Dhobi Ghat, a Mumbai Experience

Mumbai has many unusual sites that most people don’t see in their daily lives. I will chronicle some of them in this blog to point out how different lives can be here. One of the things we were told to go see is a place called Dhobi Ghat. Dhobi Ghat is basically an outdoor Laundromat staffed by up to 10,000 people, so its size and scope is beyond what most can imagine. The locals tell me that when the British were here they wanted locals to clean their uniforms. Since the people here were not expert enough, the British imported some people from Northern India to do this work. This began the development of a migrant community which over the years has grown in amazing numbers. Now that the British are gone, the laundry business has two locations, one for commercial companies like hospitals, hotels, clothing manufacturers and another for locals to get their clothes cleaned.





While there are some machines present for spinning clothes to extract water, much work is done by hand. Of course, since there’s no OSHA here, some of the job related injuries leave permanent marks. For our photographic interest, there are places where the saris are cleaned and the color combinations are brilliant.






Another interesting activity is the “agitation” process. Most people use washing machines with this cycle that soaps the garment, adds some water and slowly rotates the center core back and forth spreading the soap. At Dhobi Ghat, this is a manual process. They use a brush to scrub soap into the garment and then lift a small number of them and smash them against a big flat rock called a flogging stone. Not the job I’m looking for but if you can slow down your shutter speed, the camera reveals some real interesting photos. Note: None of these have Photoshop tricks in them, what you see is what the camera captured.







And then finally, a video of some of this amazing place...