Jeremy Seabrook talks to Caspar Melville about life in Muslim communities in the slums of Kolkata, and paints a powerful and shocking picture of people who have suffered centuries of expropriation, loss, driven migration and involuntary separations and now find themselves at the wrong end of globalisation. The conversation draws on the study by Jeremy Seabrook and Imram Ahmed Siddiqui, People Without History (Pluto Press)

Caspar started by asking Jeremy to describe  the Kolkata slums.

Jeremy Seabrook:   The first thing you notice in the poorest part of Topsia is the canal – which is the channel for waste water.  So the first thing you notice is the smell.  The smell of decaying garbage and sewage.  It is overwhelming. The second is the way houses have been constructed out of industrial debris, old bamboo, wood, boxes, and old bags of fertiliser and phosphate, all kinds of stuff. It is a very improvised looking place.  It is very stony, the houses are very close together.  There is just about room to trundle a cart from which people are selling mouldy bananas, specked oranges, the very poor quality goods that are on sale for the people who live here.  This is perhaps one of the worst places in Kolkata.  It is very crowded, very densely populated.

As you walk in the thoroughfare, you see many people who are addicted to drugs. It is a major outlet for opium, ganga, heroin.  People are seriously addicted.  You only have to open one of the curtains in front of the huts and you can see 6,7 or 8 men who are stoned out of their minds.  It is all done in the daylight, in full view of the officials – the police, the local authority, the local communist party (though of course they have just been defeated in the elections, but it won't make any difference to these people).

The huts have very sparse interiors -  maybe an old tin chair, a trunk, a string with changes of clothing across the room, a bed roll.  Sometimes a huge wooden bed fills the whole room, on which the whole family sleeps.

And what strikes you is that everybody is working.  They are sitting on the threshold, women especially, and they are cutting away the rubber from sandals moulded in local factories.  Or they are making and selling snacks in the streets.  Everybody is doing something, even young children.

The slum areas of Kolkata have changed considerably over the 10-15 years I have been going there.  Topsia in Kolkata is an archaic form of dwelling - made of industrial rubbish.  At one time all slums were like this, but now people have got a bit better off, and they are making their houses out of tin, metal or rough brick.  Or they are renting rooms in roughly made and illegally built brick-built slums – they are illegal and could be demolished at any time.  So although it apparently looks as though the worst of the slums are being eliminated – poverty has been stacked up inside high rise dwellings.  Inside they are just as crowded, insanitary, dark, fetid and unpleasant as the things they replaced, but they are no longer so visible to the visitor from outside, who thinks ‘oh they are buildings, they must be OK’.

Two things are happening with the urban poor. Firstly they are being stacked up vertically. And secondly, compression.  They are being squeezed into a smaller and smaller area of the city’s base.  As the middle class expands, so new areas are taken over for development.  You get all these building sites with artists impressions of places called ‘Mayfair Towers’ or ‘Berkley Villas’,they're idealised views of what these places will be.  They are rising up in slum areas but whoever moves in won’t want the eyesore of the poor people living close.  So you can see that the next lot are ripe for eviction.

There is a constant process of movement and change.  Slums are not static.  They are in a ferment of economic activity and also of social uphe...