Development often comes at a price. In the rush to build something new, societies can lose part of themselves. This has become an issue in Mumbai, where developers are encroaching on the World Heritage-listed Dhobi Ghat, regarded as the world’s largest outdoor laundry.
While the traditional space of 731 washing stones has been preserved, much of the rest of the land has been sold off for badly needed housing. Certainly life for many dhobi wallahs will be different.
There is of course a rough beauty to the space: multicoloured fabrics swaying in the breeze, cleaned by families who have worked there for generations. But that romantic image is belied by a more prosaic reality, of extreme physical labour and clothes that need to be dried on open ground, making them dirty. The truth is that washing machines and driers simply do the job faster and better. There will always be a place for cleaning by hand. But that space, like the Dhobi Ghat itself, is shrinking.
