Find the word definition

Wikipedia
Chawl

The chawl (from Marathi चाळ, chāḷ) is a name for a type of residential building found in India. Typically, housing units in chawls are availed of by relatively poor but gainfully employed working-class families. Chawls were constructed in abundance during the early 1900s, in the textile mill areas of Mumbai, and indeed this is how they originated, to provide cost-effective housing to mill-workers in Mumbai. They were later built by working-class emigrants working in other manufacturing industries also. This type of housing is no longer built, but remaining structures are still in demand because of their relatively affordable rents.

Usage examples of "chawl".

Sanjay told me that even the pathetic slum-dwellers who paddled out from the chawls each evening to steal the blue and red navigation lights from the river for some purpose of their own paid a commission to the goondas.

Their services as guides were needed for only a few minutes to lead me through the chawl to a main street where I managed to wave down a taxi.

Sluggishly her feet follow his, up into the upper reaches of the huge gloomy chawl, the broken‑down tenement building in which Lifafa Das and his cousins have a small corner, at the very top… here, near the top, she sees dark light filtering down on to the heads of queueing cripples.

He wrapped a rag around my eyes an' took me to the roof of the chawl, man!

Basti, chawl, whatever the Calcuttans called it, it was the ultimate slum.