living in Bombay for fifteen years and in the squatters’ settlement for twelve. He had come as a boy from the countryside and had at first stayed with someone whom he knew; and that only meant, though he didn’t say, that he might have had floor space in somebody’s room. He had found a small job somewhere and had gone to night school and ‘matriculated’. Getting into Air India afterwards as an office boy had been his big break. That airline is the least bureaucratized of Indian organizations: the ambitious office boy had been encouraged to become a technical apprentice.

This almost Victorian tale of self-help and success unfolded as we walked. But self-help of this sort was possible only in the industrial city, whatever its horrors. The technician, if he had stayed behind in his village, might have been nothing, without caste or skill or land, an occasional day labourer, perhaps bound to a master. Now, Air India and the Shiv Sena between them gave him energy and purpose. He said he had no personal ambitions; he wasn’t planning to move out of the settlement. And he added, with the first
touch of rhetoric, but perhaps also with truth, that he wanted to ‘serve the people’. Look, here was something we should notice: the committees had placed dustbins in the lanes. And he lifted a lid or two to show that the dustbins were being used.

But the shanty town was a shanty town. Dustbins were only dustbins; the latrine blocks and the washing sheds were now not near. The twisting lanes continued, shutting out air, concentrating heat, and the small hillside, its Lilliputian novelty vanished, began to feel like a vast wasps’ nest of little dark rooms, often no more than boxes, often with just a bed on the earth floor, sometimes with little black runnels of filth between the rooms, occasional enfeebled rats struggling up the gutters, slimy where steep, scum quickly forming around impediments of garbage.

It was Sunday, the technician said: the municipal sweepers hadn’t been. Again! Sweepers, the lowest of the low: their very existence, and their acceptance of their function, the especial curse of India, reinforcing the Indian conviction, even here, and in spite of the portrait of Dr Ambedkar in the committee room now far below, that it was unclean to clean, and leading to the horrors we were about to come upon.

There were eight committees, and it had at first seemed too many for that small settlement. But eight were apparently not enough. There were some sections of the settlement where for various reasons – perhaps internal political reasons, perhaps a clash of personalities, or perhaps simply an absence of concerned young men – there were as yet no committees. Through these sections we walked without speaking, picking our way between squirts and butts and twists of human excrement. It was unclean to clean; it was unclean even to notice. It was the business of the sweepers to remove excrement, and until the sweepers came, people were content to live in the midst of their own excrement.