Dhobi Ghat, Mumbai: World’s biggest outdoor laundry

World’s biggest open air laundromat.

Between the SkyScrapers in Mumbai you will find the Dhobi Ghat, the world’s biggest outdoor laundry. The washers, locally known as Dhobis, work in the open to wash the clothes from Mumbai’s hotels and hospitals.  Clothes are washed  in large concrete pens and dried under an open sky. The Dhobi’s are mostly engaged in washing clothes for large, lower-market commercial organisations like restaurants, or hotels or guest-houses.

Boiling water in oil Barrels

The soiled clothes are first soaked in water, boiled in oil drums. The clothes are then “flogged” on a concrete wash pens to get physically rid them of dirt and stains etc. Clothes are then dried in the open, mostly on the roofs of the buildings. Finally they are ironed with age old charcoal presses with heavy wooden handles.