Celebrating Mumbai's Chawls

These fast-disappearing, nondescript housing structures (once ubiquitous to Mumbai’s geography) have, over the years, provided a fertile background for Hindi cinema to explore the lives of the city’s working class.

- Maithili Rao

3 Storeys was a film waiting to be made. It is surprising why it took so long for film-makers to use the ubiquitous Mumbai chawl as the setting and character to tell stories of lives lived cheek by jowl. Old chawls have yielded to sleek, soaring glass towers in the once mill areas, now not only modestly gentrified but made posh — malls, offices and upscale residential towers screaming their 21st-century f lash and power. A slice of Mumbai’s history — social, political and economic — is embedded in these nondescript, often decrepit and sometimes surprisingly sturdy structures that are part of the city’s geography. You drive past them in Dadar and other crowded streets in the heart of the city, uncurious about how they have survived the onslaught of real estate developers. And thus, chawls did manage to survive (for how long is the moot question), scrambling to provide a roof over the heads of the lower middle-class multitude.

Something so taken for granted becomes invisible over time. That is one of the reasons why films centred in and around chawls are far and few between. The films veer between stark realism, stock humour and a wide cast of characters to provide an emotional landscape for the lead actors and, sometimes, a glimpse of the surreal lurking in the common corridors, always abustle with the comings and goings of residents.