page_title: Girangaon
section_title: Life in Girangaon
hierarchical_section_title: Girangaon / Life in Girangaon
caption_attribution_description: This is an image from my new play Cotton 56, Polyester 84 that tells the story of the cotton mill district of Mumbai city, India. Kaka and Bhausaheb, mill workers who have lost their jobs, relate the story of their lives. The mill district in Mumbai has been one of the important factors for Mumbai's prosperity and cosmopolitan character. It is in the news because of the controversial sale of lands the old mills stood on. Mill workers who lost their jobs when the mills shut down want some of the money from the sale to go to them and their families. They also want some of the land to be used to build low cost housing for them. Citizens groups support their demand and want some of the land to be made into open spaces for the city. But the government and the builders' lobby wants to convert as much land as possible into shopping malls and entertainment centres.
context_page_description: Girangaon was a name of an area now part of central Mumbai, India, which at one time had almost 130 textile mills, with the majority being cotton mills. The mills of Girangaon contributed significantly to the prosperity and growth of Mumbai during the later nineteenth century and for the transformation of Mumbai into a major industrial metropolis. Girangaon covered an area of 600 acres, not including the workers' housing. The mill workers lived in a community, and they fostered a unique culture which shaped Mumbai at the turn of the twentieth century. This textile industry flourished until the early 2000s after which most of the mills were shut down, as the owners deemed them unprofitable and declared they were incapable of paying their workers' wages.
context_section_description: Both men and women worked in the mills. They would start working there at a young age (some as young as 16), and worked 12 hours a day (from sunrise to sunset) until the passing of the Factories Act of 1847 restricted the working day to 10 hours. When the Great Bombay Textile Strike was declared in 1982 by Datta Samant, there were an estimated 240,000 workers in Girangaon.
  90% of the population who worked at the mills lived within a 15-minute walking distance of them. Most of the buildings were chawls; a survey conducted in Parel in 1921 determined that 27% of the population in Parel lived in rooms with six or more people. These chawls were built by both the government and the mill owners, but neither paid much attention to the quality of the housing. In 1929, one chawl in Dadar was described as being a "dark, unwholesome den into which the light of day does not penetrate and which of necessity breeds disease and pestilence." Often the rooms did not have adequate ventilation, and the lack of lavatory and washing facilities distressed the women in particular. The windows were kept closed to keep out the stench of the gutters and to keep dirty water from flowing into the house during the monsoon season.
  Due to this overcrowding, the distinction between home and street was blurred; Girangaon residents spent more of their time on the street than in the home. There was great participation in communal festivals like Moharram, Ganesh Chaturthi and Gokulashtami. Local shop keepers and mill owners were often coerced into contributing to such festivals, and adjoining localities competed with each other in the grandness of their contributions. The local liquor shop or gymnasium was a common meeting place. The workers of Girangaon patronized arts like poetry, theatre and dance (tamasha). Several notable actors first found fame here.
caption: Scene from a popular 2007 play "Cotton 56 Polyester 84" by Sunil Shanbag about life in Girangaon
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