Mumbai's textiles past is getting knit together

The mill workers exited the gates of India United Mills 2 and 3 at Kalachowkie a long time ago, but the muster chowky where they marked their attendance, now musty and decrepit, still stands. Once the city’s first textiles museum that’s coming up on this 11-acre plot in the heart of Girangaon (Village of the Mills) opens, this will also be the spot from which a new generation will enter – this time with a ticket, for a window to a world now a part of the city’s past, when the textile industry was the biggest provider of employment in urbs prima Indis.
A wobbly board bearing the name of ‘KD Madane, registrar’ hangs along the wall here, immortalising at least one of the people who worked on the premises, if not all those who trooped in, in 3 shifts: 7am to 3pm, 3pm to 11pm and 11pm to 7am. Next to it is a clinic where a family planning doctor offered advice every Tuesday. All this, of course, is in a one-storey administrative building; there are 16 more, bigger, buildings along the stretch, of which close to 9, all Heritage I to II B structures, will be restored to recreate a bygone era and the rest pulled down and rebuilt.
One of the buildings has a massive, empty hall where lie strewn spindles and piles of cotton, along with a board meant to inform workers of bucketfuls of water that used to be kept ready nearby in case fire broke out. The hall, which opens up to an area where trucks unloaded the cotton they’d bring in, will be turned by the BMC into an amphitheatre that will showcase the life of a textile worker.
Along the path is a pond, now filled with algae but once a provider of water, situated bang opposite the workers’ canteen so they could look on as they took brief chai breaks from grinding work or ate the dabbas that came from home. Water from the pond was used for firefighting, and an underground water tunnel carried it to the area where cotton was turned into cloth, the process requiring it at various stages.
The BMC’s plans for the museum were stuck since 2009 and took off only last year. Work will happen in three phases, and the first, which includes landscaping, cafeteria and the amphitheatre, is underway and set to be completed and opened in 2 years. According to Idzes Kundan, additional municipal commissioner overseeing the project, Phase II will involve building a musical water fountain within the pond, restoration of the mostly basalt structures in order to highlight how work unfolded and how mill workers led their lives and the organising of dialogues on development of textiles. The restored structures will have a textiles museum, a library, an auditorium, space for art exhibitions and a public plaza. The total cost is about Rs300 crore, with the first phase costing Rs7 crore; the BMC made a budget provision of Rs25 crore for the museum last year.
And not all the history has vanished. A mill worker, Pravin Ghag, told TOI he worked as a clerk close to the muster chowky. “I had close ties with most mill workers as I was not just supposed to keep attendance but to ensure leave records were up to date,” he recalled. Hopefully, the museum will also end stories of robberies inside the complex. In one robbery post-2010, cast-iron rods supporting various structures were taken away. Sources said the rods would have fetched a huge price. “Ever since the mill shut, no one came in regularly, so someone cleverly cut the rods in such a manner that the whole structure wouldn’t come crashing down,” said one official.