Spilling Homes

Typological study of Chawls of Mumbai

As you move along the southern and the more western parts of the city, the landscape starts shifting from vertical to horizontal and goes back and forth, as one sees multiple highrises and smaller and more spread low housing units. Chawls became Mumbai’s indigenous housing typology, which stood to accommodate the working class of Bombay in the 1900s and are a form of low-cost affordable housing that houses the middle class of the city. This article sets out to explore this typology and dwelling format that has shaped the city and become a microcosm itself. It attempts to address the question of what comprises a home and its ever-shifting boundaries considering the form, the people, and notions of privacy.

Jariwala Building Source - author

Need for chawls

After the Civil War in America and multiple such blows to the European colonies the cotton textile industries were shifted from places like Manchester to the colonies including Bombay. What we now know as Parel, Girgaon became the center to set up these factories that attracted an influx of laborers to the city. The migrated population initially lived in temporary houses like huts, sheds, or under make-to-do roofs on the roads. Indian capitalization began with heavy exploitation of the early working class that moved to the city and occupied the city’s marshes and low-lying lands and developed it in their expertise to make it habitable. These workers were later thrown out from the land for occupying it illegally and these areas were then converted into prime commercial estates. Such uncertain living conditions caused the question of accommodation of these workers at a low or affordable rate to arise.

About 70 mills were set up across the city by the 1890s, most owned by Indian traders, mostly the Bohris or the Buradis. Mills brought workers and hence the mill owners built housing for them. One of the first chawls was built in Girgaon, “village of mills”. Chawls became a standardized dwelling for the mill laborers in Bombay and were located in what was called the ‘native town’ by the British, meaning the inner city, while they were housed in a more spacious part of the city that was then fortified by them to establish a clear class divide.

Building Form of Chawls

Chawls, essentially a row of single or double tenements, are structured of 2-4 identical floors stacked on top of each other. They are usually wrapped around by a continuous linear balcony, also commonly known as the ‘gallery’ by the dwellers. A uniform framing of timber columns and beams holds up the structure and its sloping roof is made of corrugated iron sheets or Mangalore tiles. Rhythmic running railings move along the edges of the balcony, usually of iron or wooden joinery. Windows overlooking the outside of the gallery remains open through most of the day. Smaller raised platforms beside the doors of each unit become the stages for the white rangoli with shades of haldi and vermillion. Broken chairs, spare cupboards, covered washing machines, stacked plastic tubs, and rolled-in mattresses. Laundry lines tied from one end to the other, seem singular and continuous but are claimed by the houses in front by the color of the nylon ropes used. A central courtyard between the 2 or more building units of a chawl doubles as the cricket pitch and the center for festivities usually with the temple at its axis.

Source - author Corridors

Floor plan : on site Source - author

Jariwala Chawl in Tardeo, Mumbai Central

Just outside the Mumbai Central Railway station is the Jariwala Chawl. Built in the year 1970 for the second generation of the mill workers, the chawl stands 3 storeyed high at the edge of the main street. Finding its entrance through a long trail of shops just below the building, we entered a wide and high corridor with iron doors tied with chains to the poles on each side. One could tell they were seldom shut. The corridor drills the building on top and goes through and through to open out to the backyard facing the comparatively newly built MHADA low-cost settlement.

The form of the building is a single block placed on a southwest-northeast axis with angled tapering smaller edges and pitched roofs. The building gets divided into two along the axis with the front facing the street and the back facing the MHADA settlement. The front comprises 8 units on each side of the central corridor and the back of 6 units on either side. Both ends of the chawl are attached to a block of common washrooms on each floor on the backside of the structure.

Single unit plan: on site Source - author

Sacred Spaces : stationery affordances

The corridors in the chawls run parallel to each other in the front and the back. About 3 feet in width, the corridors hold a plethora of orphan objects leaving only about a foot’s space to walk along. On asking for a glass of water Yogita Kaki welcomed us to sit on the short, white wooden shoe cabinet in the gallery as she gathered her saare and took a long step going over the pati at the doorstep to get us a glass. Both the corridors bring in light to the central wider corridor with a singular bench against one of its walls for older men and women to sit and enquire of happenings around the chawl. All units of the chawls facing the street are residential and the ones perpendicular on the ends are occupied by smaller institutions. Balwadi and a beauty parlor on the first floor, kathak classes, and a lawyer's chamber on the second. The first 6 tenements on either end are connected to the 6 at the back, doubling the unit and keeping the air flowing from the openings in the front and back. The standard unit measures about 10ft by 10ft. The threshold is extended vertically by a 1-foot-tall pati to establish a buffer before one’s house but still keep it open and accessible. The living area consists of a single bed, ‘cot’, against one wall perpendicular to the cupboards that make up another wall to segregate the living and kitchen and to provide a wall to mori inside just beside the kitchen. The windows open up to the corridor and sit above the objects of the household overflowing outside.

Chawl and its clientele

The size of the units set up an economic hierarchy as well, where comparatively richer families have settled along the front center of the chawl occupying the two tenements, back and front. While the lower income families reside in the single unit smaller kholi on the edges at the back near the common washrooms. The front facade of the chawl can be seen decorated with identical Diwali lanterns, pink in color, in front of every unit, painting an image of people from the same community (mostly the same religion) celebrating together. Here we come across a heavy Hindu-majority. The front facade of the chawl also abuts another such communal settlement that was preparing for the coming Ganeshotsav. Aaji asked us to visit the Tardeo cha Raja, Ganpati pandal right across the street facing the chawl, which now was only a tarpaulin cubical structure. The board on entering the chawl says, Jariwala Mitra Mandal, an organization that collaborates with the organization hosting Tardeo cha Raja right in front since the 1980s.

1- Same kandils for all 2- ganpati mandal hand painted board Source - author

The Spill-over

Indians have historically looked at houses as the whole mohalla. The homes spilled over the street with community demarcations and professional hierarchies. Migrant workers of the city who moved from their native places for the town often called their tenements ‘Kholis’ meaning rooms. The idea of a ghar was different from the idea of a kholi. Ghar constituted a community and a shared neighborhood, which was highly imbibed in the daily living of the people here. The tenements here can be seen following a similar idea of community. The form homogenizes the community but along the specificities of language and caste. The Jariwala chawl is a Hindu-populated chawl with a Marathi-speaking majority and some leased to Gujarati speakers. Home for these settlers became more than a 10ft by 10ft cubicle. It extends outwards to the corridor being the sleeping space usually for the young adult men of the family. The mori is the closest space inside the house that offers privacy. Designed as space to store water it gets used as the washing space as well as the bathing space. The deities reside in the common corridor where uncles every morning show offerings of incense sticks.

Deities in the common passage

Source - author

The Contemporary

Having spent the majority of my childhood in a chawl in Mulund, I vividly remember the doors of the floors remaining open throughout the day and shutting in the night with a singular ‘kadi’ only, wheat and chillies laid on muslin cloths in the galleries to dry, the smell of tobacco being roasted from the adjacent house and the constant rush of guests, unknown, yet finding a seat in our home as an extension of the neighbor’s. With changing times, basic needs for each generation evolve. Readymade masalas are now bought from the market but the sense of this overflow of one’s space still remains. The extension of one's house into the public space remains a habit that might have given birth to the idea of a grilled door or a safety door, to maintain privacy but still extend one’s threshold to meet another. The chawls in such means become microcosms of amalgamations of peculiar parts of the city with people from similar cultural contexts huddling together. Dialects, cultural forms, and deities give rise to multiple solidarities along the city's edge that shape into chawls that transcend from being housing to constituting neighborhoods. The constantly in-motion galleries change the buoyancy of such spaces and create diffused boundaries as a result.

Grilled doors of Jariwala Chawl Source - author

References

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