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Rethinking the Twentieth-Century History of Mumbai*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2013

DOUGLAS E. HAYNES
DOUGLAS E. HAYNES*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755USA, Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This review examines three major books on the history of Bombay. Historians of the city have tended to focus primarily on the period before 1930; this tendency has seriously limited our understanding of the dramatic transformations that have taken place in Bombay over the course of the twentieth century. Each of the studies reviewed here devotes considerable attention to developments since the 1920s. Collectively these works make a significant contribution to the appreciation of such matters as working-class politics, the changing character of workers’ neighbourhoods, land use, urban planning, and the ways the city has been imagined and experienced by its citizens. At the same time, these works all shift their analytic frameworks as they approach more contemporary periods and this restricts the authors' ability to assess fully the character of urban change. This paper calls upon historians to continue to apply the tools of social history, particularly its reliance on close microcosmic studies of particular places and groups over long periods of time, as they try to bridge the gap between the early twentieth century and the later twentieth century. At the same time, it suggests that historians need to consider Gyan Prakash's view of cities as ‘patched-up societies’ whose entirety cannot be understood through single, linear models of change.

Type
Review Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 5 , September 2014 , pp. 1435 - 1449
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

Nikhil Rao, Sujata Patel, Prashant Kidambi and Eric Beverley have offered suggestions on earlier versions of this review. Two anonymous reviewers for the journal also made valuable comments.

References

1 The official name of the city in English was changed in 1995 from ‘Bombay’ to ‘Mumbai’, after the Shiv Sena came to power in Maharashtra. Some residents still prefer the former name, regarding ‘Mumbai’ as possessing strong associations with regional chauvinism and associating ‘Bombay’ with a more cosmopolitan image of the city. This review will try to follow official usage as much as possible, employing the term ‘Bombay’ before the 1990s and ‘Mumbai’ for more recent periods.

2 The inter-disciplinary scholarship of Sujata Patel and Thomas Blom Hansen, scholars who work in sociology and anthropology departments respectively but who have done significant historical research, is a significant exception. See especially Patel's, Sujata introductory essay, ‘Bombay and Mumbai: Identities, Politics and Populism,’ in Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition. Patel, S. and Masselos, J. (eds), Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2003, pp. 3–30Google Scholar, and Hansen, Thomas Blom, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2001Google Scholar.

3 Prakash, Gyan, ‘The Urban Turn’ in Sarai Reader: The Cities of Everyday Life. Vasudevan, Raviet al. (eds), Centre for Developing Societies, Delhi, 2002Google Scholar.

4 Patel, S. and Thorner, A., Bombay: A Metaphor for Modern India. Oxford University Press, Bombay, 1996Google Scholar.

5 A similar argument has been made in Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920, Ashgate, Aldershot, England, 2007, p. 8.

6 A valuable list of Chandavarkar's significant publications is provided at the end of the volume. A major recent article written by Chandavarkar and published after his death but that is not listed there is ‘The Decline and Fall of the Jobber System in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry, 1870–1955,’ Modern Asian Studies, vol. 42, 1, January 2008, pp. 117–210.

7 One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: The Mill-Workers of Girangaon: An Oral History. Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar (eds), Seagull Press, Calcutta and New Delhi, 2004.

8 Nikhil Rao has been particularly involved in doing work that crosses older chronological barriers, including his recent book, House, but no Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay's Suburbs, 1898-1964, University of Minnesota Minneapolis, 2013. See also, ‘Towards Greater Bombay: Town Planning and the Politics of Urban Growth, 1915–1964’ (unpublished essay, 2011).