Under The Skin – Dharavi’s Lost Leather Artisans

Barbaric city sick with slums,

Deprived of seasons, blessed with rains

Its hawkers, beggars, iron-lunged

Processions led by frantic drums,

A million purgatorial lanes,

And child-like masses, many-tongued,

Whose wages are in words and crumbs.

I hear these words from Nissim Ezekkiel’s poem The Unfinished Man in my head as I look at Saju Kunhan’s topographical artwork, Old Mumbai. My grandparents migrated from Tamil Nadu to Mumbai in the early 1950s, and Kunhan’s body of work enquiring into themes of ancestry and migration speak to my own identity as a third-generation ‘Bombay Tamil’ with roots in Dharavi.

In Kalpana Sharma’s concisely researched account, Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum (2000), the author highlights the tremendous cultural diversity contained in this Mumbai neighbourhood. My own childhood memories attest to this. Walking into Dharavi felt like visiting my native place, Naduvaikulam, near Kalakkad, in Tamil Nadu. Tamil on signboards, small shrines housing Pillayar (Lord Ganesha) and Amman (Goddesses), the veshti-wearing statue outside Kamrajar School, and women wearing big gold thaalis to signal their marital status.

But there were other memories too. Of my father proudly stating that leather products made in Dharavi were the best in western India. Of the sight—and smell—of streets where hairy, woolly animal pelts were hung to dry. Of the chemical smell rising from the row of karkhanas and stores where leather was processed and sold. The history of my community is tied to the legacy of Dharavi’s famous, now-extinct tanneries.

Making Dharavi

Dharavi was formed by carving out parts of Bandra, Mahim, and Sion. Previously a dumping ground, Dharavi had by the 20^th century become home to over 20,000 small-scale industries and several communities, who migrated from within the growing city and outside. Among these, the Tamil migration to Dharavi has an interesting and unique trajectory. There are records of Tamil speakers arriving in Bombay dating to the late-1800s. However, a major influx started in the 1950s, seeking work in mills and tanneries. Among them was my great-uncle N Shanmugarajan, who migrated to Dharavi in 1952 from Tirunelveli. He says, “There were two major pull places for employment for Tamil makkal (people)—Columbu (Colombo) in Sri Lanka and Bambai (Bombay) in India.”

Boom time

Tirthankar Roy observes in his 1994 paper, Foreign trade and the artisans in colonial India: A study of leather, “Leather was probably the most important of the quasi-services that became commercialised during the colonial period.” Tanning used to be a rural industry but by the end of the 19th century, India had become one of the world’s largest exporters of tanned hides. This necessitated a spread to the cities. Tanners have to live around cattle because rawhide must be retrieved and cured within hours of the animal’s death. Due its proximity to the abattoirs and leather-working centres of Bandra and Deonar, Dharavi became the logical location for tanneries.

In the Plague Visitation album, we see tannery workers photographed outside Bombay Municipal Slaughter House in Deonar. Their skullcaps identify the men as Muslims. As V Ashok Kumar, a second-generation resident of Dharavi and tannery owner, puts it: “Tannery Dharavi la start pannunadhe namma Tamilargal thaan.” (“Tamil Muslims were the first to establish tanneries in Dharavi.”) In the late 1800s, Muslim tanners from Madras and workers from Tirunelveli migrated to Bombay. “There was also a community called Dhor in Maharashtra that worked in the tanneries. They used to speak the Dhori language,” says Ashok Kumar. What started with Tamils continued and extended to other communities from different regions. By the 1970s, more Chamars from the north migrated to Bombay to work in the tanneries owned by Tamils.

Tirunelveli is popular for its halwa (wheat pudding) and aruvaal (billhook machete), but it’s also known for being a hot-bed of caste-based discrimination. Dalits from here moved to Mumbai not just seeking employment but an escape from the violence.

Legend has it that the Kolis of Dharavi gave a piece of land to the Muslims to build the Badi Masjid in 1887. Following this, Dalit workers also bought a piece of land by pooling in their savings and built a Ganesha temple that is 112 years   old today. These holy sites are symbols of their peoples’ history in the city. Dharavi’s identity was also majorly shaped by the community that earned it the moniker of ‘chinna Tamil Nadu’. Shanmugarajan sums this up perfectly in Tamil-Hindi: “Namma Tamil makkal poora inge thaane irundhanga.” (“Our Tamil people were all here.”) Locals speak a blend of Hindi, Marathi and Tamil, evident in the word ‘Tholwadi.’

Tholwadis are areas in Dharavi where tanneries are concentrated. This portmanteau is derived from the Tamil word ‘Tholu’ meaning skin or hide and the Marathi word ‘Wadi’ meaning hamlet. Almost every lane in Dharavi used to have a tannery, where animal skin was processed to make leather. These were typically one-story structures with a mezzanine floor. Hides were dried in the sun on their patra (tin-sheet) rooftops. A common sight around the neighbourhood was huge blue plastic drums filled with hide soaking in chemical solution.

Caste & craft

The Rig Veda and later Vedic texts refer to the craft of tanning (referred to as ‘carman’) and to articles of leatherwork (‘carmamna’). These articles include containers for wine, meat, curd, and water; straps for yoking chariots, whiplashes, slings, and bowstrings; and shoes made of leather. Vivekanand Jha , in his article,  Leather Workers in Ancient India and Early Medieval India (1979), points out that there was “no sharp class division in the Rig Vedic society. Since the majority of occupations came into being in the later Vedic period, castes were not stratified yet and demarcated from each other by rules related to endogamy, hierarchy and restrictions on food and social intercourse.” He argues that leather work enjoyed professional dignity: “Carmamna did not communicate impurity through touch or contact.”

Leather has also been an artistic medium for centuries. Indian storytelling traditions like Tholubommalaata and Tholpavakoothu centre around leather puppets made from goat skin. It is also used to make traditional percussion instruments, like the tabla and mridangam. Despite leather’s longevity as a material, the people who craft it have over time been pushed into the margins of society.

It is usually people from Muslim and Dalit communities who work in tanneries. Among the latter, specific castes are involved with leatherwork: Chamars in North India, Madigas and Chakkiliyans from Telugu and Tamil areas, Mochis in Gujarat, and Mahars and Dhors in the Deccan. Sudheer Rajbhar, founder of the Chamar Studio, says, “Mere papa kaha karte the Chamar ka matlab ‘cha’ se chamda, ma se maas, aur ra se rakht.” (“My father used to say that ‘Chamar’ comes from the words for hide (chamda), flesh (maas) and blood (rakht).”) But unlike a surgeon who also deals with the same corporeal elements, a leatherworker is deemed “dirty” due to casteist notions of purity in Indian society.

Drum circle

Dharavi’s tanneries started to disappear for a variety of reasons. Some were relocated to Deonar for environmental reasons; the chemicals used in the process can be hazardous to health. Others were replaced by high-rise buildings in a city that’s always starved for space. Political and economic upheavals like the 2016 demonetisation and the beef ban of 2019 dealt deathblows to an industry that was already fading.

Sudheer Rajbhar works closely with Chamar artisans from Dharavi who lost their livelihoods with the shuttering of the Tholwadis. Chamar Studio works to change how traditional Indian leatherworking skills are perceived in the fashion market. Referring to the ambitious Dharavi Redevelopment Project that’s currently underway in the city, Rajbhar says, “I’m not against development but development of what? Imagine if we developed craftsmanship and communities. Imagine if Dharavi had incubators for the craft of leatherworking.”

Many Tamil tannery workers who migrated to Dharavi belonged to the Pariah community, who came to identify later as Adi-Dravidians. ‘Pariah’ comes from the Tamil word ‘Parayan’ used to refer to the drummers who played during death rites. The tanners who made processed hide and crafted drums also became skilled at playing them. To connect to this history, the art collective Neelam Kalai Kulu performs the traditional Parai Attam dance on the streets of Dharavi. For me, as a third-generation Bombay-Tamil, such joyful assertions of identity are a call to reclaim my family’s history and preserve it from the fate of the lost tanneries.

 

References

Shanmugarajan, Dharavi Interview, 2024

Ashok Kumar, Dharavi, Interview, 2024

Sudhir Rajbhar, Mumbai, Interview, 2024

Sharma Kalpana, Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum, Penguin Books, 2000

Tirthankar Roy, Foreign trade and the artisans in colonial India: A study of leather, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research Bombay, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 31, 4, 1994

Jha, V., Leather Workers in Ancient and Early Medieval India, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 40, 1979

Ezekiel Nissim, Collected Poems, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2005

Nikhil Latagajanan, The Sound of Fury, 2019

Manuraj Shunmugasundaram, Once a Pariah, Business Standard, 2015

Dharavi’s Kala Qilla, weathered by time and negligence, lives on due to local community’s effort, Devyani Nighoskar, FirstPost

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