Slum Residents’ Campaign for a School

Slum Residents’ Campaign for a School is a long, sometimes violent struggle for primary education in the Cuffe Parade Slum. Its partial victory makes a school possible for children shut out of nearby classrooms, but the terms of the concession expose the residents’ precarious standing: the settlement is treated as though it does not exist, and the school may have to disappear when construction ends.

Need and exclusion

The immediate need was substantial. The settlement had about eight hundred school-age children, while schools for miles around were full and unable to admit them. Residents had organized teachers and found what they considered a suitable site, yet those preparations did not secure approval. The campaign was not simply a request for a building: its outcome would determine whether children in the settlement could attend a local school at all.

The slum’s physical and political circumstances sharpened that need. Beside the Mumbai World Trade Centre Construction Site, the Cuffe Parade Slum occupied ten acres, with seven thousand small huts housing twenty-five thousand of Bombay’s poorest residents. The neighboring developments offered shops, displays, lights, and fountains; the settlement had no electricity, running water, or toilets. Its residents also lacked assurance that the authorities would continue to tolerate the settlement. Lin’s account places the school campaign within this sharp divide: a large community lived beside a prominent construction project, yet its existence remained institutionally insecure.

That insecurity shaped the authorities’ resistance. As Lin explains to Karla, officials feared that establishing a school would confer a kind of legitimacy on the slum. In legal and administrative theory, the settlement was unrecognized and therefore did not exist. Prabaker turns that contradiction into a wry description of residents as people who are not people, living in houses that are not houses. Lin extends the joke to the school: even the educational institution the residents seek can only be treated as a not-school. The humor registers a serious exclusion, in which people’s practical needs are visible but their claim to recognized civic life is contested.

Organizing and official resistance

Residents had pursued the school for years before the concession was won. They organized their own teachers and identified a place for the school, taking practical steps to make education possible before receiving municipal permission. The authorities nevertheless put up a strong fight. The account does not detail the particular confrontations, but it does state that the campaign sometimes became violent. Its long duration and the resistance it encountered distinguish the school’s eventual opening from a simple administrative favor: it followed sustained collective effort under conditions where recognition itself was at stake.

The book also depicts forms of neighborhood decision-making outside formal courts and police. In a separate dispute, a council of Hindu and Muslim neighbors settles on a shared, reparative punishment for two young men who fought over religion: each must learn a prayer from the other’s observance. Qasim Ali Hussein describes justice as both fair and forgiving, concerned not only with punishing wrongdoing but also with trying to save those who have done it. This episode is not presented as part of the school campaign, but it shows another way the community establishes rules and responds to conflict, in contrast to the municipal authority whose recognition the school requires.

A conditional victory

The campaign succeeds in securing a compromise. The municipality allows a temporary school to be set up nearby and agrees that another school will be organized soon. For the residents, that is a concrete gain after years of work: children who had been excluded by overcrowded schools can have an institution in their own vicinity. Lin describes the day as a major occasion because the community has won its school and plans to celebrate that night.

Yet the permission is explicitly provisional. The temporary schools will have to be torn down when construction is finished. Work on the nearby towers has already continued for five years, and Lin estimates that roughly three more years of construction remain, perhaps longer. Even then, nobody knows what will happen. In theory, the slum will be cleared. The arrangement therefore gives residents access to a school without settling whether their homes, community, or educational provision will be allowed to remain. The same building project that supplies the timetable for the school’s possible removal leaves the settlement’s future unresolved.

Community meaning and narrative role

The school victory is presented alongside two celebrations. While residents prepare to mark the campaign’s success, a man who works in the settlement is hosting a special lunch because he has finally had a son after five daughters; everyone is invited. The two occasions are distinct, but their coincidence places public organizing within the everyday life of the community. The campaign’s achievement is not abstract: it matters to families and children who share a neighborhood already marked by uncertain housing and scarce services.

Lin explains the campaign to Karla, while Prabaker’s wordplay gives its exclusion a memorable form. The contrast between a school residents have organized and an officially unrecognized settlement clarifies what the struggle is about: education, but also the ability to make a collective need count in the eyes of authority. The residents win a school, not security for the place where it stands. That qualified outcome gives the episode its force: collective action can win practical change, yet the terms of recognition remain controlled by institutions capable of withdrawing it.