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18Should You Go on a Slum Tour? (India, 2017): Poverty porn? / History of “slumming it” / Impact of slum tours

I DID SOMETHING I NEVER THOUGHT I'd do. I went on a slum tour.

I had talked to Tushar Gandhi and Ashok about the possibility of going on a tour of the Dharavi slum and to my surprise, neither discouraged me.

“They are a bit voyeuristic,” Tushar admitted. “It has become more lucrative for the operators because of the popularity of Slum Dog Millionaire. Lots of tours are happening…for locals, too.”

I had read about guided tours of the slums for a few years and thought of them as a recent phenomenon, which isn't the case.

Tours of slums date back to nineteenth-century London when wealthy citizens visited the slums to experience the vibrant culture. The tours were organized and a term for it was coined: “slumming it.” The New York Times in 1884 wrote about “the visiting of the slums…by parties of ladies and gentlemen for sightseeing,” to see “Hebrews,” “squalid negro neighborhoods and tenements…crowded with sweltering humanity” where ‘sensitive olfactories’ may be offended.”

The modern-day version seems no more palatable. In South Africa in 2013 for $82 per night you could experience poverty in luxury at the only fake “shanty town…in the world equipped with under-floor heating and wireless [Internet].” At one point tours of Rio's favelas were very safari-like. Tourists crammed into open-roofed SUVs stood and gawked at locals and snapped photos of them like they were zebras ...