Villages in the City: The Gramastha Mandals of Mumbai

Drawing on a year’s fieldwork in the Mumbai BDD Chawls neighborhood, this paper analyses an urban migration phenomenon called the gramastha mandal. Gramastha mandals are village-run committees that buy chawl (tenement) rooms and rent them to single male migrants from their own villages. Save a few studies and cursory references, gramastha mandals have received limited academic attention, especially in today’s climate of economic liberalization following the widespread closure of Mumbai’s cotton mills. Through an examination of gramastha mandal living arrangements, working patterns and social activities, I answer three broad questions. Firstly, how have the gramastha mandals been impacted by the closure of the mills that once provided a major source of employment? Secondly how does living in a gramastha mandal room impact migrants’ relationships with the city around them and, thirdly, how does this arrangement perpetuate societal divisions from the village? I suggest that most gramastha mandal residents remain more part of their villages than of Mumbai’s social structures, and that this alienation has increased since the mills closed and opportunities for forging a working-class urban solidarity correspondingly declined. Moreover, through strict eligibility criteria, gramastha mandals replicate, rather than erode, village fault-lines between caste Hindu and Dalit Buddhist communities, a phenomenon that shows only limited signs of changing.