I went to Lodha World One in Parel the other day and looked down from its highest floor at the clouds blanketing Mumbai. The residents of this apartment were gods, wealthy enough for this to be their “other apartment”.
The website describes Lodha World Towers as “a world of unimaginable luxury spanning 17 acres”, comprising some of “Mumbai’s finest residences” and “embodying global standards in luxury”. Most of the enclave’s occupants would not have been born 75 years ago, and would have no idea about the hundreds of thousands who had lived, worked and died on this land before them, struggling for a place to sleep.
If they knew, it might shake them to their roots.
Lodha’s 17 acres once belonged to Shrinivas Mills, one of the 58 mills scattered over 600 acres of Girangaon, the ‘village of mills’. The first mill, a structure quite unlike anything in Mumbai, appeared in Tardeo one day in 1854: it had a slender smokestack sticking out, like a finger in God’s eye.
Bombay’s other trading families — Tatas, Petits, Wadias, Thakerseys, Sassoons, Khataus, Morarjis, Cotton and Greaves — smelt money and opportunity and rushed to set up their own mills. By 1900, there were about 200 mills.
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They were long, low, blocky structures, blowing noxious clouds from their sky-high chimneys. By 1982, when a year-long strike would effectively shut down the entire industry, there were nearly 300,000 workers.
Exactly where Lodha World Towers stands, thousands of workers toiled 12 hours a day, seven days a week, inhaling lungfuls of dust and cotton fibres with each breath. Others endured the sweltering 38°C heat of the starching and bleaching sections all day.
Unlike those who live in Lodha’s posh enclaves, housing was a nightmare for mill workers. The poorest of them, such as cart-pullers, inhabited zavli sheds, fragile shacks assembled from the dry fronds of date or coconut trees, empty kerosene tins and corrugated metal. Air and light did not dare enter; the first monsoon rain would wash it away.
The most harrowing were the chawls. Sometimes, as many as 25 squeezed into a space meant for six, like so many sardines in a can, sleeping in shifts.
The chawls had no latrines, and children and men defecated in the lanes between the buildings; women waited for darkness. There were no sinks or bathrooms, so verandahs the size of phone booths were enclosed with matting and repurposed as bathing areas. The water flowed out, collecting in pools outside the chawls, and mosquitoes laid their eggs there. Eventually, everything in sight was submerged in the foul sludge, blocking the drains and filling the air with fetid vapours.
By 1987, the value of the mill lands far exceeded the value of the mills that stood on them. Everyone knew that there was obscene wealth to be made if only the laws could be tweaked. But the Development Plan of 1967 barred the owners from selling or repurposing their mills.
Dramatic change came in 1991. The government released Development Control Rules 58, allowing the sale and redevelopment of mill lands but with a precondition: a third must go to the municipality and another third to the Maharashtra Housing and Development Authority to make low-cost housing for mill workers and others. The mill owners could do as they pleased with the remaining one-third. That wasn’t good enough. They wanted more land. They wanted all of it.
Subverting DCR58 required ninja moves. In its first baby step, in 2000, the government quietly amended Section 37 of the Town Planning Act to empower itself to make changes to the development plan without consulting the BMC.
The next year, using this unilateral power, the government made a “minor modification” to the Development Control Rules to permit owners to surrender only the existing vacant land, not the land that would become vacant if the mills were demolished. With a stroke of the pen, the mill buildings and other built-up areas became untouchable. The one-third rule would only apply to open spaces in Girangaon.
In 2005, Lodha builders bought Shrinivas Mills. Their plan was to build an upper-class heaven on the ruins of a proletariat hell.
I am told an influencer lives high up in one of the Lodha towers. I don’t know his name but they say he keeps the apartment only for the parties he throws the few times he is in India. Each room is a different, flagrant dayglo colour, lurid red or fantasy purple or brazen yellow. During parties, laser beams and electric strobe lights pulse everywhere.
In 1882, when the British introduced a sinister invention called electricity to Girangaon, it was not discos that lit up. With illumination now available after dark, there was no longer any reason to let the workers go home at sunset. Mills extended their working hours to 8 pm, extracting 15 hours of back-breaking work at the same crippling wages.
Genoo Babaji, a 38-year-old head mule jobber and a mill worker since age 10, told the Factory Commission of 1875, “I am altogether broken to pieces. I shall soon die.”
Elite buildings like Lodha World Towers now stand where workers like Genoo fought for their lives.
You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.