Book Review: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
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Quite a passionately and poetically written book, so grippingly written that it feels much more like fiction than creative non-fiction. Katherine Boo spent a long time in the slums of Mumbai, researching her subjects and picking the focal characters with a great deal of thought. Virtually everyone in this book is at least somewhat sympathetic, even the ones who do horrible things to one another. The book’s apparent thesis, that desparate poverty coupled with sharp inequality engenders terrible anti-social behavior, comes home again and again. My one qualm is the degree to which Boo harps on the theme of corruption. Every single aid group, government program, or pro-social initiative is undermined by bribery or embezzlement, and Boo very nearly relishes the chance to point that out. She may be right, but it’s a bit tiring.
The cleverly chosen eponymous setting is a slum filled with some of Mumbai’s poorest residents, hidden from a sparkling new airport-and-hotel complex by a billboard for Italian luxury goods. It’s such a perfect symbol that I was at first convinced this story was a novel; but no, it’s just plain, unfair reality. Boo’s generous description and her power to zoom in or out of her story makes it easy, and more than a little heartbreaking, to see this picture of global economic equality brought into sharp relief.
I of course was fascinated by the political machinations just beneath the surface of the story. Without really very much knowledge of Indian political history, I found the story to be an interesting microcosmic study of the push-and-pull of different ideological and socioeconomic forces. On the one hand are constitutional protections for women and underprivileged castes, enshrining the egalitarian ethos of the decades-old independence movement. On the other hand is corruption and outright fraud which undercuts those protections, in this case exploited by a Hindu nationalist party (the Shiv Sena, a truly frightening group). And then again there is the social infrastructure which supports the Shiv Sena, a network of neighbors and friends who are tied in to the party mainly by local economic forces that are not remotely ideological. And on the other other other hand - these people, the grassroots of Shiv Sena as it were, are not exactly politically correct liberals; they have their religious and regional prejudices, too. So who, ultimately, is responsible for this disastrous ideological force in Indian politics? Who knows, it’s a complicated web, but one which Boo’s excellent narration helps untangle a bit.
For anyone who cares to understand daily life in India, or who cares to learn something about global poverty in the face of rapid development (and in the face of crippling recession), this book is an excellent place to start. It’s only a microcosm of larger forces at play, but it’s wonderfully written and a well-chosen story.