Dhobi Ghat: City’s Grime


A place in India, where local washer men wash clothes, an ‘open air laundromat’ is called Dhobi Ghat. The dhobis or the washers’ clan is a very old community found all over India. The dhobis are of diverse origin, whose ancestors took the occupation of washing clothes evolving over time into a distinct caste on its own. They are an occupational caste grouping and have been granted scheduled caste status.

The most famous Dhobi Ghat is in Mumbai where dhobis and their families work together in what has always been a hereditary occupation. Over 10,000 workers wash over 1,000,000 pieces of clothing a day, by hand, each individual standing in the soapy water near their washing stone for up to 16 hours. These are people mainly from Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh who work at the colony, living in shanties inside the colony and the adjoining locality.

The dhobis collect dirty linen, wash it, and return it neatly pressed to your doorstep all for a pittance. The clothes soaked in sudsy water, thrashed on the flogging stones, then tossed into huge vats of boiling starch and hung out to dry and finally ironed and piled into neat bundles.

Dhobi Ghat which is an integral part of the city of Mumbai is the largest of its kind of profession in the world. Men do the work of flogging machines at the vast expanse of the hutment-like colony. The land sharks have not spared the ghat which is located in a prime area. Initially the Dhobi Ghat was spread out over 22 acres but now it has shrunk to 10 acres.

Its a wonder of the historic present in the age of washing machines, an old world operating system of disposing off dirty linen in a modern city. Belonging to a lower caste, having migrated from other parts of India and toiling hard for a pittance amidst the political confrontation of being a non-maharashtrian and soon to be consumed by the machines leaving them unemployed. It contains all the elements for a tragic story of a sect of people toiling hard, incessantly cleaning the grimes of the city with no one to look after them.