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Bombay Brokers Edited by Lisa Björkman. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021. 472 pp. ISBN: 9781478011491 (paper).
Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor By Juned Shaikh. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. 242 pp. ISBN: 9780295748504 (paper).
The field of urban planning in colonial Bombay took off after the plague of 1896. The colonial administration identified overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions in the neighborhoods inhabited by the mill city's working classes as the causes of the epidemic, and the Bombay City Improvement Trust was founded, inaugurating an era of deliberate remaking of city spaces. Over the next century, the city underwent several phases of planning alongside the continuous expansion of slums and suburbs, until the citywide mill strikes of 1982. When many mills did not reopen after the long strike ended in 1984, innumerable workers were plunged into unemployment and the city's horizon was rapidly remade into “glitzy shopping malls, luxury apartments, and corporate offices of the service sector” (Shaikh, p. 6). Deindustrialization proceeded apace with slum expansion over the next few decades—in 2011, almost 62 percent of the city's population lived in slums. Bombay transitioned to an era of market-driven development: enhancing the conditions for business, real estate, and private investment would incentivize the private sector to construct low-cost housing for the city's poor through “public private partnerships,” planners projected (Björkman, pp. 47–48).
The two books reviewed here chart the making of urban spaces, politics, and lives in Bombay/Mumbai across these transitions—from colonial planning to welfare-oriented postcolonial development to development by economic liberalization. Outcaste Bombay by Juned Shaikh is an outstanding historical study of caste as central to the production of urban space in Bombay, and urbanity as central to the making of Dalit cultural politics between 1896 and 1984. Following the insights of Dalit studies, the book argues that industrial modernity in Bombay served to both obscure and intensify caste practices. Shaikh demonstrates how caste was reproduced under capitalism through the built forms of the city and through language and the way that Dalit politics recognized this, organizing to annihilate caste and capital through a revolution in Dalit housing and literature. While the city's Dalit and working classes demanded a political revolution and a redistribution of resources to...