THE LEATHER ARCHIVE OF INDIA

Bombay grew rapidly in the 1860s after it took hold of the global cotton market during the American Civil War (1861-1865). While Bombay fell into an economic recession after cotton demand dropped after the opening of American markets following the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the finishing of a transcontinental railway line to Calcutta in 1870 placed Bombay at the centre of this newly-built trading channel from Europe to the depths of India. It was in the midst of this flurry of industrial activity that the British started worrying about the waste that was accumulating in the streets of the southern commercial distinct of Mumbai and established the first waste infrastructure in the coastal city by organizing the transportation of street sweepings (consisting of human and animal waste, industrial dust and debris, and tons of garbage) to the northern parts of the city that had been designated as wastelands by the British. Accumulating waste laid the literal groundwork for the British to transform the swampy marshes of northern Mumbai into reclaimed and propertied land for industrial use. By the 1870s, the Bombay Municipal Corporation had relegated its polluting industries to these newly-consolidated wastelands, including all of the small-scale leather workshops, slaughterhouses, and smoke-emitting industries that had opened up in the southern commercial district of colonial Bombay during the previous decade. In 1896, it was the Bombay Municipal Slaughterhouse at the heart of these polluting wastelands that was selected to served as a temporary hospital to segregate residents who had fallen from the plague and were widely seen as pollutants themselves. This spatial clustering of waste and pollution into adjacent districts laid the groundwork for the village of Dharavi to emerge not only as a hub for leatherworking and industrial activity during the late 19th century, but to become an important urban growth centre that was leading the recycling of plastic and metal waste by the late 20th century. During the 20th century, Indians from across the subcontinent flocked to the marshy wastelands and industrial outskirts of Mumbai in search of better futures. Refusing to cathect the spatial designations proffered by the British colonial office, they remade these districts to suit their own needs and desires producing what social scientists, urban planners, and other neo-colonial researchers have attempted to once again contain and variably described these areas as “slums” (which likely derives from the word “slump” to describe areas that fallen or slumped out of civilized society) and “informal economies” (to insinuate their inability to participate in civilized forms of economic relation). Refusing to see Dharavi as a wasteland that has turned into a slumped entity or sphere of uncivilized economic action, Foundation Chamar looks toward the open-ended scientific research and experimentation that entrepreneurial residents of these areas have conducted with waste and pollution since the 19th century to see Dharavi and the Government Leather Working School as driving forces in the field of recycling, pollution and waste management sciences who have inspired our boundary crossing work with rubber tire waste, VOCs and other un/touch/able matter. 

The Government Leather Working School in colonial Bombay was opened by the Department of Industries in 1937 as an extension to the tanning demonstration parties that it had been placing in each of the revenue districts of the province for extended periods of approximately six months since 1934. The purpose of these tanning demonstration parties was to exhibit the modern colonial techniques of leatherwork and impel leather working men from the rural villages who belonged to a number of tribes and castes to adopt these industrialized practices of leatherwork. The British hoped that modern industrial leatherwork with its martial emphasis on regimented industrial progresses, the slaughter of cows and the physics of balance would help men from the Chamar and Dhor castes to prove the fitness of their manhood and cultivate a civilized “esprit de corps” so that they might partake in modern fraternal liberal relations. In its annual reports, the Department of Industries dedicated an entire section to describing the activities of each of the six tanning demonstration parties, going into details about the success of their reformatory activities that sought to standardize and transform local leather tanning practices so that the Chamar and leatherworks would abandon their vices, debts, and feelings of shame to better compete on the European market of leather goods where leather was adjudicated primarily by hide quality, softness and durability, dyeing style and consistency of colour, and finally finishing. Revenue district collectors issued grants to support the establishment of tanneries in the villages under the condition that the local inhabitants would adopt the practices demonstrated by the colonial regime. Many of the Chamar and Dhor leatherworkers from the rural villages of the Bombay Presidency derived leather from the skin of cows, sheep and goats who had died of natural causes by dragging the cattle outside of the village limits where they could be flayed under the dictates of Brahmanical caste conventions. It was the colonial tanning demonstration parties who took issue with this practice due to the damage caused to the cow’s skin by dragging its carcass across the ground and pressed for the slaughter of cows because they delivered leather skins that were younger and stronger, which were considered to be higher quality in the European markets. When the tanning demonstrators brought forward these concerns, the Department of Industries responded by first distributing handcarts for the transport of dead cattle outside of city limits to each of the revenue districts in the province and then settling up slaughterhouses where possible or otherwise connecting rural leatherworkers with urban slaughterhouses. These activities are examples of how modern tanning practices profoundly altered the life and political economy of the cows in colonial India at the same time as they crafted modern religious boundaries and by doing so, fuelled an anti-colonial politics of cow protection that quickly turned into horrific episodes of religious and caste-based violence against Dalits and Muslims.

In 1937, the Department of Industries published its first education brochure about the benefits of chromium tanning. Translated into Marathi, Gujarati and Kanarese, the brochure detailed the wonderful marvels of synthetic chemistry for the villagers of the Bombay Presidency. Widely circulated by the tanning demonstration parties, the brochure was designed to encourage villagers to turn toward the burgeoning market of chemical goods for their tanning activities rather than using the locally available materials that they had long used to tan the animal hides, namely turwad and babool bark, or a sticky substance known as ghatbor that is produced using the fruit of the jujube tree. While bark tanning (otherwise known as vegetable tanning) used open vats for its procedure, the British induced locals to adopt closed tanning methods that used sealed bags to increase the chemical contact between the tannins and the hides in process, acting as a temporarily enclosed catalyst until the highly-concentrated chromium tanning liquid would be disposed in local waterways and readily convert into its more toxic form of hexavalent chromium. Moreover, while leatherworkers from the villages had previously only used natural pigments to colour the hides after completing the tanning process, the tanning demonstration parties introduced synthetic dyes produced by the major chemical manufacturers of Europe. These synthetic dyes that were derived from by-products of the petrol industry expanded the range of colourful possibilities for leather artisans while simultaneously releasing carcinogens and other synthetic chemical compounds (rendered volatile through the extractive practices of colonial capitalism) into the tanneries of rural India and by extension, into the bodies of the leather workers who operated them.