Chawls have been themes for films and have inspired several creative people. Seema Sinha journeys into the psyche of community living

TIMES NEWS NETWORK (TIMES LIFE; February 6, 2011)

REMEMBER Basu Chatterjee’s Jaya Bhaduri-Anil Dhawan starrer Piya Ka Ghar (1972; picture on the right) in which the marriage-fixing priest creates a dreamscape in the imagination of young Malathy and her parents about the Mumbai chawl? He tells them: “The boy lives near the seashore, in a five-storey building; as kings and emperors have palaces, the people in Mumbai, the city of dreams, have chawls.”

And when the heroine of the film relocates to her screen husband’s house, in ‘Bharat Mahal’, she is shocked to find herself in a shanty room, divided two ways with the kitchen as her bedroom, and a common toilet. The efforts of the newlyweds to find privacy, intimacy and love in the obscure, noisy and cramped space form the film’s storyline.

Perhaps, people living in chawls in Mumbai do feel like kings and emperors with the common verandah, courtyard and street down below all to themselves, so what if they actually own a match-box size apartment! Check out what Nikhil Ghosalkar, a young architect living in Mumbai’s Urankarwadi chawl, Girgaum, has to say, “With the common passage, I actually feel as if I own a 27 bedroom flat! There is no uniqueness in a skyscraper whereas multipurpose space is the unique feature of community living. Chawls are our More >