Explained | How ‘chawl’ tenements helped Mumbai become a megacity

The chawls offered generations of low-income arrivals in Mumbai a foothold in India’s 'city of dreams' and succeeded in becoming hives of community activity while offering homes that were close to workplaces.

By Ronojoy Mazumdar

For more than a century, the chawls of Mumbai have acted as one of the city’s most important forms of affordable housing. Large tenement complexes built during Mumbai’s industrial boom from the 1850s through the first half of the 20th century, chawls once housed workers from the sprawling ports and textile mills of what was then called Bombay.

In a city bounded by water on three sides where land has long been scarce, these hulking complexes always presented challenging conditions, built to three floors or more to conserve valuable land and typically housing entire families in just a single room without private washing facilities. The chawls nonetheless offered generations of low-income arrivals in Mumbai a foothold in India’s “city of dreams” and succeeded in becoming hives of community activity while offering homes that were close to workplaces.

But while hundreds of chawls remain, housing many tens of thousands of residents, they are due to be swept away and replaced by high-rise residential towers in one of the most ambitious urban renewal plans the city has ever seen.

The chawls’ upcoming demolition nonetheless signals the progress of two transformative trends: the disappearance of affordable housing from Mumbai’s downtown, where chawls are overwhelmingly concentrated, and the end of its tradition of mingling the rich and poor in the same tight-knit neighborhoods.

This change may be striking, but it isn’t necessarily surprising. While their units are currently rented out at prices fixed by the state — often as little as the local equivalent to $1 (Rs 83) a month per unit in areas — the chawls stand on some of what is India’s most valuable real estate, areas where even purpose-built, low-cost housing units cost on average $400 (Rs 33,200) a month.

The development of Mumbai’s chawls tells a story whose outline is common to many megacities. The buildings sprang up during the British Raj, a time when new urban jobs were luring people in their thousands away from the countryside for work in textiles or as dockworkers in one of the busiest ports in Britain’s global empire. The growth of chawls can be thought of almost as synonymous with the expansion of the city. Before Bombay became a key harbor for trade and the British navy, the region was inhabited by small fishing communities. This transformation was powered partly by events in North America, as textile manufacturing boomed when the US Civil War cut off transatlantic cotton exports to Europe.

This boom fueled a desperate need for cheap housing, and chawls were a common answer. Typically built around a central courtyard, the chawls grouped rooms around a corridor, divided into either single or double room units, with bathrooms usually shared between the residents of each floor. This arrangement would perhaps have been ample with one or two workers per unit. In practice, this was never how they were used in India, where multiple generations — uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins — shared space. For families arriving from the countryside, where they spread out across larger courtyard houses, the chawl apartments were an abrupt change.

Yet the chawls still offered (and continue to offer) benefits. Their density and grouping around courtyards — which still today continue to be the focus of activities like community sports, religious festivals and weddings — helped to generate camaraderie and community spirit between households. This spirit of sharing is underlined by regional community ties within chawls, as newly arrived families usually preferred to live with their own kind, along regional, linguistic, religious and caste lines. Most every community present in the city would have its own set of chawls.

These community bonds have helped transform chawls into places where much space sits in a grey area between the public and the private. For low-income families in an expensive city, they offer a semblance of a safety net that the state doesn’t provide. The solidarity they generate is especially helpful for those needing help with child-care or in creating opportunities to socialize for older residents.

“Only the architecture of the chawl provides in-between spaces between the house and the street, which are very important,” said Prasad Shetty, co-founder and professor at School of Environment & Architecture in Mumbai. “We’ve described it as an architecture of care.”

Take for example, the BDD chawls in central Mumbai between the skyscrapers of Prabhadevi and Lower Parel. Built by the municipal government about a century ago, this area is inhabited by a large number of Buddhist followers of B R Ambedkar, an icon of caste consciousness and struggle in India whose likeness is found in shrines and painted on walls across the neighborhood. Despite this concentration, the area is not religiously or politically homogenous. Also represented here is the Maratha community, who hail from Maharashtra, the vast state to which Mumbai is the capital. The community’s votes make the area a stronghold for the right-wing regional Shiv Sena party.

Cramped houses also likely encouraged residents to stay outside as much as possible, whether at work or at the movies. The development of a passionate cinephile culture helped make Mumbai’s Bollywood the center of the world’s most-watched film industry.

“Because houses were so small, cinemas and affordable food halls became really important,” said Rupali Gupte, a professor at Mumbai’s School of Environment & Architecture. “There was this sense of the city as a whole becoming home.”

Architecturally, while most chawls’ construction was plain, it was done thoughtfully. Early ones close to the city’s dockyards have sloping roofs to fend off monsoonal rains that soak the city from June to October. Verandas help to protect interiors from rain and sun while ensuring good ventilation during humid summers. Earlier chawls built of wood, stone and brick helped create a more breathable fabric for each building. Residents also adapted other habits from older architecture, making up for the absence of substantial open or part-roofed spaces of traditional Konkan houses by using courtyards, balconies and verandas for daily activities and — with space at a premium — even sleeping.

Later chawls lost many of these attributes. By the 1920s, they were increasingly built in configurations that loosely echoed the terraced houses inhabited by British industrial workers, albeit at much higher densities. Instead of being focused around courtyards that echoed traditional homes in rural India, these later chawls lined up rows of single aspect rooms that bore a loose (and possibly not coincidental) relationship to the back-to-back houses found earlier in the industrial cities of Britain.

Mumbai’s chawls are long past their heyday. With the disappearance of much of the industry in which their original residents were employed, their condition has deteriorated and their crumbling exteriors may even be potentially unsafe. As these buildings now stand on land that is some of the most expensive per square foot in the world, redevelopment has become perhaps inevitable. And sure enough, a plan is now underway to replace the chawls with residential skyscrapers, a project that (after the proposed redevelopment of the Dharavi slums) is perhaps the most ambitious so-called urban renewal project in India today.

The government’s blueprint for the area is to duplicate what its slum rehabilitation body has done in other parts of the city, which is to temporarily re-home residents elsewhere while constructing low-cost housing on the bulk of the land — and while commissioning private builders who profit from the sale of luxury apartments in a smaller portion of the space. Critics argue the new buildings will be claustrophobic, ugly, and leave inhabitants vulnerable to disease.

Plans involve constructing 40-story towers and roughly tripling the size of tenement residences into apartments. Previous experience with affordable housing projects in Mumbai suggests the concerns should be taken seriously, with long delays and even incomplete work representing risks for current inhabitants. Moreover, many fear that the new buildings will incur significant maintenance costs, which are likely to push out those who have been living in the chawls for decades, benefiting from below-market rents that have statutory protection.

Such development shifts Mumbai away from a place where some of the world’s richest share space with some of the most destitute and where housing has a clear connection to the ground-level surrounding. Take for example, Lodha Trump Tower in Lower Parel, located barely a kilometer from Worli’s BDD Chawls. Mumbai has long been a place where a blue-collar worker from the chawls might rub shoulders with a banker living at Lodha Trump Tower as both walk to the railway station for their commutes.

“Bombay has never had ‘tony’ areas,” said Mustansir Dalvi, professor at the Sir J.J. College of Architecture in Mumbai. “The entire city has always had the very rich and very poor living almost side by side.”

It may seem mistaken to mourn the departure of the chawls and the social mixing they made possible. Not only have their conditions deteriorated, they also now appear out of step with contemporary notions of nuclear families and individualistic ways of life. It is still worth remembering that their conditions fostered a way of life that provided substantial support for residents.

Evolving into a uniquely Indian kind of living space, they have contributed to the culture of the city in numerous intangible ways. How much of their vibrant community life survives as they are replaced with skyscrapers will determine whether the financial capital of the world’s most populous country can sustain a remarkable, living thread with its early history. As this hangs in the balance, it’s worth reflecting on what lessons they might still offer for Mumbai’s future development, especially in terms of affordability, semi-public social spaces and community.