Living in India’s Slums, ed. Hans Schnek, 2001

Living in India’s Slums, ed. Hans Schnek, 2001
Chapter 3: An Inventory and Typology of Slums in Bangalore

I found this chapter to be a good parallel to the other reading I did for the week from Poor in Urban India because it also is focused on a particular city…this time Bangalore. I think after reading about some other cities, that I will be able to draw some interesting connections and distinctions between cities.

This chapter starts out with something I found very interesting: they couldn’t come up with a comprehensive list of slums in Bangalore. There was no existing authentic list, and some lists that were made were so varied that any list’s validity was called into question. The author pointed out that this was largely a matter of interpretation because the definition of a slum is not something that is necessarily clearly defined. Therefore, for this paper, the author said, “The operational definition of slums followed in this paper is the residents own perception of slums. Clusters of kutcha/semi-pukka dwellings which the residents themselves consider as their habitat have thus been included in this inventory.” (51) I thought that this definition was very true to the field of anthropology but I question how adequate it is in actually critically analyzing slums because there would be no standard. I do not know how to address this issue or whether it is actually an issue or not.

Another thing that I learned from this reading is that there are levels to slums. At some level, I am sure that I already knew this, but it is just something that needed to be brought to the surface for me. I never really thought about the fact that some slums would be considered “very poor” whereas others wouldn’t. I would have necessarily thought that ALL slums are very poor but I guess that is just because I have never seen real slums and seen them in contrast to each other. Therefore, this reading was good for me because it made me see aspects of what a slum is, in a very small part at least, and shows me how short the typical American’s world view can be.