For more on the chawls see: https://www.sahapedia.org/physical-and-social-configurations-of-the-bombay-chawls

The city does not allow a particular narrative to settle and keeps on emerging and opening newer dimensions of contest. These stories constantly remind us of this - one cannot hold the city with a particular narrative or concept... it is turned on its head as the city changes.

This is a semi-fictional narrative of a chawl in Mumbai. Note the manner in which various pieces of information from popular stories, family histories, archives, policy documents, field work, architectural studies, ethnographies and deep interviews are stitched together to write this piece which opens up the history of the city.

The specific chawl which has been predominantly represented in this piece has been completely redeveloped and is now called Ganga Avenue.

Though this narrative is a story of many chawls stiched together to become a montage, all sections of this piece are true. A substantial amount of information and details used in this piece is through fieldwork, personal interviews of people, archives, and popular stories of families.

This was the popular 33(7) regulation in the Development Control Regulations of Mumbai 1991.

The Government of Maharashtra formed the Bedekar Committee in 1968 to deal with the problems of repairs and reconstructions of old dilapidated tenanted buildings in the Island City of Mumbai whose rents were frozen in 1940 as per the provisions of the Rent Control Act. Based on the recommendations of this Committee, the government passed the Bombay Building Repairs and Reconstruction Act in the year 1969. Under the provisions of this Act, the Bombay Building Repairs and Reconstruction Board was formed in the year 1971. A repair cess was levied on old dilapidated tenanted buildings under the provisions of this Act. Thus, these buildings were called cessed buildings.

For drawings of chawls see:

https://bardstudio.in/chawl-typologies/

A note on the semi-fictional form of writing: https://bardstudio.in/navigations/notes-on-the-semi-fictional-form/

https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/68698/the-one-foot-shop/

Neer Adarkar and Meena Menon's book, One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices (Seagull Books, 2001) had many interviews of women from the mill lands - most of them workers, and some who ran eating places. The book also talks about affairs of these women with male workers.

Several Pathare Prabhu families owned lands on which chawls exist today. Many of these families have also shifted northwards into bungalows or flats either living on rents from the lands / properties in the south.

Several Pathare Prabhu families have ancestral temples built on their lands that survive even today.

The census of India shows explicitly the high sex ratio from 1901 (when the census had started) until the 1980s. In the 1920s and 30s, the number of women were half the number of men. The census has numbers for the whole city, the actual ratio in this area would have been much greater.

Along with oral histories, place names and surnames, even colonial maps record the pastoral history of Mumbai

Note the central idea here - agricultural land gets subdivided based on the logic of fertility and not based on size and shape.

This is a popular surname of the Pathare Prabhu sub caste. They are said to have arrived in the city with a run away king in the 10th century, who established Mumbai as his kingdom. Many of these families own inherited land in Mumbai with several complex stories of land and property subdivisions and inheritance.