Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo; Penguin; Price: Rs.499; 254 pp Arguably the world’s most examined and analysed urban conglomeration, the western India city of Mumbai aka ‘slumbai’, because half its population lives in degrading squalor which would have challenged the descriptive powers of novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), whose emotional evocations of the wretched slums of Victorian Britain (Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol) and of Paris on the eve of the French Revolution (Tale of Two Cities) did much to arouse the dormant conscience of the British establishment in the 18th century. Unfortunately, despite over half a century of political independence and supposedly huge progress made in lifting millions of people out of poverty, Indian society has not yet been able to produce writers, reform pamphleteers or academics capable of sufficiently stimulating intelligent response to the worsening problem of urban blight, and widening disparities between rich and poor in urban India. Curiously, the appalling living conditions of inhabitants of Mumbai’s squalid slums where the everyday frenzied struggle for survival of an estimated 8 million free India’s citizens mocks the grand aspirations encapsulated in the Constitution of India, seems to prick the conscience of foreigners and non-resident Indians much more than it does of native academics and writers. Among the recent writers who have captured the vice and iniquity of contemporary Mumbai are US-based Suketu Mehta (Maximum City, 2004); Australian writer Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram, 2003) and most recently Katherine Boo, a staff writer of the New Yorker and former editor of the Washington Post. Reacting to a “shortage in India-based non-fiction: of deeply reported accounts about how ordinary low-income people — particularly women and children — were negotiating the age of global markets,” Boo spent over three years observing, reporting and documenting the lives of the residents of Annawadi, a slum habitation encircled by the gleaming new Mumbai International airport and several five-star hotels, by way of “written notes, video recordings and audio tape”, and accessing over “three thousand public records, many of them obtained after years of petitioning government agencies under India’s landmark Right to Information Act” to write Behind The Beautiful Forevers (a reference to an advertisement for flooring tiles on a wall hiding the slum from public view). Let’s frankly admit it, writing about how the poor survive within an increasingly corrupt and oppressive system is unlikely to interest indigenous newly-rich academics or journalists. Deep within the collective Indian mindset is the belief that the poor have themselves to blame for their poverty. If only they studied and worked hard! But what about the reality that teachers don’t show up for work in crumbling government schools, and what’s written in government-sponsored textbooks is often factually erroneous and ungrammatical? And what about the fact that wages are low (Rs.28 per day vaults a citizen over the poverty line)? Details, details… Admirably, Boo has devoted herself to investigating these mundane details which exasperate the Indian middle class, scholars (and journalists). In Annawadi and its environs, the extremes of human existence come alive.…
