Urban planning experts Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava write that Dharavi, the Mumbai “slum” in Slumdog Millionaire isn’t really a slum:
The imagery represents what most middle-class residents of Mumbai (and now all over the world) imagine Dharavi to be. The urban legend of its squalor has taken root because few Mumbaikers have ever been there — just as most Manhattanites still avoid stepping anywhere near Bedford-Stuyvesant, that beautiful neighborhood in Brooklyn. Times may have changed since the mid-’70s, when the community worker Barry Stein described Bed-Stuy as the “largest ghetto in the country,” but prejudices die hard, in New York and India.
Its depiction as a slum does little justice to the reality of Dharavi. Well over a million “eyes on the street,” to use Jane Jacobs’s phrase, keep Dharavi perhaps safer than most American cities. Yet Dharavi’s extreme population density doesn’t translate into oppressiveness. The crowd is efficiently absorbed by the thousands of tiny streets branching off bustling commercial arteries. Also, you won’t be chased by beggars or see hopeless people loitering — Dharavi is probably the most active and lively part of an incredibly industrious city. People have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state — including having set up a highly functional recycling industry that serves the whole city.
Dharavi is all about such resourcefulness. Over 60 years ago, it started off as a small village in the marshlands and grew, with no government support, to become a million-dollar economic miracle providing food to Mumbai and exporting crafts and manufactured goods to places as far away as Sweden.
