Free India by V.S. Naipaul Page A

practical: he offered no visions of Bombay remade, of the chawls and shanty towns pulled down and the workers acceptably rehoused. India simply didn’t have the resources. Its urban future had already arrived, and was there, in the shanty towns, in those spontaneous communities. All that authority could add were services, ameliorative regulation, security. The shanty towns might, in effect, be planned. It was only in this way that the urban poor could be accommodated. But the idea that the poor should be accommodated at all was not yet fully accepted in Bombay. A plan to give the poor thirty-square-yard building plots in the projected twin city had run into opposition from middle-class people who had objected on social grounds – they didn’t want the poor too near – and on moral grounds – the poor would sell the plots
at a profit
and, after this immorality of profit, live where they had always lived, in the streets.
    The engineer was a Bombay man, but not a man of Maharashtra, and therefore hardly a supporter of the Shiv Sena. It was his interest in housing for the urban poor that had sent him to live for a week or so among the squatters of the mill area, queuing up with them every morning to get his water and to use the latrines. He had discovered a number of simple but important things. Communal washing areas were necessary: women spent a lot of time washing clothes (perhaps because they had so few). Private latrines were impossible; communal latrines (which might be provided by the municipality)would bring about an immediate improvement in sanitation, though children might always have to use the open.
    But the most important discovery was the extent and nature of the Shiv Sena’s control. A squatters’ settlement, a low huddle of mud and tin and tile and old boards, might suggest a random drift of human debris in a vacant city space; but the chances now were that it would be tightly organized. The settlement in which the engineer had stayed, and where we were going that morning, was full of Sena ‘committees’, and these committees were dedicated as much to municipal self-regulation as to the Sena’s politics: industrial workers beginning to apply something of the discipline of the factory floor to the areas where they lived.
    The middle-class leadership of the Sena might talk of martial glory and dream of political power. But at this lower and more desperate level the Sena had become something else: a yearning for community, an ideal of self-help, men rejecting rejection. ‘I love the municipal life.’ Gandhi had said that in the early days; but municipal self-discipline was one of those Gandhian themes that India hadn’t been able to relate to religion or the Independence movement, and hadn’t therefore required. It was the Sena now that had, as it were, ritualized the municipal need, which Independence, the industrial revolution, and the pressures of population had made urgent.
    The bus stopped, and we were just outside the settlement. It was built on a small, rocky hill above a cemetery, which was green with the monsoon; in the distance were the white skyscrapers of southern Bombay. The narrow entrance lane was flanked by latrine blocks and washing sheds. The latrine blocks were doorless, with a central white-tiled runnel on the concrete floor. They were new, the engineer said: the local Shiv Sena municipal councillor had clearly been getting things done. In one of the washing sheds children were bathing; in the other, women and girls were washing clothes.
    The entrance lane was deliberately narrow, to keep out carts and cars. And, within, space was suddenly scarce. The structures were low, very low, little doors opening into tiny, dark, single rooms,every other structure apparently a shop, sometimes a glimpse of someone on a string bed on the earth floor. Men and their needs had shrunk. But the lane was paved, with concrete gutters on either side; without that paving – which was also new – the