Media representations of UNHOUSED populations are abundant and easy to find. More often than not, they sensationalize the lives of the people who live in slums, are homeless, or marginalized in other ways, in both negative and positive ways. Here is a small collection of media representations of a particularly well-known slum in Mumbai.

The slums of India’s major cities are known around the world. The slums at the Mumbai airport enjoy a visibility that others don't given that they are the first thing you see when you fly into the city as they abut the runways. Dharavi is the name of the slum that is next to the airport:

Dharavi is a district of central Mumbai, India. Sandwiched between Mahim in the west and Sion in the east, is Dharavi — one of Asia's largest slums. Spread over an area of 175 hectares, Dharavi has a population of more than 1 million people. (Wikipedia)

There are several videos online that show views of Dharavi out the windows of landing planes. Additionally, there are many videos, from other cities, that show slums at a safe distance through a window of a plane, taxicab, or train. It has become a travelogue sub-genre all its own. Here is a shorter video of a plane landing at the Mumbai airport:



Here is an interesting report (more for how it says things than what it says) from Al Jazeera, from this past summer, about plans to expand the Mumbai airport and displace people who have been living nearby for over 50 years. This report tells the story in a way that doesn't replicate the typical media depictions of housing struggles - they usually tell the perspective of power, and not that of the inhabitants. The report begins to touch on the bad planning and the endemic corruption that threatens to displace as many as 100,000 people. India's corruption benefits the powerful and wealthy and allows the slum areas to keep existing rather than be turned into adequate housing with all the necessary services.

Slum residents fight Mumbai airport expansion - 18 June 07



"Slumming India" (2002) by Gita Dewan Verma is an in depth, withering analysis of ineffective planning and governance, corruption, NGO interference (or NGOs for the sake of NGOs), and other factors that keep India full of slums rather than solve the country’s housing problems. Most major western cities (London, Paris, New York, Chicago, and others) had shantytowns as they developed – their reasons for existing are strikingly similar to those currently in developing cities, in India and elsewhere. Slums are not a given in cities, they are caused by a variety of factors that structurally keep them there.



Heartbreak all the way to the horizon…

Gregory David Roberts’s rather bombastic account of his first encounter with these slums is in his novel “Shantaram”. The narrator (who is a fictionalized version of the author) flies into the Mumbai airport. He doesn’t see the slums from the air or least doesn’t mention this to us – maybe this is for dramatic effect as they would have been visible from the airport when the author was there. The novel takes place in the 1980s. Here is the account:

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The journey from the airport to the city began on a wide, modern motorway, lined with shrubs and trees. It was much like the neat, pragmatic landscape that surrounded the international airport in my home city, Melbourne. The familiarity lulled me into a complacency that was so profoundly shattered, at the first narrowing of the road, that the contrast and its effect seemed calculated. For the first sight of the slums, as the many lanes of the motorway became one, and the trees disappeared, clutched at my heart with talons of shame.

Like brown and black dunes, the acres of slums rolled away from the roadside, and met the horizon with dirty heat-haze mirages. The miserable shelters were patched together from rags, scraps of plastic and paper, reed mats, and bamboo sticks. They slumped together, attached one to another, and with narrow lanes winding between them. Nothing in the enormous sprawl of it rose much above the height of a man.

It seemed impossible that a modern airport, full of prosperous and purposeful travelers, was only kilometers away from those crushed and cindered dreams. My first impression was that some catastrophe had taken place, and that the slums were refugee camps for the shambling survivors. I learned, months later, that they WERE survivors, of course, those slum-dwellers: the catastrophes that had driven them to the slums from their villages were poverty, famine, and bloodshed. And five thousand new survivors arrived in the city every week, week after week, year after year.

As the kilometers wound past, as the hundreds of people in those slums became thousands, and tens of thousands, my spirit writhed. I felt defiled by my own health and the money in my pockets. If you feel it at all, it’s a lacerating guilt, that first confrontation with the wretched of the earth. […] Still, that first encounter with the ragged misery of the slum, heartbreak all the way to the horizon, cut into my eyes. For a time, I ran onto the knives.

Then the smoulders of shame and guilt flamed into anger, became fist-tightening rage at the unfairness of it: “What kind of a government,” I thought, “what kind of system allows suffering like this?” (Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts, Abacus, London, 2003, pp. 6-7)

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There are a couple more paragraphs in this harrowing account. It is the account of an outsider and this is clear. Slums are depicted throughout this mesmerizing book in various manners – sometimes they are banal, romantic sites of interwoven community, and at other times dramatic spectacles. I couldn’t put this book down, but for reasons other than my interests in understanding how UNHOUSING is depicted in popular media, as it is a really good tale of a man who escapes prison, hides in India for many years, joins the Bombay mafia, and then is captured again.

The book is being made in to a film starring Johny Depp and Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan. The "Bollywood News and gossip" blog reports:

Shantaram will be extensively shot in Australia, China and India. The film is the screen adaptation of Gregory David Roberts’ book of the same name. The story is of true global value and is about an Australian convict called Roberts (Depp) who is caught for a Bank robbery and for heroin addiction. Roberts flees from prison and comes to Mumbai, India. In Mumbai he confronts the mafia and befriends Kader Bhai (Bachchan). Kader Bhai becomes his mentor and guide and Roberts finally decides to help the slum dwellers and starts a health centre that provides free medical facilities to the poor.

http://bollywood.celebden.com/?p=1136