The furnaces heat continuously, spreading acrid smoke to the top floor of Yusuf Galwani’s workshop, a three-story house accessed by steep iron stairs. They bake diyas, small terracotta candlesticks and oil lamps. Placed one floor below, they will soon be used by Hindus for Divali, the festival of lights, celebrated each year between late October and early November. The season of religious festivities has begun in India and, for Yusuf Galwani, it marks the climax of his activity. The artisan exports his products all over the world and employs seven potters who also shape large ornamental vessels for the main hotels in Bombay.
The renowned potter is not based in an exclusive neighborhood, but in Dharavi, the largest slum in Asia, with almost a million inhabitants and extreme density in the heart of Mumbai: more than 350,000 inhabitants per square kilometer. This city within a city offers an extraordinary variety of religions, castes, languages, provinces and ethnicities. A concentrate of India, both precarious and happy, with a thriving informal economy, far from the sordid image conveyed in the film Slumdog Millionairethat made him famous.
The 240 hectares of Dharavi form a labyrinth of alleys, where small adjoining brick houses fit together: temples, mosques, churches and some 20,000 specialized companies and workshops. From here come leather goods, suitcases, backpacks, textiles, clothing, pottery and papadums (thin, crispy bread cakes that dry in the sun in huge upturned baskets). The neighborhood also recycles, in noisy workshops from another century, old machines, car parts, oil cans, chemical drums, bottles: everything that the city has rejected. The global annual turnover of the companies is estimated at one billion dollars (approximately 920 million euros).
The Smoking Potters District (Kumbharwada), where Yusuf Galwani lives, has about 2,500 families. With his three brothers he inherited his parents’ house. He was born here, he never knew any other environment, but his future is uncertain. The government of Maharashtra, led by a coalition close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, entrusted, after a tender, in November 2022, a project to renovate the neighborhood to Indian tycoon Gautam Adani.
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