-Hind Swaraj, MK. Gandhi, 1939

‘Everyone must be his own scavenger. If you become your own bhangi {sweeper), not only will you ensure perfect sanitation for yourself, but you will make your surroundings clean and relieve those whom you call bhangis, of the weight of oppression.’

-The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, eds R.K. Prabhu & U.R. Rao, 1945

‘As many as 1,370 people have died in India cleaning human excreta. We don’t need to romanticize the problem to bring about change. The basic fact that as human beings we can’t have other human beings clean our excreta should lead to the change.’

-Bezwada Wilson speaking at Mallya Aditi International School, Bengaluru, 16 December 2016

Whatever the father of the nation thought and said about modernity, the railways and conquest of disease certainly made life easier for the new inhabitants of Shivaji Park. So also the arrival of the flush toilet. Although it took a while for architects to find the appropriate place for toilets in the new apartments they were building, the important thing was that they were hygienic and did away with the inhuman practice of manual scavenging. The railways transported people faster than the trams that still trundled on their north-south routes through the centre of the city. In every way Shivaji Park was moving forward (or in Gandhi’s view, morally backward) giving residents a new sense of selfhood. In the old district of Kalbadevi your home was often your workplace and the street was part of your home. In Girgaum your workplace was in the Fort but your home included a convivial veranda and a central courtyard for celebrations and quarrels. In Shivaji Park, your workplace was a long commute away but you had the means to get there rapidly and in comfort. Although your home was contained within the four walls of your block, you had verandas from where to call out to passing vendors of fish and vegetables. And although you did not have common corridors to sit out in and shoot the breeze, you had a 28-acre park--one of the biggest in the city--to relax in, and the sea breeze as bonus. 

Dadar West’s ‘progress of matter’ began on 12 April 1867, when the first four-bogey local train left Virar at 6.45 in the morning, picked up passengers from Borivali, Goregaon, Andheri, Bandra, Mahim and Dadar to deposit them at a station in Backbay Reclamation, located somewhere between today’s Churchgate and Marine Lines stations. The train left Backbay at 5.30 in the evening to bring passengers home from their workplaces. By 1925, when Shivaji Park came into being, 1,323 trains were running on the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway (BB&CI) tracks. Many were electrified and carried around 35 lakh passengers back and forth every day. Long after 1951, when the BB&CI Railway was merged with the Saurashtra, Rajputana, Jaipur State and Cutch State Railways to form the Western Railway, Dadar West station continued to be called BB Dadar and Dadar East GIP Dadar. GIP stood for the Greater Indian Peninsula Railway which had started its local service in 1856.

The railways made another vital aspect of modernity possible. Women were now able to travel unaccompanied to work. Clerks travelled, nurses travelled and teachers travelled by train. Soon there was a visible upswing in the value attached to job-holding women in the lower-middle and middle-middle class marriage market. Modernity for Marathi women also meant slipping out of the nine-yard kashta lugda into the lighter six-yard sari. Although the nine-yard sari hitched up between the legs had never kept the Marathi woman from cycling, swimming or playing badminton, it announced itself as old fashioned and was seen as unwieldy for women in a hurry.

Another gift of the ‘progress of matter’ was the flush toilet. For Hindus this was not merely a modern convenience as it was say in England where it was introduced in the mid-19th century, but was fraught with problems. Once the idea of such a toilet was sold to the British people, there were no religio-cultural taboos that they needed to deal with before installing it in their homes. In Shivaji Park the acceptance of the flush toilet as a convenience was one thing, but its placement in the house quite another. Chawl dwellers had not faced any problem regarding toilets whether they were basket privies or flushing toilets. In the early days the basket privies were located safely outside the chawls from where manual scavengers lifted the excreta. Later they were located in the corridors outside the homes, as in the villages and small towns where the residents had come from. In his invaluable book House But No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs 1898-1964, Nikhil Rao gives figures for the gradual shift from basket privies to flushing toilets. The highest number of conversions occurred in 1920-21, over a decade before the Shivaji Park precinct was developed. The problem in Shivaji Park was that there was no place outside the home for toilets. Flats were advertised as self-contained which meant toilets were located inside the flats. But pollution taboos meant they could not be located anywhere in the house. For instance, not next to the kitchen. Caste rules meant that sweepers could not be allowed into the home to clean toilets. There was of course no question of residents cleaning them themselves. The toilets had therefore to be so placed as to allow sweepers to do their job without entering and thus ‘polluting’ the home.

Architects found two ways of circumventing the problem. In my sister’s parents-in-law’s flat in Engineers Colony, a narrow corridor separated the bathroom and toilet block from the living areas. The toilet was so placed as to allow the sweeper to enter it using a separate spiral staircase at the back of the building. In Lalit Estate, the bathroom was/is near the kitchen and the toilet beyond it near the front door. The toilet has two doors, one opens into the flat and the other onto the landing. When the sweeper knocks, you open the landing door, so he enters and leaves without entering the house. We used the landing door only when my grandparents lived with us. At all other times it has been kept locked with the sweeper entering the toilet through the house.