Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a non-fiction book published in 2012 and written by the American writer Katherine Boo. The full title of the book is Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity and it is set in the Mumbai slum of Annawadi in the years 2008 - 2010. The book enjoyed a positive reception from critics and was awarded the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2012.
Boo's work overall is known for its investigative attention to the conditions of the disenfranchised, the poor, and the disabled in the United States. In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, she analyzes the lives of those living in a slum in Mumbai, which she was able to experience firsthand when she spent multiple years in India with her husband, intellectual historian Sunil Khilnani.
The main characters in the book are Abdul, a garbage sorter; Asha, a kindergarten teacher who dreams of one day becoming a slumlord; and Sunil, a small boy who scavenges for garbage and who rarely has enough food to nourish himself. All the subjects of the book try to navigate and survive an oppressive system that shuts them out of the globalizing, tech-booming India that is advertised on billboards and television ads. All that separates them from the glamorous luxury hotels is a tall wall plastered with advertisements, built by the Airports Authority to block the sight of the slum from arriving tourists. The slum exists under constant threat of demolition, so the residents live in constant fear of what will happen to them and their few belongings when they are forced to leave.
The book was received positively by the general public and was even adapted into a play shortly after it was published. The book is important because it gives a platform to those living under the thumb of corruption in Mumbai and exposes the institutional biases against the poor and minority groups in India, particularly Muslims.
