Dharavi

Where it sits. Dharavi occupies just over 2.39 square kilometres — about 590 acres — of central Mumbai, wedged between the Western and Central suburban railway lines near Mahim and Sion, with the Mithi River along one edge. Around a million people live there, giving a density above 418,000 per square kilometre and making it one of the most crowded pieces of inhabited land on earth. Its position is the reason it matters commercially and politically: it sits in the geographic middle of the city, minutes from the Bandra Kurla Complex financial district, on land whose market value bears no relation to the incomes of the people on it.

The story behind it. In the eighteenth century this was a mangrove island fished by the Koli community, and it was known as Koliwada. As Bombay's population passed half a million in the 1850s the colonial government pushed the most polluting trades out of the peninsula; the first tannery moved to Dharavi in 1887, and leather workers — largely from the lowest Hindu castes and from Muslim communities — followed. Kumbhar potters from Gujarat arrived and were granted a ninety-nine-year land lease in 1895; their quarter, Kumbharwada, still fires pottery in wood kilns. Embroiderers from Uttar Pradesh started the ready-made garment trade. The settlement is conventionally dated to 1884, and by independence in 1947 it was the largest slum in the country. None of it was planned. Housing and workshops grew together with no provision for drainage, water or roads, which is the origin of the sanitation problems that persist. A plague in 1896 killed more than half the population of Bombay, and Dharavi has taken the brunt of the city's epidemics since.

What it actually is. Calling Dharavi a slum obscures what is happening inside it. It is a dense industrial district where households are also factories: leather tanning and finishing, garment stitching, pottery, food production, and above all recycling — Dharavi processes an enormous share of Mumbai's plastic, aluminium, cardboard and electronic waste, sorted, shredded, melted and re-pelletised by hand in the 13th Compound. Estimates put the settlement's annual turnover above one billion US dollars as of 2009. It is also intensely mixed: Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Uttar Pradeshi and Bihari communities living alongside each other, with Hindu temples, mosques and churches within metres. Dharavi's first Hindu temple, the Ganesh Mandir, was built in 1883, and its oldest mosque, the Badi Masjid, opened in 1887. Redevelopment schemes have been floated since the 1950s and none has been carried through; the current one is the largest and most contested yet.

On screen. Dharavi has an unusually deep filmography. Danny Boyle used it as the backdrop for Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which shot in Mumbai's largest slum and in shanty areas near Juhu, with Boyle openly citing the twelve-minute chase through Dharavi in Black Friday as the model for his own opening sequence. Zoya Akhtar's Gully Boy (2019) is the more thoroughly local film: Ranveer Singh plays Murad, a rapper from Dharavi, in a story drawn from the lives of the Mumbai street rappers DIVINE and Naezy, shot on location between January and April 2018, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on 9 February 2019 and selected as India's Academy Award entry that year. The neighbourhood also appears in Deewaar (1975), Nayakan (1987), Salaam Bombay! (1988), Parinda (1989), Dharavi (1992), Bombay (1995), Traffic Signal (2007), Aamir (2008) and Kaala (2018), and was the subject of Channel 4's Slumming It in 2010 and the German documentary Dharavi, Slum for Sale (2009).

Visiting responsibly. Guided walking tours have run here since the mid-2000s and are genuinely contested — some residents regard them as intrusive, and the phrase poverty tourism is used with reason. If you go, go with an operator that employs local guides, returns a stated share of the fee to community programmes, and enforces a no-photography rule in residential lanes. Do not wander in alone with a camera. Tours typically cover the recycling compound, a pottery yard, a papadum-drying terrace and a garment workshop, and take about two and a half hours through lanes that are frequently under a metre wide and unlit.

Getting there and timing. Mahim Junction and Sion stations on the suburban network both border the settlement, and the 90 Feet Road and 60 Feet Road cut through it. November to February is the only comfortable season for walking; April and May are hot and airless in enclosed lanes, and the June to September monsoon floods parts of the settlement, which is a bad time to add visitors. Mornings on weekdays are when the workshops are working and the visit makes sense.