Dalits and Housing: Dwelling in a Metropolis, Living in Ghettoes, 1928–70

The urban migrations of ‘untouchables’ (dalits) to the city of Mumbai (Bombay) in the late 19th and the 20th centuries was a process that transformed ‘untouchable’ selfhoods and fashioned new social imaginaries. The ostensible anonymity of urban spaces – of modern modes of transport, of shared rhythms of work in mills, docks, and railways, of dwelling in the metropolis, of eating in restaurants and walking in the city – opened the spaces in which the polluting touch of the ‘untouchable’ became inscrutable. And yet, the promise of emancipation in the city came to be frequently re-evaluated when ‘untouchables’ were denied housing in particular  localities, restricted to menial jobs in the urban economy, and could not escape their ‘untouchable’ status even in communist trade unions. The paper highlights how the question of housing and claims to urban space were integral to the cultural politics of dalits in the city. It draws on housing reports, archival sources, pamphlets, newspapers, dalit autobiographies, ethnographic accounts of upper caste social workers, and oral interviews to highlight how housing and living conditions in the city became key sites of struggles. The paper foregrounds ‘dignity’ as an important conceptual category in the struggle for urban space. Dignity, the paper argues, indexes a critique of capitalist production of urban space and an imagined way of living in the city.